"I'm uncertain, but my gut believes she's obscuring something. It could be nothing, but it's smart to leave no stone unturned."
"Unless it's got a scorpion underneath it," Gian muttered. The General slowly folded his arms and glared down upon his lieutenant. "I mean, Sir, yes Sir!" Gian saluted and slipped into the shadows, following back into the great hall.
Marciano unfolded his arms and looked back at the hand he used to lift the painted girl to her feet. The hand that was smudge free. Shaking off his instincts as something to keep the boy busy, the General marched back out to the stables humming the song of Casamir under his breath.
A gaggle of red robes waddled down the back corridors of the castle, being shooed by a harried woman who gained a good decade trying to get this impromptu party off the ground and now had to helplessly watch it tip right back over. Judging by the occasional sound of shattering glass and cries of "Hold my mead, I gotta try this!" she knew she was in for a long night.
But the red robes didn't mind; it'd been a spectacular night for them. A few of the Lords, before taking their pants off and joining the conga line, inquired about having the historians work one of their parties. Perhaps one for the young Marquess' naming day. If the clown is busy.
Aldrin kept running his hands through the dried paint, cracking it off and shedding a trail of toxic breadcrumbs. Bartone wouldn't shut his still flapping mouth, declaring himself the keynote speaker of the night and still glancing wistfully at the promise of a fourth encore. But Ciara's gaze met his and he backed down immediately.
After suffering a near heart attack from running nose first into the soldiers roaming the hall, she gripped Aldrin's hand tight and burst in upon Casamir just as he was hoisting the head of Miqueso (whose gaze turned men into cheese) upon the Basilisk, creating a shockwave of stone cheese. As the hall broke into wild hysterics while the latest round of wine kicked in, Ciara grabbed the hero's hand and pulled his ear to her mouth.
"We need to leave."
"Nonsense," he shook her off and rose to the applause, still waving the head of cabbage around as if it could turn someone into anything other than an unpleasant person to travel beside.
But she wasn't about to risk her hide for a man's swelling ego, "Lord and Ladies," she called to the horde, "I regretfully must request the leave of Sir Casamir. There are far flung adventures that require his aid." The crowd booed, not wanting to give up their new toy. "Unless, of course, you wish to pay to keep him for another hour?"
The eyes shifted to the Baron, who --being a man that rose to his height by not wasting a coin unless objectively necessary-- hobbled to his feet and exclaimed, "A final round of applause for the traveling bards!"
Bartrone reluctantly bowed deeply, like a master thespian exiting from the last production while Pajamas waved his final stolen chicken leg about proudly. Ciara clapped, made a small curtsey and shoved the two out the door.
Once the stage lights faded, Bartrone spun on the girl foolish enough to step on his toes, "How dare you insert yourself into matters you cannot comprehend?" His mouth foamed a bit as he inched deep into Ciara's personal space. A threatening hand began to rise.
But she felt strength rising from the deep pool of "being in the right," "And how dare you threaten the lives of every single person in the caravan to feed your vanity."
As she loudly whispered her threat, the other red robes appeared, along with one of the bearded men who seemed to have gotten himself a bit lost. Bartrone glanced at his fellows, generally amiable men he'd spent over 15 years of his life working and living with. But make no mistake, if an opportunity ever presented itself, he'd toss every single one of them under the carriage and he knew they'd do the same.
That was how their academic community survived, always working together to keep everyone else from getting on top of you. "You walk a very dangerous path, gel," Bartrone said, his voice dropping out of the honeyed range it spent over three hours gallivanting in.
Ciara blinked, sensing the hand still floating on the periphery. But Aldrin piped up, "She's right. We best get out of here before any of them soldiers wise up to what was under their noses."
Bartrone still glared upon her, but the hand lowered. Ciara sighed, grateful for the help from the "graduate student," but despising the fact she needed it. Chase broke free from the mass of robes and handed a single hand whittled rose to the four players, a tear in his eye.
"Forgive my brother," Chance said, "He always loved the theater."
Hustling without running, the mob made their way back towards what they thought would be the gate out but found only bored soldiers and a very barred door. These men were blessedly not dressed in the black of the Empire, but the much more muddled greys of a man who couldn't be bothered to come up with a uniform's color scheme. The Baron's men sniffed the air and said "'s closed so no 'uncloths' get in. Servants go out through the East entrance."
So the horde shifted, trying to follow the vague point of a man in the middle of the moonless night, stumbling amongst the twists and turns of a castle they'd seen only glimpses of from a wagon that picked everyone up in the town square.
"He said it was east, right?"
"How can you tell which east is east?"
"By that big shiny star, of course."
"That's the light for the midden, you person of questionable intelligence."
"How can you tell in this dark?"
"It's a cloudy night, there are no stars."
While Chase and Chance, the scouts for the group, led them about in circles, Aldrin slipped back to Ciara who was bringing up the rear. More black paint crunched off his fingers that he wiped across his pants and then his chin, leaving a wide smudge. The boy must have been a personal demon to the King's laundress.
"I thought for sure we were in for it when you ran into that soldier," he whispered to Ciara.
The girl nodded lightly, still on edge until they could see the proverbial light of day (and prayed they wouldn't need the real one to get out of the castle courtyard), "Thank Scepticar they're as bright as a wickless candle."
Aldrin, now rubbing the paint into his itching eyebrows turned to look behind her at a passing glint of light in the field of darkness beyond the castle walls when one of the Bother's called out. "Ah ha! I knew it, just keep going right and you'll find your way out."
"Unless you were facing the opposite direction," one of the other red robes pointed out.
But the brothers were right, beyond their pointing fingers lay a narrow portcullis raised for the few trying to leave the party before their children tried to sell all their siblings to goblin kings. Ciara let free a breath she didn't know she'd been holding since Mitrione burst in upon her recitation.
