To The Far Reaches Read online

  It was one of the long slender logs they had fed into the fire, one end unscathed and the other ablaze like a low summer sun. Dell could feel its horrible heat as Dunn approached.

  ‘Father’s always saying you have a fire inside you,’ Samus said strangely. Quietly. ‘Let’s find out.’

  Dunn stood over her and now some hesitation crept into his face.

  ‘Do it,’ Samus demanded, and when Dunn faltered further he screamed. ‘Do it! Craven! It’s what father would expect. Why did he go hunting?’ Samus asked deliriously. ‘So we could hunt!’

  Dunn grimaced and ground the end of the burning log into Dell’s eye.

  Dell was beset with more pain than she could have imagined. An impossible scream rushed from her lips and it felt as if the raw bones of her cheek were exposed to the snowy air. She had not thought there was so much pain in the world. Her hands restrained, she had enough sense through the fog of agony to fight with her cheek and brow to keep the log from melting her eye away. And what a heavy price her face paid. Chunks of coal were ground into in her skin and continued to burn, the pain drilling down to her fingers and toes. Her body wanted to lift off the ground but Samus kept her in place. She screamed and screamed and he laughed and laughed.

  ‘There’s no fire inside of you!’ he exclaimed merrily, while Dell throttled in agony beneath him. ‘But you don’t look quite right anymore. Dunn?’ he asked his brother. ‘Shall we make it a pair?’

  Dunn, still holding the log with a dazed expression on his face, shook his head and walked backwards.

  ‘Give it here craven. I will do it,’ Samus snapped. ‘We can’t leave her all odd.’

  He stretched his hand out for the log. Through the miasma of her pain Dell was able to lay a hand on a single thought. Samus meant to kill her. He would not be able to explain such events to Kerr. He would torture her, kill her, and then tell Kerr that she had attacked Dunn and then fled. While Samus took the log from Dunn, Dell hurt him the only way she could. She leant forward and bit him in his boy bits, his already tender boy bits, even though it felt like she was going to split her face in two to do it. Samus toppled with a high scream and Dell wriggled free and made immediately for the wall and wrenched a spear free. Samus was already on his feet and charging at her in a mad limp, log in hand. Dell barely had time to get the end of the spear up. He tried to swat it away but he misjudged the ferocity with which Dell held her position, despite her injuries. She was no ordinary little girl, and never would be. Her new markings were a threshold she had been pushed through, never to return. The spear entered Samus’ belly and came clear out the other side. He gave a spit of dark blood then fell to his knees then his side, dead. Dunn was frozen in a stupor.

  As clearly as Dell had known that Samus had meant to kill her, she now knew another truth. That she would be killed if she remained in Marr. If not by Kerr, then by the elders. She had no option. She tucked a dagger into her trousers and pulled a pelt off the wall. She then gave Dunn a bloody stare and ran out into the early night. He did not follow. She found the track leading out of the village and ran, only stopping to pack her eye with ice. The only thing she left in Marr was a trail of blood on the snow.

  Separate ways

  The scar that ran miserably down Dell’s face itched as she stared down the High Salt Road from her nest on the hill. She had borne the scar for many more years than she hadn’t, but it had never truly settled. Some days it itched, on others it burned and in the cold it prickled. Her other scars – and there were many – all came from blades and healed well and lay in silence, but the scar across her face was an ever-present sensation, like the slow turning of a screw.

  Suddenly, Dell shuffled down into the bushes when she spotted a speck on the horizon. A lone rider. They were moving fast, kicking up a fine trail of dust. She crab-walked to the precipice until she was right over the road. She couldn’t see the rider anymore, so she crouched down and waited, listening. After a few minutes the drum of hooves started and Dell moved even further to the edge. She peaked through a bush and scowled. The rider was moving too fast. It was going to be difficult to time her attack. She rose slowly, looking for a reaction from the rider. He didn’t look up, his eyes focussed on the road. Dell grabbed the branch of a tree and slowly leaned over the edge. One foot was firmly bedded on the cliff, the other dangling over the road. When the rider was about four horse-lengths away, she let go.

