Best Served Cold

We could have our own city, Benna had said. You could be the Duchess Monzcarro of… wherever. Of Talins, had been his thought. We deserve to be remembered. He’d planned it himself, alone, and given her no choice. Just as he had when he betrayed Cosca. It’s better this way. Just as he had when he took Hermon’s gold. This is for us.

He’d always been the one with the big plans.

“Benna,” she mouthed. “You fool.”

“You didn’t know,” said Orso quietly. “You didn’t know, and now we are come to this. Your brother doomed himself, and both of us, and half of Styria besides.” A sad little chuckle bubbled out of him. “Just when I think I know it all, life always finds a way to surprise me. You’re late, Shenkt.” His eyes flicked to the side. “Kill her.”

Monza felt a shadow fall across her, lurched around. A man had stolen up while they spoke, his soft work boots making not the slightest sound. Now he stood over her, close enough to touch. He held out his hand. There was a ring in his palm. Benna’s ruby ring.

“I believe this is yours,” he said.

A pale, lean face. Not old, but deeply lined, with harsh cheekbones and eyes hungry bright in bruised sockets. Monza’s eyes went wide, the chill shock of recognition washing over her like ice water.

“Kill her!” shouted Orso.

The newcomer smiled, but it was like a skull’s smile, never touching his eyes. “Kill her? After all the effort I went to keeping her alive?”

– 

T he colour had drained from her face. Indeed she looked almost as pale as she had done when he first found her, broken amongst the rubbish on the slopes of Fontezarmo. Or when she’d first woken after he pulled the stitches, and stared down in horror at her own scarred body.

“Kill her?” he asked again. “After I carried her from the mountain? After I mended her bones and stitched her back together? After I protected her from your hirelings in Puranti?”

Shenkt turned his hand over and let the ring fall, and it bounced once and tinkled down spinning on the floor beside her twisted right hand. She did not thank him, but he had not expected thanks. It was not for her thanks that he had done it.

“Kill them both!” screamed Orso.

Shenkt was always surprised by how treacherous men could be over trifles, yet how loyal they could be when their lives were forfeit. These last few guards still fought to the death for Orso, even though his day was clearly done. Perhaps they could not comprehend that a man so great as the Grand Duke of Talins might die like any other, and all his power so easily turn to dust. Perhaps for some men obedience became a habit they could not question. Or perhaps they came to define themselves by their service to a master, and chose to take the short step into death as part of something great, rather than walk the long, hard road of life in insignificance.

If so, then Shenkt would not deny them. Slowly, slowly, he breathed in.

The drawn-out twang of the flatbow string throbbed deep in his ears. He stepped out of the path of the first bolt, let it drift under his raised arm. The aim of the next was good, right for Murcatto’s throat. He plucked it from the air between finger and thumb as it crawled past, set it carefully down on a polished table as he crossed the room. He took up an idealised bust of one of Orso’s forebears from beside it-his grandfather, Shenkt suspected, the one who had himself been a mercenary. He flung it at the nearest flatbowman, just in the process of lowering his bow, puzzled. It caught him in the stomach, sank deep into his armour, folded him in half in a cloud of stone chips and tore him off his feet towards the far wall, legs and arms stretched out in front of him, his bow spinning high into the air.

Shenkt hit the nearest man on the helmet and stove it deep into his shoulders, blood spraying from the crumpled visor, axe dropping slowly from his twisting hand. The next had an open helm, the look of surprise just forming as Shenkt’s fist drove a dent into his breastplate so deep that it bent his backplate out with a groan of twisted metal. He sprang to the table, marble floor splitting under his boots as he came down. The nearest of the two remaining archers slowly raised his flatbow as though to use it as a shield. Shenkt’s hand split it in half, string flailing, tore the man’s helmet off and sent it hurtling up into the ceiling, his body tumbling sideways, spraying blood, to crumple against the wall in a shower of plaster. Shenkt seized hold of the other archer and tossed him out of one of the high windows, sparkling fragments tumbling down, bouncing, spinning, breaking apart, deep clangour of shattering glass making the air hum.