by Carol A Park
She marched out of the cellar, and Ivana and Vaughn followed closely behind.
So far so good.
The guard wrinkled his nose as they passed.
Askata sniffed. “The whole room stank,” she said. “Send for my maid and have her draw a bath. I want it hot by the time I get back to my rooms.”
Her tone had changed to one Ivana hadn’t heard her use before. Here was the imperious noblewoman who expected others to come at her beck and call. There was no room for argument in that tone.
The guard blinked and bowed. “Yes, my lady. Of course.” He let the door slam shut and then scurried off.
There was a second guard outside the cellar door. He bowed, but Askata had commands for him as well. “And you!”
The guard started. “Uh, at your command, my lady?”
“Go find a bucket and a mop and then a chamber pot. Banebringer or not, there’s absolutely no excuse for allowing the prisoner to wallow in his own filth for so long that it offends the nose of anyone who enters. Honestly.” She sniffed again. “Men.”
The guard bowed and, likewise, scurried off.
Two down, two to go. Ivana was marginally impressed.
Askata led the way down a short dimly lit hall. Both open and closed doors lined the hall—Ivana saw bottles of wine and liquor lined up on shelves in one room, and trays of root vegetables in another.
Ivana fingered the last vestiges of the aether she was burning. She’d be lucky if it lasted another minute.
At the end of the hall, Askata marched without hesitation through an open archway. It led to a final large, open room stacked with crates and barrels. On the other side of the room a stairway ascended to the kitchens and servants’ quarters. There were two guards in this room, one short and clean-shaven and the other tall and scruffy. They were sitting at a table that had obviously been erected for their benefit, tossing dice.
The moment they entered the room, Askata crossed her arms and scowled at the guards. “Gambling on duty?”
The guards both shot out of their chairs, guilty looks on their faces. “Ah, begging your pardon, my lady,” the shorter one said, “but we’re just trying to pass the time. Not much exciting going on down here.”
“Do you know what that man at the end of the hall is?” Askata asked, raising her finger slowly to point back the direction they’d come.
The short guard flushed. “Uh…”
“A Banebringer, that’s what,” she snapped.
The taller guard spread his hands. “Well, Arty and Sax are on duty down there. I’m sure we’d hear if—”
“Unacceptable excuse,” Askata said, her eyes snapping with fire. “Report immediately to your supervisor and request replacements for the duration of your shift.”
“But, my lady,” the taller guard said, looking baffled. “We just saw both Arty and Sax go by, saying you had asked them to do something. If we go too—”
“All the more reason you should be on alert! Go, now!”
The two guards straightened up and hurried from the room, and not a moment too soon. The last of Ivana’s aether ran out.
Askata drew in a sharp breath and looked at them.
“Well done,” Ivana said, keeping her voice low. “But that won’t hold them long.” The last two guards had obviously been overcome by their surprise and a forceful personality; once common sense seeped into their brains they would realize that something was off about the situation.
“No,” Askata said. “But we just have to get past the kitchens and out the back. Hopefully, no one will be about.”
Askata went first, cautiously, and then gestured for them to follow.
Vaughn stumbled as they began to climb the stairs. He leaned against the wall, taking in staccato breaths.
Ivana halted with him.
“I just…need a minute,” he said.
“We don’t have a minute.” Ivana was beginning to wonder how they were going to get away from the estate without being tracked and caught, let alone out of the house, with Vaughn in this state. He wouldn’t be able to travel far.
She hoped she didn’t have to make the choice between leaving him and saving herself or staying, fighting, and hoping for the best.
Vaughn grimaced, gathered himself up, and began to climb again.
They joined Askata at the top of the stairs, but now she waved them back. She stepped out into the hall at the top.
“My lady?” a young, feminine voice said. “Begging your pardon, but what were you doing in the cellars? Is there something you need?”
“Oh, Rhianah—I was hoping no one would notice,” Askata said, her voice dripping with embarrassment. “There was a particular bottle of wine I was hoping to find and I happened to be nearby and…well, I thought I knew right where it was.” A pause. “Never you mind,” she said, her voice taking on the air of command. “Just run along.”
There was a rustle of fabric, and a few moments later, Askata came back to the stair and waved them on.
She’s good, Ivana thought. She tugged Vaughn on.
They emerged into a bright hallway. At the end was the door leading out—but before that, to the left, the noise of pots and pans banging together and the chatter of gossip floated through an open door. This they hurried past, Askata keeping the closest to the door.
They almost made it.
Just as they reached the door leading out, it flew open, and standing in the frame was one of the guards Askata had shooed away from gambling.
They all froze.
Then, his eyes widened and he drew his sword. “Noxtl!” he shouted through the open door behind him. “The pris—”
Ivana grabbed Askata, hurled her around, and put her dagger to her throat. “Let us go, or she dies.”
The guard’s knuckles were white as he clenched the hilt of his sword with both hands. He was young and likely hadn’t seen much, if any, action. “I-I-I can’t do that,” he stammered, moving to block the way out.
She pushed Askata toward the guard, and, startled, he dropped his sword in an instinct to catch her.
