Chapter 16

Angharad flinched, but she did not die.

No, the ball hit the tree about a foot to the right of her head. Bark went flying and a heartbeat later both cultists keeping watch turned her way – she felt Cozme going still as he was caught leaning out of cover.

The cultists shouted, and just like that the traitor had killed them.

There should have been a burst of movement, of surprise and fear and hatred, but instead Angharad breathed deep. The urgency bled out of her, slowly but surely, as a great silence spread. Stillness hung in the air, like the world had been seized by the throat.

The fishing line struck the scene before her and the impact rippled out, as if writ on water.

Angharad Tredegar stood stranded on an island’s shore, stones digging into the soles of her boots. She looked down at herself, seeing on the water the moment where time had gone still: at once she knew she still stood there, in that other place, but also that so long as she stood on this forlorn shore it was nothing but a reflection on shadowy waters. The ripples calmed, showing again the crystallized act of Augusto Cerdan’s betrayal in perfect detail. Without turning or daring to move an inch, Angharad knew that there was something besides her. An entity great and terrible, so much that her mind trembled at the very thought of beholding it.

The Fisher’s steady breath was as a gust of wind, the spirit patiently fishing in the moment-become-water.

“He betrayed me,” Angharad finally said. “I knew he would, but to think he would go so far? Master Cozme and his brother, even Isabel.”

She ground her teeth, seething with impotent anger.

“He is a man without honour,” she bit out.

Above them there was only darkness, as if they stood under an eternity of nothing, but Angharad somehow knew there was a ceiling. This was a cavern, resounding with the quiet echo of water lapping at the shore of the island within it. Where the spirit she had struck a pact with still waited, his patience as absolute a truth as the coming of the tide.

“Honour,” the Fisher said, slowly speaking the word as if feeling it out.

The fishing line struck at water, ripples turning the moment into a confusion of colour and lines, and the spirit hummed.

“A worthless thing.”

She rocked back as if he’d struck her across the face. Anger and surprise fought fear for the barest of heartbeats, long enough she looked at the spirit. A hulking shape towering above her, more fortress than man, and in the dark she could make little more than a silhouette. But she saw the trails of ichor, the rivulets of black on grey skin that bled down from the crown of his head. They dripped down the Fisher’s body all the way to the stones beneath his feet, staining them black. There was a basket on the other side of him, tall as she and full of wriggling things.

Instinct screamed at her not to look at it too closely.

“It is not,” she sharply replied. “It is priceless.”

The Fisher shook his head, chiding.

“Its price is known to all, Angharad Tredegar.”

His voice was not a man’s voice, with emotion and cadence and all the shades of humanity. It was a spirit’s, as much the glimpse of something she could barely comprehend as a sound. Her mind told her she heard the sound of the sea against stone, of bones shattering like twigs, but she could not have explained why. Against her will, Angharad wrenched her gaze away. She was trembling, slick with sweat. The spirit was not meant to be beholden by mortal eyes.

“Why were you betrayed, child?”

“Fear,” she said. “Fear and jealousy.”

The spirit laughed. It was a sound utterly without joy: a wound ripping open, a friend abandoned in the dark.

“Because you are weak,” the Fisher corrected.

“I am not weak,” Angharad hissed. “I have earned ten stripes, spirit, and won against-”

“The victories of a child,” he dismissed. “You fight a woman’s battles, now, yet still hold them up as trophies. Why should they not betray you? It is nothing more than what you deserve.”

“We had a truce,” she shouted. “He turned not only on me but on his brother, on Cozme and Isabel. How can you claim I am at fault?”

“Truce,” the spirit repeated, amused. “Another word. How many will you hide behind?”

“Keeping your promises is the foundation of the world,” Angharad bit back. “Of everything we are.”

“There is only one foundation to the world, child,” the Fisher said, with a certainty like iron and stone, like tide and decay. “The eldest law, whose name is extinction.”

And now she understood, for she had learned at her father’s knee as much as her mother’s. The old songs, the old tales, the old ways. She had come here in the dark, on the eve of death, and the spirit she had bargained with was testing her. Angharad swore she would not prove unworthy.

“That is despair, spirit,” she said. “I refuse it. It will not own me.”

And she meant it, for all that she had a role to play. Angharad was not without fault, and sometimes she bent honour or twisted it, but she would never renounce it. It there was failure, it was hers and not that of what she aspired to. Even if she fell short all her life, why should she cease trying? The final betrayal of what you were was to surrender to the tide of the world, to let it decide who you were to be.

“Perhaps it is not writ in the bone of Vesper that honour should matter,” Angharad admitted. “But it can be made to – and I will fight to make it so.”

