CHAPTER SIX.

The Uninvited Guest.

We waited inside the courtroom, listening to the shouts of soldiers echoing their way through the halls.

'If it's Trin . . .' Brasti began.

'Shut up, Brasti,' Kest said.

'I'm just saying, if this is Trin then I'm quitting the Greatcoats. Three hundred laws in this country, there ought to be one says she can't try to kill us more than once a year.'

'Whoever it is, they're coming this way,' Kest said.

'Realm's Protector,' Antrim hissed, 'you must go now use the door behind the magistrate's throne. We can't ensure your safety if-'

Valiana drew her sword. 'I won't protect the realm by running away.'

'Now who's going in for reckless symbolic gestures?' I asked. I looked at Brasti, who was already drawing his bow. He hopped up onto the magistrate's throne and balanced with one foot on either wooden arm. From there he could fire over the top of the heads of the guards in front of us if it came to it.

More guards poured into the room, only to be felled before the invading force I could now clearly make out our foe, but what I saw made no sense to me.

The intruder, who had apparently managed to get around the two dozen scouts patrolling the roads and riverside around Ossia's palace, who must have walked right by the crossbowmen and spearmen who stood at the gates and upon the walls, who was even now knocking down the guards who protected the halls and rooms of the palace, was a thin woman in a filthy, tattered dress with pale, matted hair plastered to her face.

'Is that Trin?' Brasti asked, squinting. 'I can't tell.'

The woman took a step towards us. She was at least thirty feet away, and even now guards were still rushing in the room behind her, trying to grab at her. Whenever anyone got close, she lifted her hand and with the barest twitch of her fingers sent them sprawling to their knees.

I pushed past the men in front of us and stood before her, maybe twenty feet away. 'Who are you,' I asked, 'and why have you come here?'

As she took a single, small step forward, I said firmly, 'You need to stop. You need to stop now and answer my questions before-'

The woman made no reply.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw Antrim signal and two of his men ran past me, their swords drawn, and attempted to cut her down. Before their blades could reach the apex of their motion both men had dropped their blades and fallen to their knees.

'I don't know what kind of magic you're using to prevent the guards from striking you with their swords,' I said, 'but it's not going to work on arrows.' I was really hoping it wasn't. 'You need to stop. Now.'

Still there was no reply. She took another step forward. Now she was less than ten feet away from me.

'Whoever you are, I beg you, stop. Brasti doesn't miss, and from this distance he could hit you with both his eyes closed. Do not come any closer.'

Kest came to stand next to me. He stared as her and said, his voice low, 'Falcio, I think there's something on her face, underneath her hair. It looks like . . . is that iron?'

I peered at her myself and caught a glint of something . . . some kind of mask or helm underneath the hair plastered to her face. For an instant I hesitated, remembering the wooden frames Trin had bound to her victims' faces to control them from afar. Was this some new form of that same damnable magic?

Another step closer.

I no longer had time to find out. 'Brasti,' I said, 'the next time she moves, put an arrow through her heart.'

'I have her,' he said.

The woman raised her foot to take another step, but before it landed on the floor in front of her the whistle of an arrow filled the courtroom, swiftly followed by a second, and a third.

I waited for the intruder to fall, but she didn't.

Brasti had missed.

I turned to Antrim. 'Get the Realm's Protector out of here. Now!'

'No-!' Valiana started to protest, but disobeying the Realm's Protector would be easier to live with than letting her be killed. Antrim signalled to his men with an odd gesture of his hand that I didn't recognise I'd have to investigate that later, I reminded myself and two of them immediately grabbed Valiana by the arms and began to lead her towards the back of the courtroom, where a single door led into the halls of the palace. Two more walked swiftly alongside them, covering Valiana with their bodies in case anyone intended firing a weapon at her.

'Apparently Antrim's worked out a few new protocols,' Kest commented, his blade in his left hand and a look of searing pain in his eyes.

'Oh, now you'll fight,' Brasti said from behind us, his voice tighter than usual. He wasn't used to missing his target. I heard the creak of his bow and once again the sound of arrows flying past us one after the other. 'Something's wrong, Falcio. I can't hit her. I'm aiming right at her, but-'

'Maybe your aim is just off today,' Darriana said, and I saw a blur as she leaped past me, her thin-bladed sword high in the air, point down, coming in for a strike that would drive the tip right through the intruder's skull. At the last instant, all the strength seemed to flee her body and she went sailing past, like a doll flung by an angry child, and crashed against the wall of the courtroom before slumping to the floor.