  It was a poorly timed ambush, thwarted by the brisk pace the rider was demanding from his horse. The rider had already passed when Dell landed on the road with a groan. He stopped and turned, his eyes bulging at the sight of Dell. He turned the horse back around quickly, dug his heels into its flanks and took off again at a gallop.

  Monkeys, muttered Dell to herself.

  She immediately put her head down in pursuit, her cloak flapping madly behind her. She was no match for the horse, who broadened the gap between them with every pass of its legs. The road veered to the left around a table-top grass hill, but Dell kept a straight line, one ear cocked to maintain a bearing on the horse. She ran straight up the hill, grabbing fistfuls of grass to stop herself from slipping. While the rider took the long way round, Dell cut across the hill-top, spurred on by the horse’s slowing footfalls as it navigated rockier sections of road near the water’s edge. The grass whipped across her boots and she used the sound as a measure of her pace, digging in deep to make it faster. She started down the other side of the hill just as the rider turned the corner. He immediately made her out, her black cloak stark against the bright green grass. He pinched his face and spurred his horse on, bringing her to full pace again. Dell doubled her efforts down the slope, desperate to drop down onto the road before the rider passed again. She lost her footing and upended, but the grass was forgiving and she was soon on her feet again.

  Dell had the better hand on the second meeting; the road was rocky and the drop not as sheer. She launched herself off the grassy wall just as the rider was passing. He almost made it through but Dell managed a hand on his coat and ripped him off his saddle. She landed in a ditch, but the rider did not fall cleanly. A foot stuck in a stirrup and the horse startled, taking him on a bloody ride down the road, his head catching every jagged rock. He cried out in pain the first time only.

  Dell slowly crawled out of the ditch and dusted herself off, then started walking after the horse. There wasn’t any hurry anymore. She spotted a large serrated rock, the points of which were blushing red like a big cat’s teeth after a kill. Soon there was another hosting a more gruesome prize; a small chuck of scalp beneath a patch of black hair. After that the blood trail was consistent, the bottle having been uncorked as it were. She caught up with the horse about a half hour later, drinking from a thin, icy stream. The rider was still attached by the stirrup, his face submerged in the frigid water. Dell cut the rider free and sent the horse back from where it had come with the flat of her dagger against its rump.

  She rolled the rider over in the water. He was young and bearded, with a surprised look on his dead face. She opened his satchel and found what she was looking for. A scroll with a wax seal, bearing the crescent moon insignia of the royal house of Furness. Dell ran her blade underneath the seal and opened the parchment. The missive was wet and the letters had started to run, but it was still legible. It was addressed to the captain of the royal watch at Dorphet and read as expected:

  Salt Bridge Down

  Bart Molden freed the insurgent

  The party travels with the wizard Ortello

  Kill all but the prince

  It was the same message that had been borne by the first two riders. Three riders in the three days since the boy had blown up the Salt Bridge and they had escaped the capital with the prince and that wretched skeleton of a prisoner. The castle was desperate to send word of the escape to Dorphet, the first major settlement north of Dantriné. They had sent several ravens also, and Dell had given her falcon Dreddfort a fat mouse for every one that he plucked from the sky.

  She posited the tightly rolled parchment in her boot then pulled the rider out of the stream. She left him in the long grass, then departed the Salt Road to find the smuggler’s trail a half-mile inland. When she found the route she broke into a light run as the rest of her party had a long lead. She had been waiting on the hill all afternoon for the next rider. She moved quickly and ate up the trail with ease as she carried no fat and her own body was not a burden. She ran for an hour and passed no one. As little traffic as there was on the Salt Road these days, there was even less on the smuggler’s routes. People had flocked to the cities and stayed there, like maggots to an open wound. There was no trade anymore, even black market trade. It was an age of hoarding and stealing, not enterprise and exchange, honest or otherwise.

  Dell slowed as she saw signs she was entering some sort of broken-down hamlet: a burnt out wagon, some half-plucked chickens, rancid clothes flailing in branches. She started to walk and her body quickly brought up a thin sheen of sweat. She stopped under a tree and rested.

