Naturally, he assured the others it was no trouble, but would they kindly go first? Consideration like that was the better part of valor, in his opinion.
Naturally, Chigenda let him have none of it. The Zuti would not save himself until he was certain, absolutely certain, Rurik’s own finely honed sense of bullshit would not get the boy killed. “Alviss,” Chigenda repeated like a mantra. “I promise. I promise.” Which left Rurik dangling in the dark, nothing but air between his legs and below his feet, air and ground much, much too far down. The only things he could be thankful for were thus: there was no breeze that night, yet the clouds were thick. No moon. No stars. No wandering light by which stray men might behold them.
A guard passed below them. They folded to the rope like bats to a branch. His torch lit enough and his eyes were frantic. Much of the castle still slumbered, but this one was clearly from the tower from which they dangled. There came the fateful moment wherein they questioned his intelligence. Then, in a show of that trait most undesirable in a guard, he had the sense to look up.
Being closest to the ground, Rowan dropped like a falling star and fell upon the man as hard. A shout went up as the man buckled, crumbled, was flattened. “Come, come!” Rowan hissed back up the line, for there were doubtless others already moving to investigate the sound. Essa shimmied faster down the line, while Rurik, still moving one hand after the other, heard her whisper in turn, “Just jump, Rurik, jump!” though if she had any sense left in her head, she should have known he would never do such a thing.
“Brother,” his sister called, “It’s not so far brother, I swear!”
He looked up—looking down had been a mistake—and Chigenda was just above him, one hand on the rope, one hand on his spear. Defiance was in that look. Rurik blinked, suffered a moment of the thought, Did you die for nothing, Alviss? and plummeted toward the earth. Flesh met him, two pairs of arms seized him where he fell, and all tumbled with the force of the jolt.
Then they were on the ground, and they were loose. Chigenda slid the rest of the way down, landing with a graceful slop in the mud. Voices carried through the yard. He was certain they were congregating at the other side of the tower, trying to see about the commotion. The Company did not sit around to find out.
There was no time for it, but Rurik bent before Anelie and took her hands in his, running over the skin, feeling the warmth of her, weighting her back into the real world. She looked at him with wide, uncertain eyes, eyes that begged something he was no longer certain he could give. Then he hugged her to him and whispered thanks to Assal that he might, at least, be granted this one reprieve from the black spots upon his soul.
“Did they hurt you?” he asked.
“…do you really want to know that?” she countered.
It was as sharp as rebuke as, “Don’t ask stupid questions.” He hugged her tighter, and did not press.
“Kana, is she…”
“She had me, Rurik. It’s always better, so long as you have someone.”
This, from a girl that had never known her mother; from a girl who had always been blamed for her mother’s death. He shuddered, slid back to let her go. There was no more time to regard her, though he wished to spend long hours with her, to learn the inner workings of this mind which had, in its way, always been too great a thing for the childish world into which it had been thrust. She never had a chance. Not really.
“Time and place, Rurik,” Essa cautioned. When he looked up, he saw that Kana, casting this way and that with at least as much anxiety as a deer pinioned by an arrow shaft, was draped over Essa’s back as some knights slung their shields. Though her eyes drifted past him, it was clear she did not recognize him; another life, he reminded himself, he had never gotten to see because of Walthere Cullick.
They moved slowly through the yard. Rowan and Rurik might still have passed for something other than they were, but not Chigenda, certainly not the children.
“How do we get out?”
“Shithole this big must have something…”
“We can still make it to the—”
It wasn’t much of a plan. It died as quick. They might not have known what was going on, but this was a castle, an isolated mass of brickwork and arms dedicated to defense. When shouts started to go up, some enterprising—or at least, not drunk—sergeant no doubt threw up the cry for the gate. They could hear it clamp shut, even as far back as they were. Someone shouted from the walls. More than one someone, as it turned out. Rurik had the feeling they were seen, that bows were even now being craned toward them.
