by C. K. Brooke
“How many applications will it take?” asked Dmitri, as Pavola examined the beaker’s lid.
She evaded his eyes. “I’m…not sure.”
Suspicion crawled through him. Meticulous Pavola always thought everything through, down to the last minutia. It was unlikely she’d have overlooked the timing of such critical efforts. “Pavi?” he pressed, stern.
“Look, I….” She exhaled. “It could take a while.”
Dmitri frowned. “How long is ‘a while’?”
Though clearly reluctantly, her confession unfurled. “At the pace we must go to protect you from overexposure, it could be a few moons. I’m not entirely—”
“We don’t have a few moons,” he ejected. “You are leaving in a matter of weeks for university, aren’t you?” How could he survive long enough to corrode a bar of cast iron when no one would be around to feed him?
Pavola looked down. “I’ve thought about it. And I’m planning to write the school and ask them if I may begin the following semester instead, so that I may stay here until….”
Dmitri shook his head, lowering the goggles. “Don’t do this, please. If you start with one sacrifice, it will never end. I cannot let you surpass your only opportunity to—”
Thud. Thud. Thud.
He stopped at the sound of footfalls. Pavola lifted her head and jerked it over her shoulder. The thudding became steadily louder. “Someone’s coming,” she whispered, eyes panicked.
“Hide,” Dmitri commanded her. “Over there. Behind the desk.”
She lifted the bucket and set it in a dark nook. Dmitri gave her a blanket from his cell and she tossed it over the supplies. She then scuttled to the ancient desk and crouched down beneath it, pulling the stool in front of her as the footsteps issued ever nearer.
Dmitri crammed the pages of his novel into the far corner of the cell and crumpled another blanket over them. He sat upon the pile, concealing it as he leaned against the wall, feigning sleep or delirium.
Nothing had ever terrified him more than the groan of the keep’s door opening, and the sound of boots slowly clunking over the flagstone. Dmitri prayed Pavola would remain safely unseen. He did not dare open his eyes.
Through his closed lids, he detected a shadow approaching, could hear the soldier’s labored breaths as he recovered from the climb up the multitudinous stairwells. “Holy hell,” the man gurgled. “I think he still breathes.” He rapped the bars, and Dmitri stirred, slow and deliberate. “Oy. You.”
Dmitri opened a single eye, imitating exhaustion.
“How the devil are you still alive up here?”
The prince mustered his most convincing croak. “Rain…water.”
“Huh?”
“Please,” Dmitri rasped, extending a trembling arm as weakly as he could. “Feed…me.”
“Oh, brother,” he heard the guard grumble. “The captain will be most displeased. Not to mention, His Majesty.” He shook his head, and lifted his voice. “Hate to break it to you, son, but we’ll need to finish this off, once and for all. I’ll send someone up by the end of the week to put you out of your misery.”
With that, he stomped out, the door clanging shut behind him. Dmitri listened in horrified silence until he could no longer hear the monotonous plods of his boots. Once Dmitri was certain the soldier was out of earshot, Pavola emerged from beneath the desk, her face stricken. “Mit,” she whispered. “By the end of the—”
“Pavi, it’s no use.” He sighed, not bothering to rise. He ran his fingers through his hair. “We just have to accept it.”
“What do you mean, it’s no use?” She squeezed the bars, her eyes indignant. “I thought you said you had other ideas!”
Dmitri’s throat clenched with guilt. “I did say that.”
“And?”
He couldn’t look at her. Should he lie to her again, about having formulated his own escape plan? He didn’t want to. At the same time, he couldn’t bear to cause her suffering on his behalf.
Pavi fingered the lock on his door, and knelt to bring her eyes level with it. She squinted inside, brow furrowing in thought. “If only I knew where to find the key,” she said.
Dmitri glanced up, a memory occurring to him. While previously, he had tried to think of anything apart from the night he’d been imprisoned, the events now replayed in his mind: the enraged king locking Dmitri’s cell shut, the silver key glinting on its gold chain as the king draped it around his throat, tucking it beneath his ruffled collar.
