CHAPTER I:
THE GIRL WITH THE KNIVES
The girl with the knives lay dead on the road.
It had been five days since the bloated man in the seedy backroom of a haberdashery in the Culdiheen capital of Forecastle had handed Morrigan the tiny scroll and a bag of coins.
Five days since she had broken the wax seal bearing the mark of the one-eyed temple, and unrolled the missive to read the instructions:
Igrador. Boy. Dark.
Five days since she had signed the contract.
With her target somewhere in the northern realm of Igrador, she had made her way up the coast of Culdiheen through the shipping towns of Hul, Brace, and Mainsil, to the fishing and trading village of Mizzen, where everything stank of fish and whale oil. Here, she had found a boatsman willing to sneak her across the heavily guarded rivermouth: a smuggler who tried to tell her his name before she quickly cut him off, preferring shared anonymity for the transaction. He pocketed the coins and took her aboard his black-sailed lugger among mismatched crates filled with his contraband wares.
Under cover of darkness on a moonless night, he skilfully island-hopped the small boat out into the bay where the great River Tiberon spilled into the Tyolean Sea, then made the crossing over the churning sea toward the Igradorean coast. The smuggler’s black sails and low freeboard kept them hidden among the dark waves from a watch tower that stood on an outcrop to the west with wide views over the islands of the bay and along the stretch of coastline.
Even though the crows had brought the news south that a calamity had befallen the Igradorian capital of Underock, bringing an end to the war they waged with Padoga across the river border, the river itself was still impassable in either direction with the banks heavily watched and guarded on both sides.
As the smuggler unloaded his illicit cargo onto the pebbled shore, the last he saw of the unnamed passenger was her silhouette disappearing into the coastal forest above. To the east, lay the town of Ripasea, named in the old tongue for where the river met the sea.
Morrigan made her way through the trees at night until she met the road that ran from Ripasea to Wéarf further up the coast. Just before dawn, she’d stepped onto the road not far from where she now lay face down, barefoot, with the contents of her bag sprawled across the dirt.
‘I think she’s dead,’ said a soldier, cautiously nudging her body with his boot.
‘What a pity,’ called one of his companions from a safe distance.
Five in all, their armour hung loose and incomplete beneath the Castrian tabards of Underock, dirty and tattered from life at the frontline.
Following the fall of Castle Underock, there had been no more orders from the missing King Baltus or his War Council, and the years-long attempted invasion of Padoga ground to a halt. As the Castrian platoons ceased to be paid, those who weren’t immediately conscripted into one of the ten barons’ armies slowly disbanded, leaving the armies of Baltus’s former bannermen encamped along the River Tiberon while the barons squabbled among themselves over who had claim to the throne.
Bellies as empty as their pockets, these five soldiers were among the last Castrians to finally desert their stations and seek lives away from the disarray.
‘Looks like she was robbed,’ the soldier told the others.
Many deserters had already passed this way and any one of them could have killed and looted this traveller. With Igrador now unruled and in turmoil, the roads were also crawling with bandits trying to eke out a living after years of Baltus’s heavy-handed taxes to fund his failed war.
‘Check her pockets,’ ordered their captain. He pointed around the scattered stuff and told the other three, ‘See if there’s anything of value in this crap.’
While the men fanned out to fossick among the strewn items, the point soldier flipped over the girl’s body and brushed the curled dark hair from her face.
‘Wow. She was pretty.’
‘I wanna see,’ said another, dropping one of Morrigan’s empty boots in the dirt.
‘Just focus on what you’re doing,’ his superior ordered.
The point man patted down the pockets of the girl’s breeches, feeling nothing inside, then reached into her leather vest. That’s when he noticed something odd.
‘She’s still warm.’
‘What do you mean?’ asked the leader.
‘The body’s still warm,’ he repeated, glancing back over his shoulder to the others.
When he looked back to the girl, her eyes opened and he only had enough time to register their exquisite beauty – one iris was silvery grey, the other golden bronze – before he felt her dagger slide effortlessly across his inner thigh.
He let out a scream, falling back onto the road as he clutched at the wound pouring blood in a steady stream. Before the others could draw their swords, Morrigan hurled the blade at the nearest, striking him dead centre of his chest.
The third soldier rushed forward as the girl rolled to one knee, twirling her body in the dirt as she opened her cloak to reveal two neat rows of glistening knives tucked into a pair of leather belts criss-crossing her chest. Her hand was a blur as she unleashed another dagger and the man tumbled to the ground in a cloud of dust.
The fourth man turned on his heels and fled back along the road. Realising he was beaten, the captain dropped his sword and held up his open hands in surrender.
