Ash Rising Page 5

  “I see. And how do you feel about it?”

  “You sound like an old wet nurse. I feel it’s bloody ridiculous, as you well know. We should be out capturing more ravens or crows, not practising our curtsies. But the king has spoken.”

  The Duke of Novrecorte smiled for no reason Rize could see. “It seems he has.”

  The bird is still shaking as it takes off into the thin air.

  Its wings wobble as goes but it knows that it must not stop or it might not be over. They could come, bringing their sticks and pain again.

  The two-leggers had come for it today. It had heard strange noises and smelled the rich smell of another bird having killed and eaten its fill, the smell of stale blood and a two legger long dead. Its brain had surged its muscles forward, stomach already secreting juices to welcome in the dead meat.

  Then it had seen, and it was too late.

  So many of them… The bird had momentarily frozen at the sight of all these two legger’s crawling on the ground. It had suddenly felt its old terror from the days when these creatures were big as trees and it was small. They had crowded it around it and its mind had been addled by their squirming. So, when it saw the juicy two-leggers in a box, writhing like gifts for the taking, it had not seen a trap the way it would have another day. Then it had been held fast by something and been which made its mind go cold and blank with fear until it could move again.

  The bird dips slightly in the air to one side accidentally. Fear would not do. It had got away, it had survived. That was all that mattered now.

  Dimly, it perceived that its flesh hurt. Somewhere on its face, they had hurt it.

  The bird keeps flying and recalls the faces of the two-leggers who had attacked it. It is good with faces. If it saw them again, it would know them. It would remember

  .

  Chapter Seven

  The Memory of Water

  Ash was dreaming.

  It was always like this, on nights when the moon was full and unclouded, hanging in the blackness like a jewel waiting to be clawed out of the sky. These dark evenings, relatively cool and free of screaming outside the walls, were when Ash would dream of the world as it was before the Project.

  It wasn’t great, but it was what it was.

  But this was different. It must be, or how could she be thinking about the fact that she was dreaming? The velvet of the seat jolted and bumped beneath Ash as the unseen horses cantered along. Ash was in a carriage, or seemed to be, barrelling through the countryside with what felt now like impossible speed. This is not real, said a small faint part of her brain, but it had been so long since Ash was in a carriage that she barely heard. She placed her dream-hands out in front of her like a blind person and they connected with real wood, real velvet and glass that pressed coolly back into her palm. She left them there for a while, caressing the silky coldness. It felt so good to feel again. And then Ash saw something that took her breath away.

  The dream landscape outside was green – live plants, tender and budding, whizzing past the coach window. It was a green almost to hurt your eyes, so long had it been for Ash. It was a green to make you believe in God. Dream-tears were on her cheeks, but she didn’t care, didn’t look down to wipe them away. She was trying to memorise the colour of the life outside her window.

  Time seemed to mean nothing for this dream, for Ash was suddenly sitting in the breakfast parlour of Rhodopalais, her father and stepmother in front of her. Stupefied, she looked at the man who had raised her, dead these past six years. She did not know she recalled his face so clearly – the way his mouth turned down beneath his bristly moustache, the way he stood straight and tall even in private. Those details burned. Quickly, Ash looked away at the room - spotless and filled with sunlight, still full of all its furniture, now burned or sold or both. Why am I dreaming of this? The world has gone mad – why am I dreaming of the past now?

  Abruptly, the scene changed. She was in a square, a town square near to the palace it seemed, for there were people in fine dress walking around in the unhurried way no one did nowadays. So many people! Ash could not remember the last time she had been outside, seeing strangers milling around who weren’t rushing at her. Out on the town! She looked down at the cobbled roads beneath her that seemed to lead to everywhere. On her feet were a pair of prim laced ankle boots she did not recognise, noticeably unbeaten down by time, still black and shiny. Ash resisted the urge to hide them. Dream people did not steal or kill you for your shoes.

  Suddenly rain came bucketing down, soaking her skin with the memory of water. This was not the desultory few drops and roiling black sky that passed for storms lately, but a real downpour, vertical lines of white liquid goodness pouring down from Heaven above. All around dream people were scurrying for cover, worried about their fine dress, but Ash spread her arms wide and smiled.

  The smile did not last long. The rain stopped as abruptly as a water pump no longer being worked. Dripping wet, Ash looked up in time to see a familiar form. The enormous bird shape blocked out the dream sun as it flew over the square, its black feathery torso the size of a man and its wingspan stretching wide enough to knock chimney pots, its dog-sized talons dragging across roof shingles and causing screams. Ash stared grimly as the present intruded on the past. Then it dived. And Ash fell.

  Ash’s eyes snapped open just in time to feel the shocking cold snap as her cheek hit the cold stone floor. Derrick was shaking her shoulder with Old Merta and Tansy peering down at her.

  “Ash, they’re coming.” And she knew just who he meant.

  It was twilight. Derrick had been checking the perimeter, while the sky was still light enough.

  He could have been walking somewhere else, or his sharp eyes could have missed it. But he had seen them – a mob of about ten, ragged and starving, strength only in their hunger as they stumbled through the broken Rhodopalais gates like sleepwalkers.