“Ira.” His eyes clamped onto Pavola’s. “Your uncle. He has the key. He wore it the night he locked me away.”
“Wore it?” She looked confused.
“Around his neck.” Dmitri’s mind churned. “How long has it been since you’ve last spoken with the king?”
She scratched her temple. “A while. At least five years, since he dismissed all the staff who’d raised me. And before then, I’d hardly met him once.” She shrugged helplessly. “These days, I imagine he’s so far from his mind, he wouldn’t even remember who I am.”
“Is there any way you could find an audience with him before the week is out?” urged Dmitri. “See if he still wears the key? If so, perhaps you can find a way to get it from him.”
“I will try, Mit.” A tear glittered in her eye, but her face was set with determination. “For you, I will try.”
THE NIGHT WAS STILL. GEO waited beside Lucie, who wrung her wrists. He stayed her hands. “There’s nothing to be anxious about.”
She frowned. “Isn’t there?”
“Cerise will not repeat her errors.” Geo glanced up at Madame Hollie’s aging building, from which they expected the woman in question to emerge at any moment. “There’s too much at stake.”
“Even if she does her job,” Lucie dropped her voice as a stranger strode up to the door and covertly slipped inside, “what if we can’t find your brother? What if he’s already…?”
Geo cringed, shoving the thought aside. Dmitri wasn’t dead. He refused to believe it. “I forbid you to adopt such an outlook.”
Lucie watched the ground. “Yes, Your Highness.”
“Lucie, I…don’t mean to reprimand you. Only to encourage you to hope.”
She lifted her chin, focusing upon him.
“Have faith,” he whispered. “No matter what happens, promise me.”
Before she could respond, Cerise’s unmistakable shadow materialized through the backdoor. Draped around her shoulder was an oversized rope lariat. The prince extended a hand, and Cerise dropped a tiny tincture into his palm. He pocketed it and adjusted the quiver at his back. “Ready?”
The women nodded.
The walk to Wintersea was brisk with purpose. While on their first attempt, uncertainty had hung over them like a brewing tempest, this time felt different. Geo carried a sense of clarity and resolve. He would not fail.
All was silent when they arrived within shooting distance of the drawbridge. Twelve sentinels stood watch that night, six on each side. Quietly, Geo uncorked Cerise’s tincture. It reeked of herbs and something chemical. As planned, the women knelt behind him in the grass as he extracted an arrow from his quiver, and dipped the arrowhead into the solution. It glistened, dripping in the moonlight, and he dipped another, and another. His dozen laced arrows prepared for attack, he raised his bow and took aim at the guard farthest to the left.
He pulled back the first arrow. The release was soundless as the weapon soared through the air and lodged clean into his target’s calf. Before Geo could hear the man’s cries, he fired the next arrow and the next, hitting each of the watch guards until all had been struck in either calf, thigh or hip. Within moments, they collapsed, unconscious, to the ground.
Geo beckoned his companions, jogging to the victims. “How long until they wake?” he asked Cerise.
“A few hours,” she panted, tossing
herself down beside the limp men. She dragged one toward her and began removing his blazer and cap. “Take their clothes. A disguise may help us buy some time.”
Geo stole his arrows back from the inanimate men and stuffed them into his quiver. He turned to Lucie. “Will you assist her? I am going to lower the drawbridge.”
She put on the gray blazer Cerise handed her and dutifully helped tug the boots from the next fellow. Heart pounding, Geo threw himself onto the ladder up to the vacant gatehouse. A pulley of chains hung from the enormous windlass overhead, and Geo was momentarily overwhelmed. No wonder there were so many guards at the gate. It wasn’t only for security, but it surely required the might of more than one man to lower the bridge.
Well, time to test his strength, he decided, and flung onto the pulley. He ejected a hiss of exertion as, with all his weight, he pulled the chain. The bridge began to budge, groaning like the devil, and Geo swore. The sound would alert everyone in the fortress of their presence!