“Well,” Rurik said, as they darted across the open yard, “how did you get Chigenda in?”
Unencumbered, Rowan took his arm and pulled him along. He forced him down when Essa hissed, waited for a pair of guardsmen to jingle and jangle past. Servants were likewise scattering, and it was this blur of shapes alone, no doubt, which let them keep their cover. Then Rowan said, “We didn’t. He did.” The swordsman looked back at the Zuti, wary. “Don’t,” he added.
“But—”
“You don’t want to know.”
“As though we have so many options!” Rurik hissed.
“And what do you suppose smells a damn sight worse than the dead?” The swordsman nudged him with an elbow.
They were trapped. Stone rose on all sides, and the only thing keeping them alive was a lot of confusion and a few tall shadows to crouch in. It had to be confessed, Rurik hadn’t much given time to dwelling on that smell, but now that it was pointed out, he reckoned it was mighty powerful. He crinkled his nose, but still he growled, “Chigenda, how did you get in?”
The Zuti tutted. “Up earth.”
“Mud man! Mud man!” Kana cheered and clapped, before Essa took her more tightly in hand. Delightful, silly, but hardly appropriate.
Rurik snorted at them both. “The hell’s that mean?”
The Zuti smacked his lips, studying the sky, then the ground across to one of the perimeter towers. There was nothing in that look Rurik liked.
“Chil’en…dey swim?”
“Of course!” Anelie bluffed, cheeks puffed out to comic rage. “Who are you to ask?”
“Like fish!” Kana squealed.
How they had not been noticed by the guards yet, Rurik had no idea. He winced inwardly, and kept shooting glances back at Charlotte’s tower, wondering how long before the mob came out to lynch them. Nothing was going right tonight. As usual.
When he looked back, Chigenda had come much too forward for comfort—that, and the smell had gathered such strength as to be insufferable. It brought tears to his eyes.
“Wound, close?”
Essa frowned for him. “They’ll infect, Chi.”
“Close?”
“For now, but…”
Chigenda hefted Rurik up as though he were nothing, up onto his shoulders, letting a stunned Anelie be taken up under Rowan’s wing. Rurik squirmed, and struggled, but the Zuti hushed him, and moved, for that tower and the guardsman there, who squinted into the night and started to shout at them. The spear was lowering almost as soon as he saw the eclectic collection that was coming his way.
Except that a crossbow bolt took him through the throat and splattered his shock all across the far wall. Bumbling against Chigenda’s back, Rurik stared at Essa as she discarded the thing, and Kana began to wail. She was not a woman that had ever believed in leaving a weapon behind. He supposed there was some worth to that now.
At least, there might have been, if the bell above their heads had not begun to ring. “You, down there!” someone shouted from one of the arrow slits in the tower.
A full running check of the shoulder was enough for Chigenda to get the door banged inward, once they pried the lock. A pair of surprised guards, dealing cards around a table, stared up at them as they stumbled in. For half a second, they all exchanged the look. Then things moved too quickly for Rurik to reckon.
He hit the ground. That much he knew. By the time he managed to roll over o
nto his good side, one of the guards was gargling on the floor and Chigenda was pinning the second to a table, over and over, with as little remorse as a tiger sinking its teeth into a deer’s throat. A rattle of chain on the steps, though, told them that time was near its end.
“Chigenda! For the love of Assal, we have only so many minutes to us, and children, if you would kindly…” Essa barked.
It got through to him, but only barely. Chigenda looked up, glassy-eyed, and only shook it off after a doe-like look around his own mess. Then he was up, and moving, and he slammed through another door, into a small box where that smell only redoubled in strength. Rurik gagged, for only now did he understand. The garderobe—by Assal, he means to pitch us down into a sea of shit.
The children’s noses screwed up, and Anelie’s hand flew up to her face. “Uck, what is that stench?”