  “Ash wake up! Did you hear me? Bandits coming up the north-east side.”

  Ash had heard. She hadn’t realised that she had been waiting for them all this time. Months of stomach-churning tension every waking moment had prepared her for this. Her hand was already on her crossbow by the time she realised that she was breathing fast, with Derrick shouting about commoners coming to loot.

  She moved as if in a dream to the broken window that was defensible, while he bolted the doors and shoved the kitchen table towards them.

  “This time they’re coming in for the house!”

  She nodded, but her mind was still, blank, like unmoved water. She knew that to think now would be to die. To think was to be afraid and to be afraid was to hesitate, just that one instant, before pulling the trigger or running. That was death, hopefully quick and simply, but maybe not. Maybe slow and by the mouthful. These people were hungry. They hadn’t had horses to butcher, conservatories to raise. Who knew how long it had been since their last scrap of food? Who knew how many had already seen their children starve, or worse, eaten them before they could starve themselves?

  The first was a bug-eyed, emaciated man with what might have once been blonde hair. Mostly likely a scout for the others, naked except for the threadbare remains of what had been his trousers. His feet were bleeding, Ash noticed, detachedly, as she raised her crossbow. She let Derrick shout the warning, it sounded better in a man’s voice, but they both knew that the thin man would not stop. He could not stop. Wordlessly, Ash and Derrick nodded to each other, timing their movements to be perfectly in sync. Then, as per their usual agreement, they fired at the same time. It was better that way. That way, neither of them knew for sure that they personally had killed someone, another human being.

  After the first man, roughly ten or so of them came at once. Ash was grimly surprised to see some in the tatters of upper class dress, banded together with people who in another life may have been their former servants, their former strangers.

  A weathered, bandit-looking man with most of his teeth missing was situated right in the middle o
f the scrawny throng. This seemed to be the leader. He had a sullen-looking woman on a chain, with an old dog’s collar around her neck and the tattered remains of a merchant’s wife’s gown about her shoulders.

  “We know ye’v Expansion food,” he yelled from within his posse.

  How had they known about that? Ash found herself silently thanking God that they had had the foresight to cover and hide the enormous pumpkin, more from carriors than anything else, but still.

  “Bring it out!” the man yelled, causing the woman on her leash to stumble as he raised his fists. He yanked at the woman, moving to bring her in front of him as a shield, motioning to his followers to ready weapons. “Bring it out and we might not eat you too,” he snarled, quieter this time.

  That was all the go-ahead Ash needed. She put an arrow in the middle of his throat without waiting for Derrick.

  The remaining emaciated would-be raiders lurched away as the arrow hit home, widening their protective circle as their leader fell to the floor gasping and dying. They muttered words Ash could not hear, did not want to hear, as they tried to regroup around the unforeseen change of plans. They walked to the door, more hesitantly now, with their eyes on the window and door where their enemies stood.

  It was the chained lady who at last raised her voice for the others, a broken reed of a voice with anger in it. “We’ll be comin’ back fer that pumpkin!” She shook her chained fist at the closed door, the clinking the only sound in the still air and then slumped over again, breathing hard.

  With that, the small rabble turned around and shuffled back the way they came, towards the outer grounds and gates of Rhodopalais, less like pillaging murderers than disappointed children who had come to see a show and found they could not get in.

  Chapter Eight

  Strained Relations

  Ash had sat watching the fire for what felt like hours.

  It calmed her, took the faces of the attackers away and it was an extravagance she decided to permit herself after finding the pumpkin.

  It was well after dusk when Derrick ran in again. After the shenanigans earlier, he had stood under cover near the gates for hours, watching. No one had asked him too, but he had. And when Ash had brought him a chunk of raw pumpkin for eating while he was there, he had just shrugged her away and not taken it. She hadn’t pestered him, she understood. She never wanted to eat after, either.

  But now, now he was different, Ash could tell without even needing to see him first, in that way childhood friends could. When he came up, not quite running but not quite strolling either, Ash felt her shoulders tense and her hands reaching for the crossbow. What was it this time?

  “There’s a traveller,” Derrick panted, leaning on the doorframe. “Just one, coming up through the gates. Looks like a woman.”

  “A traveller?” Ash could not have been more surprised if he had said the king himself, or a travelling circus complete with dancing ponies, had decided to visit.

  “No one leaves their homes, Derrick. Even to walk in their gardens. Not the men, no one. What on earth would a woman traveller be doing out at night? Stay inside, just in case, but you must have seen wrong, is all.”

  But sure enough, in just a few minutes, the petite figure of a cloaked woman came walking unhurriedly out of the darkness, not even looking this way or that for owls.

  Ash let Derrick stand in the doorway holding his crossbow, looking imposing and wheezing less now. She stood right next to him, ensuring that neither Old Merta nor Tansy could be seen behind them. A woman out at night was a strange sight indeed, but she looked harmless enough and Ash could tell from the way she was walking that, at the very least, she was not holding a weapon all ready and armed. Whether she was carrying one remained to be seen.

