you don’t want me to kneel. It doesn’t look comfortable.’
‘Don’t be cruel.’
‘If you were truly sick, I assure you I’d be the soul of solicitousness,’ he said and held out a hand.
Reluctantly, I let him help me up and lead me to the couch in the sitting room.
‘Pretty strange fit,’ he said, pouring me a drink of ale and handing me the wooden cup with care. ‘Quite short,’ Dieter continued. ‘And lacking in the actual fit.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ I wanted to stand, but he pulled a footstool in front of me and perched on it, blocking me in.
‘Tell me, Matte, what did you see?’
I clutched the cup in both hands. ‘A frightened little boy. Whom you promised not to kill. Will you honour it?’
‘Ah, but it was you who broke the bargain, Matte.’
The truth of it made me tremble. I had gambled, and lost. Would Renatas pay the price?
‘And it appears the boy’s location wasn’t your only secret. No, you also had the secret behind your rumoured shadow sickness. I must confess, I’d always wondered why your grandmother let you live if you were prone to such a weakness as fits. I thought her soft-hearted for it.’
He paused, eyeing my rising flush of anger, as if to give me time to speak. I gritted my teeth, refusing to give him the satisfaction.
He shrugged. ‘When I met you, I revised my opinion. Obviously you weren’t entirely without strength. After all, you, alone of all your kin, had crawled out of the carnage. And then you’d had the gall to march up to my men and pretend we were allied, the blood of your court still on your clothes and in your hair! It was impressive, Matte. Bold.’
I wished a real fit would seize me and paralyse my mind, leaving me frothing and insensate.
‘I had no other choice,’ I hissed.
‘Well, you could have fought back in the sanctuary. Although you would have died, of course.’ He leant closer, his eyes alight. ‘And you couldn’t die, could you, Matte? Because you’d already seen that you didn’t.’
I leant back into the couch, shaking my head.
‘It wasn’t simply canniness saved you, was it?’
‘Leave me alone,’ I whispered.
‘You saw the invasion. You saw how to survive,’ he persisted.
‘I saw my shroud!’ I cried.
Silence followed as I stared at him, trembling.
He smiled, a slow bloom of triumph. ‘So you did foresee the attack.’
‘No,’ I replied. ‘The results of it. Fire, death all around. And me, walking dead among the dead.’ The impossibility of that outcome still left me cold with fear, and acutely conscious of the brand I bore.
‘Good,’ said Dieter.
‘Good?’
‘I liked our first meeting,’ he said with unabashed cheer. ‘I liked you, bold and brazen. I’m glad it wasn’t the false courage of foreknowledge.’
A tiny spark of pride lit the hollows of my heart, making me despair at what I’d become. What sort of sick and twisted creature was I, to be jealous of the good opinion of a man I … I wanted to say I hated, but how could I claim that, even to myself, when I wanted him to think well of me?
Dieter leant closer still. ‘So, Matte, tell me, what did you see?’
‘Nothing,’ I insisted, my hands fluttering up between us as if to ward off his persistence.
He caught them in his own, stilling them. ‘The boy, Matilde, you saw something for the boy.’
I shook my head.
He gripped my hands tighter, pressing me into the back of the couch and moving so close that he filled my vision and I couldn’t look away.
‘Tell me what you saw for the boy.’
‘Bones,’ I intoned, the intensity of his gaze drawing the words out of me in a whisper.
I felt like I had on our binding night, when I’d knelt down before him, frightened and alone, and he’d daubed my head, marking and claiming me more intimately than any mere binding.
‘He was bones beneath the winter sky. You were draped in snakes, as was he. Tiny little snakes with red fangs.’
He digested this in silence, staring through me with an abstracted look. I shifted, trying to ease the pressure of his hold.
‘And the meaning – does the lad die? Do others die because of him?’
I frowned, shook my head, shrugged. ‘Neither, for certain.’
He cocked his head to one side. ‘Is it possible you’ve never learnt to interpret your visions?’
‘You’re the one who dabbles in the arcana, not me,’ I retorted.
He drew back. ‘Your mother obviously had something of the wild knowledge