Page 12 of The Boy Bride

“But they’ve been forced to eat people,” Lill finished for him. “No, they haven’t.”

“I wasn’t going to say that,” said Halza unconvincingly. “I was going to say, ‘But their father is a monster.’ You know the stories of what he’s done.”

“Of course.”

But Halza wanted to repeat them anyway. “He put a whole village to the sword—men, women, children—because someone there signed the Eye of Envy when he was riding past. A cousin of mine told me.”

That did sound monstrous; it also sounded tactically stupid, risking your men’s lives over a trivial insult like that. Lill wondered if it was true. Nothing he had heard about Vanu Urártu had suggested he was a bad tactician.

“He destroyed those temples at Alazani,” Halza went on, “and slaughtered the priests when they tried to flee. I heard about that in Bezevand. And you’ve heard how he wiped out the Kuro clan, haven’t you? Relentlessly hunted them down, every last one? They say he drank the blood of the youngest son after he killed him. He carried the father’s severed head around and⁠—”

“That’s enough,” Lill cut him off irritably.

“I’m sorry. I know. You think you have to give yourself to him, but … Holy God, I wish I’d stopped you before you climbed that ladder.” Halza was doing the closest thing to wringing his hands that Lill had ever seen a strong and hearty young man do. “I blame myself.”

That was just insulting, and Lill half wanted to point it out. He settled for getting up and walking out the door, ignoring the plaintive questions about where he was going that followed him.

He felt better than he had when he came out earlier, and he was determined to push himself. It was true that he needed to get on his feet and regain his strength, but he also needed to orient himself to the village. Get the lay of the land, his training reminded him. Know the terrain. He wanted to do this properly.

He wanted not to think about a man who drank blood and razed temples and did whatever it was Halza had been about to say Vanu did with people’s severed heads. A man whom even his admirers called a beast. Lill needed no convincing. And he would have to face the man soon enough; there was no need to dwell on the details now.

Chapter 5

Cozy Like That

The infirmary was right under the outer wall, and Lill remembered how to find his way from there to the paved path at the centre of the stronghold. This time he encountered no goats. Everything was still, silent except for birds crying overhead.

The three houses on the side of the path that Lill had come from were all roofless husks. Looking through the doorway of one, he saw that the interior had been converted into a luxurious sty housing a family of pigs. The ducks might have been kept exclusively for eggs, the goats for milk and hair for spinning, but the only reason to keep pigs that Lill knew of was for meat. He would have to tell Halza.

The houses on the other side of the path were intact, with slate-shingled roofs, two with doors, the third with a curtain covering the doorway. Lill remembered he’d seen someone—or thought he’d seen someone—in that doorway before. Had he imagined the man, or had he been real? If he was real … Lill ran down the list of people in the stronghold, as given to him by Khatu. He wasn’t Khatu’s younger brother or his father—he’d looked in his thirties. He wasn’t the henchman, Tirtu, whom Lill had already met. If he was real, the man who looked like a warrior angel, with his scarred face and gold hair, was Vanu Urártu.

Why hadn’t he thought of that before? Because for his entire life, Lill had heard the name Vanu Urártu spoken with hatred and fear. He hadn’t exactly thought that Vanu was an old man; he almost hadn’t thought of him as having an age at all. He’d just been a fact, like the mountains or the winter. When Lill had begun thinking in more concrete terms about what faced him on his mission to Umtúshta, he’d pictured someone like Lord Davanu: sixty or more, weather-beaten and grey-haired, still vigorous but with a distinct belly distending his tunic. But if Vanu had been seventeen when he cut down White Viper in the year 700—he must have used trickery, if that was so—he would be only thirty-two now.

Lill looked at the doorway with the curtain. That man had ducked when he came through it. He had to be over six feet tall. Again Lill found himself wondering: did Arsha know this?

If that was Vanu Urártu, how was Lill supposed to go about killing him, even if he had weapons? Lill stood staring at the doorway on the other side of the path, as if that gold-haired man—Vanu—might emerge from it again at any moment. He didn’t, and neither did anyone else. The curtain swayed in the breeze and then was still.

Shaking himself out of his reverie, Lill followed the paved path to his left, to a place where it intersected with another path. Here he judged he was roughly in the middle of the round fortress. To his left, the path led from the crossroads to the blocked-up gate, which he was seeing from the inside for the first time. In the other direction lay the half-ruined great house that must have belonged to the lord of Umtúshta. The lord and his family were still here; did they live in there, in the half of the building that still had a roof? Or had they moved out into one of the more intact but much smaller dwellings in the village?

Lill followed the path to the paved yard that fronted the lord’s house. There was a well here, with a well-head of yellow-grey stone and a pulley. On one side of the yard were three fruit trees in full bloom and a cat sleeping in the shade. Several small outbuildings and a bread oven stood on the edges of the yard. Lill walked under the trees, past the cat, and between a shed and a pile of firewood next to the bread oven. He stopped and looked at the firewood. Where did that come from? Three years after the gate had been blocked up, how did they have a pile of split logs—not broken-up furniture or bits of ruined houses but neat chunks of chopped-down tree—stacked as high as the roof of the bread oven?

Maybe there had been more trees in here, and they had cut one of them down? Maybe they just hadn’t been baking much bread.

He walked around the back of a house whose roof looked recently thatched, and whose shutters were closed. As he passed the window he heard distinct noises from inside: someone grunting as if with effort, repeatedly, as if … No, it was two people, there were surely two different voices. Lill backed silently away, a hand to his mouth, as if he needed to stifle his breath to avoid detection.

He had never, to his knowledge, heard the sound of two people fucking together, but he had a few times heard a boy in the dormitory making half-stifled noises as he used his own hand shamefully. Lill had never done such a thing himself. But whatever the people in that house were doing, it had the same urgent rhythm.

He remembered wondering in the darkness of the dormitory whether the boy in the next bed was enjoying what he was doing, because it was hard to tell from the sound. He wondered the same about the people behind the shutters. Their noises sounded almost anguished. He remembered—he hadn’t thought of it in years—what had happened to that boy, after he had been caught.

He turned and fled back past the bread oven and the cat, through the quiet yard and down the path toward the infirmary.

* * *

Vanu whistled to himself as he draped wet clothing on the hedge to dry. He missed music, if he was honest. He’d never say so to the girls, and he wouldn’t have tried to bring music into the house when they couldn’t enjoy it with him. But sometimes the silence of their days here left him yearning for noise.

He looked across the yard at Atari pulling weeds out of her garden. She had been so pleased with the harvest she had produced last year, entirely through her own efforts. It warmed his heart in a way he couldn’t quite put into words, even in his own head, to see her so proud of something.

Susami came around from the back of the girls’ house with a basket full of wet garments.