  “Good evening,” the traveller said sweetly from beneath her hood, as though they were holding out a cup of ale rather than a crossbow. “This is Rhodopalais?” she asked, in a voice just shy of uncertain, not really a question.

  Hearing the name from someone else sent a jolt through Ash. The signs that had ostentatiously marked the start of their lands had long since been stolen – first for the gold leaf, then for the metal and lastly for anger itself - even before things had got really bad. How had the woman known the name? But more than that, just hearing it spoken sent a shock through them all, in the way that all destroyed worlds feel shock when someone mentions their past, trappings of when times were normal, in such a casual way.

  “It was,” said Ash, speaking for the staff. “Although we’d be interested in hearing how you came about the name. Do you come to seek hearth and shelter?”

  “Oh, that would be lovely.”

  It was a stupid reason to risk their safety, but Ash found curiosity burning in her stomach, the first alive thing she had felt for months. She had to know – how did this woman know the name of their estate? And who travelled at night? Who did not watch for birds?

  “Please, come in,” Ash found herself saying.

  “Thank you ever so,” the woman answered cheerily as though she had expected the answer to be nothing else and walked amicably past Derrick and his crossbow inside and set about taking off her cloak. A bright head of coppery hair emerged from beneath a hood – hair that had most likely been very fine, in times when hair was still tended. The woman came in, patting dust off her cloak ordinarily enough, but Ash felt as though she could smell the night and wildness on her. This woman had come some way. Who on earth travelled in such times and on foot? Who did not watch for birds?

  Derrick squared himself up to her retreating back as though she were a bear and not a woman half his size. “What is it you want?”

  “Shelter would be kind, the traveller said without looking at him. “By the fire will serve me well, no need for more.”

  “And food?” Ash asked in a low voice.

  The woman looked at her full in the face at this. “Of course not,” she said softly. “You must think me blind. Not in these times, no. Just hearth and a few words’ conversation.”

  Ash took a step closer, trying to read the details of the stranger’s face as though there were some hidden meaning there. “I do not think you blind, but I think you brave. It’s been many a moon since we saw someone travelling through here that was not in the claws of a bird.”

  The woman spared a small smile like cracked pottery and nodded. There was something so strangely familiar about her, some intangible something in her face. “It was important enough to risk the carriors. I’m looking for someone who once lived here. I am looking for the Lady Cerentola.”

  “The Lady Cerentola?” Old Merta came out from the shadows, her eyebrows raised near enough to her kitchen cap and looked at Ash, blinking. Ash returned the look, not needing to say anything. Finally, she turned back to the traveller.

  “The Lady Cerentola is unwell, being older now in years, as I am sure you can imagine in these times. You’ll understand if-”

  “Not her. The young Lady Cerentola. Daughter of the first wife of his lordship.”

  Silence washed over the room, making even the cosy hearth fire seem cold. It was impossible. How could a stranger know about her? How could she know any of what she apparently did know, able to travel to Rhodopalais on foot by night from who knew where?

  “The ‘young’ Lady Cerentola is no more,” Ash said at last. “What business would you have with her?”

  The woman paused for a second, her face white with surprise. Then her expression hardened. “No, she is alive. I would have seen it if not. I am sure of it.”

  “What do you want with this ‘lady’?”

  “That is only for her ears.”

  “As I said, she is no more.”

  The stranger shook her coppery head smartly. “I know she is alive, I know.” She threw her travelling cloak wide for an instant, the better to get into some inner pocket and with that the conversation went cold. Without speaking, Ash walked the distance between them and drew the cloak back with her hand. Beneath it were the unmis
takable orange robes of a Pathfinder.

  The woman watched her expression without speaking, her face tense but unrepentant in the firelight.

  “We have enough vultures in these parts, stranger,” Ash hissed. “Why come to take the poor’s warmth and their sense too, with your zealot babblings?”

  “It matters not what you think,” the woman shot back. “Only the Lady Cerentola.”

  “Oh, does it not?

  Old Merta stepped in, coming in between the two and glaring. “Ash! There is no need to be so rude.”

  But Ash was watching the traveller. The woman stopped her arguing as if she had been slapped and looked at Ash in amazement.

  “Ashlynne.” she whispered, her mouth falling slightly open as she looked at the grubby kitchen girl before her with eyes wide. “Ashlynne, is it really you?”

  All the world stopped.

  “How do you know my name?” Ash managed at last.

  The traveller seemed to remember herself and wiped the look of amazement from her face, shutting off her features neatly like a closed book. Again, a wave of familiarity swept over Ash. Something about that face… who was this woman?

  “How do you know my name?” Ash said again, louder than she’d intended.

  Rather than answering, the traveller continued her business of looking within some inner pocket. At last, she pulled out a tattered and grimy roll of tightly bound canvas, the kind they used to do oil paintings on at court when it was fashionable with the nobility some years back.

  Ash took the canvas, but before she could unroll it the sound of her stepmother’s shoes came around the corner. Next to this sudden new stranger, Stepmother looked suddenly old and derelict, in her shabby genteel gown.