The Edge of the World Read online

  Moving quickly, he managed to dodge it, as well as the third strike that soon followed. The surprise of Lynch’s attack was matched only by its savagery, with the wiry prentice acting fast to press his advantage. The Brute and the Newt followed his lead, using the distraction to pounce on Drake, grabbing him around the arms and head to keep him from intervening.

  ‘Let go of me!’ Drake shouted while Joss gasped for breath, struggling with his swordbelt and fighting to keep his balance.

  ‘Trying to pull your Cheater’s Blade on me, eh?’ Lynch said, sounding amused. ‘Go ahead. Do it. The last prentice that unsheathed a weapon on a fellow order member was turfed out on his ear.’

  ‘Who said – anything – about unsheathing it?’ Joss asked through sharp puffs of air, just as he managed to unclip the scabbard from his belt and use the holstered blade as a bludgeon to smack Lynch across the face. The prentice rocked back a step as the Brute and the Newt looked over in shock.

  ‘You right, Lynch?’ the Brute asked in a wavering little voice.

  Rubbing his bloodied mouth, Lynch shot Joss a murderous look. ‘Better than this mongrel’s gunna be when I’m done with him.’

  He moved to leap on Joss with both hands outstretched, but was stopped by a tiny blur that caught him hard on the cheek. ‘Arrrgh!’ he cried, clutching his face. ‘What in all of Shoda’s Pits was that?!’

  ‘A chestnut!’ a voice called out, and Hero dropped down from above to stand between her brethren and their attackers. ‘And there’s plenty more where that came from, Lynch.’

  ‘A chestnut ?! You hit me with a chestnut ?’ Lynch shrieked, hand clamped firmly over one eye.

  ‘Wouldn’t want to draw a blade on you and have you run off to tattle about it, would I?’ Hero said, brandishing one of her improvised weapons. ‘Besides, I had to make it a fair fight. I can’t imagine you have the necessary skills to fend off anything genuinely lethal.’

  Everyone turned to see how Lynch would react. Squinting through a quickly blackening eye, he offered Hero a twisted sneer. ‘You think you’re so clever, don’t you? So tough and mucking untouchable.’

  Hero cracked her knuckles around the fistful of chestnuts in her hand. ‘Stay,’ she shrugged. ‘Find out.’

  Lynch stared at her, then hocked a thin line of spit from between his teeth. ‘Y’ent worth the bother,’ he said, then clapped his cohorts on their shoulders. ‘Come on, boys. Let’s leave the cheats to their scheming. They’ll keep for another time.’

  Joss and his brethren watched closely as Lynch and his cronies receded into the shadows. Lynch was the last to vanish, eyeballing each of them in turn with naked hatred. Neither Joss nor his brethren blanched, with Hero staring at her rival until well after his vicious little face had disappeared from view.

  ‘I can’t leave you two alone for a single evening without you getting into trouble, can I?’ she asked. As she stashed her arsenal of chestnuts in her jacket pocket, something in Joss’s brain clicked.

  ‘That was you, wasn’t it?’ he said. ‘After I left the banquet – when I was struck by the falling chestnut. That was you.’

  ‘Can’t say I didn’t try to get your attention. Then or now,’ Hero replied, stalking back to the gnarly old tree from which she’d dropped, its branches grazing the tallest reaches of the fortress. ‘How are you both, by the way?’

  ‘Better for you coming along,’ said Drake, rotating his shoulders where the Brute and the Newt had grabbed him.

  Hero turned her attention to Joss. ‘How’s your gut?’

  Joss placed a tentative hand on his stomach, still throbbing with the pain of Lynch’s punch. ‘Nothing broken,’ he said.

  Hero ran her fingers along the tree’s bark and the small ‘H’ that looked as though it had been engraved there some years before. ‘I feel I should apologise,’ she said. ‘Lynch has always been a nightmare, but he’s chiefly been my nightmare. I never thought he’d target you.’

  ‘That’s nothing you can help,’ Drake replied, drawing closer to her. ‘Every order has its malcontents.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Joss said as he followed step. ‘Ours goes by the name of Horace Vahst. Real muckeater, that one. Tried to steal my boots once. While I was still wearing them.’