As Essa helped him to his feet, Rurik could see into the little chamber. It had two doors: one to the tower, one leading to the outside world. The seat, where men and women made their business, had been torn clear open, leaving nothing but a long drop into what he could only describe as hell. Chigenda was already shifting his gear around in preparation for the drop.
“We cannot survive a fall like that. They do not even have a moat!” Rurik wined.
“Fall? What do you mean fall?” His sister’s eyes grew wide indeed, and for the first time that night he recognized terror in them. Kana’s whimpers began to take on a new pitch.
“Is full,” Chigenda said, unphased. “Tunnel, far end. Lead to hill, in city. Slope.” He brought his hands up to form a sort of hump, and made a sliding motion. Rurik felt his stomach lurch again.
“Oh you’ve got to be…”
“…shitting you?” Rowan grinned. Rurik scowled. “Oh lad, when you have to get this messy, you have to learn to take the little pleasures where you can. If I can survive it, I’ve no doubt you can.”
The Zuti slid a hand over his nose and mouth, whispered something in his own tongue, and dropped like a stone into an echoing slosh below. Leading by example. Somehow, I always thought they meant something more glorious. Then Essa led him up to the same drop, as Rowan leant into the door, the sounds of rattling steel now at a feverous pitch beyond. Rurik drew a deep breath—a dreadful mistake, for he coughed it out quick enough. He was sure he would not survive. Anelie stepped up beside him, though, and he managed a sickened smile, for her sake.
Down they went. Into the muck, and the hope that there was a hole out the other end.
* *
Charlotte Cullick tried to keep her face still as the soldiers scoured Sara’s room, and the shouts of others still resounded up the castle stoneworks. The world watches, the world judges. A maker of optimistic phrases, she was. An inherent gift of being born a Cullick, perhaps. Fact remained, however: it would not do to reveal her doubt before them, regardless of her inner conflict. Too many months, too many years had been spent making these very men think of her as something more than human, and something more than a woman.
That was what they would say, after all. If she raged too often: “Oh, it must be that time of month.” If she wept openly: “Women, you know; their emotions get the better of them, time after time.” If she let them inside the barrier so carefully constructed: just a woman, just a woman, just a woman. She ground her teeth and drew her hands back through the frazzled mane of her hair.
This will not do. Across from her, Usuri sat huddled like a wounded beast, legs drawn up to her chest and arms tight about them. Charlotte frowned at her. Why did I let you talk me down? Strange, the things that people contrived to live for. So far as she knew, Usuri had set the boy aside for months and yet…and yet…
That thought made her bitter. Bitter enough that some of the guards began to edge a little further away from her.
“Ser Edwin,” she snapped.
The knight was before her in a heartbeat, eyes somewhat reddened with drink, but hand still firm enough to steady the hilt of his blade. Good enough, you sauced old windbag. “Take a party. Scour the streets. I do not want them loose in the city.” Magic had set fire to it once. Then war. There was enough ash on their wind to choke a flock of geese from the sky, and she had no intention of letting some sullen lordling do the same in some misbegotten act of revenge.
Then again, she thought, he had more than ample opportunity. She eyeballed the witch, and could not shake the bitterness. Just how many words have you been sharing, Usuri, and with whom?
Of course, it had been Usuri who had warned her of their coming. It had been Usuri to describe what form they would take. Without her eyes, or ears, or whatever bit of her she had leant to the great beyond for the trick, someone might very well have been minus a head this evening. Her mother, based on where they had been headed.
“Should someone warn your father?”
By the Maker, no. That is the last thing we need. After this whole mess with Sara, the last thing she needed to do was give her father an excuse to force his way inside the tower. No doubt then it would be two birds with one stone, and a Matair would end up blamed for the princess’s sudden demise as well. No, she was going to keep him in the dark as long as possible.
“We can tell him once we have found them. Until then, it’s your honor at stake, Edwin.”
Ser Edwin clapped a hand to his breastplate with solemnity. “I shall leave no stone unturned, lady.”
