by Morgan Rice
Sebastian choked back his tears. “I love you, Rupert.”
Rupert didn’t say anything for a moment or two. When the words came, they were barely above a breath. “I love you too.”
Sebastian thrust the blade home.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Around Angelica, all her dreams fell apart. She heard the ringing bells that meant people had forced their way into the palace, heard the shouts, the screams, the crack of pistols and muskets. Each one was like a hammer blow to everything she’d planned.
She ran through the palace, to the royal bedrooms, passing the guards on the doors.
“What are you waiting for?” she demanded, pointing back down the corridor. “Defend your queen. Join the battle!”
The two men there looked at one another, then set off in the direction Angelica had pointed. She had no idea if they would actually join in the fighting that she could hear in the distance, or if they would simply cut and run as soon as they were out of her sight. It didn’t matter; two soldiers in royal uniforms would have to fight, because the invaders wouldn’t give them any other choice.
“I should have killed Sophia when I first met her,” Angelica said, looking around the rooms. There was so much here. So much that had been hers so briefly.
A part of her wanted to stay here, seated regally in front of the doors, waiting for the enemy to come. That part of her said that she should show these peasants what a real queen was, and stand proud when Sophia came to confront her. At least that way she would get to see the look on her face when she learned Sebastian was dead.
A flash of hurt ran through her at that, then anger at having the feeling. Sebastian had betrayed her, again and again, by refusing her. He’d run from their wedding. He’d chosen her. He deserved to die for it, and feeling… this, did nothing to change that. She would not feel pity for him. Would not feel love.
“Don’t be weak,” Angelica told herself. “You can survive this. They have Ashton, but that means nothing. You can take it back.”
Her family still had lands, friends, resources. She would leave Ashton and go to their lands overseas. Sophia was not the Dowager, to hunt her down wherever she ran. She would not send murderers, certainly not across half the world. Angelica would, though, and once the kingdom was without a leader again, people would start to remember who had been crowned as their queen. She might not even need an army to do it, just the right words at the right time.
“I’ll bring an army, though,” Angelica promised.
But before that, she had to survive. She could hear the sounds of the battle below getting closer. A glance from her window showed the fighting in the streets, with royal colors and those of Ishjemme blending into a mix that was red with blood and black with smoke.
If she waited here, there was every chance that some enterprising soldier would kill her as soon as they all rushed in, or that they would do the things that soldiers always did in war, in spite of Sophia’s pretense that she stood for what was right. Even if they simply took her as a prisoner, she would still be the captive of the person she hated most in the world, waiting to be executed in whatever way took Sophia’s fancy. Angelica thought of all the things that she would do if the positions were reversed and shuddered at everything she imagined.
No, she couldn’t allow herself to be captured.
“Then stop wasting time and think,” she told herself.
The first step was simple. She grabbed a small pouch and stuffed it with coins, jewels, whatever would help to pay for her to escape. Nothing too bulky; as much as Angelica would have liked to take her crown with her, it would mark her out as surely as holding her family’s banner aloft. She needed things that could be hidden. She took only the bare minimum of knives and poisons for the same reason.
Once she got beyond Ashton, her plan seemed simple: take a horse and ride for her family’s lands, then find a boat to some more permanent safety. The question was how she got out of Ashton, out of the palace, even out of this room without being spotted for who she was.
Angelica found herself thinking of Rupert, and how he’d briefly fooled his mother. She thought of Sophia, and all the time she’d spent passing for a noble. If her enemy could do that, wasn’t there a certain irony in what she was considering?
“Servant. Servant!” she called out, wondering if anyone would bother coming, or if she would have to go out hunting for someone suitable. Almost to her surprise, a girl hurried into the room, managing a timid curtsey. Her hair was a dirty blonde, not really the right shade for Angelica’s needs, but there was no time to do more.
“Your majesty?” she said.
Angelica slipped a length of cord into her hand quietly. “I have a job for you, girl.”
She stepped in close to the servant, almost behind her.
“You see,” Angelica said, “I need to die. I want you to help me with that.”
“Your majesty?”
Angelica caught the shock in the girl’s tone. It was nothing like the shock, however, when Angelica slipped the strangling cord around her throat and pulled tight. The servant struggled, of course, her hands flying to her throat, but Angelica was already pulling as hard as she could, and she had the advantage of surprise. The servant kicked, then staggered, then finally fell still.
Angelica knelt beside her for several seconds, willing her breathing to slow. She’d murdered before; she’d killed her husband. Compared to that, one indentured servant was nothing, and she had no time to be weak like this. She had to act.
It seemed to take forever to swap clothes with the dead servant, stripping away her plain outer dress and swapping it for Angelica’s finery. The dress was a gray, loose, shapeless thing, but perhaps that was a good thing, since it would draw fewer stares to her. It would certainly hide the things that she wanted to take with her better. She tried not to listen to the way the sounds of the battle were getting closer while she worked, because there was nothing she could do to speed this deception up.
