Traitor's Blade

THE FEY HORSE

When I regained consciousness, my hands were bound at the wrists, but it didn’t bother me much. Dazed as I was, Ugh had to half-carry me through the passageways of the Duke’s dungeon. The walls were the same hard stone that formed the base of the palace and the promenade out front. Here truly was the Rock of Rijou: an inescapable prison for the Dukes to use to entertain themselves with the suffering of others.

I was crying, not for any reason I could put into words, but because as much as the mind may grow to disdain the body, the body will always mourn the desecration of the spirit. Ugh was singing softly as we walked, and I wondered if he knew he was humming the King’s Law Against Unjust Punishments. If not, it was ironic, and if he did, that was something I couldn’t really understand.

‘We say goodbye soon, I think,’ he said in his thick accent that I still couldn’t place. Perhaps he was from somewhere from the far north?

‘Goodbye?’

We reached the end of a long passageway that ended in a set of narrow stairs going up. There was a door at the top with bars revealing fading afternoon light.

‘I take you through this door, then to stable. She commands. When horse is done, nothing left to bring back.’

‘Horse?’

‘Shush now,’ he said. He threw me over his shoulder and started up the stairs. ‘Talk gets me trouble with Lady. But you interesting man. Funny songs. No music for me usually. Maybe not such a bad man as they say. Makes me want to say goodbye.’

At the top of the stairs he pounded hard on the door, six times. A guard on the other side looked through the bars and then pulled a key from his neck and opened it up. ‘Destination?’ the guard asked.

Ugh set me back down on my own feet, still holding me up, but more roughly now someone was watching. ‘Stable. Lady give him to horse.’

‘Orders?’

‘Orders are in my fucking fist, like always. You want to see them closer?’

The guard stepped out of the way and let us pass.

‘Guards are like fucking dumb animals here,’ he said to no one in particular as we proceeded along the open courtyard, then, ‘Maybe you like to run, eh?’

‘Sure,’ I replied. ‘Just need a bit of a head start.’

‘They say you Greatcoats fucking tough guys in the day. Tricky, eh? Maybe you have trick to use on me, too?’

I looked at him. ‘I’ve used up all my tricks, I’m afraid.’

Ugh pushed me forward. ‘Is not important. Guards from here to palace gates. You not get ten paces before they pull you down.’ He turned me and looked me in the eye. ‘So no trouble, yes? No point, yes? No making trouble for me, yes?’

‘Let’s go see the horse,’ I said.

He grunted, turned me back around and pushed me onwards.

It was a short distance to the stable – I’d imagined he was talking about the palace stables but this was different. We entered through the wide doors into a single large building that stank like sixteen different hells. Inside was almost completely empty, except for a cage made of iron bars in the centre. Next to the cage was a chair, where the Duchess Patriana sat sipping something from a small cup. Inside the cage was a monster.

The beast was massive, almost twice the size of a Knight’s charger. The head was huge, and stood almost an arm’s length above even a tall man. Its coat was tattered, almost skinned, and every inch of its body was covered in welts and scars. Its ears were flat against its head and its eyes were black as coal. When it opened its mouth, I saw its teeth had been filed to points. The sound that came from its mouth was closer to a growl than any sound I had ever heard a horse make.

Patriana motioned for Ugh to bring me forward. When we got within a few feet of the cage he let me go, but I started to fall and only his sudden grip on the back of my neck saved me from having my head ripped off by the creature inside the cage. Its eyes were mad with fury at being denied its prey.

‘Saints,’ I said. ‘What is it?’

Patriana smiled. ‘This? This is one of my pet projects, if you’ll pardon the humour.’

Inside, the cage was filthy. It had likely never been cleaned, so the horse’s waste just piled up until it dripped through the bars. Hanging from the ceiling of the cage were the torn corpses of some kind of creature, although it was hard to make sense of their shapes, stripped of skin and sinew as they were.

‘You need a different hobby,’ I said conversationally.

She smiled again. ‘You don’t recognise it? I would have thought a romantic like you might recognise one from the storybooks. After all, they are a sort of namesake for your kind, aren’t they?’

My stomach fell and my heart came up into my throat. ‘It can’t be—’

‘Oh, trust me, it is. And very expensive it is to find them, I can assure you.’

‘A Fey Horse … you did this to a Fey Horse?’

‘Come now, don’t be modest. Didn’t they also used to be called Greathorses? I would’ve thought you’d feel a connection.’

