by Claire Luana
He wasn’t sure he had done the right thing. Without Sable, he felt untethered from the world, from right and wrong and betrayal or loyalty. There was only with Sable and without Sable. And without Sable, nothing really mattered. Nothing except King Imbris paying for what he’d done.
Perhaps Lucas and his brothers and sister didn’t deserve to die. But neither had Sable. Neither had Cal or his mother. The gods seemed little concerned with fairness—innocent people died every day while monsters like Hadrian Imbris and Willings and Killian lived on, their poison creeping into the cracks of the city itself. The Aprican invasion could be a purifying fire. Cutting out the rot that was the Imbris dynasty. Hale nodded to himself. Good could come from this.
Night had fallen over the camp as Hale went over the terms of his agreement with General Marius and Sim Daemastra. It seemed that the men would be true to their word, taking the city with as little bloodshed as possible. Sim Daemastra had asked detailed questions about Thom and Wren, about the guildmasters being held, marking everything down in a little black notebook. The man’s interest sent fingers of unease creeping up Hale’s spine. It was the part of his deal with the Apricans that made him most uneasy. While Daemastra’s flowery words spoke of cultural exchange and sponsorships, his shrewd eyes betrayed an eagerness that set Hale on edge.
The sound of Wren and Thom’s muffled shouts brought him back to his dilemma. They didn’t seem resigned to their fate, not by a long shot. Hale pondered his options. He hadn’t wanted to betray Thom and Wren to the Apricans, but he understood they wouldn’t be able to set aside their sentiments to do what needed to be done. But neither could he leave them here as Aprican prisoners. Sim Daemastra’s unnaturally smooth face swam to mind. It might not be safe for Gifted in Maradis. Could he spare them? Give them one final gift, for old times’ sake. Their freedom.
Hale stood, moving silently across the grass between tents, keeping to the dark patches of shadow between the tall torches. The Apricans would attack tomorrow. In plainclothes, men would flood into the city through the tunnel and make their way to the gates. In a coordinated strike, the soldiers would throw open the gates and let in the Aprican armies from all sides. If it went as planned, it would be over in a few short hours. Maradis would fall.
Hale spotted what he was looking for: an empty soldiers’ tent. He ducked inside and grabbed the soldier’s rucksack and threw in flint, a knife in a leather holder, a waterskin, some hard bread, and two apples sitting on the man’s little bedside table. Lastly, he grabbed an extra spear that was leaning against the canvas. He murmured a thank you to the absent man and moved back towards the tent where Wren and Thom were being held. Hale tossed the bag into the shadow of the tent and swaggered up to the guard dozing in front. “Supposed to relieve you,” he said.
The guard, a tall, wiry man with a thick, brown beard, frowned at him. “Where’s your uniform?”
“My captain already told me to change into plain clothes for the assault tomorrow. I won’t have time after my shift.”
“Though my shift wasn’t over for another half hour?”
“Captain’s also making me start early. Mad at me for talking back about the uniform.” Hale grasped for an excuse. “Officers,” he said with a rueful shake of his head.
“Ain’t that right,” the man commiserated.
In that moment, Wren let out a scream of rage inside the rent, rattling her chains in fury. “Let me out, you blond bastards!” she shouted.
The guard rolled his eyes. “Bitch hasn’t shut up. I’ve half a mind to go knock her out, get a little peace and quiet.”
Hale chuckled, trying to mask the anger that bloomed at the guard’s crude words. “May do that myself if I get desperate.”
The guard clapped him on the shoulder and dropped a heavy ring of keys into his hand. “Best of luck,” he said before sauntering off across the camp.
Hale waited several minutes until he was sure the guard was completely out of sight. Wren and Thom were keeping up an impressive racket inside the tent, but they fell into silence when he ducked inside, the rucksack with its meager supplies in hand.
They were chained to a heavy block of stone, their wrists shackled. “Hale,” Wren said, drawing her dignity around her like a cloak. The way she’d said his name had made it sound like a curse. Thom looked on warily next to her, his mop of blond hair drooping over his eyes. It was the second time the man had been held captive in as many weeks, Hale realized with a flicker of guilt.