The girl cast him a gentle nod as his cowardly companion continued to run to what should have been safely beyond the throwing distance of any knife. Without taking her eyes off the surrendering captain, she drew another blade, rose to her feet, and lunged forward as she hurled it toward the runner. Steel whistled through the air and thudded wetly into the back of his neck.
Seeing the man fall, his lifeless body tumbling along for several yards, the captain let out a yelp and dashed off the road into the protection of the woods.
Morrigan drew one more blade.
The man zigged and zagged through the undergrowth, trying to keep trees at his back and glancing every so often behind him. Confident that if he could no longer see the girl then she could no longer see him, he stopped to catch his breath.
There was a faint whistling sound, a dull clang to his left, and he turned just in time to see a flying dagger ricochet from one tree to another, altering its trajectory with such precision that it landed perfectly in a small gap in his loose chest armour.
The girl with the knives smiled at the sound of the body falling unseen in the forest.
For as long as she could remember, she never missed.
As a street kid, she had made money in taverns by betting people that if she could toss one of their coins into a cup from across the room, she could keep it, even if the cup was being erratically moved back and forth by the barman. This eventually led to more interesting feats of marksmanship with rebounds, blindfolds, and then people. Which was how she came to be the girl with the knives.
A whimper brought her attention back to the first soldier. He had tried to crawl some distance along the road, leaving a long red streak in the dirt until he collapsed by the roadside.
She approached him and sat down beside him, cross-legged. A speck of yellow buried within the tall rushes of dry grass caught her attention and she parted the stalks to expose a lone daisy straining to reach the sunlight. Her fingers gently fondled the flower as she spoke.
‘Don’t worry. I’m not going to kill you,’ said Morrigan as she plucked the long grass from around the daisy, one strand at a time, and the wounded soldier was unsure if she was speaking to him or the flower. ‘You’re already dead.’
Ah, she was talking to me, he realised.
‘You’ll bleed out from that cut. Right here.’ She surveyed the landscape around them – the plains and low hillocks at her back bathed in the golden light of the morning sun, the forest of pine and birch and ash opposite the road, and tendrils of chimney smoke rising from the distant rooftops of Ripasea in the south ‘Good a place as any to die, I suppose. But before you go, I need you to answer some questions.’
‘Why would I do that?’ the man spat, his fate already written.
She continued clearing the dry grass from around the flower, making a little patch in which it could grow happily without shadow.
‘I suppose that’s a fair question,’ she agreed. ‘Well, I’ll answer yours and then you can answer mine. Because, just as I know how to start such fatal bleeding, I also know how to prevent it.’
The man’s hands, soaked red, pressed harder against the gash in his thigh but still his life bubbled and dribbled between his fingers.
‘And it’s not by doing that,’ she said.
‘Alright,’ he caved. ‘What do you want to know?’
Her fingers caressed the stalk of the flower. Tiny filaments along its length, tickled her skin like fine hair as she asked, ‘What happened at Underock?
‘I wasn’t there. I was stationed at the bridge with the Third Company.’
‘I didn’t ask where you were,’ she scolded. ‘I asked what happened at Underock. If you’re going to waste time answering questions I didn’t ask, you’re not going to make it to my final question. Now, what happened?’
‘I heard it got blown up,’ he groaned. ‘In a mighty explosion.’
She had heard that the castle had been destroyed, but since she had never heard of a military weapon that could inflict such devastation, she assumed it was an exaggeration.
‘By whom?’
The man shook his head, unconvinced by what he had heard. ‘The Nightlings?’ he said at last.
‘Is that an answer or a question?’ she asked.
‘That’s what they say. Creatures of the night stormed the castle.’
His answer was not what she had expected. Her employer would only have sent her to Igrador to kill someone who had negatively impacted their interests. When she’d heard that Underock had fallen, she assumed that was the catalyst for her contract, that her target had been responsible in some way. But if these Nightlings had caused the events at Underock, she had to uncover a new pathway for information about the boy.
‘And what happened to your King Baltus?’ she asked.
‘They ate him.’
‘Who? These Nightlings?’
The man nodded, growing weaker now. ‘Please, I don’t know anything else about all that.’
‘What’s happening on the battlefront?’ she inquired, thinking perhaps her target was in that direction.
‘Nothing. The army has been stalled there for years, and now with Baltus dead, the barons are squabbling over who should be in charge, so it’s over. We’re heading home.’ He looked over at the bodies of his fallen comrades. ‘We were heading home.’
Morrigan pondered a moment, watching as the dark pool spread around the soldier. Her target had been described as a boy, so perhaps he was a young baron or one of their children who would overthrow the others or unite them against her employer. If that were true, surely her mission note would have been able to pinpoint a specific barony rather than the general location of ‘Igrador’. The nation was huge.
She tapped the little flower as if patting a child on the head, then stood up and dusted off her leggings.