Antrim shouted, an order I didn't make out, and he and the remaining Ducal guardsmen rushed the intruder and once again she raised her hand slightly and they fell to the ground.

There were more than three dozen bodies in the room, and only Kest, Brasti and I were still standing.

And the intruder.

'Ossia's guards appear to have decided on a nap,' Brasti said.

I looked at the men on the floor and only then realised they weren't unconscious in fact, they hadn't even fallen, not really. They were on their knees, bowing low before the woman who had just singlehandedly invaded a once-all-but-impregnable Ducal palace.

The woman took another step.

'Falcio, what do we do?' Kest asked as a powerful compulsion to kneel started pushing us to the ground. The impulse to give up, to . . . accept . . . was overwhelming. But this woman, whoever or whatever she was, had forgotten one thing about us.

I forced myself to hold my ground, lifted my rapier and said, 'We're the Greatcoats, Lady. We don't fucking bow to anyone.'

Stay on your feet, I screamed at my unresponsive body. Do. Not. Kneel.

Despite my best efforts, my knees were beginning to buckle. I strained against the force, whatever it was, with every ounce of will, but still I saw the woman growing taller while I, ever so slowly, was bending down. In the periphery of my vision, I could see Brasti and Kest losing the battle too.

I tried to push past the feeling, which was now becoming oddly familiar to me. I will not bow before you, whoever you are.

The woman's hand came up a little higher and now I saw a tremble that I didn't think had been there before. I felt the pressure increase, and I lost another inch in the fight. I tried to change from resisting the pressure to kneel to simply throwing myself at her, but that didn't work either, though the shaking in the woman's hand was definitely increasing.

She took another step towards me and the pressure became unbearable. My knees were half-bent and I was slowly losing my balance.

It's too much, I thought, unable even to keep my head up. If she gets past me, she'll walk right through the palace to wherever they're keeping Aline.

I heard first one thump and then a second as first Brasti and then Kest fell to their knees.

She'll do whatever it is she's come to do and no one will be able to stop her.

Drops of blood dripped onto the floor in front of me and I realised I was straining so hard that I'd reopened my wounds.

No! I screamed silently. I swore an oath to protect that girl. You don't get to her without getting past me first.

With an effort that couldn't have been any harder had my tongue been crushed under the weight of an anvil, I said, 'Greatcoats. Don't. Kneel.'

The force increased even more and I felt myself beginning to collapse and then, all at once, the pressure disappeared it just vanished, not from any surge of will on my part but because something had at last broken in the intruder. She took a stumbling step towards me and I nearly skewered her with my blade before I realised she wasn't trying to attack me she was falling to the ground herself.

She landed hard on her knees in front of me and then fell sideways and rolled onto her back. Some of the hair slid away from her face and I could now see the grey-black iron mask she was wearing. There were no slots through which I could see her features. I approached her slowly, carefully, my rapier still ready.

'Who are you?' I asked, my voice unusually weak. I leaned over her and swept the rest of her hair back and saw that the mask had been partly broken off, one of the iron bolts attached to a second half that wrapped around the back of her head sheared off.

You don't put on something like this by choice.

Antrim walked unsteadily towards me. 'Falcio, you don't look so good.'

'Help me get it off,' I said, kneeling awkwardly before the woman on the ground. 'She wasn't wearing this for protection . . . It's some kind of-' I tried pulling at the straps, but they were held fast. There didn't appear to be any clasps to turn to remove the bolts. I wiped my hands against my shirt so that I could get a better grip but they came away slick and wet and red. I'm bleeding, I thought stupidly.

Whatever strength fear and fury had brought me was gone now and I fell onto my side. My face was not far from the woman's and I could see there were small cuts all over her, visible beneath the torn fabric of her tattered dress.

'Someone get that damned doctor back in here!' Brasti shouted.

'The mask,' I muttered. 'Get the mask off.'

I didn't think anyone had heard me, but Kest was raising his heavy warsword in his left hand. He brought it down with stunning force, and for a second I expected to see it driven straight through the mask, but instead, he'd severed the head of one of the iron bolts holding it in place. He did it a second time and I reached out and pulled the mask from her face.

Her face was so tired, so full of pain, that I almost didn't recognise her.

'Who in the name of Saint Shiula-who-bathes-with-beasts is she?' Brasti asked, waiting for the command to fire again.

As gently as I could, I placed my hand upon her cheek. 'Not Shiula,' I whispered, 'Birgid. Birgid-who-weeps-rivers.'

