“I’m just stopping to water my horses. I’ll be on my way in a—”
“Didn’t ask you about your horses. I asked your name, sweetie. What is it?”
“Ruby.” Scarlett was too far to one side for Hadrian to see her face. His view consisted entirely of the wagon, barrels, and the hind ends of the horses.
“See, she knows better than to give her real name,” Royce said.
“She’s here to help us,” Hadrian told him.
“All by herself? Against six Manzant slavers?”
Hadrian looked out the rear window, searching for others. The road, flat and straight, was empty for miles.
Royce shook his head. “She’s the one who put us here.”
“What’s with the boy’s clothes, Ruby?” one of the slavers asked.
“Brother’s clothes. Easier to work in.”
“Where you taking all that beer and ale?”
One of them came to the wagon and jostled a barrel, then another. “They’re full.”
“They’re, ah—old. Going bad. Has a real rank taste. I’m taking them to Manzant to sell. Guards are grateful for whatever they can get.”
Hadrian leaned against the wall of the wagon.
She’s lying—but why?
Fawkes could have sent her to ensure they were locked away.
Do you understand the meaning of the word thorough?
His brain knew it was possible, even probable, but his heart didn’t want to believe.
She’s here to help, he reasoned. Maybe she tried to get others, too, but they refused. She’s stubborn and foolish and chased after us alone.
“You’re in luck, little lady. We’re from Manzant. You can give it to us.”
“Wasn’t planning on giving it to no one. I’m selling it, but sure, I can sell it to you. Let’s see, for all six kegs it’ll cost you…five yellow tenents or twelve with King Vincent’s profile.”
“Naw, I’m thinking these are donations.”
“Then you’d be thinking wrong.”
Two of the men lifted a barrel from the wagon and hauled it out of sight.
“Leave that alone!”
“Just taking a taste, honeysweet.”
“Stop it!”
“Looks like we’ve got ourselves a party, boys.”
“By Mar! We got beer, ale, and a pretty little thing to entertain us.”
“And you didn’t want to come.”
“I know, right? I would’ve been kicking myself.”
“We’re spending the night here, aren’t we? I mean, no sense in going any farther today, am I right?”
“Absolutely. Hey, Owen, why don’t you make a fire?”
“And just leave the whoring and drinking to you? Screw that.”
“I said stop it!” Scarlett’s voice cut a note higher. She was scared. The horses didn’t like it. The two on Scarlett’s wagon shuffled, making their tack jingle, and the lorry shifted forward and back.
Hadrian jerked on his chains; they rewarded him by cutting into his abused flesh. He pressed his face to the bars of the window, but he couldn’t see anything beyond Scarlett’s barrel-laden wagon.
“Why don’t you sit down?” a voice growled.
Startled by something, both sets of horses jerked. The wagon Royce and Hadrian were in lurched, slamming Hadrian’s face against the window. At the same time, Scarlett gasped. Not quite a scream, but close.
Hadrian jerked on the manacles again, and blood dripped around his wrists.
“Ain’t nothing wrong with this, is there?”
“Tastes fine to me.”
“It’s even a little cold.”
“I think she’s lying to us, don’t you?”
“Lying to us about more than the beer, I’ll bet. Those clothes are lying, too. They say you’re frumpy, but I’ll wager you’ve got quite a figure underneath.”
“No!” Scarlett shouted.
Running feet slapped dirt, and a moment later Scarlett appeared back in Hadrian’s vision. She stared through the little window, eyes wide with fear. “Help!” she screamed.
One of the men caught her by the arm. Scarlett jerked back and slammed against the side of their wagon. She screamed again. Another man grabbed her around the waist and lifted her up. Her hat came off, and that long red hair cascaded out. The men exclaimed in pleasure at the sight.
“Told you them clothes were hiding something special!”
Hadrian threw himself at the wooden wall. The boards, thick and solid, didn’t even shudder. The impact only served to jar his ribs, and a fresh bolt of pain stole his breath.
“Settle down in there!” one of the slavers shouted, banging on the wall of the wagon.
