Written on the Dark

CHAPTER I

The deepest part of the night in the most savage winter of the coldest year anyone could remember.

So he thought, hearing the middle-of-night bells that meant he needed to get up-to go outside, right now. Into the city. Into the ice, in the blackness.

He didn't want to. Why would anyone in their right mind want to? Were there enough coins to steal to make it worth going out into the streets now?

Evidently, yes. Because they were going to try. Not so many coins but . . . enough?

He was lying alone in Silvy's bed. Silvy had gone upstairs to Anni and Eudes's room, carrying the candle. He had no light here. She had let him stay in her room, however. She knew why he'd wanted to sleep away from his mother's house tonight. She didn't ask questions, didn't force him not to answer, or lie. Silvy was his most trusted friend, possibly his only trusted friend (he didn't want to think too much about that, just now). They'd agreed some time ago not to bed each other. Probably wise. Most of the time he thought so. It protected the friendship.

He'd already been awake when the night's third bells sounded from the sanctuaries. He'd counted them. He tended to awaken too early when he had a thing to do, a place to go in the dark, or at dawn. A lifelong fear of being late, oversleeping. He didn't sleep well, in any case. Often lay in bed (at home, in a tavern bed with a girl) working up a poem. Lines in the dark. He was a man who shaped lines in the dark. He'd rise and light a candle at the embers of a fire to scribble by. That defined him, he thought. It would do as well as anything else to define him.

He was still young, of course. He might grow into something different, someone different. You weren't the same through the whole of your life, were you? Not marked by one thing. If you lived long enough to change, of course.

Thierry Villar didn't expect to live a long life. In this city, in this time, it was a reasonable way to feel. So he thought, anyway. Perhaps he might be modestly famous before he died? Not just known in a few taverns here in Orane. Known, and sometimes hated. His verses could be harsh, and he named names. Sometimes names of people who were, well, famous. And not happy with what he wrote about them. He took chances that way. Didn't you do that for your art? For some reason the thought amused him, even though nothing was really amusing in this cold.

His poems, their mockery, drew raucous laughter in the taverns and had earned him drinking and dicing companions. And sometimes the company of women afterwards. Worthwhile, accordingly. He was young enough to judge things that way.

It really was time to get out of bed. He had some distance to cover, after curfew, through streets where the ice lay in places as a coating over manure and refuse.

But it was smart to have established his presence over at The Mule earlier this evening and then to sleep here tonight. Eudes had served him two cups of wine downstairs and Thierry had played dice for a bit, low stakes. He had no money to lose. Eudes would remember, would say as much: "Thierry Villar? Yes, was here drinking with some students, why?"

It was Jad-cursed cold outside. It was cold inside. It could make a man mad, or kill him. People died in a winter like this. There were wolves in the city. They slipped through the walls, crossed the frozen river, roamed the darkness, starving, bold. You didn't want to encounter starving wolves in the night.

The god was supposed to battle demons on behalf of mortal men and women in the black cold beneath the world now. That was probably a lot like this, Villar thought. Heresy! His mother and stepfather were deeply pious. He was . . . less so. He didn't know what his father had been like. Had been too young when Rochon Larraigne had died of a fall and mother and child had come to Orane the way so many did, desperate for food and shelter. Seeking a way to survive while poverty stalked the world.

They'd been lucky. Protected by the god, his mother would say. Had said. He had an education, a life of some security ahead if he wanted it. And yet here he was, about to dress and go outside to rob a holy place. Folly and need. Someone might say greed, but he'd stay with need, thank you. When you gambled at dice or cards and lost to certain people, you really did need to pay them back. And he'd long ago spent what money he'd ever had on a woman. The wrong woman entirely.

He was halfway dressed already, lying in bed. Ridiculous, but necessary. He pushed aside the three blankets Silvy had (Jad bless her forever) and pulled on and belted his trousers over leggings. The trousers were stiff, half-frozen. Of course. He swore. A second pair of socks over the ones he already wore, then a second ice-cold woollen shirt over his tunic. He pulled on his boots with difficulty, swearing at them, too, at himself, at the Jad-cursed world.

Not at the city, mind you. He loved Orane too much.

"I hate how much I love this city," he'd even said to Silvy once. Said it to others too, but she was the one who'd told him it was an odd thought, and asked him why. It was the way she was. She asked questions.

They'd been in the tavern downstairs, he remembered. He'd just recited a new poem, received coins and drinks for it. And laughter. He chased laughter, Villar thought. Always had. Needed it.

In the inns and taverns he was quick with his words, was known (feared) for it. But that time he'd thought for a bit before answering her. "Because if you love something too much, you can be destroyed if you lose it," he'd said, eventually.

She'd left it at that. She knew Jolis de Charette, too. Of course she did. Had even warned him about her. Silvy had an annoying habit of being right about things.

No time for that thought, either, just now. He needed money. He needed to do a thing tonight.

Villar found his cloth cap on a post at the end of the bed. Pulled over his ears, it made him look like an outlaw. One of the Jacquards, with their secret language and safe houses dotting the countryside, with door-knock sequences you needed to know to be admitted, not killed, and then coded phrases to speak. He even knew some of those, from a late-night conversation with a man who'd had too much to drink once.

He didn't know the countryside at all. He didn't like the countryside. He was a city person. This city. Which he loved. Too much.

It was holy for him, really, for all the violence and danger within it. For all that he hadn't been born here. Orane was what he knew of the world, really.

Holy for him. He laughed at himself. He was about to take part in the robbery of a genuinely holy place. The cloth cap of an outlaw suited.

Moving cautiously in the utterly black room, trying to stay quiet, he retrieved his patched-up coat, pulled it on. Dark outside, dark in here. Dark in his heart? Not really, Thierry Villar thought. He just had needs. And perhaps one of those, beyond the fact of poverty and a dangerous debt, was for adventures such as this, with people such as the ones he was headed out to meet.

