“And you believe that within the city exist the ‘right’ conditions?”
“Apologies, Princess,” the guard said, bowing his head to her, “but if ever there was a city close to destroying itself, it’s Perennia. I don’t mean to offend you, but…many believe you and the general deserted us in our time of need or…or that you’re traitors in league with Isalla’s enemies.”
Adina nodded slowly. “And you, Guardsman?” she asked. “What do you believe?”
The man hesitated, but finally met her eyes. “I’m a simple city guard, Princess. Such high matters are beyond me. But once, when I was first starting out, I worked with an older guard who had served under your father. He’d retired from His Majesty’s household guard, and only offered his services from time to time, but I guess I looked at the man like something of a hero, serving under so great a king as your father was, the gods bless and keep his soul. I asked him…” He paused to give a soft laugh. “Pestered him, if you want to know the truth, about his time in the castle. At first, he was reluctant, but finally he began to tell me stories. Some of those stories, Princess, were about you. You were young then, but the man spoke of you highly, said that you had a heart to match even that of your father, and that you were always kind to him and the other guardsmen.”
He paused for a second, and Adina waited to see if he would say more. Finally, he shook his head. “No, Princess. I do not believe you a traitor, nor a deserter, and believe that whatever reason you had to leave the city as you did, you and the general, I believe it must have been a good one.” He seemed to come to some decision, and nodded, his face set. “Whatever help you need from me, Princess, you’ll have it.”
Adina smiled. “Thank you, Guardsman. I know that these are troubled, uncertain times, but I assure you that you do your queen and your homeland a service by helping us. Now, if you would allow us to pass—we must stop this execution before it takes place.”
The man’s face grew troubled. “The execution is scheduled but a half hour from now, Princess. I am not sure you can make it. I wasn’t lying about the state of the city. There are some out there—more than a few—who, I think, might be tempted to violence should they see you in the open, and would no doubt attack you and your companions without giving you time to explain.”
One of the other guards, who’d been waiting by the gate, stepped forward, an almost eager expression on his face. “I’ll take them to the square, Marcus, if that’s alright with you.”
The first guard turned on the man, frowning. “Bow when you approach royalty, recruit. And I told you, you refer to me as ‘Captain,’ not Marcus.”
The man’s face grew sullen, but he nodded, sketching a distracted bow at Adina. “Sorry, Captain, but as I said I’ll be happy to lead them there.”
The guard captain frowned, as if considering whether or not to reprimand the man for his tone while Adina and the others were present, but apparently decided to save it for another time. “No, the streets will be dangerous, and if we want to get to the square, there’s no time to waste. Hugh,” he said, turning to address one of the other guards, a man with salt and pepper in his beard who held himself with the bearing of a veteran. “You and I will escort the princess and her companions to the square.”
The man nodded, stepping forward. “You other two,” Marcus went on, “watch the gate—we will return as soon as possible. Now,” he said, turning back to Adina and the others, “Princess, are you ready?”
“Yes,” Adina said, “and Marcus, is it?”
The man winced. “Forgive me, Majesty, but my mother and father were loyal subjects to your father, and they gave me his name. I hope that it does not cause offense…”
“Of course not,” Adina said, smiling. “It is a strong name, a proud one, and it suits you well, I think.”
The man’s face went red at that, and he shifted uncomfortably before bowing his head again. “Thank you for your kindness, Majesty. Now, we must hurry if we’re to have a hope of making it in time.”
Adina glanced back at the others then nodded. “We’re ready.”
“Very well, Princess. We will do our best to protect you and your companions, but I cannot guarantee your safety, as much as I might want to. The city is a dangerous place just now, and we will have little time for stealth, as we will have to move quickly to get to the square in time. This way.” He turned to start away, and the sullen guard stepped in front of him.
“Sorry, Mar—I mean, Captain. But don’t you think someone should be dispatched to inform Queen Isabelle that her royal sister has returned to the city?”
“Fine,” Marcus said, waving a hand dismissively, “do so then return to your post at once.” He glanced back at Adina, waited for her nod. And then they were running.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Captain Brandon Gant was a man of simple pleasures—not for him the fine clothes and decadent meals that so many of the wealthy enjoyed or, at least, pretended to. He’d tried both, on occasion and always regretted it—the first always seemed to chafe and constrict him, and he’d spent that day in a life or death struggle, trying not to be strangled by his attire. The second always left his stomach roiling uncomfortably and guaranteed a night spent racing his unsettled bowels to the privy. He’d won every time, but the matches had been too close for comfort, and neither the food nor the clothes were experiences he cared to relive.
For food, he was a man who enjoyed plain fare: meat, potatoes, maybe some bread, and a nice cold mug of ale to wash it all down. For clothes, well, there had always been the uniform. The one he wore when going about his duties, or the dressier—but still relatively practical—one he donned when attending audiences with his queen or visiting dignitaries. Not that there had been many of the second of late—being at war with an ancient wizard with unimaginable powers had a way of reducing the number of a city’s visitors significantly. As far as he was concerned, that was one of the few benefits of the whole thing.