“They’re jealous of our good fortune,” another said.
With arms and feet thrashing, Scarlett was carried out of sight. Hadrian continued to press his face hard to the corner of the little opening in the wall, struggling to see what they were doing. All he saw were Scarlett’s horses standing, hoofing the ground and lifting their heads to watch what Hadrian couldn’t see. On the ground just outside, Scarlett’s hat lay in a rut, long red hairs caught in the brim.
Scarlett screamed. The sound was different this time, and Hadrian was surprised to discover that screams had their own language. Before she’d cried out in fear; now she shrieked in panic. Fear of the possible had become the terror of reality. She wailed until her cries were muffled. Things went quiet for a few seconds, and then she screeched again. After a minute or so, the screams stopped, and Scarlett settled into a whimpering ongoing sob.
Hadrian couldn’t help himself. He began to thrash, trying to find a way out of the chains, out of the iron manacles that had him helpless—a way that didn’t exist.
“Hold her!”
“Get her ankles! Get her goddamn ankles!”
Hadrian pulled on the iron, feeling the brackets cutting deeper, neither giving at all.
“Easy,” Royce whispered.
“I have to do something! I can’t just sit here and listen to this.”
“Nothing you can do. Relax.”
“I can’t relax!” he yelled. “She wasn’t involved, Royce. She’s here to help and now…” Hadrian put his face back to the window but still couldn’t see.
“You can’t do anything else,” Royce said in his all-too-cold, all-too-complacent, all-too-callous way. Times like this Hadrian hated his partner, hated his ruthless indifference. This side of Royce was devoid of compassion, of empathy. He could sit content while just outside—
Scarlett shrieked again, this time louder. The slavers replied with laughter.
Once more, Hadrian put his face against the bars of the window. The cool metal pressed against his cheek. “You sons of bitches!” Hadrian shouted. “Leave her alone!”
More laughter.
Royce did nothing. He sat on the floor of the wagon, his back against the wall. No struggling, no effort to squirm out of the manacles—he just sat there, head back, looking at his boots. At least he wasn’t smiling. That was something.
Scarlett wailed louder, and then fell back once more to sobs. After that came a good deal of grunting and some sounds of gagging and spitting. Then slowly, bit by bit, the noises faded. The horses still jangled their tack and stomped their hooves, but he couldn’t hear Scarlett anymore.
Did they kill her? The idea grew in his head.
At first, he didn’t want to believe it, but as the silence continued, he grew steadily more certain of the possibility. They’d killed her and were sitting around her body, drinking and recovering.
Hadrian stayed by the window, straining to hear. Wind brushed grass, making a sound as light as rain. A single cricket trilled a lonely note. Somewhere, a swallow chirped. So quiet.
Why is it so very quiet?
Footsteps.
Hadrian heard them shuffle on dirt. They paused, then grew louder as they approached Royce’s side of the wagon.
Feeling sick, furious, and drained, Hadrian turned toward the
rear door, hoping someone would be stupid enough to open it. With his wrists bound up, there wasn’t much he could do, but he was pretty sure he could kill at least one.
Hadrian was good at killing—that was his skill, his one true talent. Once upon a time, he had actually been proud of that ability. He’d since outgrown his pride and sobered up from an addiction to blood, but at twenty-two he’d come too late to the simple wisdom that killing wasn’t something to take pride in. And yet there were times, moments like this, when he realized that even terrible talents had a use.
To his amazement, he heard a key enter the door’s lock.
They’re opening it!
Hadrian glanced at Royce with wide-eyed anticipation. His partner shifted to a crouch. His nimble, cat-smooth movement announced his agreement to an unspoken plan.
If the man opening the wagon door also has the key to our chains…
The door swung open. Both Royce and Hadrian started, then stopped short, confounded by the sight of red hair.
“Hang on, I have to find the right one,” Scarlett Dodge said, holding up a large metal hoop filled with a dozen keys. A bit of dirt smeared her shirt, and she had a grass stain on one knee of her trousers. Other than that, she looked fine. “Here, turn around,” she told Hadrian.