Once Angelica had dressed her unwilling double, she cut down a curtain cord, tying one end around the top of the room’s curtain rail, the other around the dead servant’s neck. It wasn’t a very convincing scene, but it would buy her some time at least.
Angelica could hear the clash of blades now, but she knew she couldn’t leave it there. She pulled out the fine braids of her hair, then took a knife and held it to the golden strands. This was harder than killing the servant had been. This mattered. Still, she managed to do it, hacking her hair shorter, then rubbing in fireplace soot as a quick way to darken it. Lifting the hem of her dress, she took one soot-blackened finger and drew the mark of the Indentured on her calf. It wasn’t something she would have done at any other time, but right now it was probably the best protection she could find.
The sounds of the fighting were too close for more than that. Quickly, Angelica cleaned her hands on her dress, adding a layer of dirt to it that disgusted her, composed her features into a suitable mask of distress, and burst out from the royal chambers, hurrying along the corridor.
Two of Ishjemme’s soldiers, obviously well in advance of the rest, stood over the bodies of the guards Angelica had sent out to protect her. It seemed that the two men had done their duty after all. Strange the things men found to die for, but Angelica felt a hint of gratitude. Without them there to slow things down, perhaps she would have been caught in the middle of her preparations.
She might still be caught now, though, and fear filled her at that thought, even as the two soldiers looked over at her.
“Oh, Goddess,” she stammered out, roughening her voice the way she’d roughened the rest of her appearance. “Please don’t kill me!”
“We’re not here to kill you,” one of the soldiers said. “Who are you?”
“You can see she’s just a servant,” the other supplied. “You’ll need to come with us. It isn’t safe here.”
He probably meant it as a kindness, but it would amount to the same thing as being a prisone
r, and Angelica doubted that the protection her rough disguise offered would last forever. She still had a card to play though.
“The… the queen…” Angelica said, interspersing the words with a couple of sobs.
“What about her?” the first soldier demanded. “She’s here?”
Angelica pointed back in the direction she’d come from. “She… she’s dead!”
It was enough to set the men running in the direction of the royal chambers. Angelica hurried just as quickly in the opposite direction, slipping into the servants’ passages as soon as she could. In that space, soldiers would be expecting frightened servants. She hurried on, picking a route that she hoped would take her to the outside as quickly as possible.
It did, bringing her out into a spot in the palace gardens not far from the formal maze that so many nobles had loved to take a turn around on sunny afternoons, or evenings, when they wanted to find a way to be alone with prospective lovers. Angelica knew that maze well, and all the doors near it that might let her out into the city, free to work on the next part of her escape.
That sounded easy enough, but she’d reckoned without the cordon of enemy soldiers who stood in the gardens, containing a milling crowd of nobles, servants, and more, who were making enough noise among them to be heard over the remaining sounds of the fight.
“This is intolerable!” one nobleman said. “Don’t you know the family I’m from?”
“No,” a soldier replied. “That’s kind of the point.”
Angelica understood in that moment. They were going through them, apparently sorting them into those who were free to go and those who had to stay. Probably, the group who fell on the wrong side of that decision would be kept for questioning, or imprisonment, or even execution. It was exactly what Angelica would have done, and exactly what she had been hoping to avoid.
For a moment, Angelica considered running back into the palace, but then she felt a hand on her back, an Ishjemme soldier there pushing her forward, even if it was gently.
“You have nothing to be afraid of,” he said. “You’re a servant, right?”
On impulse, Angelica lifted the hem of her dress to show the mark she’d applied inexpertly with soot.
“Show them that and they’ll let you go,” he said. “Our queen was once indentured like you. She hates people being treated like that. Soon, you’ll be free. Truly free.”
Angelica didn’t have to fake her smile. If what this soldier said was true, then he had no idea how right he was. She slipped into the crowd, letting it hide her in a sea of faces. Soon she would be free, and then she would be able to start working to undo everything Sophia had done today.
CHAPTER TWENTY ONE
Outside the palace, Emeline struggled to help the troops make sense of everything that was happening. It would have helped if she had more of an idea herself. The palace seemed mostly quiet now, suggesting that the little resistance within was faltering, but part of the reason she was outside was that she didn’t want to take part in whatever violence was left there.
Instead, she was here, helping a contingent of Hans’s soldiers to herd the people fleeing from the palace, helping to sort the ones who could safely be let go from the ones who might still pose a threat.
“How long are you going to keep us here for?” a middle-aged noblewoman demanded.
Emeline didn’t bother pointing out to her that this was probably the safest place for her right now. So far, there hadn’t been any reports of looting or violence toward nobles, but Emeline suspected that it would probably only take one spark of fighting to do it.
“I’m sure it won’t be too much longer,” Emeline said, simultaneously reaching into the noblewoman’s mind to learn as much as possible about who she was.
She could see Aidan and Cora doing the same a few dozen yards away, but there were so many people out there now that there was no time to stop and talk. It seemed as though at least half of the people in the palace were there in the gardens by now, and more were arriving by the moment as they realized that it wasn’t some ancient castle, secure against invaders, and that those invaders were now inside.