I’d heard of Greathorses, of course, or Fey Horses as they were more commonly known. But they didn’t look anything like this. Fey Horses were noble and wild. The few herds rumoured to exist were the subject of children’s fantasies, mine maybe even more than most. The dream of finding a Fey Horse, of riding a beast that ran faster than anything else in the world, that could run for days, that could face down a pride of mountain cats or any other beast … The Fey were to horses what Saints are to men – but better than that, for Saints can be capricious, even evil. The Fey Horses in the storybooks were noble protectors. But not this …

‘Yes,’ Patriana said, reading my expression perfectly, ‘this really is one of the Fey. She is the last of her herd, in fact.’

I remembered the old stories, some that Bal Armidor had told at the inn near my childhood home and others from books in the royal library. Paelis and I used to joke about how much faster the Greatcoats could travel if we only had Greathorses to match. ‘Four days’ ride to Warrelton, I think, Falcio, or two if by Greathorse,’ he used to say. There was one book, a favourite of both the King’s and mine, about a boy who learned the language of the Fey Horses and rode them to battle against the Knights holding his mother captive. ‘Dan’ha vath fallatu,’ the boy would say in their special language. ‘I am of your herd.’

‘What happened to the rest?’ I asked, my eyes still locked on the mad creature held inside the cage.

She sighed. ‘Failed experiments, I’m afraid. Can you imagine, twenty of the beasts and only one comes even close to my desires? No, I must be honest with myself, this was not a very good investment.’

‘But why? Why in the name of every God and Saint would you take something so beautiful and—?’

‘And what? And ruin it? What use is a Greathorse running around in the plains, Falcio? What purpose does it serve? The beasts exist to serve, just as the peasants do, just as you do. What use is a beast that doesn’t pull a plough, or provide food, or carry a Knight to war?’

‘Twenty,’ I said, my throat numb. ‘Twenty Greathorses and you destroyed them all …’

‘I trained them, after a fashion, but it wouldn’t take. I burned them. I cut off pieces of their flesh. I fed them poison, beat them bloody, had them strangled with ropes, pulled out their eyes. Nothing would turn them to my purpose.’

‘What possible purpose could you mean for them with such practices?’

She looked genuinely surprised. ‘Why, to make them into war horses, of course. Imagine a division of Knights riding into battle on these brutes: they’d be unstoppable. Do you know you can fire arrows into these things and their hide is so thick they won’t die? They’d just keep going, and oftentimes as not the arrow will eventually fall out and the bloody thing will recover completely from its wounds. Truthfully, killing them was so much work that I still wonder whether it was worth the bother.’

‘What are those things strung from the ceiling?’ I asked, horrified.

‘Ah, you’ve noticed. Well, that’s what finally did the trick. This one’s a female, you see. So what we did was, we impregnated her with the fluids of another horse. They’re able to cross-breed, probably how such small numbers have been able to maintain their herds. When she gives birth, which is just about the only time the bloody thing is weak enough for my men to get in there, we take the foal and we torture it to death. After the fourth or fifth one, the beast finally found its rightful purpose, which is to kill, of course. It’s a bit of a shame that it took so long to figure out, and of course there are still a few problems to solve, such as making it obey commands and not just tear anything it finds to pieces. But that just needs a bit more time, that’s all.’

She said the words as casually as you might tell your neighbour about the weather. I looked around the stable, at the other guards by the doors, at Ugh. How could any man not pull his sword from its sheath and run her through? How could any man endure this?

‘You’re not going to get emotional on me, are you?’ Patriana asked, noticing the tears on my face. ‘After all, we’re not done here yet.’

‘Why have you shown me this?’ I asked. ‘Why not just leave me in my cell, or kill me?’

‘Because,’ she said soothingly, ‘I am a teacher at heart. I want you to learn. I want you to understand.’

‘By every God and Saint, understand what? That you’re a monster?’

‘No, Falcio: understand that I am right.’

‘You’re insane.’

She shook her head. ‘Can you really be so blind? Are you really no smarter than the beast in the cage? Look at her! That’s you, don’t you understand?’

She stood up and came to face me. I felt Ugh’s hand clutching behind my neck, reminding me that I had no power here.

‘Your precious King Paelis was no different. He had a need for weapons, and so he chose you. He selected you like he selected the others, conditioned you for the purpose he’d devised, and then used you to attack his enemies.’

‘You compare building a judiciary to protect people’s rights with making a monster that can do nothing but rend and tear and kill?’

‘Yes!’ she said. ‘Yes. It’s exactly the same. People have no rights, Falcio, save those granted them by their rightful Lords, their rightful owners. Paelis was no different to any of his fellow nobles, though he certainly liked to pretend he was. So he enjoyed watching peasants pretend to be happy? How is that any different from the Duke who has a different purpose for them? In the end, Paelis had power and he used it to create the world he wanted. But he went too far, Falcio. The monarchy have always understood that within our individual realms we have supreme power, but he wanted to change that. He was the one who broke the natural laws of this land, Falcio. He was the tyrant!’

