‘I don’t know what to do,’ he whispered.
‘There is nothing you can do,’ she said. ‘The forest is dying. The world comes to an end. All that you know will break apart. Fragments will spin away. There is no need to weep.’
‘Can you not — can you not stop it?’
‘No. Neither can you. Every world must die. The only question is: will it be you who wields the knife that slays it? I see an iron blade in your hand. I smell the smoke of woodfires upon your clothes. You are of the people of the forge, and you have beaten your world to death. I have no interest in saving you, even if I could.’
Suddenly he wanted to strike her. He wanted her to feel pain — his pain. And all at once he realized, with a shock, that he was not the first one to feel as he did. The anger collapsed inside him. ‘You tell me nothing I do not already know,’ he said, face twisting at the bitterness he heard in his own words.
‘This is my gift,’ she said, and smiled again.
‘And in receiving that gift, all we can do is hurt you.’
‘It is not me whom you hurt, Captain Ivis.’
‘Then you feel no pain?’
‘Only yours.’
He turned away then. A long walk awaited him, back to the keep; a walk from one world to another. It would take the rest of the night. He wanted to believe the best of people, even the Deniers. But what they had done appalled him. He could make no sense of the sorcery they had awakened, or what ghastly rites they had conducted in this secret place. He did not know how they had found her; if they had conjured her up out of the earth, or from the blood of sacrifices.
He reached the edge of the clearing, made his way up the avenue of deformed trees, feeling as if he was being spat out, flung back into a colourless, lifeless world. The forest was suddenly dull around him, and he thought, if he dared halt, if he dared pause and draw a breath, he would hear the trees singing. Singing as they died.
Malice sat with her sisters in the bolt-hole they had found under the kitchen. Directly overhead was the bakery, and the stone foundation of the huge oven formed the back wall of the tiny room. Where they crouched now, milled flour sifted down from the floorboards each time someone thumped past overhead, and in the low light from the small lantern set on a ledge, it seemed the air was filled with snow.
‘If only she wasn’t a hostage,’ Envy said. ‘I’d cut her face.’
‘Drop coals on it when she’s sleeping,’ Spite said.
‘Make her ugly,’ Malice added, enjoying the game even though they played it all the time, hiding in the secret rooms of the house, drawing close together like witches, or crows, while people walked above them all unknowing and stupid besides.
‘Poison would be perfect,’ Spite began but Envy shook her head and said, ‘Not poison. Malice is right. Make her ugly. Make her have to live with it for the rest of her life.’
Weeks past, they had hidden in the corner tower opposite the one Arathan used to hide in, and had watched the arrival of the new hostage. Envy had been furious when Malice had commented on how pretty the woman was, and this had begun things: the plans to ruin that beauty. So far, of course, nothing had been done — just words — since it was as Envy had said. Sandalath Drukorlat was a hostage and that meant she couldn’t be touched.
But it was still fun planning, and if accidents happened, well, they just happened, didn’t they?
‘She’s too old to be a hostage,’ Spite said. ‘She’s ancient. We were supposed to get a proper hostage, not her.’
‘A boy would have been best,’ said Envy. ‘Like Arathan, only younger. Someone we could hunt down and corner. Someone too weak to stop us doing anything we wanted to him.’
‘What would we do?’ Malice asked. She was the youngest and so she could ask the stupid questions without her sisters beating her up too badly, and sometimes they didn’t beat her up at all, or put things in her that hurt, and that was when she knew that her question had been a good one.
Spite snorted. ‘What do we do to you?’ she asked, and Malice could see the gleam of her smile and it was never good when Spite smiled. ‘We’d fill him up, that’s what, and keep doing it until he begged us.’
‘Begging never works,’ Malice said.
Envy laughed. ‘You idiot. Beg us for more. We could make him our slave. I want slaves.’
‘Slaves were done away with,’ Spite pointed out.
‘I’ll bring them back, when I grow up. I’ll make slaves of everyone and they’ll all have to serve me. I’ll rule an empire. I’d kill every pretty woman in it, or maybe just scar them for ever.’