Still, his feelings for the uniform were the closest he’d ever come to a real, genuine love. It wasn’t the fabric itself, of course, that had always earned his admiration, but what it stood for, what it meant. The uniform was a symbol, a ward against the darker things the world had to offer—disorder, chaos, cruelty. And he, when he donned it, became a living, breathing symbol of the same, one of those blessed men whose calling was to bring order to the chaos, to bring law to the unlawful and justice to the unjust.
He had always put on the uniform with a sense of pride, a sense of a duty fulfilled, an obligation met. But as he fastened the top button of his collar and stared at himself in his room’s simple looking glass, he realized that, for the first time, he felt neither of those things. In their place were feelings of guilt, of shame, as if the cloth had somehow become tainted. Hale’s words echoed in his mind. At least I am honest with myself. At least I know what I am.
Brandon had always been sure he knew himself, knew what he stood for, but since speaking with the crime boss, he was no longer so certain. For the first time he could remember, the uniform didn’t seem to fit right, as if it had been made for someone else. He frowned at the man in the mirror. Not elderly, not yet, but getting there quicker with each passing year.
All those years, all that time, and with little enough to show for it. No wife to weep when he died, to throw herself on his grave and cause a scene. No children to carry on his name, to face their lives armed with the lessons their father had taught them. Only him and the uniform. The eyes that stared back from the mirror didn’t look like his eyes at all, not like the eyes that he’d seen on so many other mornings just like this one. Not just like this one, a voice whispered in his mind. No, maybe not, but this part, at least, was the same.
Yet the eyes staring back at him were the eyes of a stranger, those of a lonely old man who would die sooner or later, leaving no mark on the world to show he had ever been there at all. He’d spent a lifetime of service to a king or a queen, and never before had he felt those years
had been wasted. But as the task he’d been given loomed ahead of him, he felt that waste now.
He forced himself to stand straight, but it did little to change the appearance of the old man in the looking glass. “You will do your duty,” he told the elderly stranger. “That, at least, you will do.”
The stranger didn’t disagree, didn’t argue, and he chose to take his silence as agreement. The problem, of course, was that where once his duty had been as clear as the sky on a cloudless day, now it seemed murky and uncertain. He would do his duty, yes, of course he would. But what, exactly, did that mean?
He’d spent the last days hoping, praying, that someone—Swordmaster Darrell, perhaps, or the sailor, Thom—would come to him, would demand that he release May. He had imagined the conversation a thousand times, imagined doing his best to calm them, to reason with them, to explain that he was only obeying his queen, doing his duty. But even in his imaginings the words had always sounded false, more like an excuse than a reason, and he had not been able to convince them.
You must help, these figments had told him, you must. And again he would explain to them that he could not, that, if given the choice, he would have stood with them…but he had his duty, surely they must understand that. They hadn’t though, and in these imaginings—visions felt like a better word, for never before had the conjurings of his mind felt so real—they had tried to reason with him, to convince him.
The scenes had always stopped there, perhaps because he himself had been unsure whether their pleading would be successful or not, but Brandon hoped that, in that dream world if nowhere else, they had been. He had waited for just such a visit, had expected it each time he ventured forth from his rooms, had even found himself looking for excuses to do so, but none had come. And perhaps that was for the best, after all.
Since he and Councilman Grinner had butted heads about his treatment of May, the captain had felt watched, followed. There was no proof to it, for each time he turned when walking through the castle or down the street, sure that he would find someone watching him, there was nothing. No one. Yet the feeling did not leave him, and he had been a guard long enough to trust his instincts. And if someone were following him, it seemed clear enough who had sent them. For all his faults—and there were many—Councilman Grinner had never struck Brandon as the type of man who allowed many uncertainties into his life or who didn’t pay attention to things or people—people such as a certain willful Captain—who might cause him problems.
And was it any great surprise, after all, that Brandon hadn’t seen them? The men and women like those Grinner would send on such a task were those who were accustomed to sticking to the shadows, to staying unnoticed. Men and women who had spent their lives as criminals, scraping a living off the unwary and unfortunate and scuttling back to the darkness whenever a true threat presented itself. As much as he hated to admit it, Brandon knew little of such things, for his life had taught him how to deal with the blade he saw coming, but it had done nothing to show him how to see the blade in the first place.
Yes, perhaps it was best that the swordmaster or the first mate had not come to him asking for help, for he suspected that they would have never reached him anyway and, if they did, their lives would have almost certainly been forfeit. He looked out the window and saw the sun high in the sky. For the first time in his life, he was late for an assignment. Gods, but if only I could miss it entirely. He cleared his throat, straightened his collar a final time, and gave himself a brisk nod, full of a confidence he did not feel. “You will do your duty.”
***
Brandon waited for them in the castle courtyard, outside the dungeon entrance. So he wasn’t the only one running late. While he waited, he looked over at the castle gate in the distance—the point at which they would begin the long walk to the city square. Or, at least, the point at which he would. He suspected that May and Hale had walked that path a thousand times already in their minds, and however difficult they might have imagined it, Brandon doubted they were fully prepared. But, then, is anyone ever really prepared to die?