At the sound of her name, her eyelids fluttered opened and she reached a trembling hand to cover my own. 'We are met once again, man of valour,' she said, her voice incongruously beautiful, musical. Then she coughed, and a trickle of blood escaped her lips. 'I have failed, Falcio.'

'Failed at what? Who did this to you?'

But her wounds overcame her and her eyes closed. I felt my own injuries begin to steal the last shreds of consciousness from me, but a single question pulled at my thoughts: who had the power and the will to do this to the Saint of Mercy?

I retrieved my rapiers from the floor and rose to my feet. My vision swam.

'Falcio,' Kest said, reaching out to me, 'you need to rest. Your wounds . . .'

I didn't hear the rest of what he said. I was too focused on the people rushing frantically about the room and in the halls outside: guards, nobles, merchants. It's odd the way human beings move together, almost like ants. Even in the midst of chaos, there's a kind of flow to the motion of their bodies through space. That's why I noticed one figure, near the far door, who wasn't moving like the others. 'Protect Birgid,' I ordered Kest and Brasti as I took off in pursuit of the man who may have killed a Saint.

As I stumbled through the halls of the Ducal Palace of Baern chasing after my nebulous opponent, I found myself thinking about the style of duellist called a perseguere: a fencer who has mastered the art of keeping his blade in contact with his opponent's, so he never feints or retreats, just continually pursues his enemy across the court.

Only it works better if you actually get near him.

I bashed my injured shoulder into the wall as I tried to turn the corner too quickly, then slipped on something wet and sticky. I wasn't terribly familiar with this place and my opponent was moving faster.

As I got closer to the centre of the palace, the halls became crowded with people rushing to and fro, either to find out what had happened or to get away from danger. I pressed forward, ignoring them where I could, pushing them out of my way where I had to, but when anyone actually looked at me, I began to notice their expressions quickly changed from irritated to aghast.

I suppose I'm not looking my best right now, I thought, as I reached the main doors, and realised that I'd completely lost my prey. Worse, I was so out of breath and dizzy that it was all I could do to stay standing.

A man stepped in front of me and put a steadying hand on my shoulder. 'You don't look well.'

I tried to push him aside. 'Out of the way. I have to keep looking.'

'You won't get far in your condition,' he said.

I looked down at my shirt and saw red roses blooming across a white field. Of course. That's why I'm moving so slowly, why everything is so blurry.

This also explained what Kest and Brasti had been shouting at me a few minutes earlier: 'Falcio, you're bleeding!'

The flaw in the perseguere's fighting style is that you can become so perfectly focused on one thing that you miss everything else that's going on around you. For example, I had forgotten just how badly I'd been wounded in the duel with Undriel, just as I had forgotten that I still hadn't fully recovered from the Greatcoat's Lament, or, for that matter, from the neatha poisoning that had nearly taken my life.

Most importantly, as I looked up into the smiling face of the man who'd spoken to me the man who, unlike everyone else around me, was just standing there, unmoving I realised that I had forgotten how easy it is to sneak back into a building this size in the middle of a crisis.

'Good,' Undriel said, his eyes on mine. 'It wouldn't suit me for you to not know.'

I almost laughed out loud at the sheer absurdity of the situation. I'd assumed the figure I'd spotted lurking in the shadows must be the man who'd tried to kill a Saint. Instead, this was nothing more than a case of petty revenge over the loss of a duel neither of us ever should have fought.

Undriel drew a thin, straight blade, no more than six inches long, from behind his back.

'You call that a blade?' I said. 'Let me show you a proper one.' I reached for my rapier, only to realise I'd dropped it on the floor several feet back.

'There!' Kest cried from somewhere behind me.

'Get those damned people out of the way, Kest!' Brasti shouted. 'I haven't got a clear shot!'

My eyes locked with Undriel's; we both knew they wouldn't make it. His hand shot forward, the short blade darting out at me.

Cuffs, I thought; time to parry with the bone plates in the cuffs of my coat. But of course I'd taken my coat off too, so it was only by some minor miracle that when I slapped Undriel's blade aside it didn't slice right through the back of my hand. I say 'minor miracle' because a proper one would have sent the knife spinning away.

I grabbed Undriel's collar with my left hand and yanked it forward, smashing his cheek against the corner of the wall, and he stumbled back away from me.

Two guardsmen finally took some notice and began running towards us. Undriel immediately stepped back and put his hands up in the air.