He drew up next to her and looked at her and looked at the city and turned and spat. “You know who that is.”
She looked a long moment and blinked and turned her head and looked again. “I know,” she said.
“He says she helped you.”
“She didn't know anything.”
The mercenary laughed. “Oh, I know. I'm not this rabble. Never think that.”
The queen sat very still and felt something cold and small sinking endlessly into her. A deep winter twisting and withered.
“Why?” she said. Barely able to hear herself.
“Why? You wonder why a king kills people?” Tipping his head to the side. “You've been around this long enough to know that.”
“But why her?”
“Same reason as anyone else.”
It was growing now and she knew she would kill him and she didn't need to say it. She didn't know if he knew it as well. She had met some who would but she thought in him, with all this skill and knowledge that he had, even as someone who walked in the same world she did, was this brooding arrogance that he could not shake and would never want to and that would only be stripped from him at the very end and by then it would be too late.
“Fear,” she said.
“It's the only thing that matters.”
“That can't be.”
He rested his hands on the saddlehorn. This a man secure in his own lack of servitude, but also at his heart still a servant and the silver for it riding on his belt. But a different kind of man, and showing it in the way he held himself.
“Of course it can,” he said. “A man is what he is because he fears being something else. A king is a king because everyone fears what he can do. Whenever they stop fearing him that's when someone else rises up and then the king becomes a tarred head on a stake and someone else becomes king and then they fear him instead.” Looking at her there in the open air. “You didn't fear him enough and now look at you.”
She kept watching the twisting fire and it was too far away. They could see very little and even at a dead run in this country she'd never make it before the girl was dead. She thought of all those times this slight girl had come in and taken her to the bath, helped her with her clothes. Simply doing what she was told in life and all she'd ever known and doing it as well as she could. And now torn out to come to this end.
“But why kill her?” she said. “He has me.”
He smiled again. “To make sure everyone knows. There are things that happen when power and fear come together and this is one of those things. He'll use it just like any king. Make them believe what he wants about her and turn her into some vicious evil and everyone will praise him for rooting it out and fear him at the same time and when he raises those banners they'll fall behind him even though he sends them to their own death because they'll know that death is the only thing that awaits. Might as well find it on a field with a sword in your hand.”
They rode down then and she thought she could hear the servant girl screaming at the stake. She knew it was just the wind and that they were too far away, the trees edging up and blocking their view as they descended on the old dirt road, the dust rising in the air around them, but she could not help but think it was the girl. She closed her eyes and could see her with the flames moving up her legs and in her hair and so she opened her eyes again and looked out at the country around her.
A calm and green land, full of forests and fields and blue rivers falling noisily through stones. An open land and prosperous. Something her family had worked at for a long time, to make it a place where kings and shepherds alike could enjoy what it offered and relax in safety and never look to the roads in fear. Never hear the rumbling thunder of thousands of horses and marching men, never hear the tearing shriek of a warhorn in the air.
And now, as the servant girl screamed in the fire, she felt it was all coming to an end.
They did not go to the city. They came down to the outskirts and took an old farming road out west and into a small forest. A stretch of trees that had once been logged and then allowed to grow again and still here and there the immense old trees that had survived that first cutting, a hundred years older than anything around them. Perhaps two hundred. Their gnarled trunks black and towering above the rest, their huge sweeping canopies. Nothing like the deep forest she had been in, but still those old trees in all the young, green growth like stewards of some age long past.
Here the road narrowed and they went up and down two hills and out into a field of grass and moss and sand. The city far off to the east now and this a place she had never been. The trees breaking for the field and heavy still on all sides, secluding this place from the world.
In the middle of the field stood an old house. Not the size of a keep but large and made of stone. Ivy running up the sides and still thick and green for the season, though it would become thin and withered and barren in the winter, as the snow descended and swept this whole field in white. Heavy wooden shutters over the windows and a wood shake roof. A single tower rising like some brooding watchman from the far corner, the roof sharply peaked next to it, an enormous chimney on the opposite side. A black iron flagpole standing off the top of the tower, but no flag flying from it.
Before the house stood a dry fountain. The shape of a naked wood nymph with her hands raised, where water had once sprayed and fallen into the wide bowl. That bowl the same stone as the house. It was marred with age and discoloration and parched dry as it must have been for years at this abandoned place, and he was sitting on the edge of the fountain picking at his fingernails with his knife.
He did not look up as they rode across the field and stopped before him. Both climbing down, her more slowly and the mercenary with a soft grace. His hand not on his sword, she saw, but close. Trying to act casual about it and also looking at the two guards who stood near the fountain. Another by the heavy oak doors at the front of the house, standing on the second of three stone steps leading up.
“You were true to your word,” he said. “That was very fast.”
The mercenary bowed his head slightly but did not ever take his eyes from the prince. “She was not hard to find.
“And not too much trouble?”
“Not at all.”
Then he finally looked up, holding the knife poised in the air over his outstretched fingers. Looking her up and down in a way she did not care for. His hair longer now and falling down the side of his face. Something in his eyes both calculating and wild.
“Good,” he said.
“Shall I go?”
He went back to his fingers. “No, no. Stay for now. We won't be long.” He smiled slightly as he dug in with the knife. “I didn't bring your money, but I have it. We'll ride into the city.”
The mercenary did not respond.
She looked at the three guards, and they were not men she knew. She wondered how many of those were left, how many he had replaced. She knew many of the generals were gone. The leadership changed to those he knew followed him and him alone. Some of the old ones relieved of their posts and others sent into battles they could not win, killed on the field perhaps with the knowledge that they'd been sent to die and perhaps not. But dead all the same.
“Who did you talk to?” The prince spoke softly, still working with the knife.
She didn't answer.
The movement stopped, but he didn't raise his eyes. “Who did you meet with?”
“No one,” she said.
“We both know that's a lie.”
“It's not.” She looked back the way they'd come. The trail that had once been a road barely visible in this forgotten forest. “I just ran. I stayed at an inn and asked about passage over the border. No one would take me.”