She readied herself for pain or anger, for the test of her resolve, but the spirit only flicked his fishing rod. Lights swirled, and below the waters she glimpsed shapes moving.

“And so you are betrayed,” the Fisher said. “You claim rights you have not won, acting as if your desires are born worthy of respect.”

“Why do you still exist, Fisher, if the eldest law is absolute?” she challenged.

“It can be stalled,” the spirit said. “That, too, is true. But only strength can achieve this, and you are weak. Your will is dull. Your enemies defy you with impunity.”

Shapes circled around the bait under the surface, as above lights scattered like a broken mosaic.

“Laws,” the Fisher told her, “are the right of the strong and them alone. Your honour is not a law, it is a noose.”

Her heart clenched with fear. This… it did not feel like a test of her mettle. There was no fearsome wrath, no pain or fear or battle of tricks. The Fisher did not seem interested enough in her for this, and that more than anything else had a gaping pit opening in her stomach. Was this only a remonstration before her death, some kind of sick sermon from the ancient spirit? No, she told herself. Doubt is how victory slips away. It must be a test, it must.

“I do not believe that,” Angharad replied, looking down at the waters.

She clenched her fists, knowing that as soon as the ripples settled she would once more see Augusto Cerdan betraying his kin and professed love for a better chance at running away. The Fisher was not wrong, that the infanzon had done it because he feared her not. Because he thought he would get away with it, that even if she survived she would be bound by oaths not to slay him for his treachery. All of this might never have happened, if she had simply let him fall last night. But that was not the whole of it, was it?

If you began to act in only the ways that helped you, if you cared nothing for duty and dues, then you were as an animal. And that sickness, it spread until there was no law but the law of the sword and the whole world was as a butcher’s yard. There was a cost to peace, to plenty and safety and Vesper being more than packs of wolves tearing each other to bits: sometimes, you had to lose. To accept that you could not win every time, because if you could not why should anyone?

Honour had been used against her, but that did not mean honour was wrong. Only that the wicked had been cleverer than she.

“Having the sharpest blade,” she quietly said, “that’s not what honour is. It is defending the weak, it is doing the right thing. Even when it costs you.”

The Fisher did not even turn her way.

“Then perish.”

It was not a test, Angharad Tredegar then understood. It had never been. This was no tale of the Fifth Branch, where the clever princess moved the heart of the spirit with her honour. No play where her perseverance would be rewarded with the aid of an all-powerful ally, not even a song of cleverness and guile. The old monster she had made a pact with had wanted her to be a worse woman than she was, and now that she refused to be that monster would let her die. And the utter dismissal, the casual disinterest, was what burned her most. Because had the spirit not known who she was, when they made their pact? And now it shamed her for it, as if being anything but a selfish pit of despair was some sort of sin.

“What did you choose me for, if not this?” Angharad snarled. “What else, if not honour?”

Below the waters, one of the shadows bit the bait. It struggled after, scared and hurting and somehow knowing it was going to die.

“I remember them shouting of it,” the Fisher said, “when the ships first landed on our shores.”

Arms like towers pulled, ripping out of the water a wriggling shape that Angharad’s eyes shied away from. It was caught in a great palm, the barbed hook deftly slid out of shadowy flesh.

“Honour, honour!” the spirit laughed. “They raised it a banner, bedecked their champions in it, painted it on the lips of their queens.”

The wriggling thing fought with terror’s strength, but for all its efforts it did not slip the Fisher’s grasp. Angharad could not see the old spirit’s face but she knew it was smiling, just as she knew that part of her would have wept at the sight of it. The Fisher’s fingers squeezed, and after a wet and ugly crack the wriggling thing no longer wiggled at all.

“How sweet it made their screams taste, when my teeth cracked their bones.”

Angharad shivered as the spirit tossed the broken thing into the basket, where the dead flesh spread terror like poison in a cup.

“They loved their honour so much, your forebears,” the Fisher reminisced, “that I nailed them to the Young Shore so they might sing of it on the wind for their coming kin to hear.”

Oh Sleeping God, Angharad trembled. What have I done?

“There were so many the sea turned red,” the spirit told her lovingly, “that not even seagulls could drown out the screams.”

What had she sworn to free or die trying?

“Honour?” the Fisher said. “I would not give wind for honour. I gifted you my sagacity, child, because you hate them. Because you fear them.”

And on the water before them Angharad saw scrawled the nightmare of the night where her life had been broken forever, the fire and the screams and the blood on the stone. Her breath caught in her throat and she did not deny the spirit’s words for they were the truth.

Angharad Tredegar would avenge her family.