“You’re…you’re all right?”
“Yeah,” she said with a little puff of air—an almost-laugh that said, Why wouldn’t I be? “Turn around.”
He did as she instructed, sending Royce a baffled look. Royce didn’t look surprised, but his face was covered with suspicion.
Hadrian felt a tug on the manacles at his wrist.
“What did you do? Your skin is all torn up and bloody.” She loosened one; then both popped open, and his arms were free. The relief in his shoulders was immediate. A surge of blood reached his fingertips, igniting a burst of pins and needles. The ache in his side—while not gone—eased a bit.
“Hold steady,” she complained, starting to work on his collar.
“Are you sure you’re all right?” he asked.
“Me? Of course I’m sure.”
The heavy metal collar made a loud hollow clunk! as it hit the wagon’s bed. Hadrian rubbed at his raw neck and swallowed several times, enjoying the simple pleasure.
Scarlett paused before Royce, holding up the key. “If I unlock you, are you going to be nice?”
Royce said nothing. He stared at her with an unfathomable expression: anger, suspicion, but also something else.
Scarlett let out a frustrated sigh and went to work on Royce’s locks. As she did, Hadrian climbed out. A cool breeze chilled the sweat on his skin as he cautiously moved around between the two wagons. He headed toward the river, which proved to be no more than a pathetic trickle running over the road. High banks told tales of spring floods, but at that moment Mercator Creek wasn’t impressive. There was no bridge; the two-track road just plowed through a shallow section where rocks refused to wash away. The team of horses that had pulled the prison wagon drank from the rippling water. Scarlett’s pair were held by a hand brake, too far back to join the other horses. The two animals were slick with sweat, their hair soaked flat and dark beneath the leather straps and collar. She’d driven them hard—too hard to let them drink until they cooled down.
Around the front, a keg marked BEER sat upright in the road. It looked exactly like a miniature rain barrel; its lid had been broken into two parts. The dirt around the base was dark and wet. A few inches away, he spotted a tin cup in the dirt. Next to it lay a slaver. He wasn’t alone. Hadrian counted the men and came up with all six. They were lying on the road or in the grass—although one was partially in the creek, the fingers of his left hand shifting in the current.
Royce came out of the wagon and pushed past. He descended on the nearest guard, his torn cloak spreading out like the wings of a vulture with the movement.
“You don’t have to—”
Before Scarlett could finish, Royce had pulled a dagger from the soldier’s belt and stabbed the man in the throat.
Royce moved to the next one.
“He doesn’t have to do that,” Scarlett said, moving to stand beside Hadrian.
“Don’t bother trying to stop him. There’s no way he’ll let them live.”
“No, it’s not that,” Scarlett said. “I didn’t drug them.”
Royce paused, looking first at her, then down at the man he straddled. He placed a hand to the slaver’s throat. He nodded in a sort of grim approval and rose. Still holding the dagger, he returned to Scarlett, who took three quick steps backward.
“Royce!” Hadrian shouted, but the thief ignored him.
He caught her by the throat with his left hand. His middle finger being broken, he used his thumb to hook under her chin, forcing her head back against the side of the prison wagon. The dagger was clutched awkwardly, painfully, in his other hand, which still bore the boot mark where someone had stepped on it. “Why’d you do it?”
“Royce—let her go!”
“I want to know why.”
“Because unlike you, she cares about people. We got to be friends the other day. She did it for me.”
“No,” Scarlett said. “I did it for him.” She managed a shallow nod at Royce.
The thief stared. “Explain why you’d risk your life for me. Explain fast.”
“Royce!” Hadrian yanked a sword from the belt of a black-uniformed man.
“I did it because you were drugged with my herbs. Someone took them from my place while I was out with Hadrian, but I knew you wouldn’t believe that. I knew you’d blame me, and that Manzant can’t hold you. And I heard what happened the last time you got out—what happened to those who helped put you there.”