My head dropped and my eyes stared at the ground as I said, ‘He wanted people to be free, that’s all. He wanted—’

‘He wanted to be loved,’ she said softly in my ear. ‘That’s all it was. The idle desires of a weak and feeble mind never meant to hold a crown. It was an accident that took the life of his brother Dergot, the rightful heir. If that stupid bitch, Yesa, hadn’t set him on a window ledge he’d still be alive. Greggor could hardly have done worse than his first wife, but in Yesa he came very close.’

‘Why are you telling me this, Duchess? You’re cold and you’re malicious, but you aren’t vain. If I’m so irrelevant, then why am I here? Why was it so important to show me that you’d corrupted a Fey Horse?’

She took my chin in my hand. ‘Because, my dear boy, I wanted to prove to you that it could be done. You’d never have believed me if I’d just told you, would you? This will make my next experiment that much easier.’

‘What is your “next experiment”?’ I asked wearily.

She smiled and kissed me warmly on the cheek. ‘You are, Falcio val Mond.’

Despite myself, I almost laughed. ‘Me?’

‘Don’t hold yourself too cheaply, Falcio. You’re almost valuable to me now. You see, I honestly believe you hate me more than any other man alive today.’

‘On that one point we may agree, your Ladyship.’

‘And so I have much to learn from you, Falcio val Mond. In the process of turning you, of changing you from Greatcoat to my own loving creature, I will learn much about how to train my people, how to make them more useful to me. That’s what I do, Falcio: I make things useful.’

‘You make monsters,’ I said.

‘If you want to call it that. But make no mistake, I do it very well.’

‘Not so well with your own daughter, though. She may be foolish, but she has none of your vile spirit moving her.’

Patriana laughed. ‘My daughter? Oh, my daughter is much more dangerous than I am. I dare say she is my finest accomplishment!’

I thought about that. Was she lying? I’d put my life on it that Valiana wasn’t evil. Were Kest and Brasti even now dead at her hand? How could the Heart’s Trial not show something like that? Was it rigged? Was all this just a ruse?

‘Enough now,’ Patriana said. ‘Let’s begin your training, shall we?’

She walked back and sat down on the chair.

‘You told me there were no others, Falcio, and the girl seems to agree with you, so—’ She motioned to one of the guards, who opened a door and pulled Aline out. She was bloodied, and her clothes were in rags. A gag was tied around her mouth and her eyes were wide. The guard brought her towards us and dropped her on the ground in front of me. I felt Ugh let go of my neck and I dropped to my knees in front of her.

‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Why didn’t you take the soft candy? Why did you let them—?’

‘Enough now, Falcio. It’s time to get started.’

At the guard’s signal, the others around the room brought a number of long poles with them. One of the poles was shorter and made of metal, and the end had been cunningly worked into the shape of a simple key, which the guard shoved into the lock. As he twisted it, the other guards used the poles to keep the beast from getting out. Finally, one of the guards attached the end of his pole to a cord, and attached the other end to a collar around Aline’s neck.

‘What are you doing?’ I shouted, but they ignored me. ‘Stop!’ I snapped my head forward and managed to pull free from Ugh’s grip, but another guard pushed me to the ground just outside the bars of the cage. Before, the horse had tried to attack me when I was that close; this time its eyes were wide and it was obviously seeking a way to escape through the gradually opening door to the cage.

As soon as the gap was wide enough, they pushed Aline inside and snapped the door closed again.

‘Watch what it does now, Falcio. See how it first terrorises the prey before killing it, as if it wants every other living creature to experience the fear and suffering it witnessed in its own foals’ eyes.’

‘Damn you!’ I screamed. ‘Damn you, woman – get her out of there! Get her out and I will do whatever you want – do you understand? You won’t have to do anything to me, I’ll do your bidding – just get her out of there!’

Aline was huddled in the corner as the Fey Horse towered above her, teeth bared and a sickening growling sound coming from its mouth. Its hooves struck the ground.

‘Now, Falcio, that’s not quite how this works.’ The Duchess turned to me. ‘What I find the most fascinating, and I hope you will as well, is that all of this hate and anger you feel will actually help speed things along. Isn’t that odd? Watching this girl get torn apart, followed by the other entertainments I have planned for you, will actually make you more malleable, not less. It turns out that the human mind has limits to what it can deal with, and once you break those limits … How can I put this? It’s like returning a statue to its original marble: you can chip away at it and make it into whatever you want, as if the original form had never existed.’

