Page 78 of The Boy Bride

The look in Lill’s dark eyes was hard to interpret. He seemed very far away.

“Yes,” he said finally. “It was your fault. But … ” He paused, thoughtful. “It wasn’t only your fault. There were other … factors. And it was a long time ago.”

Lill sat up, swinging his braid around behind his back and obviously trying for a bright expression. It wasn’t the most convincing thing.

“Will you show me how to milk the goats? I’ve heard you’re the only one who can do it, and that Faru wanted to slaughter them for meat years ago because he hates them so much.”

“They bite him. Every chance they get.” Vanu grinned. “You’ll get on fine with them.”

* * *

“Tirtu, do you remember an ally of Vanu’s named Madurasha?”

Lill sat on the cushions in Tirtu’s front room after dropping off the day’s portion of milk and accepting an invitation to stay and drink tea.

“The treacherous dog.” Tirtu’s face twisted with a bitter expression as he put the pot of tea down on the table between them. “Of course I remember him.”

He didn’t say, “Wasn’t he your father?” It seemed Vanu hadn’t told him that. Good.

“What happened?” Lill asked.

“Don’t you know? He turned on Lord Vanu, that’s what happened. Promised his allegiance and then ambushed us. No one saw it coming. But—” He shrugged expansively. “It didn’t matter. He died for it. Lord Vanu killed him. I heard Davanu say Vanu never really trusted anyone after that, but I’ve always wondered if it was the other way around, that he never fully trusted Madurasha.”

“Why was he allied with Vanu in the first place, though? Madurasha was Zashian.”

“Pure-blooded Zashian nobility.” Tirtu nodded. “You asked Lord Vanu any of this?”

“No. I’m asking you.”

“Right.” Tirtu leaned forward to pour the tea. “It’s not that you asked him and he didn’t want to talk about it.”

“No, it’s not that. I’ll ask him when I know what it is I’m asking.”

“Ah, I get it. Well, you should know it was all a bit before my time. I mean, I was around, but I wasn’t one of Lord Vanu’s confidants in those days. I was a pig man who just wanted to do his part to help my people. I did travel down to Torakand that time. Lord Davanu had gone down to live there, and he was the one who got Madurasha on our side. He was the one who wrote to Vanu to come down, bringing some of his men, and talk to Madurasha.”

“Talk to him about what?” Lill pressed.

“You’d have to ask Lord Vanu about that.”

“Because you don’t know, or because you don’t want to say?”

Tirtu scowled, but there was no real anger in it. “Because he can explain it better than I can. I wasn’t part of the inner circle then, I told you. They had a plan … But it all came to nothing, because Madurasha turned on them.

“We were on our way home when we were ambushed—badly outnumbered because there weren’t that many of us to begin with. And there was Madurasha with his hearthmen—or whatever you call them in the lowlands—bringing up the rear. The cur. I don’t believe he planned on doing any fighting himself, I think he was just there to watch. But when we routed the main force, he stepped in, the bastard. Tried to take Vanu down himself. I was there then. I saw that. That fucker brought his own death down on his head. May his name be forgotten.”

Lill remembered how Vanu had described the encounter. I was fighting wounded, he had said. I go over it in my mind sometimes. Could I have disabled him and taken him prisoner? After he had been betrayed like that? It was hard to see how you could escape the conclusion that it was Vanu who acted with greater honour, in that situation.

If it had been Lill’s place to question his mission … But it had never been his place. Certainly not now.

There was something else he’d been wanting to ask Tirtu. “Vanu said something about being ‘born a curse.’ What did he mean by that?”

Tirtu sucked in a hissing breath. “You shouldn’t talk about such things.”

“Come on. I want to know. Better I talk to you than make him tell me, don’t you think?”

“All right, yes. He’s not—it isn’t true. That’s what I believe—I don’t care what the shamans might say about it.” He grimaced guiltily. “Heart of the Blue Heaven. I don’t mean that, I don’t know what they do say. But someone’s said he’s a curse, and I don’t believe it.”

He cleared his throat and adopted a storytelling attitude. “Vanu’s mother was Makhi Tarna. She married Garda Burgunu, see, but not more than a year later Garda was taken captive, after a raid that went bad. He was a slave in the steppes for a year or more before he was ransomed, and while he was away, another man took his wife. Maybe it was against her will, maybe it wasn’t—there were different stories. I was a boy in the Summer Pass at the time, I knew nothing of such things. In any case, she had a child by this man, Samaru Urártu. The Urártu and the Tarna—her family—they were bitter enemies. So Makhi’s husband came home to find she’d had a child that wasn’t his, couldn’t be his, and he didn’t stop to find out whether she’d been taken against her will or not. He killed her. Then the Tarna killed him. The Burgunu—his family—swore revenge on the Tarna, the Tarna tried to revenge themselves on the Urártu … ” He was arranging the cups and the teapot to represent the different families, locked in their triangular feud, and for a moment he sat and stared at them bleakly.