They were holding hands. He didn’t remember when that had happened.
Tasahre jumped away. They were wet, both of them, soaked through. The air smelled of the rains, but the sky was clearing again, the sun breaking through the cloud.
Berren looked at his hand and whimpered. It burned. The last joint of his little finger was gone. He felt faint.
‘Thank you,’ she said.
Berren blinked. What he’d expected was a torrent of anger for pulling her away, or for having gone there in the first place, or for a hundred and one other things he’d done wrong.
Tasahre put a hand on his shoulder. He couldn’t meet her eyes. ‘You were right,’ she said. ‘He was too strong for me.’ She winced and screwed up her face, put a hand to her head. Berren looked at her then. Looked at her eyes, searching for any trace of what the warlock had done to her. There were no marks, no scars, nothing. She was scared, that was all, scared like he was.
His head throbbed, a searing ache that pushed through the pain of his finger and slowly devoured it.
‘Why did you go to that place, Berren?’
‘I thought I might find Master Sy. I’m sorry. You saved my life.’
‘And you mine,’ she said. ‘Come. You have unmasked a monster. It cannot be allowed to escape.’
‘No.’ Berren shook his head. ‘You go.’ The more he looked at her, the more it hurt that he’d have to leave again. He would though. He couldn’t stay here. The House of Records, the Headsman, now the warlock, they were all too much. No, he couldn’t stay. ‘You tell them. I can’t … Look, I just can’t. There’ll be lots of questions and I’m so tired. I can’t.’ His head was crippling him.
Tasahre stared at him and he didn’t know what to make of what he saw in her face. Longing? Or was that just a reflection of his own? She touched his cheek. ‘Stay here. I won’t be long.’
Master Sy had said something like that. He nodded, knowing full well he’d be gone before she got back.
‘Stay,’ she said again.
He bit his lip. Made to touch her and then thought better of it.
‘Your hand!’
She took his hand in her own and looked at it, and then all of a sudden he was telling her everything, right from the start. The prince, the assassin in the scent garden, Kasmin, Kol, the Headsman, the papers they’d found and what he’d seen in the Two Cranes and what the Headsman had said after he was dead, all of it. It was too much to keep inside him any more and he had to let it out. He watched her as he spoke, looking for any sign of what she already knew. When he was done she looked at him, brow furrowed and face fierce.
‘Show me the wound.’
Berren held out his finger. It was hurting badly now. Blood was oozing out from under his makeshift bandage. He didn’t dare look. Thinking about it made him shiver and feel sick.
She looked at him then shook her head. ‘This needs to be dressed, and properly. Come!’
‘It’ll be all right. Don’t you need to go tell someone about the witch-doctor?’
‘More likely than not the abomination has already fled, if he has the power, and this will not take long. Today is the day of the Abyss, the day of the dark, a bad time to face such a creature. Perhaps that’s why my strength was not enough to break him, even as wounded as he was. Come!’
The practice yard was empty. The clouds had unveiled the sun and the sky was bright again. All the monks and the priests and the novices were closeted away in their temples. Tasahre took Berren into a small low hut with a sliding door, the place where the monks kept the tools and devices they used for training along with their weapons; and, it turned out, other things. Berren stared, wide-eyed. He’d seen lots of swords in one place in the Armourer’s Quarter, certainly he’d seen bigger swords there, but here … there were so many! Straight swords, curved swords, swords with a hook on the end, all short-bladed and in pairs to be used the way the dragon-monks liked to fight. He’d never seen so many different styles and designs.
Tasahre smiled. ‘When an elder dragon merges with the sun, his swords are left to the order. That is how we have remembered those who guide us for more than five hundred years, since before the schism. Since before the first of the sun-king’s ships with their Taiytakei guides cast anchor in Aria.’ She opened a small chest by the entrance, filled with neatly arranged pots of powders and salves.
Berren tried to grasp how long that was and failed. He started to count the pairs of swords instead but there were too many. There must have been close to a hundred.
‘Every sword has its story.’ Tasahre sat Berren down on a bench. Several of the swords were missing their twin, he noticed, and a few had clearly seen a good deal of fighting. ‘Berren! Look at me!’
She jabbed him in the neck with one finger, somewhere near where his jaw met his ear. He gasped, paralysed and swamped by a pain that ran up the entire side of his face as though all his skin had been torn off. After a second or two it ebbed and he could breath again.
‘What …? What was that for?’
Tasahre dangled something in front of him. He was starting to notice that his hand hurt. Really hurt. Warm blood was running down his palm and dripping onto his legs. Oh Gods — now she’d ripped his makeshift bandage off him.
‘Distraction,’ she said. She dipped into the chest and set to work, sprinkling powders into the bleeding wound, pressing a gobbet of black mud over the top and then wrapping a piece of cloth tightly over everything. ‘You have seen how we train. There are accidents, at times. So we learn to dress them. This is how a sword-monk treats a wound, Berren. See the difference.’
He tried but there were tears in his eyes. It burned like acid and he thought he might be sick. Tasahre stood back. She held his wounded hand in her own and touched the first two fingers of her other hand gently to it. Berren winced and almost whined, squeezed his eyes shut, fearing what would come.
The pain began to recede. In the dim light of the hut, he saw, her fingers were glowing. Not much, but enough that there was no mistaking it. It was the way she’d glowed when she’d chased down the warlock.
‘You’re …’ The pain was almost gone.
‘The blessing of the sun,’ she breathed. ‘A priest would do it better, but this will suffice. The wound will heal quickly and the pain will be tolerable. You will not lose more than you already have.’ Then she picked up the bandage she’d taken off his hand and sniffed it. ‘You know I cannot be silent about what you’ve told me. Where is your master, Berren? Truly now, do you know?’
Sword-monks could smell a lie, that’s what everyone said. They could sniff them out, easy as smelling out a dead fish. Tasahre was looking at him, eyes hard, straight into him.
‘That was the only place I could think of. He wasn’t there.’ The Headsman had told him where Master Sy might be, but the Festival of Flames was months away. ‘I don’t know where else to look.’ And that was true, and if he had known, right there and then, he would have told her too. ‘How did you know where I was?’
‘I followed you through the city.’
‘You tracked me? What, followed my footprints on the cobbles or something?’
‘I followed you, Berren. It seemed you might go looking for your master after Justicar Kol came to ask his questions. You were not truthful when you spoke with him. I watched and then I followed. It was easy enough.’ Tasahre’s eyes narrowed. ‘What are your master’s dealings with that monster?’
Berren shrugged. ‘He never says. I think … I think … The Headsman — he said he was bringing soldiers to the city for you from across the sea. He said the priests in this temple were going to start a war. Is that true?’
Now it was her turn to look away. ‘I cannot answer that, Berren. The city men who came here today think the same. That is why they were here, and that is why they are looking for your master who they say holds the proof. They cannot say who has done this, so they point their accusations at us all. I came to Deephaven to bring the word of the Sun. I came to serve the Autarch and to protect him. That is all.’