Ivana lunged at him and kicked him in the groin. He crumpled and stumbled to the side, and she shoved him into a shelving unit full of supplies behind him. The entire contraption came raining down on his head.
As he flailed, Ivana pushed past him, and then pushed open the outside door. Vaughn staggered out, followed by Ivana and Askata.
Thankfully, the aforementioned “Noxtl” didn’t appear to be nearby—nor was anyone else.
“The gardens.” Vaughn panted. “There’s an exit there. Our best bet. I have…an idea where we can go from there.”
But Askata pulled back. She was trembling.
Ivana turned to face her. “You could come with us,” she said.
Askata shook her head. “I can’t.”
“What will he do to you?”
“He—I’ll be all right. He won’t dare tarnish his reputation letting it be known his own mother helped a Banebringer escape.” She gave Ivana a weak smile. “Go.”
Vaughn grabbed Askata’s hand. “Thank you.”
Ivana was surprised to see that his cheeks were wet, but whether they were tears of sentiment or pain, she didn’t know.
Askata squeezed Vaughn’s hand. “Go,” she repeated.
There were shouts in the distance, and thuds coming from the other side of the door.
Askata didn’t have to tell them again.
Chapter Twenty-One
Wounds
Vaughn was flagging. The world seemed permanently off-kilter, every breath was agony, he was dehydrated and hungry, his head still throbbed from Airell’s concoction, and he hadn’t had any restful sleep since he had awoken to follow Ivana—and that had only been half a night.
About ten minutes into their flight, he had tripped and fallen and almost hadn’t gotten back up—but Ivana had shaken and slapped him until he was annoyed enough to find the strength to keep moving.
So he pushed himself on. The
re was no stopping until they could find somewhere safe to rest; there would be dogs after them soon enough.
But fate was kind, for once; this early in the morning, they passed only the gardener, who, hunched over a line of shrubs and elbow-deep in weeds, hadn’t even looked up.
Vaughn had roamed these lands once, as a boy and adolescent, and they were still familiar to him. And this wasn’t the first time he had sought to hide from Airell.
Once they had left the estate grounds proper, he found the path he was looking for. It ended in a tangle of bramble at the side of a creek that ran through a shallow ravine.
They wrestled aside the brambles, skittered down the slope, and splashed into the creek, which only came up to Vaughn’s thighs.
Funny. He remembered it as deeper than that.
He stopped only to fill his stomach with water to quench his desperate thirst, and then led Ivana farther down the creek until the ravine grew wider but deeper. There would be no climbing back to the top of the ravine other than the way they had come.
He put his hand up, halting Ivana, and glanced around.
This was the place. He was sure of it.
He trudged out of the creek to the opposite bank and poked around in the man-high stiff bushes and brambles there.
After pulling aside a few branches, he relaxed. It was still there. The fort he and his brothers—less Airell—had made, tucked underneath the side of the embankment where the creek had eroded the rocky hillside at some point in the distant past.
The roof was comprised of dirt and rock, but they had reinforced the fort with planks of wood for walls.
It was overgrown—he could see plants peeking out of the one window they had cut—but it still stood.
He dropped to the ground and hobbled on hands and knees through the door—also lower than he remembered. The moment he was inside, he collapsed to the dirt and closed his eyes, laying his cheek against the ground.
He heard the rustle of the branches as Ivana followed him in. “What is this place?” she asked.
He didn’t open his eyes. His eyelids hurt. Now that he had closed them, he wasn’t sure if he could open them again. “A fort…my brothers…”
He couldn’t seem to continue, but Ivana apparently got the gist. “Airell doesn’t know it’s here?”
Vaughn shook his head—and even that movement hurt. “Impossible to see from the top of the creek.”
“So we’re relatively safe, for now.”
Most likely, he thought, but the words wouldn’t come out. Safe or not, exhaustion was already claiming him. He curled up on the moss-covered ground and fell asleep.
Amber light filtering through the green of the shrubs hiding the entrance to the fort played on Vaughn’s face, waking him.
He opened his eyes.
He could see the creek from the spot where he lay. He also heard splashing, and since he didn’t see Ivana, he assumed she was cleaning herself up in the creek. Something he also badly needed to do.
It took three tries to get himself upright; every time he twisted wrong, his chest protested painfully. So that hadn’t improved. He swallowed; his throat was still parched. He turned his head from side to side; it felt marginally better than it had that morning, if not completely well, and the world had stopped acting as though it were on a pendulum. But he could barely sit up, let alone bathe without managing to drown himself.
But there was one thing he had to know that was more important than anything else. He burned aether, reaching for the water just outside.
To his utmost relief, the action caused no additional pain. Soon, the water responded to his call by way of a trickle floating through the doorway, and he directed it into his mouth. It was sloppy, and half of it ran out of his mouth and down his chest, but he didn’t care. He could use his magic again.
He never thought he’d be so happy to have his magic fully back. He’d grown used to it always being there over the years; he’d also grown used to hating it.
Maybe he didn’t hate it as much as he’d thought he did.
