Memories bolted through him like bullets. Aurelia. Riding. Debating. Quarreling. Questioning. Standing up for what she believed. Risking her safety to know her country.
He had convinced himself that he would die before her. That he would have that power. That choice.
“Vantauge.” A voice.
Strange that Robert could hear it through the shroud. Though without breath, he could not answer.
“Seems I was wrong.” A boot slid into his vision. Scuffed leather. “Here I thought you were on her side.”
Drew. Drew had been in the capital. He would have seen.
“She gets you clear across the country. Within days of Tyralt City. And you’re sitting here: three thousand men like a herd of whipped geldings.”
Tell me what you saw.
“Haven’t even bothered to wonder why you’re still here, have you?”
Robert had been waiting—waiting for the royal army to slay him. But this voice could achieve that feat as well.
“She would be appalled,” Drew continued.
The words conjured her image. Boiling eyes. Raised chin. Robert tried to fight off the assault. A useless attempt. She was defeating him now, crushing him in a game of double hearts. Then smiling as she danced among hay bales. Laughing as she raised a bucket of fresh milk. Spinning at her first sight of the Geordian desert. Holding him after his parents’ death. Challenging him in the council tent. Kissing him good-bye.
“Meanwhile, her sister is just sitting in the palace, calm as you please.”
No, she’s glorying in the blood she’s spilled, Robert thought. Now he could find it in his heart to hate Melony.
The boot had the effrontery to kick him. “They told me you would quit—the gossips I’ve been using to work the palace. Them and the romantics—the ones who still think you’re nothing more than a would-be consort. I said they’d find themselves with a steep debt once I collected. But here you are, letting the usurper win.”
Robert needed to hear about the death. The words. The blunt, harsh truth.
A featherless hat hit the ground. “I went into that council tent of yours, and you know what I heard, or rather, smelled? Argument. Three generals and they can’t even decide to move. They’ll wind up splitting the men into separate groups. And there’ll be no army left for Melony to fight.”
Did Drew think he could goad Robert back into existence by threatening him with the fall of the revolution? The revolution had already fallen.
“‘Course the court aristocrats claim your chances are impossible. But these men of yours—they’ve already achieved the impossible. Against Anthone.”
Anthone was a distant memory.
“And in that battle on the slope.”
Battle? What rumors had Drew swallowed?
“All they need is a leader.”
If the voice would not say the words, Robert must: “She’s dead.”
He waited for the other man to confirm. To say which heinous act of murder Melony had used to slay the pulse of an entire country.
“I doubt it.”
What? Robert’s gaze flew upward. To the horseman.
Drew’s head was bowed, his hand gripping the back of his neck. “I’ve no proof she’s alive,” he said, then let his grip slide free. “But she never came into the city. Dead or alive. I’ve had men at the gates. Well, they aren’t my men, but they’re in my employ—so to speak. They inspect every wagon. And they say nothing’s changed. No directives. And neither Aurelia, nor her corpse, has been through those gates.”
A piercing agony swept Robert’s chest. Hope. Hope was forbidden within the shroud.
“Talk is rampant in the capital,” Drew yammered on. “News of the revolution. Guardsmen had to put down riots after word of her disappearance spread. If the queen executes her sister now, Melony risks creating a martyr. So I reckon the plan is to wait.”
For what?
“For the three thousand revolutionary troops, less than a week’s ride from the capital, to turn on themselves and go home.” The horseman stretched a long arm up to a tree branch and snapped off a limb. “Then she’ll start the arrests. Send her favorite lackeys to kill off everyone with even a remote relationship to Aurelia’s generals. Take over Lester’s estate. Put the frontier back into the hands of the power-hungry. Systematically eliminate the Valshone. And sell off the desert to Anthone for a bargain price. Sounds right, doesn’t it?” Drew met Robert’s gaze.
“And when all that is done,” added the horseman, “our fair queen will bring Aurelia out of whatever dungeon she’s hidden her in and kill her off. On the brand-new scaffold in the Central Plaza. Where Melony can make sure everyone who has any power whatsoever sees that execution. And learns from it. And understands the full threat of arguing with the crown.
“‘Course I didn’t think you would make it so easy. I told the palace gossips they were forgetting about one thing. You. And they laughed in my face. Oh, yes, reminded me you were nobody. Said you weren’t even a real general. That the commoners were all just grasping for one of their own to proclaim a hero.” Drew retrieved his hat. “I told the talkers they were underrating you. That you were the lad who got her out of the palace before her father mysteriously died of poisoning.”
Aurelia had gotten herself out of the palace.
“And then the lad who got her out of the country, past a whole brigade of royal military.”
It was Drew who had gotten her out of the country.
“And then you were the lad who got her back into Tyralt.”
Again Drew.
“And the lad who got her to the frontier.”
That had been the Oracle.
“And the lad who drove a whole mass of frontiersmen and Valshone through a burning forest to defeat the royal army.”
Robert knew the horseman was pressing him, as she would have pressed him. But nothing held any meaning beyond the wrenching, tearing possibility that she was alive. If she isn’t dead, and she isn’t in the palace dungeon, then where is she?
