Page 1 of The Boy Bride

Chapter 1

The Boy Bride

It had been three years since the cry was on everyone’s lips: “The Lion of the Summer Pass has been taken!” Whether that was true or not, Lill didn’t know, because if they’d taken Vanu Urártu, why hadn’t they killed him? Instead, the Great King’s men had wanted the local people to be satisfied that they’d immured the Lion in one of his mountain strongholds. Lill remembered explaining to one of the younger boys of the Order that “immured” didn’t literally mean they’d walled him up, like in the stories.

Except, he realized as his palanquin was set down with a bump, and he slid back the shutter to peek out, apparently it did mean exactly that.

It was late afternoon, the shadows long in the waning spring sunlight. They had left the shelter of the trees, and the road had flattened out. The shoulders of the mountains rose up on either side, the bare rock yellow-grey, the evergreen forests like patches of dark fur on their slopes. In between, perched on a flat promontory above the pass below and constructed of the same yellow-grey stone, as if it had grown there, stood the fortress of Umtúshta.

The arched doorway in its massive outer wall had been entirely filled in with a mixture of cut stones and tumbled rubble from the surrounding mountains. The ground around the walls had been cleared of trees and shrubs, making a broad ring of barren earth across which any fugitive could easily have been spotted running away. But how could anyone get out, when even the arrow slits in the walls had been sealed with mortar and stone?

“There must be a door around the other side,” Lill murmured to himself.

But the bearers, who had grumbled all the way up the mountain slope about having to carry a young man with two feet capable of bearing his own weight, had set the palanquin down here, for some reason. And the guide who had accompanied him from Radush, Halza, had dismounted and was coming over to offer a hand to help Lill out.

“You look surprised,” Halza said, glancing from Lill up to the walls of Umtúshta and back again. “Did you not know what you were getting into?”

Lill climbed to his feet and shook out his skirts. He settled his headdress, firming up the pins that anchored it to his braids and flicking back the edge of the veil. He ought not to have shown surprise. He composed his expression.

“It’s symbolic, isn’t it? People can get in and out somehow.”

Halza’s eyes widened. “Oh no, it’s not symbolic. They can’t risk him getting out.”

A flock of birds took off noisily from the trees behind them, rattling the branches and flapping up into the grey sky above the sealed stone walls.

“Then how am I meant to get in?”

“I’ve been wondering about that all the way up the mountain,” Halza confided. “I suppose you go over the wall. Which, the way you’re dressed … ” He looked down at the full sweep of Lill’s layered skirts and grimaced.

Near the edge of the cleared area was a square stone building, much newer than the fortress wall and flat-roofed like the houses of the Akramarran plains below the mountains. A man in leather armour strolled out of it toward their party, carrying the heavy spear of an infantryman casually over one shoulder.

“Who’s she?” He jerked a thumb at Lill.

“He is the boy bride Lord Davanu arranged to have sent,” Lill’s guide explained.

The soldier frowned at him and called back inside the guard house: “Hey, are we expecting anybody? A boy bride from—where did you say you’re from?”

“Torakand,” Lill supplied.

“Yeah, yeah.” Another soldier emerged, this one unarmed and holding a half-eaten, slightly shrivelled apple. “Boy from Torakand, I heard about that. Gift from one of the Hawa lords down there.” He looked at Lill and gave a low whistle. “Hello. You’re not a boy. She’s not a boy, is she?”

That was new: his first time actually being mistaken for a girl instead of just told he ought to have been a girl, he was like a girl, and so on. How much simpler if he had been clearly one thing or the other.

“He is,” said Halza, “and⁠—”

“We’re supposed to send him in?” the first soldier interrupted.

The apple-eater nodded, mouth full. “Orders from Captain Barzana. Send him over.”

“How?” the first soldier demanded.

“There’s that ladder sort of thing.”

“Oh, that. Where’d we put that?”

“The problem is,” Halza cut in finally, “the way he’s dressed, as you can see, it is going to be tricky for him to get up there. And I don’t know what the arrangements are for getting down on the other side … ”

The first soldier spat on the ground. “Somebody should’ve thought of that before dressing him up like that.”