your revenge ease your pain?’
‘No.’ When he took to his bed, when he closed his eyes, it was blue sky Makin saw, the blue line of sky he had watched from the ditch he had lain in, run through, bleeding out his lifeblood. A line of china blue fringed with grass and weeds, black against the brightness of the day. The voices would return to him – the harsh cries of the footmen set to chase down his household. The crackle of the flames finding the roof. Cerys hid from the fire as her mother had told her to. A brave girl, three years in the world. She hid well and no one found her, save the smoke, strangling her beneath her bed before the flames began their feast.
‘… your father.’
‘Your pardon?’ Makin became aware that Lundist was speaking again.
‘The captain of the guard accepted you for wall duty because I know your father has ties with the Ancrath family,’ Lundist said.
‘I thought the test …’
‘It was important to know that you can fight – and your sword skills are very impressive – but to serve within the castle there must be trust, and that means family. You are the third son of Arkland Bortha, Lord of Trent, a region that one might cover a fair portion of with the king’s tablecloth. You yourself are landless. A widower at one and twenty.’
‘I see.’ Makin nodded. He had disarmed four of Sir Grehem’s men when they came at him. Several sported large bruises the next day although the swords had been wooden.
‘The men don’t like you, Makin. Did you know that?’ Lundist peered up from the notes before him. ‘It is said that you are not an easy man to get along with.’
Makin forced the scowl from his face. ‘I used to be good at making friends.’
‘You are …’ Lundist traced the passage with his finger, ‘a difficult man, given to black moods, prone to violence.’
Makin shrugged. It wasn’t untrue. He wondered where he would go when Lundist dismissed him from the guard.
‘Fortunately,’ Lundist continued, ‘King Olidan considers such qualities to be a price worth paying to have in his employ men who excel at taking lives when he commands it, or in defence of what he owns. You’re to be put on general castle duty on a permanent basis.’
Makin pursed his lips, unsure of how he felt. Taking service with the king had seemed to be what he needed after his long and bloody year. Setting down roots again. Service, duty, renewed purpose, after his losses had set him adrift for so long. But just now, when he had thought himself cut loose once more, bound for the loneliness of the road, he had, for a moment, welcomed it.
Makin stood, pushing back the chair that Lundist had directed him to. ‘I will attempt to live up to the trust that’s been placed in me.’ He thought of the ditch. Cerys had had faith in him, a child’s blind faith. Nessa had had faith, in him, in his word, in God, in justice … and her trust had seen her pinned to the ground by a spear in the cornfield behind her home. He saw again the blue strip of sky.
Lundist bent to his ledger, quill scratching across parchment.
As Makin turned to go, the tutor spoke again. ‘The need for vengeance feels like a hunger, but there is no sating it. Instead it consumes the man that feeds it. Vengeance is taking from the world. The only cure is to give.’
Makin didn’t trust himself to speak and instead kept his jaw locked tight. What did a dried-up old scribe know of the hurts he’d suffered?
‘There’s a gap between youth and age that words can’t cross,’ Lundist said. He sounded sad. ‘Go in peace, Makin. Serve your king.’
‘The Healing Hall is on fire!’ A guardsman burst through the door into the barracks.
‘What?’ Makin rolled to his feet from the bunk, sword in his hand. He’d heard the man’s words. Saying ‘what’ was just a reflex, buying time to process the information. He glanced at the blade in his grasp. An edge would rarely help in fighting flames. ‘Are we under attack?’ No one would be mad enough to attack the Tall Castle, but on the other hand the queen and her two sons had been ambushed just a day from the capital. Only the older boy had survived, and barely.
‘The Healing Hall is on fire!’ The man repeated, looking around wildly. Makin recognized him as Aubrek, a new recruit: a big lad, second son of a landed knight and more used to village life than castles. ‘Fire!’ All along the barracks room men were tumbling from their beds, reaching for weapons.
Makin pushed past Aubrek and gazed out into the night. An orange glow lit the courtyard and on the far side tongues of flame flickered from the arched windows of the Healing Hall, licking the stonework above.
Castle-dwellers scurried in the shadows, shouts of alarm rang out, but the siege bell held its peace.
‘Fire!’ Makin roared. ‘Get buckets! Get to the East Well!’
Ignoring his own orders, Makin ran straight for the hall. It had once been the House of Or’s family church. When the Ancraths took the Tall Castle a hundred and twenty years previously they had built a second church, bigger and better, leaving the original for the treatment of the sick and injured. Or, more accurately, to repair their soldiers.
The heat brought Makin up short yards from the wall.
‘The Devil’s work!’ Friar Glenn’s voice just behind him.
Makin turned to see the squat friar, halted a few yards shy of his position, the firelight glaring on the baldness of his tonsure. ‘Is the boy in there?’
Friar Glenn stood, mesmerized by the flames. ‘Cleansed by fire …’
Makin grabbed him, taking two handfuls of his brown robe and heaving him to his toes. ‘The boy! Is Prince Jorg still in there?’ Last Makin heard the child had still been recuperating from the attack that had killed his mother and brother.
A wince of annoyance crossed the friar’s beatific expression. ‘He … may be.’
‘We need to get in there!’ The young prince had hidden in a hook-briar when the enemy had come for him a week earlier. He had sustained scores of deep wounds from the thorns and they had soured despite Friar Glenn’s frequent purging in the Healing Hall. He wouldn’t be getting out on his own.
‘The Devil’s in him: my prayers have made no impression on his fevers.’ The friar sank to his knees, hands clasped before him. ‘If God delivers Prince Jorg from the fire then—’
Makin took off, skirting around the building toward the small door at the rear that would once have given access to the choir loft. A nine-year-old boy in the grip of delirium would need more than prayers to escape the conflagration.
Cries rang out behind him but with the roar of the fire at the windows no meaning accompanied the shouts. Makin reached the door and took the iron handle, finding it hot in his grasp. At first it seemed that he was locked out, but with a roar of his own he heaved and found some give. The air sucked in through the gap he’d made, the flames within hungry for it. The door surrendered suddenly and a wind rushed past him into the old church. Smoke swirled in its wake, filling the corridor beyond.
Every animal fears fire. There are no exceptions. It’s death incarnate. Pain and death. And fear held Makin in the doorway, trapped there beneath the weight of it as the wind died around him. He didn’t know the boy. In the years Makin had served in King Olidan’s castle guard he had seen the young princes on maybe three occasions. It wasn’t his part to speak to them – merely to secure the perimeter. Yet here he stood now, at the hot heart of the matter.
Makin drew a breath and choked. No part of him wanted to venture inside. No one would condemn him for stepping back – and even if they did he had no friends within the castle, none whose opinion he cared about. Nothing bound him to his service but an empty promise and a vague sense of duty.
He took a step back. For a moment in place of swirling smoke he saw a line of brittle blue sky. Come morning this place