“And that you might,” said Drew, “be as strong a force in this revolution as Aurelia herself.”
Midbury. Robert lurched to his feet. In Tyralt’s name, she was at Midbury. Curse himself! She’d been alive and under her sister’s control for fourteen days. And she was on Melony’s estate. In this forest!
Chapter Twenty-One
FLAWS
Aurelia knew she was going to die. Her mind swam in its own darkness. The trek around the slope. A shot that shattered silence. A lost argument. Bullets felling Lord Lester’s guards. Then pain drilling into her upper arm. Her grip gone. And Falcon rearing. Rough hands covering Aurelia’s mouth, dragging her into more pain. Her own blood. Her screams.
Laughter yanked her into consciousness, the sadistic sound ripping through the putrid air of her dark cell. Her captors enjoyed screams.
She clenched her hand against the slivered floorboards. Her opposite arm burned from infected flesh, despite her captors’ removal of the bullet. Why had they bothered? And why bandage the wound? Why am I still alive?
Perhaps Melony was too busy fighting against the revolution. Maybe Aurelia’s survival meant Robert also was still alive—that somehow a portion of her forces had managed to escape the slope and were consuming her sister’s time. But he had been among the last to leave the Asyan. What chance had he had?
Even the threat of battle could not be enough reason for Melony to preserve Aurelia’s life.
She wants me in the Central Plaza. To break me there. To display my weakness so that the people will know I was never worth following. To destroy the revolution.
Aurelia could not allow her failings to cause that destruction.
But she could not stop herself from breaking. She had no divine powers. Could not stanch the fever that darkened her mind. Nor could she stave off the cries that came with delirium. She knew she would not be able to withstand torture. She would scream. And she would break.
Slowly she peeled
away the bandage.
The only solution she could think of—the only way to defeat her sister’s plan for the execution—was to die first.
• • •
Robert left the shroud and headed straight for the council tent. She is alive. He had no evidence beyond what Drew had just told him. And a single memory. A brief, dark moment of being lost in a dungeon in the labyrinth of the Midbury Stables. But he knew Aurelia was there.
He believed she was there.
Argument blasted from canvas.
“Who leads Tyralt if we win?” Valerian’s voice sailed. “You? A disgraced member of the aristocracy!”
Lester’s growl carried just as far. “And you think the country would be better off under your control? Because of an outdated treaty?”
“If we remain here”—even the Oracle’s tone vibrated with tension—“we all will face the same fate. My voice may bear no power with regard to numbers, but all our men are in this dire position. I ask again: What is our next step?”
Robert reached the entrance and ducked into the tent. “The capital,” he said, his voice low. “We march on the capital.”
Heads whirled toward him. Valerian gaped, halting in the midst of what appeared to be one of his rounds of pacing. Lord Lester, favoring his injured leg, lowered himself into a rough-crafted chair as though he had lost his balance. The Oracle straightened slowly from leaning over a map that rested on a sideways crate.
Not the correct map. Robert strode toward the crate.
His Lordship’s grip tightened on a crutch. His eyes were ringed in red, the lines of his face strained. “Son,” he murmured, then hesitated, the crutch digging into the earth. “We can’t march on the capital without facing the whole of the royal army.”
“Nay.” Drew entered the tent as well. His head grazed the canvas overhead, and he spun his hat in his hands. “That’s Melony’s territory. You approach those gates, and she’ll have no choice but to throw every man in her arsenal at you.”
“Exactly,” Robert agreed. He crouched down at the crate’s side, retrieved the correct map from the compartment, and stood up in the crosshairs of concern. He knew the generals thought he was crazed with grief. They had good reason. No doubt they had all tried to reach him through the shroud.
He spread out the map, covering the one already on the crate’s surface, and pointed at a mark within his sketch of the Kryshan. “If all her armed men are at the capital,” he said, “they won’t be at Midbury.”
“The queen’s estate?” Lord Lester frowned.
Drew stepped up to the map. “Her personal estate.”
Robert nodded. “It’s where they’re keeping Aurelia.”
His Lordship sighed. “You can’t know whether she’s even—”
“There’s a dungeon,” Robert said. “If she’s not at the capital”—his gaze held Drew’s— “then she’s there.”
A slow grin spread across the horseman’s face. “I’d bet a desert stallion on it.”
The Oracle eyed the map, then traced the location where the Kryshan’s eastern edge ran close to the capital. “And you believe if we appear here, we will cause a diversion?”
Valerian stepped up to the map. “Why not march directly on Midbury?”
“Because if her sister sees the cards flip in that direction,” said Drew, “she’ll change the rules.”
If Melony realizes we know her sister’s location, she’ll kill her.
Drew turned to Robert and probed, “You plan to send someone in to retrieve her from Midbury?”
“I’m going.”
Protests filled the tent, first in a jumble of sound and then separate voices.
Valerian discarded not only rank but surname as well in his address. “Robert, are you certain you’re thinking clearly?”
More certain than throughout this entire journey.
“Do you not,” the Oracle asked, “believe she would rather you chose our country first?”
Our country. She would be gratified to hear those words from the man who had once accused Tyralt of betrayal.