  Drake chuckled, while Hero offered a lopsided smile.

  ‘Come on,’ she said, patting the engraved ‘H’ decisively. ‘I want to show you something. Now that I’ve finally got your attention.’

  Grabbing hold of the lowest branch of the tree, she used it to hoist herself upward, then kept climbing until she was hidden high up among the leaves. Drake and Joss shared a grimace, then stretched their sore muscles, spat in their palms, and followed. It took them twice as long as it had taken Hero, but with sweating brows they finally clambered onto the branch beside her.

  ‘Try not to fall and break your legs,’ said Hero as they cautiously shuffled into position. ‘There’s only so far I can carry you.’

  Risking a glance at the ground, Joss saw for himself the pterosaur’s-eye view that Hero would have had of both his exit from the Great Hall the other night and Lynch’s ambush this evening. As he leaned away from the dizzying sight, his ear brushed a chestnut and sent it toppling below.

  ‘What were you doing up here?’ Drake asked, wobbling on the branch beside Hero.

  She shrugged.‘I always come here when I need to think, to get away from everyone and everything that’s troubling me.’

  The branch swayed again as Drake shifted his weight uncertainly. ‘And that includes us?’ he asked.

  Settling back into the crook of the tree, Hero sighed. ‘Of course not,’ she said. ‘But I won’t lie. Coming back here to find Lord Haven dead … it hasn’t been easy. Lord Haven is … he was …’ Hero stopped, drew another deep breath. ‘Not a lot of people have believed in me throughout my life. He was one of the few.’

  ‘How so?’ Drake asked.

  Hero considered the question for a long time. ‘He was there the day I applied to be a prentice, right here in this yard,’ she finally said, staring at the ground as if the ghosts of the past might suddenly materialise before her. ‘I was the only girl among a dozen applicants. And don’t think the others held back from letting me know it. They taunted and teased me, with Lynch the loudest of all. Even the paladeros seemed sceptical of my chances … and displeased when I actually ranked top of the leader board. Many of them refused to take me on despite how well I’d performed. I even heard Sur Rayner referring to me as “that urchin girl” and a “daughter of thieves”, and I knew that no matter how hard I tried I could never outrun my past.’

  ‘That muck-brained cuss!’ exclaimed Joss, unable to help himself, while Drake remained focused on Hero and her story.

  ‘He knew about your parents?’ he asked.

  Hero nodded. ‘He did. I have no idea how, but he knew. And he judged their sins as if they were mine.’ She glanced from Drake’s attentive face back to the tree’s swaying branches. ‘Not Lord Haven, though. The other paladeros may not have wanted me by their side, but he showed no hesitation in taking me on as his prentice. He showed me how to ride, how to fight, how to fly. When everyone else gave up on me, dismissed me, denied me – he offered nothing but acceptance and encouragement.’

  She stopped.

  ‘And now he’s gone,’ she said. ‘And everything has changed. It’s been – I’ve had a hard time accepting that. I still haven’t, really. But he was too generous a soul to memorialise him only with grief. I owe it to him to find my way out of this gloom that I’ve fallen into … even if it’s Rayner who sits in his place,’ she said with a snarl, leaving no doubt as to how she felt about the new lord of her order.

  She shook her head as if clearing her thoughts, then stretched out her arms and straightened her back. ‘I’m feeling a bit cramped here. How about we go for a walk?’

  Joss turned his gaze back the way that he and Drake had come. ‘Can’t say I’m looking forward to climbing back down.’

&nb
sp; ‘Who said anything about climbing down?’ Hero asked, and edged across the branch towards a nearby roof. She moved with a sabretooth’s grace, hopping across the divide with ease before turning to wait for the others. ‘Well? Are you coming?’

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  A THING OF STONE AND IRON

  ONE at a time, Joss and Drake shuffled along the branch, stared at the ground below, and leapt onto the roof. Hero didn’t congratulate them on their successful landing, just spun on her heel to lead the way across the fortress skyline.