  ‘You know I can hear you breathing up there, you fat lump?’ she said after a minute. There was no response for several moments then some cracking sounds, and finally a large figure fell ungraciously to the ground with a thump and rose with a sheepish expression.

  ‘How did you go beautiful?’ Bart said. Bart Molden was a former captain of the Queen’s Army, now a deserter, and close confidante of the prisoner they had pulled from Dantriné’s dungeons. In the three days they had known each other Dell and Bart had built a familiar repertoire of blithe insults and invectives, and it seemed they had known each other for longer than they had.

  ‘Another rider,’ Dell said. ‘Same note as the others.’

  ‘And where is this rider now?’

  ‘I curtsied and let him ride through to Dorphet.’

  Bart snorted. He had met some good woman fighters before, but they were huge expansive lasses, larger than men. They certainly were not cut from the same cloth as Dell. Bart doubted anyone was.

  ‘Do you think anyone has got word through?’ he asked. Dell shrugged.

  ‘Not a rider, maybe a raven,’ she said as she got up. ‘Where are the others?’

  Bart indicated further up the road.

  ‘We’ve found a place.’

  Dell noted the garbage littering the path: rotting fruit, a child’s doll infested with maggots, a decaying pianola with weeds shooting from the top.

  ‘I’m sure it’s a fine establishment.’

  ‘It’s actually not too bad. It has a fire.’

  ‘Ale?’

  ‘Yup. Dark as mud. You could stand a spoon in it.’

  Dell didn’t say anything in response. It didn’t matter to her. She’d have it dark, black, pale, flat or warm. As long as it was ale. As long as it struck that familiar note over her brain by the fourth or fifth tankard.

  They walked in silence until they reached the tavern, if that’s what it could be called. Off the trade route most establishments did not earn such a moniker. They were simply referred to as ‘places’, or for the worst of their type, ‘holes’. It was a broken, rambling building, built on moss and poking out from a sea of fog. As they got closer it smelt of rot and wood smoke. Dell saw their horse Prudence tied to a post, and Dreddfort perched on the roof. Two sunken, very old men sat outside on the balcony, wrapped in stiff blankets. The men regarded them with suspicion as they approached. There was a wooden sign hammered to the wall, presumably bearing the name of the place, but it was too caked in moss to read. Dell had an idle interest in such things, drinking houses were the closest thing she had to homes, so she took the time to pick the moss out with the tip of her sai. It read The Fenton Well. It was a fairly reputable name for what looked like a fairly disreputable establishment, which Dell took as meaning the place had once borne a better condition. She gave a sniff and walked inside, Bart behind.

  Bart went straight through, but Dell lingered by the door, taking stock. There was a long bar split in two by a fireplace. The bar was thinly lined with men who were sitting on their stools in a fashion that suggested they were hanging loosely to their sobriety. There was a large sprawling common room with some more rooms behind the bar and another entrance leading in from the other side. A couple of strong, well-built types sat at low tables drinking, but they did not fire Dell’s instincts. She figured from their hands and their clothes that they had earned their frames tilling the land and not raising swords. Dell spotted their party in the far corner and walked over. Given they included two of the most prominent figures in Dorthland, they were travelling in various standards of disguise. The wizard Ortello had managed to turn his robes from white to black and had surprised everyone by pushing out a full head of straight, snowy hair over the course of a morning, something that seemed to displease him immensely. Petyr had been deprived of his silks and caked in so much mud that no-one could think him the prince of Dorthland. The others’ anonymity was ensured by their actual anonymity. While Dell’s notoriety was spreading courtesy of the slaying of Sir Tannan Peck and her liberation of the Queen’s apparent murderer, news of these achievements was moving at a slower pace than the party itself was making, so she garnered no attention for now. Bart Molden was not an anonymous figure, but a relatively faceless one. He looked like any number of brutish men and tales of his and Mikel’s heroics were told by inebriated soldiers around campfires, not captured in oils and lithographs. His only effort was to wear a pauper’s cap he had found on the side of the road. Mikel would have been a well-known face, but two years in the King’s dungeons had rendered him unrecognisable. He had been reduced to a thin wisp, barely a man, let alone one that anyone would recognise. Poe, of course, was no-one of note to anyone.