“Look, son,” Lord Lester spoke, his deep voice prevailing as he levered himself up with the crutch. “We all want to believe she is alive. And if there is any chance you are correct, then I agree we must make every effort to rescue her. But you are needed with this army. If we’re to try to take the capital—”
“We’re not,” Robert replied. “We can’t take the city, or the country, without Aurelia. She’s the key.”
The crate sagged as His Lordship leaned his weight against it. “I doubt her captors have left her the key.”
“Not the key of Tyralt. She is the key. To the capital.” Robert looked to the horseman. “Tell them what you told me. About the talk in Tyralt City.”
Drew complied.
The others listened with mixed expressions: surprise, wariness, doubt.
“We march on the capital,” Robert said at last. “But we don’t fire. You raise a flag. And wait. If the royal army sends an emissary, you stall. Don’t surrender and don’t fire. You understand?”
“If we fire, we die,” Valerian said.
Robert nodded.
“And if the royal army fires on us?” Lord Lester challenged.
“It’s against the Code of Truce to fire on a peaceful enemy,” Valerian answered.
“Anthone dishonored that code.” The Oracle folded his arms amidst his robes. His expression had gone grim. No doubt he was thinking of the thousands who had died in the desert.
“The Tyralian army will not,” said Robert.
Lord Lester’s frown joined the Oracle’s. “You’re betting on a myth.”
Am I? Am I just as naïve as I was when I rode up to the capital two years ago?
“A stalemate can last only so long,” His Lordship continued. “Especially when men are scared. If you want the men to obey your order, you should be with them.”
Both the Heir and the Oracle nodded.
Apparently Robert had unified the entire council. Against him.
“They’re right.” Drew flipped his hat inside out. “There’s no reason you have to be the one to go in after her, Robert. There’s nothing you can do in Midbury that I can’t.”
It has to be me. Robert could not explain the depth of that need—the pull that had tugged him across his country. From the outskirts of politics to the center of revolution. And had all but severed his heart from his chest at the thought that she was dead.
“You said it before,” he told the horseman. “I’m nobody. No one will recognize me.”
Drew could not make that claim.
Lord Lester grimaced. “The question isn’t only how you will get in, but how you will get her out?”
“There’s a tunnel,” Robert replied, his mind spinning back two years to the night when he and the horseman had gone into the Midbury Stables. “Drew, you remember? Your friend pointed out the door from the inside.”
“Harvey’s not there anymore,” said the horseman. “He lost his post. Melony has fired anyone with a sense of ethics. But you tell me where that door is, and I’ll—”
“I have to see it first. I’ll have to see it in order to …”
“Find it?” Drew was shaking his head. The hat crumpled in his hand. “This isn’t why I came, Robert.”
• • •
The remaining journey through the Kryshan was swift. The revolutionary army had already covered half the distance, secluding itself in the forest’s depths; though Robert had no memory of that ride. His men stayed within the forest as they traveled now, off the main road. This forest was less dense than the Asyan. And supplies were dwindling, which meant the troops had reason to hurry. Though he and the generals had told them nothing beyond what the forces had always known. That they were headed toward Tyralt City.
On the evening of the fifth day, they halted. Except for three Fortress men who crept onto the queen’s estate and returned the next morning to announce that more than five hundred armed gua
rds stood outside Midbury’s wall.
Proof, Robert told himself, that Aurelia lived.
No glory signified his parting from the army. He made no attempt to stir the men into fervor. Told them only that he needed their patience. And trust.
He dismissed the concerned look in Valerian’s eyes and the Oracle’s query of whether Robert was certain this was, indeed, his destiny. Then rejected Lord Lester’s offer to leave a guard. Of what use would guardsmen be once Robert was inside? And what purpose could they serve before that time except to give away his identity? As would the Vantauge crest on his sword. He placed the weapon into His Lordship’s care.
Drew was the hardest to deflect. “This country has no need of a second martyr,” said the horseman, but Robert pressed Falcon’s and Horizon’s reins into a charcoal palm, giving the tall man a charge no horseman could decline.
Then gave the order to march.
The men, including Drew, departed—three thousand souls risking their lives for a diversion. If Robert failed in his task, those troops would all die. But he was not the one who could save them anyway.
He thrust away the guilt, then sank into the ferns, fir, and bleeding hearts of the queen’s estate. He was sick of forests, sick of needing to hide, sick of war; yet his eyes remained alert. He knew no small force would have attacked the larger revolutionary forces, but that did not mean they had not been tracked. Signs of patrols were everywhere: broken leaves, crushed cones, marred bark.
Ultimately he reached the roadway, packed earth embedded with a thousand needles. He pulled back among the brush, a dozen feet from the edge of the open thoroughfare. Then with slow and careful steps, he trekked in the same direction as the road.
Until he could see the gray outline of Midbury’s wall. He sank down, low to the earth, and plotted his route one broad tree trunk at a time. Then followed that plan. Until he could make out the sealed iron gate. The separate stones in the wall. And the tilted muskets in the hands of hundreds of soldiers who stood outside it.
He shifted once more, hunkering down amid tall ferns and low-hanging branches. And waited.
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