  ‘The southwestern tower has quite a view,’ she said, walking perilously close to the guttering. ‘Though you’ll have to watch your step to get there. One wrong move and we’ll be serving prentice pancakes for breakfast …’

  ‘Maybe we should have stayed in the chestnut tree, where we were only likely to break our legs instead of every bone in our bodies,’ Joss muttered as he followed her, unsure if anyone heard him as they fell into a contemplative silence that was only interrupted when Hero slowed a half-step.

  ‘I know I’m not an easy person to be around,’ she said, taking both her brethren by surprise. She was still tracing a path along the edge of the roof, keeping her eyes on where she was walking, never risking so much as a glance at either of them. ‘I learned early on that the best way to protect yourself is to never lower your guard. Never shed a tear. Never spill so much as a drop of blood.’

  She came to a statue of a phobetor, one of several that crouched along the edge of the rooftop. The winged creature eyed the prentices with blank animosity as Hero grabbed hold of it and used it as leverage to swing across to the next turret. Drake and Joss were quick to follow her example, though neither of them were as confident or agile.

  Hero pushed on, leading them up one side of the turret and down the other. ‘My mother and father made a life of deceiving others and exploiting the weaknesses of hapless strangers,’ she huffed as she marched upward. ‘And when they were sent to gaol and I went to live with my uncle, I was kept at such a distance that any shred of tenderness in me was left to shrivel, like a tree without sunlight.

  ‘I became a thing of stone and iron. A hardened implement, good only for bludgeoning and breaking and little else.’

  ‘That’s not true,’ Drake told her, and she looked at him just long enough to shrug his words away. The Lord’s Keep was looming before them now, a great pale pillar with guards roaming its ramparts. She eyed it with an intensity that could have drilled a hole straight through its granite walls.

  ‘Your uncle … surely he must have had some sense of kindness or concern for you, given that he took you in?’ Joss asked. He found it difficult to believe that family could be as unfeeling as Hero claimed.

  But Hero just shook her head.

  ‘I remember when I first arrived at the High Chamber where he served,’ she said, turning from the Lord’s Keep and continuing towards the southwestern wall. ‘I was still young, and even with everything that had happened with my parents, I still clung to a few fanciful notions. I had a journal that I took everywhere with me, given to me by my father. It was bound with soft pterosaur leather, fastened with a tiny padlock and matching key, and filled with blank pages that, with time, overflowed with my stories and drawings.’

  ‘What were the stories about?’ Joss asked, amazed to think of Hero as a young, whimsical child.

  ‘The adventures of a girl called Hero,’ she smiled. ‘Originally she was an outlaw who stole from the rich and gave to the poor. Then she became a city warden, charged with clearing the streets of crime all by herself. But when I arrived at the High Chamber in Skyend where my uncle served, she became a skyborne paladero. Because that was the first time I saw Lord Haven, saddled on the back of his winged mount, flying back to Blade’s Edge Acres. I imagined the serene freedom that would come with such a life, and I envied it more than anything.

  ‘I was putting the finishing touches on what I thought to be my best drawing of Hero when my uncle found me, and snatched the journal from my grasp. “Dreams are for the Sleeping King alone,” he told me, ripping out each page and tossing them on the fire. He even burned the binding, leaving me only with this …’

  Reaching into her collar, Hero plucked out a key on a fine silver chain. It reminded Joss of the Constellation Key, the only means of opening the gates of the Ghost City of Vaal, which had been entrusted to them when they were still all strangers to each other. But this key was smaller and finer, and its significance was far more personal – more like the thunderbolt pendant Joss wore, heavy with its own history.

  ‘My uncle dragged me to my room after that, and locked me in with no food or water, no candle, no blanket. I wept so much that night that I thought I’d never stop. But by the time the sun came up I had shed all the tears I had left in me to give. And I haven’t parted with another since.’

  They came to a stop at the edge of the rooftop, with all of the expansive valley spread out before them. Its depths were plunged into pools of shadow, its peaks spotlighted in the silvery-blue light of a moon so full it resembled a crystal ball.

  ‘When I finally broke free of my uncle and came to Blade’s Edge Acres, I took the name Hero so that I might have a fresh start. So that I could finally become what I so badly desired to be. But iron doesn’t soften so easily. And it’s an unhappy fate for you both that you have to bear me and my bludgeoning ways.’