The horse was getting closer to her now, and nipping its teeth near her face, her hair. The anger coming from it was almost palpable: rage at everything and everyone. Aline’s mouth was gagged, but I don’t think she even tried to scream, so filled with terror was she.

‘For the sake of the Gods, there must be some human decency inside you—’

I heard Aline now, her screams muffled, but obviously terrified. She was bleeding from her left shoulder.

‘See how it starts with little bites? That’s what we do with the foals. It takes an age to finish the job. You’d almost think the creature was intelligent.’

Seeing the look on my face she said, ‘You know, in retrospect it seems hardly fair to call this beast a failed experiment. It does have its uses.’

I pushed myself up and threw myself at the bars. ‘Dan’ha vath fallatu!’ I shouted at the horse. ‘Dan’ha vath fallatu!’

The Duchess looked confused. ‘What on earth is that? Dannavath? Is that some kind of—? Oh my—’ She put a hand up to her mouth and started laughing. ‘That may just be the sweetest thing I’ve ever heard!’ She turned to one of the guards. ‘You know, I think he’s quoting fairy tales at the beast!’

The guard didn’t reply, but he grinned at me.

‘Fey!’ I screamed into the bars. ‘You are Fey! You are of the unbound, you cannot be controlled, you cannot be chained. Dan’ha vath fallatu! I am of your herd! The girl is of your herd! Dan’ha vath fallatu!’

I was crying and screaming through the bars like a madman. I reached towards the beast – it was too far away, of course, and if anything it was likely to tear my arm off. But it ignored me and took another bite, at the girl’s face this time.

She screamed again. Her cheek was bloody.

‘They cannot chain you,’ I screamed. ‘They cannot bind you! The Fey are free! The Fey protect the herd! Dan’ha vath fallatu! She is of the herd! You must protect the herd—’

The beast wasn’t moving away from her; if anything, it was getting wilder, more enraged. It stamped its great hooves, less than a foot from her body, then it reared and stamped again, this time an inch away from her.

‘Dan’ha vath fallatu,’ I cried again. ‘I am Falcio val Mond. I guard the herd, as you do. I am broken, as you are. Dan’ha vath fallatu: we are of the same herd. Dan’ha vath fallatu. The girl is of the same herd. Protect the herd. You cannot be bound. You cannot be controlled. Dan’ha vath fallatu. You must protect the girl: she is like you, like me—’

My eyes were bleeding tears and the world was a blur. I couldn’t tell if the girl was dead or if the beast was about to rip off my own head through the bars. I just kept talking to it, begging, pleading, saying anything that came into my head, through the sounds of hooves smashing against the ground. The growling from its throat shifted between snarling and neighing and pounded at the inside of my heart. Somewhere in the background I could hear the guards shifting restlessly and the Duchess shouting at them, and through it all I just kept repeating, ‘Dan’ha vath fallatu,’ over and over again.

Something struck me on the head and I fell back and cleared the tears from my eyes. I saw the horse smashing its head against the bars over and over, trying to break free, and I looked into the corner and saw Aline on the ground, unmoving. I thought she might be dead, then I saw the guards trying to use their poles to push back the horse so they could remove her from the cage. Her chest was moving up and down very rapidly. The horse bit at the poles and smashed its hooves against the side of the cage, and the guards would go no closer, even with the Duchess shouting at them. The horse was screaming, shoving hard against the cage with its whole body, and the iron bars were beginning to look as if they might buckle.

Ugh, still standing behind me, picked me up. The Duchess brought her face close to mine. She was smiling. ‘You marvellous, marvellous boy,’ she said, patting me on the cheek. ‘How wonderful – I’ve never seen anything like it! I do believe you’ve managed to reach through to something deep inside that monster’s brain – and do you know what that means?’

‘It means all your vile tortures have failed, Duchess.’

‘Oh, don’t be silly,’ she said, and kissed me once again on the cheek before whispering in my ear, ‘It means I can reach it too.’

She stepped back to watch again as the horse threw itself against the bars of the cage. ‘Take him back to his cell,’ she said to my guard.

‘What about the horse? What about the girl?’ asked one of the other guards, who was holding the broken end of a pole.

‘Leave it,’ Patriana replied. ‘Either the horse will knock itself out against the bars, or it will tire of trying to escape and go back to killing the girl. Either way works. I’ve other things to think about here.

‘Dan’ha vath fallatu,’ she said to me. ‘How utterly delightful!’

Ugh threw me over his shoulder and carted me back to my cell. This time, he said not a word nor made a sound the entire way back.