A coterie assembled around him as he barked orders. They vanished with blood in their eyes and trembling hands at sword’s end. In truth, she did not suppose they stood much a chance of finding the Matair and his cronies. More likely to find empty mugs in an alehouse, on a night like this. The city full to bursting, and they were off to hunt faces they did not know. Perfect.
No one criticized precaution, though. Or at least, not to her face. Next she beckoned Dartrek, for there was one certainty she needed yet to take. “Men you trust, Dartrek. Take them to my brother, and the Emperor, and my mother. Make sure they are safe, and permit no one else into their presence without my express permission.” No questions there. Only action. The man stomped off without so much as a backward glance.
She had plenty for him now, though. She had seen the way that half-blood tart looked at him. Only a fool could have missed how she sputtered at his name. It made her uneasy. That Essa knew Dartrek from somewhere—but given the years he had called their household home, she did not know how that might be possible. Her mind raced, plots and possibilities making a thousandfold web, and yet…
“It will be alright, Charlotte.”
She stared across the empty space at the witch, watching her now with something passing concern. “The last vestiges of an old world. But you, my bird, must think on how to greet the new one.”
In another lifetime, she would have had the witch struck for that. Her left eye twitched, but she held herself back. Usuri genuinely thought she was doing right. She could not begrudge her that. After tonight, of course, her father would know the witch was still alive. She glanced back, looking for any trace of the assassin. There was none. He might escape notice, then, but it was no guarantee.
She wondered not if, but how he would rage. How he would threaten, and cajole, and promise to bring the whole world down about her head. The only problem now? He couldn’t. It was an odd sensation. All the long years of her life she had been powerless, and still she felt such but, by his own concoction, her father was placing her somewhere beyond, into a dream designed for his own beautification, played out through her own living.
She was his last chance. His only play. He had made it, and now the wheel was in motion. Little things, all along the sidelines, could be manipulated, changed, but the game itself was already locked into its final run. The outcome could no longer be blockaded.
And that left Walthere Cullick, for perhaps the first time in his life, as the man without the power. It left his position uncertain—at least as uncertain as her own. Charlotte felt the need to struggle weakly on a reflex, but there was
no need. There was nothing to struggle against.
Only that question that always haunted those that found this place: how to proceed?
It tormented her. No one else could answer for her. Usuri watched, and guided, but in that final question…only her own thoughts. Her own counsel. Charlotte smiled toothily at the witch, and the witch snorted, closing her eyes. Bruises were already purpling along her neck.
Most likely a mistake to have left those fools alive. Mercy was often a mistake, in her experience. Likely, the Durvalles would still be a dynasty for the ages, if one fool of an ancestor hadn’t seen fit to let the Cullicks live, after all. Look where that had gotten them. Yet some things could not be helped, and she had to admit—there was a witch who pressed upon her a merciful mood.
Someone had to guide those children home, at any rate. The menagerie of fools—the lot of them could be damned, but there was nothing her father could say, or do, to convince her letting those children go had been wrong. She almost hoped they would escape, simply for those children’s sake.
She knew what her father would do to them if he found them.
Something like he had done to Sara.
Something like he did to anyone who crossed him.
She closed her eyes and slowly shook the sensation out. Doubt eased with it. Creeping into the recesses, then: the answer. She decided.
* *
Rurik was quite certain they were going to die. The discomforts of their journey had finally worn him down to nothing. His skin crawled, his clothes chafed, and there was not an inch of him that did not sting with the familiar crust of dirt, and the unfamiliar gargle of human waste. It was not that he was scared. Quite the opposite. After their recent plunge, he was certain there was nothing Cullick or anyone else could do to him that could be worse than this.
It was the stink. It clung to all of them, a vile, pungent thing that was a cross between bloated death and a stopped up toilet. His cuts burned with it, his scabs ached with its passing, and he was quite certain there was no amount of bathing any of them could undertake to ever rid themselves of its cloying presence. It was enough to run a civilized man off a cliff, more poignant than any danger.
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