  ‘That’s simply not true,’ Drake said as he took her hand and squeezed it. ‘You think too little of us if you believe that we’re blind to your honour. Your courage. Your kind heart. We’ve been through too much together and we know you too well.’

  ‘He’s right,’ Joss added. ‘I don’t know how it is that we managed to find each other. We couldn’t come from further afield. But fate’s bound us together. And as I learnt in Daheed, I couldn’t wish for anyone better to call my brethren.’

  There was a long silence as Hero rubbed at the rim of her goggles, then pulled them clear off her face. Her eyes were bloodshot and watery, with teardrops hanging from her long lashes.

  ‘I … ‘ She stopped. Cleared her throat. ‘I never told Lord Haven how much he meant to me,’ she continued, dabbing at her face with the back of her glove. ‘Words don’t come easy to me, after all. But there’s one thing that his passing has taught me, even with all the doubts it’s raised and the questions I still need answered. And that’s that sometimes you have to reach down and pull the words out. So thank you. Both of you. For everything.’

  Joss and Drake both smiled, soft and warm, a look of camaraderie that they showed no hesitation in sharing with Hero.

  ‘No thanks necessary,’ Drake told her.

  ‘Agreed,’ Joss said. ‘Though there is one thing I might ask.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘This view is pretty and all – but can we get down now?’

  By the time they had reached solid earth again, a thick fog had rolled in to swamp the fortress grounds. Joss kept a close eye on the battlements as he and his brethren hurried back to their quarters, searching the upper reaches of Blade’s Edge Acres for any sign of movement.

  ‘Do either of you feel that?’ he asked, still staring.

  ‘Feel what?’ Drake replied.

  ‘Like we’re being watched,’ said Hero, and pointed through the mist to the silhouetted guards who had returned to their posts. All three prentices lowered their heads and hastened at the presence, not wishing to earn any undue attention. They were only a few doors away from their chambers when they heard someone call out from behind them.

  ‘What do you three think you’re doing?’

  Spinning around, the prentices saw a figure leaning halfway out of one of the nearby chamber doors. Joss didn’t recognise the man at first, dressed casually as he was in grey breeches and a white undershirt. The only distinguishing object on him was the lead disc he wore on a leather necklace, which was swinging against his barrel-sized chest. But then Joss saw the glowering expression stretched across the man’s
granite block of a head, and there was no mistaking his identity.

  ‘Captain Kardos,’ Joss said, and the man’s chest swelled the same way as it had at Lord Haven’s service. ‘We were just taking a quick stroll before bed.’

  The captain’s glower intensified as he shifted his weight, revealing an array of polished weapons within his quarters. Joss eyeballed the swords and knives and spears with acute unease.

  ‘You should know that his lordship frowns upon prentices roaming the grounds this late,’ Kardos said, stepping forward to block Joss’s view.

  ‘Lord Haven never set any curfews,’ Hero was quick to reply.

  ‘Lord Haven may not have. But it’s Lord Rayner who’s in charge these days. Best you reconcile yourselves to that fact,’ Kardos said before waving them on with a meaty hand. ‘Now get back to your quarters. And know that if you’re looking to cause any trouble, I’m only a few doors away, I don’t sleep, and there’s nothing that escapes my attention. Understood?’

  ‘We –’ Joss’s protest of innocence was cut short as Kardos slammed the chamber door in their faces. The prentices exchanged a look of disbelief before making a hasty escape. Edgar could still be heard snoring from within his room as Joss closed the chamber door behind them and turned to his brethren.

  ‘Did you notice that?’ he asked.

  ‘Notice what?’ said Drake. ‘The constipated look on Kardos’s oversized mug?’

  ‘Notice that Kardos was wearing a military seal,’ Hero replied, having spotted the lead disc just as Joss had.

  Drake furrowed his brow. ‘So?’

  ‘So what’s a soldier in the Royal Army doing as a captain of the guard at a paladero order?’ Joss said.

  Drake shrugged. ‘Spending his retirement years in a cushy post where the most he has to do is bully the odd prentice or two?’

  ‘Maybe,’ replied Hero. ‘Or maybe there’s more to the captain than it seems.’

  ‘Him and that private army of his,’ said Joss as he gazed out the window at the black night and all that was hidden within it.