Of course calling it an adventure was to avoid certain questions. Silvy, if she'd been here and listening to him, if he'd been speaking aloud, which he might have been doing if she'd been here, might have said as much.

But she was upstairs. With Anni and Eudes. Warm in a wide bed.

He swore again. Opened the door and went out. Closed it softly behind him. Went down the stairs.

e

The tavern called The Lamb was, predictably, known for its mutton, when it could be obtained. There was a large door at the front, with the signboard over it. It would not reopen for some hours yet.

Robbin de Vaux, the king's provost in Orane-the mad king's provost-sat astride his horse, shivering. They heard the last of the three bells ring and fade away. They'd been waiting for some time, but he expected a door to open now.

Not the main door. The small, half-hidden one, recessed, to the side, that led to stairs and the private rooms The Lamb rented by the year, the month, or the hour sometimes.

The hooves of their horses had cracked the ice of the roadway as they stamped in the cold. The smell of the street came to de Vaux. People threw their refuse from upper-floor windows. Frozen dung and piss from pots and everything else one could hurl from a window. It was not one of the best neighbourhoods of Orane's south bank, though hardly the worst.

There were no moons right now. That would have been planned, by the small-scale thieves and by the possibly much more important men whose reported deed had driven him from his bed tonight.

De Vaux had had years of war against the invading Anglcyn, or fighting outlaw bands, rebels against the crown, or disbanded soldiers who chose a different, unlawful life. He had known hardship, cold nights, savagery, wounds, fear.

He was more frightened right now than he could ever remember being.

And he could not have entirely explained why he had asked certain questions of his senior serjeant and come here to The Lamb, after being summoned to view a dead body on the other side of the river. An . . . identified dead body. A named one.

Was it instinct? Something else?

There was an extremely good chance that, come morning, when word of this death got out-he could only hold it back for so long-
the city and much of the country would explode into violence. Possibly civil war. Depending.

Depending on a thing he really didn't want to think about.

A sound. Soft, but he'd been listening for it. The small door opened. Precisely when he'd thought it might. A minor pleasure, of a sort, to have anticipated so well. A man, a shadow in blackness, stepped out.

"Torches," de Vaux said quietly, and three were lit behind him from a single carried flame.

Villar knew he had a reputation for swearing. Invective worth remembering, and reusing with laughter. He didn't mind that, though he knew that some of his own most quoted phrases he himself had taken from others, if modified sometimes. He was a poet, after all, he worked hard on his words.

Right now, standing outside The Lamb, he was shocked speechless when torches flared and he saw mounted men. Men waiting for him. Which last he knew because the one at the front said, calmly, "You can run, or go back inside, but we know you are here, and why, Villar, and we also know where your mother and stepfather live. And . . . Lambert Maar has already talked."

They knew these things? They knew his name? And he, in turn, knew this voice. It shocked him even more. He cleared his throat, his mind whirling in helpless circles. He managed to say, "Lambert Maar, my lord?"

"Don't bother trying, Thierry," said Robbin de Vaux, his majesty's provost, astride a horse in a vicious night, here waiting for him. For him? It made no sense! "He really has talked. Was careless in a tavern, someone reported it. I had him picked up. He's a careless man, isn't he?"

Fucking, fucking, fucking Lambert! Villar would have liked to have profanity equal to this moment.

He cleared his throat. "He is, yes. I've met the man. But you are not careless by reputation, my lord, and I have no idea why the royal provost himself would be here waiting for me at this hour, for something so . . . small?"

It was worth trying. What else did he have?

"Robbing a sanctuary of the god isn't so small, but we'll leave that for the moment, it is a fair observation." The provost's voice, which he'd heard many times, including at the gallows before an execution, was deep, memorable.

It was also, Villar realized, strained, tight, tense right now. Villar had no idea why. He had no idea about any of this. There were at least half a dozen horsemen behind the provost. Probably more, the three torches didn't cast their light very far.

"I have robbed nothing, done nothing," he said. He tried to sound confident. He failed. Why was there a fraying in the other man's voice? And why was he here?

"You will doubtless wish to know why I am here," said de Vaux.

His reputation was complex. Fair, usually, but a hard man, and too clever by half for the underworld of Orane. Two decades of warfare, mostly in the north but not only, before taking up his position here five years ago. Owned a large city home, had a large annual salary. It was an easier life than battling all over the country for the king and royal council, especially if you were no longer young.

"Of course I want to know," said Villar, looking up at the big man lit by torches.

He realized he was shivering. So many stars overhead on a clear night, like gems above the streets and houses, above the myriad stupidities of mortal men and women, with sunrise a long way off, still.

"I want to know that, and also," he added, taking a chance, but he was like that, "why you sound uneasy right now."

A silence. Too long a silence.

He'd had a good enough life, on the whole, Thierry Villar thought. Aside from too much poverty, and Jolis de Charette, curse her. People liked his verses, were amused when they were meant to be. And women liked him, too.

He heard laughter now, short, bitter, but laughter. Only from the one man, the provost himself. The others, however many were behind de Vaux, remained silent. They'd kill him at a word, Villar knew, perhaps take pleasure in it. Or not. Just another thief killed in a city they tried to control for the mad king.

"I sound uneasy because I am," de Vaux said. "It has to do with the reason I'm here."

Thierry said nothing. But something like hope began, like a stringed instrument plucked, inside him. At least a chance, from that answer, that he might not be on his way to a cell in the Châtelet to be tortured into a confession, and then taken to be hanged on Gallows Hill. He thought of his mother weeping for him there. Curse Lambert Maar forever, he thought-loose-lipped, sober and drunk. Stupid at all times.