Then again, if the drawbridge was being lowered, wouldn’t those at Wintersea simply assume it was the guards welcoming wanted guests? And if he and his friends entered wearing uniforms, perhaps they would not immediately be identified.
The process was loud and laborious, not to mention one of the more strenuous activities Geo had ever done. He thanked the fates for his calloused hands, which the rusty chains would have otherwise surely busted open by the time the bridge had fully dropped.
Saturated in perspiration, the man climbed back down from the gatehouse, hands sore and sweating against the rungs of the ladder. He reached the ground and was startled by two approaching uniformed figures. But they only held out another, larger uniform to him.
“Girls.” He wiped his brow. “You look very convincing.”
Cerise swung her lariat back over her shoulder, and Lucie grinned. They turned their backs as he shed his trousers and stepped into the guard’s pair, then buttoned a blazer over his shirt. “Let’s go.”
Across the drawbridge they marched, the women keeping up remarkably in the soldiers’ overlarge boots. Geo drained the last of the poison onto another arrowhead, and tossed the empty vial into the moat below.
When the doorman came into view, the prince elevated his bow and struck the man in the ankle. The guard cursed at the height of his voice, but within seconds toppled over and lay motionless. Geo snagged his arrow back and nudged the body aside before lifting the door latch.
“Good luck,” Cerise whispered.
He glanced at her. “You aren’t coming with us?”
She fingered her lariat, backing away towards the southern yard. “I know a more direct route to the king,” she answered vaguely, giving him a brief bow. “Merry meet again.”
She disappeared, and Geo glanced at Lucie. They inhaled, pulling the guards’ caps over their eyes, and heaved open the door. Into the fortress they stepped, the low rims of their caps darkening the already-drab entry hall.
Geo closed the door behind them. A pair of guards stood at the wall, murmuring. The prince and Lucie turned down the nearest corridor to avoid them…although, not quickly enough.
“Oy,” one of the guards called after them. The saliva in Geo’s throat was akin to molasses as he tried to swallow. “What was Steiner shrieking about outside just now?”
Geo did not turn to face them. “Reckons he spotted a jackal,” he grunted. “Bloody coward.” Before the men could ask anything more, he strode off with Lucie down the opposite hallway. “Straighten your posture,” he muttered to her between his teeth. “Head high. And lift your knees, like a real soldier.”
Lucie spoke between tight lips. “If I raise my head any higher, anyone who sees my face shall know that I am a woman.”
“Then pull your cap down a little more.”
She did as told, but kept her chin lowered. Her slumped shoulders also conveyed her dwindling confidence. Altogether, it was most unsoldierly. “Lucie,” Geo snapped again.
She ignored him, and Geo let out a breath. Fine. She could walk as she wished for now, while they were alone. But should they sense anyone approaching, she would need to rise to the occasion. Their lives depended on it.
“Which stairwell didn’t we try last time?” he whispered.
“I don’t remember. There are so many.” Her worried eyes scanned the ceiling. “I still don’t know whether we ought to look up or down. The tower is north,” she pointed left, “but if he’s in the dungeons….”
“Looking for something?”
Geo startled, and Lucie nearly stumbled into him. “Er, we were just…” he began, but the guard at the courtyard silenced him with an icy glare.
“Curious.” The burly man emerged from the shadows to encircle them, eyeing Geo’s personalized quiver, which proudly bore the Straussen family crest. Heart racing, Geo’s hand twitched over the hilt of his sword. “I’ve never seen a guardsman of Wintersea equipped with weaponry that appeared so…” his eyes met Geo’s, “Tybirian.”
Lucie clenched Geo’s sleeve.
The men withdrew their swords. Lucie backed against the wall behind them as Geo thrust his blade into the guard’s wide stomach. The man emitted a sonorous bellow, kneeling down onto the floor as a crimson pool expanded across his uniform. “The intruders,” he mustered the might to call, his deep voice tunneling down the corridor, “have returned!”