People lined the street outside the castle gate. Even from this distance, he could see the tense postures of the guards, their hands close to their swords as they regarded the milling crowd. Ridiculous that they should be so on edge, but he didn’t blame them. On a normal day, the men, women—and, he was sad to see, plenty of children too—who lined the street might be kind enough. Bakers and merchants, candlemakers and blacksmiths, cobblers and clerks and their families. But today, they were none of those things—today, they were a bloodthirsty mob, and Brandon had seen enough during his years in the guard to know that when a man got blood on his mind, it didn’t matter all that much whose was spilled, just so long as it was.
He supposed the crowd would follow them all the way through the city to the square. It wasn’t enough to witness the execution itself. No, later, when bragging to friends and family about having been there, they would be able to boast they had seen the two condemned step out of the dungeons, maybe even got so lucky as to watch a lone tear fall from faces etched with despair.
The metallic sound of the lock to the dungeon’s door drew his attention, and he turned, glad for an excuse to look away from that gathered throng. When the door opened, Brandon was confronted with the face of a guard he didn’t recognize. No real surprise—he didn’t recognize most of them now. Councilman Grinner had replaced men who had served for years with his own people, citing the queen’s safety as a reason to dismiss men who had, time and again, shown their loyalty to Perennia and its ruler. As if such men would ever dream of harming her, but then neither he nor, he suspected, Grinner, ever thought they would.
The guard gave what might have been a grunt upon seeing Brandon standing there then the briefest of nods before stepping out of the dungeon and moving to the side. At another time, another place, Brandon might have rebuked the man for the clear lack of respect, but he did not do so here. It would have served no purpose, and, besides, if the man decided to carry his disrespect further? What could Brandon actually do? Nothing, of course, as the man was Grinner’s through and through. The crime boss would ensure that he was well taken care of either way, and one of the things Brandon had learned long ago, when taking his first position as a leader of men, was that you never made a threat you couldn’t carry out. There was no faster way, he’d always thought, to destroy your credibility. Except, maybe, he thought sourly, to watch your kingdom taken over by a crime boss, the guards who were meant to protect it replaced with criminals who know nothing of protecting, only pain.
So Brandon remained silent, watching as the guards filed out of the dungeon, flanking the two prisoners. There was a roar of excitement from the distant crowd as they saw that the day’s entertainment had finally arrived, and Brandon clenched his jaw to hold back his building anger. He stared at the two, a club owner and a crime boss, both come to help a city they knew nothing about, to save people they had never met, and both thanked for it with their deaths. As terrible as they had looked in the dungeon, as pitiable, they looked much worse standing in the daylight, for the sun exposed the truth quicker than any questioner might.
The big crime boss was a wealth of bruises and cuts, his clothes ripped and torn in dozens of places with bloody wheals showing on the flesh underneath. His face, too, was a mass of bruises, one eye swollen completely shut, and he took each heavy, uncertain step as if he might fall at any moment, the two guards flanking him forced to hold onto his arms to keep him upright.
But it was the sight of May that broke Brandon’s heart. The once proud woman with her fiery hair and temper to match, cringed away from the light, shrank from it, as if she had spent so much time in the shadows that she had become one of them and feared the sun’s touch. Like the crime boss, she was filthy, her body covered with cuts and bruises and marks from the whip’s attentions. But it was her eyes that struck Brandon most—eyes that were frightened, and confused, and somehow feral.
Another
roar went up from the crowd, and Brandon snapped his head around, glaring at them despite the fact that they were too far away to see his expression and would not have heeded it even if they had. Today was their day, a day of destruction, and they knew as well as he that there was no fighting it. His heart heavy, he turned back to the two prisoners. We make of them animals, so that what we kill is no longer a man, a woman, and in so doing we believe that we absolve ourselves.
When the final guard had exited the dungeon and was closing the door behind him, Brandon nodded to the first who had emerged, the impromptu leader, he suspected, of the grim procession. “They look half dead already. Gods, could you not have even given them a bath, some fresh clothes?”
The man grunted, hocking and spitting. Not quite at Brandon’s feet, but not away from them either. “It’d be a waste of soap—duds them up all you want to, clean ‘em if you want, but their heads will be rolling soon enough either way.”
Brandon’s patience—already stretched to the breaking point—shattered at the man’s casual disregard for the solemnity of the occasion. Before he had time to think better of it, his fist lashed out, catching the man in the nose. The guard cried out in surprise, stumbling, and would have fallen had one of his comrades not been there to catch him. His face twisted with rage, blood seeping from his unnaturally bent nose.
He started for his sword and Brandon held up an admonishing finger. “I would consider your next choice carefully, were I you. You see, you might wear the uniform of a guard, but that doesn’t make you one, just as it doesn’t mean you know how to use that sword you carry any better than a farmer might.” Brandon shrugged. “Maybe these others can stop me before I kill you, but I doubt it, and even if they do, I suspect your boss won’t look kindly on any man who dared to come in the way of the day’s work.” The man hesitated, his anger and fear warring on his face. Brandon gave him a humorless grin. “But who knows? Maybe I’m wrong. Why don’t you go ahead and draw that blade, and we can find out together.”
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