“You need to go and stand over there,” Emeline said, pointing to a cluster of other nobles who weren’t actively involved in the fight, but who couldn’t just be allowed to go.
“Young lady, I—”
“Now, please,” Emeline said, with the kind of weariness in her voice that came from too many people trying to tell her just how important they were.
In its way, what she was doing was as much an invasion as the one in the palace. She was using her talents in a way that amounted to ransacking minds, reaching into them to find out who was a threat, who had information, who was just scared and trying to get away.
She went up to a servant, seeing nothing but memories of being shouted at and hit for being too slow. She gestured toward the garden’s gates.
“You can leave if you want,” Emeline said.
He shrugged. “Where would I go?”
Emeline didn’t really have an answer to that. She could let the servants there go, but it didn’t make the city any safer, or give them food or shelter. “You don’t have to go anywhere if you don’t want to.”
She kept going through the crowd, watching the minds of the people around her as she went. She saw thoughts of violence in one man’s mind and focused her attention on a tall man with short cropped hair. His thoughts told his story: he was a soldier who had deserted, and who was planning to stab whoever discovered him. Emeline gestured to a couple of the soldiers, pointing to him.
“It’s better if you don’t try to use the knife you have,” she said. “No one is going to hurt you unless you have committed a crime.”
Even so, he sprang forward, and a pair of soldiers leapt at him in turn, bringing him to the ground. Emeline stood back from the scuffle; she’d been part of enough fighting for one day. She was so focused on the fight in front of her that she almost missed a flicker of thoughts nearby that was too much to ignore.
Milady d’Angelica was somewhere in the crowd.
Emeline frowned, looking out over it. There was no sign of her there at first glance. She wasn’t obvious in her jewels, or in the crown that seemed to be hers now. Emeline started to look through the noblewomen, checking them one by one in case there was some sign of her.
This was too important to do alone.
Kate, Aidan… everyone. I think that Milady d’Angelica is somewhere here.
She sent that as widely as she could. Perhaps Asha and the others from Stonehome would get her message. Sophia certainly did.
Are you sure? I have men telling me that she’s dead.
I think I heard her thoughts, Emeline sent back.
An image flickered in Emeline’s mind of a face. This is her. I’ll be there as soon as I can.
No. That was Kate’s mental voice. I’ll do it. You’re needed there. Find her for us, Emeline.
Emeline planned to. From the thoughts of the others there, she could see just how important the noblewoman was, and she wasn’t about to let her get away from the palace.
Emeline started to look around the rest of the crowd now, checking them one by one, trying to find the thoughts that she wanted. There was one obvious way to find the woman she wanted, of course, but it was risky. Still, with so many soldiers around, it might be worth it…
“Milady d’Angelica!” she called out. “Make yourself known. I know you’re in this crowd somewhere! Surrender peacefully!”
She knew better than to expect a response, but she didn’t need one. Instead, she watched the thoughts of the crowd around her, seeing who was confused, who was surprised by the announcement, and who panicked.
“There!” Emeline yelled, pointing to a woman wearing a servant’s dress. “Grab her!”
She was a fraction of a second too late, because the woman who had married Rupert and taken the kingdom was already running.
***
Kate came running into t
he gardens in time to see a figure making a break from the crowd contained there, sprinting for the entrance to the palace’s formal maze.
Her? Kate sent to Emeline.
It’s her.
Then she’s mine, Kate sent back.
If she’d had her old speed, the chase would have taken a matter of seconds. Kate would have brought her down without trying, and all of this would have been over. Instead, even running as fast as she could, she couldn’t get to Angelica before the kingdom’s would-be ruler made it to the entrance to the maze.
“Don’t think I won’t find you,” Kate called out as she followed her quarry in there. She drew her sword.
Although the maze was meant to be just a formal thing, designed to delight bored nobles, there still seemed to be more than enough twists and turns to it for her to lose track of the route to Angelica.
Even so, Kate didn’t lose her position. Angelica’s thoughts were as clear as a beacon shining through fog.
“I know where you are,” Kate called out. “I can sense you. Come out now, and make this easier.”
“So you can slaughter me?” Angelica demanded from somewhere off to the left. “Do you think I don’t know what you did back at the House of the Unclaimed?”
“Then you should know that it’s a bad idea to try to hurt me and my sister,” Kate said. “You should know that you can’t escape, too.”
She stalked through the maze, letting her sense of where Angelica was guide her. It should have taken Kate right to her. Instead, Kate found herself wandering down path after path, having to turn around every time she hit a dead end.
“Knowing where I am doesn’t help much in a maze, does it?” Angelica said, with a laugh that grated across Kate’s nerves. “I’ve been here so many times I know it like I know my own home. How long before I make it to an exit, Kate? How long before you have to tell your sister that I escaped you?”
“You’re not getting away,” Kate promised her.