The Bird King(76)
“That’s not a wise thing to say,” said Hassan.
Fatima cursed him silently and slipped her arm through his. She half pulled him along the narrow path between tents, choosing a direction at random, ignoring the muffled, surprised sounds of the men in their tents as they responded to her voice. Despair drove her as powerfully as hope once had: there was nothing to do, nothing at all, but continue.
“I hated you last night,” Hassan said lightly. “While I was sitting there bleeding and going mad in the dark, I hated you.”
“I don’t care,” said Fatima. The tents ended a short distance ahead; she could see color and sky but little else to tell her whether she was heading toward the harbor or away from it. Stumbling over tent stakes, she broke into a run, pulling Hassan behind her, ignoring the heady, persistent smell of his blood. She ran toward the sky, toward pale yellow and rose slashed by slate-blue streaks of cloud, and toward the morning star that hung above it all like an inferior sun, and collided, at the last moment, with Luz.
Fatima reeled backward and fell solidly at her feet. Luz didn’t move. She was flanked by the general, silent, his neck bound in linen; four other men, almost boys, stood behind them in chest plates and broad-brimmed helms, their pikes glinting. Luz’s face was rigid; her cheeks were glowing with high, offended color; she wore a sable-lined cloak over her dress; and her hair had been combed and pinned. She had, it seemed, slept well.
“I believed you,” she said, looking down through her lashes at Fatima. “I sang psalms of praise last night because I thought you were ready. I imagined standing beside you at your baptism. I would have made a place at court for you and put eligible gentlemen in your path. But you’ve dashed all my hopes. Your pride and your insolence and your unnatural attachment to this sorcerer have veiled you from God.” Luz looked past her at Hassan, her eyes blank and unmoving save for the parasite lodged beside her left pupil.
“You will tell your secrets,” she said to him. “One way or another. Sorcery is like a fast-growing weed—even if you cut off the vine and the flower, the roots will continue to spread beneath the earth and spring up elsewhere, just like the tunnels on your maps. You received instruction from someone. Perhaps you have given instruction to others. You must tell me who and how, or you will lose your life and any chance you may still have to save your soul.”
Hassan, who had been swaying and sucking at his bloody fingers, drew himself upright. He looked back at Luz with a rage that startled Fatima, transforming his face into something luminous and terrible, a star haloed in a thicket of red curls.
“I’ve already told you the truth,” he said. “Many times over. I am as I am and there seems no point in pretending about anything, since I’m going to die anyway. I will tell you my sins. At eight, I stole figs from a neighbor’s tree and lied about it. At fifteen, I slept with my fellow apprentice mapmaker, who went on to die of rot after he was sent to battle and wounded in the foot. It was then that I began to drink. I drink, I lie with men when I can manage it, yet I spend more time in prayer than you do, judging by the relentlessness with which you’ve pursued us. God knows all my faults, for I tell Him constantly. If you’re going to kill me, do it now. I might be a courtier who slouches and spends too much on clothing and shrinks from pain, but I am not afraid of death. God knows what I am, and I am no sorcerer.”
A baffled silence followed. Luz stared at Hassan, momentarily uncertain, her chest rising and falling within the confines of her bodice. Her face softened. Fatima had never known anyone to succeed in hating Hassan, and thought for one desperate moment that his artlessness might save them after all.
“Execute her,” said Luz gently, her gaze opaque. “Take him back to his tent and bind him.”
Fatima screamed. She lunged for Hassan but was caught by the hair with a gloved hand and dragged back. Hassan was shrieking her name, his composure gone, straining against the arms that held him; for a moment Fatima brushed his fingers with hers, but they were slick with blood, and she was parted from him with only a red smear on her fingertips.
The man holding her yanked her head forward, forcing her to stare at the ground. She saw the hooves of horses dancing nervously in the mud and heard men muttering to one another and palming their weapons, but all was eclipsed by the awful sound of Hassan’s despair, a howl like the end of things, a sound that shattered Fatima’s nerves.
“Fatima.”
Her name came like a plea from somewhere behind her.
“Please—please just look at me.”
It was Gwennec’s voice. Fatima tilted her head as far as she could and caught sight of a black scapular.
“You,” she snarled. The fist in her hair tightened and pulled her head around before she had a chance to compose an insult. She was stumbling past Gwennec’s horse: she could see the monk’s foot clad in its modest leather sandal, his heel as rough and brown as what shod it, and cracked in several places. He drew it back, and for a moment, Fatima thought he was going to kick her in the face as a parting insult.
Then he did kick, but not at her: his foot landed beneath the jaw of the man who held her, slipping inside the gap between his helm and his breastplate as deftly as a letter knife parting a wax seal. The man gurgled in protest, released Fatima’s arm, and clawed at his throat.
“Run!” shrieked Gwennec, pulling at his horse’s head. He was holding the reins in an awkward, clawed way, and Fatima saw, belatedly, that his hands were bound together with twine.