“I’ve come to free you,” he said, kneeling between them and fumbling with the keys.
“Why?” Thom asked with narrowed eyes. “You’re the one who put us here.”
“I didn’t want to,” Hale said. “But I knew the two of you wouldn’t be able to see what needed to be done.”
“You mean the murder of innocent people we love?” Wren said, her words laced with scorn. “Yes, it is a bit difficult for us to comprehend. We Alesians are so simpleminded, after all.”
Hale winced inside at that but kept his face impassive. He deserved their resentment, their scorn. It was just another price he would have to pay for avenging Sable. And no price was too high.
Wren’s irons fell away with a click, and she pulled her hands to her, rubbing her wrists. “Will you be punished for this?” From her tone, he couldn’t tell if she hoped he would be or not.
“Perhaps,” Hale said. He wasn’t sure. Daemastra would be put out, but Marius wouldn’t want to risk alienating a new ally so soon. He hoped. Besides, so long as he got to kill King Imbris, he didn’t really care what happened to him after. He thought Marius would understand that and not deprive him of the chance.
“The Apricans attack tomorrow,” Hale said, working on Thom’s cuffs. “They will go in plainclothes through the tunnels. Nowhere in Maradis is safe. I’m not freeing you so you can run back into the city and get yourself killed.”
Thom’s irons opened.
“Wren.” Hale turned to her, meeting her wild, chestnut eyes. She looked so young sometimes, so innocent and vulnerable. Yet he knew there was iron in her core, hard and unyielding. She would get through this. “Leave this city. You and Thom should make a new life for yourselves. Go to Nova Navis, or across the mountains to Ferwald. Centu. Live. What we had here…it’s gone.”
Wren’s lip quivered. “And what about everyone I love? What about you, Hale?”
Hale stood, tossing her the rucksack. “I’m already gone, too.”
Chapter 35
Wren and Thom stared at each other, temporarily stunned by Hale’s sudden departure.
“We can’t run,” Wren said, shaking her head to settle her racing throughs. “Can we?”
Thom shouldered the rucksack and grabbed her hand in his. “Let’s discuss in a safer location.”
But where? They ducked out of the tent into the night. Wren’s heart felt like a wild thing within her. She couldn’t stop rubbing the raw spots where the irons had chaffed her wrists. “Where do we go?” Wren asked weakly.
“North or east border of camp,” Thom said. “Those are our choices. Maybe try to find the camp followers? Somewhere we’ll blend in?”
Wren looked about, feeling like any moment someone would shout out that prisoners had escaped. “East,” she said. “I think Marius’s tent was closer to the eastern border of camp.”
Thom pulled her forwards, keeping the high walls of Maradis to their right. His fingers were twined tightly in hers, his grip almost painful. She didn’t mind it—it felt like a tether to something safe.
“What a fool idea this was,” she whispered as they wound their way through the dim spaces between the maze of white tents. “You must be furious at me.”
“It was a pretty stupid idea.” Thom let out a shaky laugh. “But I didn’t talk you out of it. We couldn’t have foreseen what happened here.”
“I should have. Hale’s not himself.”
A misty rain began to fall on them as they picked their way through the tents towards the
blackness beyond. That way lay freedom. Freedom from the doom hanging heavily over them, the terror of trying and failing. What if they made it back into the city and it wasn’t enough? What if they doomed themselves, and still Callidus and Lucas and all the others died? Wren didn’t think she could live with herself. But she didn’t think she could live with herself if she ran, either. When she had been almost lost, almost executed, Callidus had saved her. All of them. Sable and Hale. Guildmaster McArt had sent the infused cheese that had given her one last crazy idea to save her hide. Pike had stood up for her in court. Olivia had gone against her grandaunt, Lennon against his guildmaster. Lucas had gotten out word of her execution. All of them had rallied together for her. There was something worth saving here. People she loved. A life worth living. She wouldn’t run.