“Dear God.” Tears rolled down Lucie’s cheeks as she watched the man dying before her.
Geo sheathed his bloody sword and seized the crook of her elbow. “Come!”
She staggered beside him, glancing over her shoulder while the expiring guard, moaning in a puddle of his own blood, continued to sound his fading alarm. Soon, boots echoed at the end of the corridor behind them.
“We’ve got company.” Geo pulled the woman alongside him, as the storming of more soldiers was imminent. Male voices boomed in their wake, commanding them to stop.
A formation of guards spilled in front of them. The Llewesians had them cornered in each direction. Geo was numb, dazed in disbelief as dozens of swords were aimed at them from every angle. There was naught left to do but raise his bloodstained hands in surrender. Beside him, Lucie quaveringly did the same. His heart fell to his soles. What had he done? How could he have endangered her? And Dmitri…he would never be saved now.
The lead guard whipped the cap from Geo’s head, revealing his hair and face. The other men issued small noises of surprise. “Georome von Straussen,” the guard smirked. “Fancy meeting a Tybirian royal all the way up here.”
“Where is my brother?” Geo demanded, as a painfully tight manacle was slapped over his right wrist. “I know he’s here.”
The guard removed Lucie’s cap and subsequently rolled his eyes. “And this is, no doubt, the witch-poisoner the king was shouting about the other night?” He locked her left wrist in the other manacle, binding the prince and Lucie together. “Attempting to poison His Majesty.” He shook his head with loathing.
“Ira is poison to this land,” Lucie declared, her voice impressively firm. “His treatment of our nations is an abomination. And his imprisonment of my Crown Prince is unjust.”
“Silence, wench,” the guard spat, “or I will thrash your ugly mouth.”
“Speak to her like that again,” Geo snarled, his eyes searing into the soldier’s, “and you shall never speak again.”
The man ignored him, only snapped his fingers, and more soldiers moved in, shedding Geo’s weapons from his belt and securing his other arm behind his back with a cord around the waist. To Lucie, they did the same. Awkwardly fastened together, the couple was shoved along by countless rough hands on their shoulders and backs.
“To the dungeons with them,” ordered the captain of the guard.
“Is that where you’re stowing my brother?” Geo strained to glance back at him, but the others thrust him onward.
> “Your brother is dead,” drawled the captain.
Geo halted, his body overcome with devastation. “No.” He had not come all this way, sacrificed their lives, to have arrived too late. Dmitri, his only brother, his best mate….
The men dragged him forward, Lucie weeping silently beside him, until they reached a stairwell descending into the bowels of the fortress. “Down we go,” snarled the soldier behind Geo, pushing them as they struggled down the steep steps without the use of their arms. Before long, an unwelcoming fishy odor permeated the near-black stairway.
Geo hung his head in agony as someone at the front of the procession lit a torch. The prince could only hope that the Llewesians would forego any method of torture, and that his and Lucie’s deaths would transpire quickly.
They had already suffered too much.
THE BALCONY AWAITED ABOVE, INNOCUOUS, patient, dove-white. Faint candlelight flickered through the door pane, and Cerise squinted up at the balustrades. Taking a breath, she unfurled a length of her lariat and grasped the neck of the lasso. She spun it overhead, gaining momentum. The balcony was on the third story; she prayed she had enough rope. Not that she’d ever set foot on a farm, but she’d learned a good deal about lariats. At least something useful had come from tupping so many cowmen.
It took several attempts. Somewhere around her fifth throw, the lasso finally took to the rounded head of a balustrade. Cerise tugged on the line hanging down the south wall. It was as secure as she could hope for.
After kicking off the cumbersome boots and trousers she’d stolen, she unraveled the hem of her dress. She then took hold of the lariat and climbed up, her arms burning to support her weight. Although her blood pounded with such anxious ferocity, she barely noticed her sore biceps or chafing hands. She nearly slipped at the second story, but clenched onto the rope with heightened zeal. Up she shimmied, making gradual progress, until she could touch the smooth stone balustrade.