“Royce!” Hadrian shouted, coming at him with the naked sword.
Royce let go of her and gingerly shifted the knife to his other hand, wincing as he did. He moved away from her.
Hadrian slowed down as he stepped through the grisly scene, ignoring the gathering flies. “This was stupid. What if they didn’t drink right away? What if they’d waited to celebrate their good fortune?”
“Riding in the hot sun all day?” Scarlett replied. “Pretty much a sure thing.”
“So they didn’t…” Hadrian looked at her but not directly in her eyes. It felt like too much of an intrusion. “They didn’t—you know?”
“No.” Scarlett gave her head a curt shake. She wore a little smile while narrowing her eyes, as if he both amused and bewildered her. Then she shrugged. “They were a little grabby near the end.” She pulled out the side of her shirt and peered beneath it with a scowl. “I’ll have a nasty bruise.”
“What if they had drunk from another barrel?” Hadrian asked.
“They’re all poisoned,” Royce answered for her. “But what if not all of them drank? What if the first one dropped dead before the others got around to it?”
Scarlett exposed a knife beneath the long tails of her shirt and shrugged.
“Might have killed one—maybe. These were Manzant slavers. They don’t go down easy.” Royce shook his head. “That was way too dangerous.”
“Glad you noticed,” she said. “And you should also note that this is Wagner’s entire supply of beer and ale—ruined to save you. So the two of you can go on back to wherever you came from, right? Hadrian’s swords are in the box up where the driver rests his feet. Wag says he saw them load up. That pretty white dagger and your coin, you’ll find on the bodies. Just take the horses, leave, and forget about Dulgath. Okay? Just leave.”
Hadrian saw the way Royce was clutching his broken hand.
Royce looked back at him with a familiar expression that was easy to read.
“Sorry,” Hadrian said. “We aren’t leaving.”
Chapter Seventeen
Shervin Gerami
Covered mostly in salt and birdlime, the coastal village of Rye was worse than repugnant. Christopher honestly couldn’t think of a word awful enough to describe it. An hour’s ride sou
th and west of Castle Dulgath, its shacks sat on a beach and looked like wreckage washed up in a storm. Their front yards were tiny slivers of seaweed-strewn sand covered by upturned hulls of little battered boats. Buoys, ratty nets, and snapped branches were heaped in piles. Leather-skinned villagers squatted over smoking campfires, dressed in little more than loincloths. Christopher had asked Knox to find someone unassociated with Castle Dulgath to do the deed but hadn’t expected the necessity to visit another world in the process.
Christopher Fawkes couldn’t claim to be well traveled. While he’d been to the major cities of Maranon, that wouldn’t be considered worldly for a baron. Then again, Christopher Fawkes wasn’t a baron. His father held that title. Christopher was instead the worthless fourth son, but like any contemptible child of a middling noble, he used his father’s title to open doors. Most people never questioned him. This never pleased his father, but then nothing did—at least nothing Christopher ever did. His mother agreed with her husband, as a smart wife of a despot should. Christopher’s brothers and sisters—of which he had six—followed suit in their opinions of him. This didn’t surprise Christopher; siblings in a noble household were, by nature, mortal enemies.
The only surprising hostility Christopher faced had come from his previous horse. The mare had tried to bite him every chance she got. He’d named the horse Melanie de Burke after a woman at court; she was a gorgeous and expensive purebred Renallian. He’d once loved Melanie de Burke—the woman—but he was certain she still didn’t know he existed. Melanie de Burke—the horse and biter—had been dead three years. He’d killed her—the horse, that is—and that singular act had ruined his life. As he thought about it, had he killed Melanie de Burke—the woman—he might have fared better. Such was the insanity of life in Maranon, and the reason he so appreciated Immaculate.
How far have my standards fallen when my love and loyalty are won by an animal that simply doesn’t bite me?
“Are you certain you found someone suitable here?” Christopher asked, getting down from the wagon and scanning the desolate encampment.
This is how the natives in the dark recesses of Calis live. At least he imagined so. He hadn’t been there, either.
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