They had reached the edge of the camp, the field beyond a midnight black contrasted with the bright torchlight of the camp. It was like falling off a cliff. Wren and Thom huddled under the overhang bordering a shabby brown tent covered in patchwork. The inhabitant seemed to be temporarily absent.
Thom turned to her, blowing into his hands to warm them. “What now?”
“I’m going back in,” Wren said, resolved. “You don’t have to come, and I don’t expect anything from you at this point, but I can’t abandon them. I have to try to warn Lucas.”
“Wren, I’m not leaving Maradis. My family’s in there. And everyone from the Guild. And Trick.” He said the last word softly, hesitantly.
Of course. His family. Wren felt foolish, forgetting that he had more people than the Guildmembers care about. “Of course. Okay. We go back in.”
They both peered into the night, silence stretching between then. They hadn’t talked about Hale, about what he had done. On the one hand, could she fault him? She had been contemplating betraying their city herself just hours before. Had even gone to the Aprican camp. But a part of her thought, as desperate as the plan had been, that she never would have gone through with it. Could she really betray her city, her nation, dooming it to an unknown future? She wanted a future without King Imbris more than anything, but at what cost? There was no way of knowing that the Apricans would be any better. It seemed that Hale had nothing left to lose.
“How do we get back in?” Thom pointed out, pulling down his hood and running his hand over his blond curls to dry them.
“What do you mean?” Wren’s hand strayed to her chest as she realized what Thom meant. She had been so focused on getting to this point, to somewhere safe, that she had forgotten. Hale had taken the key. The Apricans had it now. Wren closed her eyes, weariness washing over her, threatening to bear her away. Everything since Sable’s death seemed so hard. So heavy.
“Could we sneak in through one of the gates?” Thom asked.
Wren shook her head. “They’re locked up tight, guarded by dozens of Cedars. They’d shoot us on sight.”
“The harbor?”
“No boat,” Wren said, despair filling her. Callidus would die thinking they had abandoned him to his fate.
“We could…steal back the key?”
Wren considered this, looking back through the thicket of tents. “We don’t even know who has it.” She shook her head, dismissing the idea.
Thom scrunched his freckled nose, thinking. His blue eyes grew wide. “Okay, I have an idea. It’s kind of crazy.”
“Your other ideas haven’t been crazy?” She let out a tired little laugh. “Shoot.”
“We pretend to be Aprican soldiers and just walk in with them through the tunnel.”
Wren opened her mouth to dismiss this as a truly crazy idea. But then she closed it, her mind whirring to life. It could work…
The pallid light of a gray dawn was just leaking over the horizon when Thom and Wren approached the wall, their faces shadowed in the hoods of their cloaks. Ranks of Aprican soldiers waited in shadowed rows across the field from the wall, waiting for the signal that would send them pouring into the tunnel. They looked a motley assembly, in tattered cloaks and leather jerkins and shirts with sleeves too short. Whatever plain clothes could be scrounged up around camp, it seemed.
“I bet they’ll go soon,” Thom said. “If they wait too much longer, it will be light enough for the Cedars on the wall to spot them.”
“And when they go, we go,” Wren said, with much more confidence than she felt.
“Like we own the place.” Thom nodded.
Swathed in their cloaks, they might be able to pass through with the rest of the soldiers, if the men didn’t give them too much attention. Thom could pass for a soldier, though he was lankier than most of the Apricans. Wren would be the problem. If anyone saw her, they would be lost.
“Look!” Wren pointed. “They’re moving.”
“It’s now or never.” Thom nodded, striding forwards.
Wren hurried after him. “Never is sounding good,” she muttered to herself, clutching her cloak around her with white-knuckled fingers.
They merged into the stream of soldiers heading for the dark opening in the wall with little trouble. Wren could hear little but the bass beat of her heart in her ears, the rapid cadence of her breath. This march would take a year off her life, if she even made it through alive.
And then they passed into the tunnel, lit by torches held aloft around them.