He drew more water from the creek and splashed it over his head; the water was cold. One summer, he and his brothers had attempted to build a dam to make a swimming pool; it had worked for a few months and then fallen apart. The water had been warm that summer.
He closed his eyes and lay back against the dirt wall. He needed to move. That was what he needed most.
The rustle of branches told him Ivana had returned.
She nudged his shoulder. “You alive?”
He grunted. “You’d have known it if I weren’t.” He took a deep, painful breath and gingerly pushed himself to his knees. He’d probably fractured a rib or two.
He glanced around the little hut; sure enough, the bag he’d seen Ivana carrying earlier was propped up against the wall. It had to be his; he’d shoved what he could in it before leaving the inn that night he’d followed her—in case things didn’t go well and they couldn’t get back—but she hadn’t had hers with her.
He was glad she’d been able to retrieve it. There was bindblood salve in it. It would speed the healing, but he ought to bathe before using it, or he’d just wash it off.
“Going to bathe,” he said. He tried to peel his filthy shirt off and stopped short as pain lanced through his chest when he raised his arms. He lowered them again, trying to force himself to take slow, steady breaths until the worst of pain went away. Forget the shirt. I’ll just hold my breath and lie in the water until the grime washes away or I drown, whichever comes first.
To his surprise, Ivana sighed and crawled over to him. She jerked her head. “Pull your arms in, one at a time.”
He did as she asked, and when he was done, she helped him gently pull the shirt over his head without him having to contort his body.
He gave her a hopeful smile as she tossed it aside. “Don’t suppose you want to help with any other articles of clothing?”
She looked at him askance. “Really? Broken ribs, and that’s what you’re thinking about?”
His smile grew. “Not everything is broken…”
She snorted.
Ah, well. He grabbed what he needed from his bag and crawled out of the fort straight into the cold creek.
Being clean again seemed to improve Vaughn’s condition considerably, Ivana noted. He still moved slowly, a perpetual grimace on his face, as he returned to the fort, but the filth of being held over a day as a prisoner with no comforts had been washed away, and the silvery blood that had clotted his nose, smeared his cheeks, and congealed in his beard was all gone.
Actually, his beard was gone. “You choose now to return to your former look?” Ivana asked.
He settled down, cross-legged, and pulled the salve and bindblood aether out of the bag.
He rubbed his newly clean-shaven jaw. “I had a beard when Airell caught me,” Vaughn said. “He’ll be putting out word for someone with a beard for sure now.”
Ivana grunted and continued to finger-comb her wet hair. Sound enough logic.
He had managed to put on his one clean pair of pants, but he left his one clean shirt off, leaving plain-to-see the ugly black-and-blue splotches on the right side of his lower chest. “That looks pleasant,” she said.
“It feels about as pleasant,” he said. He mixed the aether and the salve and started rubbing it over the area. Once he had finished, he rubbed some over his nose, which she could see, now that the blood was gone, was swollen.
“Did they break your nose, too?” she asked.
He prodded it gently with a finger and winced. “I don’t know. It’s not crooked, is it?”
“I don’t think so.”
He let out a breath of air. “Temoth. I’m a mess, aren’t I?”
She sat back. “At least you had a set of clean clothes.” All of hers had been left behind at the inn, and while the clothes she wore were mostly dry, now, they were also bloodstained.
Vaughn glanced just long enough at the large patch of dried blood on th
e sleeve and torso of her shirt for her to see that his eyes were rife with disapproval, just as they had been that night.
Her nostrils flared at the look. “You have no idea what I went through because of that man. So you can keep your opinions about my actions to yourself.”
He pressed his lips together. “If you hadn’t run off on some decade-old quest for vengeance, we might not have been caught unaware and I might not have been captured.”
“You didn’t have to follow me.”
“I couldn’t just let you murder someone!”
“Well, bang-up job you did of stopping me,” she snapped.
He rubbed the back of his neck. “You don’t even care, do you?”
Her throat squeezed tight. Monster. She set her jaw, refusing to submit to the terror of her nightmares—at least in front of him. “Is that a surprise to you, after all this time?”
He held her eyes for a moment, and then looked away, his jaw clenched.
She folded her arms across her chest. I know what you are. The words Vaughn had spoken to her came back, unbidden, despite her attempt to shove them away.
Lost.
Her jaw jumped. Which was better, she wondered? A monster, or lost? She didn’t want to be either. She wanted…
Her chest ached, and she dug her fingernails into her arms. No more. Thoughts about what she wanted were dangerous. All that led to was disappointments.
Impossibilities.
“Thank you,” Vaughn said quietly. “For coming after me.”
She didn’t tell him she had considered leaving him. “You thought I wouldn’t?” she asked instead.
He glanced back. “Honestly? I had no idea.”
Something inside her squeezed. Was it ironic that when she was Sweetblade, he had seemed to have some sort of unswerving faith that she would do the right thing, and now that Sweetblade was dead, he didn’t seem so certain?
She had never deserved his trust. She certainly didn’t now. It had never bothered her before. But she also didn’t tell him that for some reason, it did now.
He dragged a hand over his face. He seemed like he wanted to say more, but instead, he shook his head slightly and lapsed into silence.
