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Gather a modest horde of such hidden deceivers-those of middling intelligence and clever malice and avaricious ambition-and serious trouble was pretty much assured. A singular example of this was found in the coven of witches and warlocks who, until recently, had ruled the Shake-inasmuch as a scattered, dissolute and depressed people could be ruled.

Jaws bunching, Yedan Derryg crouched down. Ripples from the faint waves rolled round the toes of his boots, gurgled into the pits they made in the soft sand. His arms trembled, every muscle aching with exhaustion. The brine from the shoreline could not wash the stench from his nostrils.Advertisement

Behind him, in the squalid huddle of huts beyond the berm, voices had awakened. He heard someone come on to the shore, staggering it seemed, drawing closer in fits and starts.

Yedan Derryg reached down his hands until the cold water flowed over them, and what was clear suddenly clouded in dark blooms. He watched as the waves, sweeping out so gently, tugged away the stains, and in his mind uttered a prayer.

This to the sea

This from the shore

This I give freely

Until the waters run clear

She came up behind him. ‘In the name of the Empty Throne, Yedan, what have you done ?’

‘Why,’ he replied to his sister’s horrified disbelief, ‘I have killed all of them but two, my Queen.’

She stepped round, splashed into the water until she faced him, and then set a palm against his forehead and pushed until she could see his face, until she could stare into his eyes. ‘But… why ? Did you think I could not handle them? That we couldn’t?’

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He shrugged. ‘They wanted a king. One to control you. One they could control in turn.’

‘And so you murdered them? Yedan, the longhouse has become an abattoir! And you truly think you can just wash your hands of what you have done? You’ve just butchered twenty-eight people. Shake. My people! Old men and old women! You slaughtered them!’

He frowned up at her. ‘My Queen, I am the Watch.’

She stared down at him, and he could read her expression well enough. She believed her brother had become a madman. She was recoiling in horror.

‘When Pully and Skwish return,’ he said, ‘I will kill them, too.’

‘You will not.’

He could see that a reasonable conversation with his sister was not possible, not at this moment, with the cries of shock and grief rising ever higher in the village. ‘My Queen-’

‘Yedan,’ she gasped. ‘Don’t you see what you have done to me? Don’t you realize the wound you have delivered-that you would do such a thing in my name…’ She seemed unable to finish the statement, and he saw tears in her eyes now. And then that gaze iced over and her tone hardened as she said, ‘You have two choices left, Yedan Derryg. Stay and be given to the sea. Or accept banishment.’

‘I am the Watch-’

‘Then we will be blind to the night.’

‘That cannot be permitted,’ he replied.

‘You fool-you’ve left me no choice!’

He slowly straightened. ‘Then I shall accept the sea-’

She turned round, faced the dark waters. Her shoulders shook as she lowered her head. ‘No,’ she managed in a grating voice. ‘Get out of here, Yedan. Go north, into the old Edur lands. I will not accept one more death in my name-not one. No matter how deserved it is. You are my brother. Go.’

She was not one of the deceivers, he knew. Nor was she a fool. Given the endless opposition from the coven, she had possessed less power than her title proclaimed. And perhaps, intelligent as Yan Tovis was, she had been content to accept that limitation. Had the witches and warlocks been as wise and sober in their recognition of the deadly lure of ambition, he could well have left things as they were. But they had not been interested in a balance. They wanted what they had lost. They had not shown the intelligence demanded by the situation.

And so he had removed them, and now his sister’s power was absolute. Understandable, then, that she was so distraught. Eventually, he told himself, she would come to comprehend what was now necessary. Namely, his return, as the Watch, as the balance to her potentially unchecked power.

He would need to be patient.

‘I shall do as you say,’ he said to her.

She would not turn round, and so, with a nod, Yedan Derryg set out, northward along the shoreline. He’d left his horse and pack-mount tethered two hundred paces along, just above the high-water mark. One sure measure of intelligence, after all, was in the accurate anticipation of consequences. Emotions stung to life could drown one as easily as a riptide, and he had no desire to deepen her straits. pqdm.com