  Bart, who was already at the bar, looked over his shoulder as Dell approached and she indicated something the height of an ale. He nodded.

  ‘Move,’ Dell said to Petyr, who was perched tentatively on the end of a bench like a sparrow ready to break its roost at the smallest sign of threat. Ortello gave a sigh and indicated that the prince should stay where he was. He had no issues with Dell on the matters which formed the basis of her employment, sword work and reconnaissance and such, but was unimpressed by her complete lack of regard for the rest of the party.

  ‘May I remind you,’ he said tiredly and in his lowest voice so as not to be overheard. ‘That you are speaking to the Prince of Dorthland.’ Petyr was looking wide-eyed at Dell, frozen in fear.

  ‘Will you please fucking move your highness?’ Dell whispered before shoving Petyr down the bench. Ortello had noted there was something in the prince’s timidity that made Dell quick to anger. The prince was now hard up against the prisoner, who turned in his blanket and went back to sleep. He was trapped between two people that horrified him. All it would take for him to faint would be for that awful falcon to perch on his head.

  ‘I see the prisoner is still making a stunning contribution to affairs,’ Dell noted as she settled into her seat.

  ‘Again Dell,’ Ortello said. ‘You no doubt remember extricating him from that particular predicament. He is not the prisoner, nor the wretch. His name is Mikel, and he is well deserving of your respect.’

  ‘We should call him Ballast,’ Dell said, taking her ale from Bart. She blew the froth at Poe, who was doing her the discourtesy of glancing in her direction, then took a long pull. She liked the wizard’s new apprentice only marginally more than the prince. Both boys were taking tentative sips from cups containing strong smelling milk.

  ‘That’s brave,’ she said. ‘Seen many cows around here? That’s probably opossum milk.’ She tossed Poe’s milk on the floor then half-filled his cup with ale. Poe took a sip and shuddered.

  ‘Ugh,’ he winced. ‘So sour.’ Dell shrugged and took another long pull from her tankard. She started to exchange stories with Bart and Ortello seemed happy at the far end of table to survey his strange collective with a quiet, bemused look. Poe smiled at the young prince, who was looking at the sleeping figure of Mikel warily.

  ‘It feels wrong to be near him, after what he did…after what they said he did. I’m confused,’ Petyr admitted to Poe, who felt a chill up his spine every time Petyr spoke to him. He was the prince of Dorthland after all.

  ‘Because Ortello trusts the man who killed your mother?’ Poe ventured. The prince nodded. ‘There would seem to be an easy explanation in all this.’ Petyr flinched a little, like he knew what Poe was going to say. ‘That Mikel did not kill your mother.’

  ‘But he did. He spent two years in the dungeons for it. My father said he did it. The Mokerin said he did it. All the staff in the castle knew it to be true.’

  Poe went to say something, but stopped himself. Petyr noted the hesitation and urged him to continue.

  ‘The matter did not seem so cut and dry outside the castle walls your highness.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You might think some of it cruel your highness,’ Poe said. ‘I don’t wish to upset you.’

  Petyr glanced to check no-one else at the table was paying attention before he spoke.

  ‘I want to know.’

  ‘There were rumours after Queen La- your mother - died.’

  Petyr swallowed hard and hesitated before he spoke again.

  ‘Of what nature?’ Petyr asked the question meekly, staring at the table-top, like he was the subject and Poe the prince.

  ‘The story that Mikel was bribed by Frahanish coin to kill your mother was accepted by most. They knew greed and understood it well, but there were others who were unconvinced by the tale.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Those who knew him. Those he had battled with. He often looked stiff and uncomfortable in court, and that sat well with the story that was told; that he was ambitious, that he sought more power. But those who knew him, knew better. They were convinced that it was the Mokerin who were responsible. That’s why they waited two years to hang him. They had to drive all his supporters from the capital, otherwise they would make a martyr of him. They splintered his former captains like Bart across Dorthland, and when there were no more voices left to shout to the contrary the falsehood became a truth. Few cared about injustice once the scarcity set in. They were too focussed on their empty bellies.’