‘Well, I better be on my way.’
‘Wait,’ the man implored. ‘You said you’d help me if I answered your questions.’
‘Actually, I said I knew how to prevent this kind of bleeding,’ she corrected as she picked up her belongings. She’d scattered them about the road herself to make the scene convincing, but the scavenging soldiers had kicked them through the dust.
‘Then tell me how,’ he begged.
‘Sure, but one last question.’
‘What?’
‘Do you know of someone called Dark?’ she asked.
‘Dark?’ he repeated weakly. ‘Is that a name?’
Morrigan sighed. ‘Yes. A boy. In Igrador. His name is Dark.’
The man shook his head. ‘Never heard of him.’
‘Thank you for your time,’ she said politely, plucking her daggers from the bodies and wiping them clean on the dead men’s tunics.
‘How do I prevent the bleeding?’ the soldier rasped, desperate. ‘Tell me. You said you’d tell me. What should I do?’
As she shook dirt from her boots and slipped them back on, she smiled at the mewling man and simply advised, ‘Don’t get cut in the first place.’
Five and a half days since she signed the contract, she set off to find her target.
Somewhere in Igrador, there was a boy named Dark.
CHAPTER II:
UNDER THE SKIN
After dusk, Syr Bayard Iden watched the crows peck at the fresh bodies hanging from the bridge. They were the latest deserters from the armies of the ten barons, caught and returned to a dark fate swinging in the breeze.
Although, it was technically no longer a bridge without the middle four arches that once spanned the mighty river separating the two nations, demolished by the Padogin bear-riders when the Igradorian army had first marched to the border with orders to cross, conquer, and capture the abandoned city of Troha, where legend claimed the streets were paved with gold.
Iden heard his name being called and turned to see a young Whitmarshan messenger girl waving to him from higher on the bank. He trudged up the slope and was led through the camp that had fallen into utter disarray since the fall of Underock.
With the King rumoured to have been killed by resurgent Nightlings, the ten barons now squabbled over who should wear the crown, and the argument had spread like a trenchfoot throughout their armies. Quarrels became fights, divisions grew, and old enmities between the men threatened to erupt into outright civil war until the barons had ordered their armies be segregated. Two nights ago, all the tents and ramshackle buildings that had sprawled for miles along the river were disassembled and moved into ten new camps radiating out from Bridge Tower like the spokes of a wheel, separated by crudely constructed barricades of logs sharpened to points by axe and clearly marked with fluttering banners.
The tower itself, an imposing stone fort built from the same white blocks as the former bridge, once watched over the border crossing. It now served as the military headquarters for the armies of the ten barons.
Walking through the portcullis, Iden was joined by other knights bearing the Whitmarshan crest of the dead tree, and the group made their way along corridors to a well-guarded chamber. Inside, the Whitmarshan Baroness Delano Lacienega presided over a gathering of her advisors.
The Baroness’s claim for the throne was tenuous at best, so she deliberated with her counsel as to which of the other barons she should pledge allegiance. She could secure her position in the new realm if she aligned with whichever baron was eventually crowned, but if she chose the wrong one to support, her future position could be dangling from a rope.
The discussion had been going in circles for days. Even though he was an exceptionally fast learner, Syr Iden struggled to keep up with the politics that bounced around the room.
Generally, the inlanders didn’t want a seasider to wear the crown, and vice versa. But the Buxtons also distrusted the Whitmarshans and had a long-standing territorial feud with the Undermoors. The Gillees and the Peak Crows were loyal to each other, but the former supported the Wéarfish while the latter despised them, as well as the Endlúnders who hated them back but had a fragile agreement with the Ripasee. The Rohillia maintained important trade relations with most others, but it fluctuated as much as the price of their timber. No one cared about the Lakháusi with their smug intelligentsia in a far-flung corner of the realm, one way or the other, and the Lakháusi simply buried their noses in their books, content with being the keepers of all knowledge.
Without Baltus, the Castrians of Underock no longer had any influence, having fled their fallen castle city to seek refuge in the towns farthest from Myrr Wood where the Nightlings lurked.
‘And what of these Nightlings?’ the Baroness asked, snapping Iden from his private thoughts.
‘We have only heard the same as you, m’lady,’ said one of the knights. ‘Rumours that some creatures of the night somehow survived the Hundred-Year Hunt and have returned.’
‘But we know not where they have gone,’ said another. ‘They have not been seen since the fall of Underock.’
They could be closer than anyone realises, Iden mused.
‘Perhaps they won’t be seen for another hundred years,’ suggested one man.
‘You’ll see them again,’ someone muttered, then Iden realised it was him. The room turned as one and he could feel the eyes of the Baroness upon him.
‘I mean,’ he stammered, ‘It’s unlikely they returned only to disappear again.’