“We need to be ready to move when we get out,” Thom said under his breath. Wren wasn’t sure when their roles had switched, but Thom now seemed to be taking charge. She felt a pang of gratitude. Her own decision-making skills felt atrophied and weak.
“I need to get to the palace,” Wren murmured. “If I could talk to Lucas, Ella, even one of their servants, I could warn them. Make them stay away from the execution. The Apricans will need the element of surprise to take the whole family. If they’re not there…they might have enough time to get out before the city is overrun.”
They were both silent for a moment. The sound of boots on stone echoed ominously around them.
“I’m going to warn my family to lay low until the city falls,” Thom said. “And then…I might know where Trick is. He was working on a way to save the guildmasters. Maybe he’s come up with something. At the very least, I need to warn him.”
The thought that Trick might have come up with a plan to save Callidus and the others was too good to be true. What they needed was some luck. She found herself wishing for a kitchen and some sugar.
“He always talked about this bar he and his friends would go to, the Foundry. Another Guild member owned it. It would be a place to start to look for him. Maybe he would have a way to warn Lucas.”
“Rendezvous at the courthouse?”
A slight nod of Thom’s hood showed her his assent.
“Wren,” he whispered, “we need to be fast. I think they’ll wait until the Imbris family is in position before they attack, but…” he trailed off.
“I’ll run,” she said.
They marched on in silence, listening to the low murmur of conversations around them, the occasional laugh. Wren’s mood blackened. To these men, this was another day, another campaign, another conquest. They didn’t care that they were going to be killing and maiming, subjugating a city and a people that had always been free. Was there any possibility that the Cedar Guard could defend the city and defeat the Apricans? No. Not from the inside. No doubt some of these soldiers would sneak off to open the various gates, sending the rest of the Aprican army streaming into the city.
Guilt needled her. It shouldn’t have mattered that the city would inevitably fall, or that King Imbris was a murderer and a tyrant. She shouldn’t have gone to the Aprican camp. Shouldn’t have suggested it to Hale. Without her key, the one Lucas had gifted her, this attack wouldn’t be possible. A horrible thought occurred to Wren. Even if Lucas lived, would he ever forgive her for what she had done? For betraying his secret and twisting his trust of her into their enemy’s victory?
“We’re close,” Thom hissed, and Wren looked up from her misery, seeing
that there was, indeed, a door a few paces before them. The soldiers were slowing down, funneling into the chokepoint two at a time. Next to the door, torchlight limning his handsome face, was Hale.
Wren’s nails dug into Thom’s arm, and he jerked. He let out a muffled curse when he saw what she did.
“Keep your head down,” he said, and he swaggered forwards, pushing in front of her, to block her from view.
Wren held her breath as she approached, her steps carrying her forwards, her lungs burning. She saw the shine on Hale’s boots as she passed and felt his presence like a jolt of energy between them. Please, she thought. Don’t see me. Please.
And he didn’t. She was past, blowing out her stale air, filling her lungs with a fresh influx. She followed close behind Thom as they passed out of the storeroom into the empty hallways of the courthouse building. Wren was overcome by a sense of déjà vu as she remembered Hale’s and her trip through the tunnel and these same hallways, giddy with the thrill of their escape. Her eyes pricked with tears at the thought of that man. She shook her head angrily to clear them. That Hale was gone.
“When we get outside, we split up?” Thom said. “Run like the wind and meet back here. Good luck, Wren.”
Wren’s voice was small when she replied. “You, too, Thom. Gods speed.”
Wren planned to bolt as soon as she was free of the building and the Aprican soldiers around her, her muscles tensed and ready. But when she pushed through the doors into the square, her feet stumbled. Before her was a large wooden platform. Emerald Aprican flags waved in macabre cheer from flagpoles on each of the four corners. On one end of the platform was a gallows, with four thick nooses swinging gently in the breeze. One for Callidus, and one for each of the other guildmasters.
Wren’s stomach lurched. This wasn’t a faked death by ingestion, where the Gifted would be squirreled away to some secret prison where they’d cook infused food for the king. It was a real execution. This was no show for the crowd. This was the end.