That oath she could not break, not without killing what was left of the girl who had been daughter of Rhiannon and Gwydion Tredegar. And if she killed that girl, what was even left?

“It has become half your name,” the spirit said. “You cannot renounce that, so the journey has become inevitable.”

The Fisher slowly turned, and before her trembling gaze fled to the stones at her feet the Pereduri glimpsed trails of ichor on grey flesh.

“There is poison in your veins, Angharad Tredegar,” the Fisher fondly said, “and when you learn to drink of it, you will become a thing of dread. One fit to break the locks on my cage.”

And as Angharad looked down at her boots, she saw the mistake at last. Because the spirit had cut to the bone of her, but he had not done it without a price to himself: he had revealed of him as much as he stripped bare of her. I gave you my sagacity, the Fisher had said. Nor merely a boon or a sliver of power, but a part what he was. That was not a small thing, one without costs or one that could easily taken back. If she died, he would lose something – and not least of it what the spirit thought was a chance of someone capable of freeing him.

Her gaze rose back to the water, finding once more Augusto Cerdan’s feverishly triumphant gaze looking back at her.

“You need me,” Angharad quietly said.

“There are others,” the Fisher said, “and my nature is patient.”

“But not wasteful,” she said. “You brought me here for a reason, Fisher. To learn your answer, so that I might beat the eldest law. You do not want me to be dead for all that you castigate me. You want me to be strong.”

For that is the only way you think I will ever be able to free you, she thought.

“Go on, then,” Angharad Tredegar said, forcing herself to look at the face of horror. “Show me your way.”

She saw nothing, only grey and shadow and ichor, yet still her eyes watered with tears. Then she smelled blood, felt it inside her mouth and sliding down her cheeks. She did not flinch or look away. The Fisher laughed: a ship breaking on a reef, a shield wall shattering.

“I am no peddler god, child,” the spirit said. “I gave you a gift of blood and bone, which you have not learned to use. Did I give you eyes or my own sagacity?”

“Then teach me,” Angharad challenged.

“That is why you are here,” the Fisher said. “You lessen yourself, clinging to your body like the shore. That is a child’s fear.”

The great spirit’s voice rang like a decree.

“Slay it,” he said. “Embrace the water.”

She watched the water before her, writ with light and a tale of treachery, and took a step beyond the shore. The water was cool, cold in a way that seeped into her bones, but she pressed on. A step after another, until was swallowed whole and she opened her eyes.

—

She stood besides Angharad Tredegar, whose expression was startled fury, and stepped away.

Violence exploded, the cultists charging towards the shout and pinning the company down. Still surprised, the four behind the tree hesitated. Isabel took a crossbow bolt to the belly, falling with a scream, and Angharad Tredegar charged into the mass of warriors.

She would die, Angharad thought, it was only a matter of time.

Brun tried to sink his hatchet in Augusto Cerdan’s back, eyes shining with emotion, but Beatris stopped him. She pulled at him and Song, face conflicted, said something to both.

Angharad thought she would be able to hear, if she came closer, but she could not quite manage it.

The three fled, Augusto struck across the face when he tried to go with them. He doubled it through the clearing even as Cozme was struck with a spear and Remund lost a hand to a sword blow. Cozme tried to run, but he was caught by one of the watchers and beaten unconscious.

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Angharad Tredegar killed five before Ocotlan broke her leg and Tupoc rammed his spear through her heart. She died trying to claw at his throat one last time, but her bloody fingers fell short.

—

Angharad’s head broke the water, gasping. She felt a massive hand rest atop the crown of her head.

“Do better,” the Fisher said, and forced her back under.

—

This time, Angharad Tredegar began by pulling Isabel out of the way. She ran towards the other four and Cozme Aflor took a crossbow bolt in the back halfway there. They all rushed into the clearing, sweeping over the two watchers like a tide, but the warband caught up with them before they reached the trees. Three survived to run.

Angharad Tredegar was not one of them.

—

She sucked in a breath, emerging from the water.

“Please,” Angharad said, “I need-”

“Again,” the Fisher said, and pushed her back under

—

Angharad Tredegar charged the watchers herself, hoping the others would follow. She took a wound to a thrown knife and Brun was shot in the arm, but they made it across the clearing before the warband caught up with them. She shouted an order and everyone scattered, as she did, running their own way towards the sanctuary road.

Five survived to flee.

Angharad Tredegar’s wound slowed her enough that Leander Galatas traced a Sign before her and she hit a wall that could not be seen, falling down for a hollow to knock unconscious. The warband took her.

—

“I’m drowning,” Angharad gasped. “You can’t-”

“Again,” the Fisher said.

—

Angharad Tredegar ordered them so scatter before they had finished running across the clearing.