Chase and Chance, the youngest of the crowd and used to seeing this forbidden side of the day gave a jolly chase through the door while some of the older members, having their first bit of fun in decades, followed close on their heels. It was only the middle aged members who spent too many nights investing themselves into tomes only a handful of men generations younger than themselves would ever read, that took the freedom slowly, savoring their brush with fame and nobility.
Bartrone turned back from his fellows to catch Ciara walking calmly with the prince, talking far too friendly with him than was proper. He paused until the two caught up and scooped the boy into a strange side hug, pulling him forward as he began to lay out the lesson plan for the morning.
Ciara stopped walking and crossed her arms. She may have been the linchpin of the entire operation but Aldrin would always be their golden child. The dunner traveling with him was little more than an extra body to haul through the wilderness.
As she tossed up her hands in exasperation, she placed one step forward when a hand clamped down on her shoulder. It was weighted in metal and clung to her collarbone with the force of a dragon's jaw. She yelped in pain as the rose slipped from numbing fingers. Aldrin spun around out of Bartrone's grasp to watch Ciara turn towards the familiar Empi
re soldier holding her tightly.
He tried to rush towards her, but Bartrone grabbed the prince tight and hauled him backwards out of the castle. A hand clamped down over the boy's screams of "We have to help..." and they vanished into the yawning forest at castle edge.
The soldier holding her tightly spun the girl around, his second hand clamping onto her other arm until she was trapped in an unbreakable grip. With the waning lamplight casting shadows, his eyes looked as black and soulless as his armor. He drug a frozen metal finger across her cheek, removing the paint from her skin, revealing the same color beneath. Grabbing her even tighter he said, "Daughter of the sand, what are you trying to hide from us?"
She tried to squirm, to break free, even to scream but his demonic glare froze to the core, as if he'd removed all her willpower. A kind of foul magic any good Scepticar would claim never really existed, even as their own tongue betrayed them.
"What do you know of the boy?" the monster pressed her, shaking her limp body.
Ciara gurgled but said nothing, trying to put all thought of Aldrin and the people leaving her behind out of her memory for fear he could pluck thoughts from her mind. Her eyes darted up at a shadow moving within the shadows, but the monster didn't follow. He was eyeing her form, sizing her up for his own fun.
"There are many ways to make you talk."
The shadow rose from behind the monster, a shimmer in the mist and, as one hand clamped down upon the soldier's mouth, another drew the blade across his throat. Dying arms unclasped Ciara in a last attempt to slay the attacker, but blood drained too quickly and the dead soldier dropped unceremoniously to the ground.
"And there are many ways to silence you," the shadow said, wiping the soldier's ichor upon his sleeve before sheathing the dagger.
His voice was far more melodious than either the nasally Aravingion accent or the guttural Ostero. It was like listening to a string section in the middle of a stirring aria before the horns had to burst in and ruin it all with a really great knock knock joke. It was also shockingly familiar.
"You."
The quarter moon smile erupted from the black face, "Yes. It is you."
"You're the one who killed that assassin," Ciara said, trying to inch away from the man she watched mercilessly slay two people. Okay, so the two people had been planning on hurting her, but she preferred to keep far away from any horse, gift or not.
"Indeed," he nodded solemnly, not one to take killing lightly. Everything else, however. "And you were the one to not get assassinated."
Shouting rang out across the courtyard. Like someone throwing a box of marbles onto the floor, soldiers burst from the seams, rolling towards every available exit. Her assassin's assassin raised a hand darker than hers, "Before you continue this line of thought, it would perhaps be best if we exit the premises."
But the marbles were too quick for them and in the blaring of the horns, as Ciara turned to leave, the portcullis clanked twice then slammed shut. If she'd been a few seconds quicker she'd have been smashed in half by the dagger teeth.
"Come," the shadow said, "I know of another exit."
"Why should I trust you?" she asked in all sincerity. Trusting random men to help led to her being trapped in a castle swarming with the enemy in the first place.
"Why should I trust you?" the shadow asked back, as if the taut frame hiding who knew how many implements of death could be easily overpowered by a sixteen year old with wooden ears stuck on her head.
"A fair point."
The half moon smile returned and turning back into the shade, the shadow dashed into the courtyard, Ciara following closely behind.
A third guard fell off the icy ramparts, his footing taken by the man stalking the shadows. The body flopped like a sack of laundry hitting the floor at the bottom of the steps. Ciara tried to not picture his intestines tumbling out of the bag like a mess of hose as she clung to the ladders edge.
Her shadow man hadn't given her any instructions, only vanished into the chaos as guards, some in the Baron's grey but most as black as the moonless night covering them, ran about barking orders in aravi. The Baron's guards tried to translate for the servants armoring up horses and saddling up infantry, but the best they could understand was ordering the pasta with that white sauce and one of those cookies on top of other cookies.
Ciara tried to blend into the chaos as well, by standing dumbstruck like most of the other servants, getting her shoulder smashed into by a boy overloaded with pikes. Squires were an internship asset the Empire was more than happy to exploit, especially in the off chance they ran out of rocks for the catapult. As she massaged the pain crying out from her bruised scapula, one of the more astute guards noticed the girl who wasn't running about getting his peers suited up for war. He opened his mouth to call out to her when an arrow split his trachea, blood sputtering over the phrase "sandworm" dying in his throat.
"Nachtegaal," the shadow called from above her head, "stop making friends. We must leave."
She looked up at the murderer who was offering her possible escape and then the body that was certain death. Gritting her teeth, she grabbed a hold of the soldier's boots and drug his corpse across the grey dirt, not looking up at the hordes rushing towards the stables on the far side of the castle. Leaving the body in the darkened corner of the wooden staircases climbing the walls, she poked her head out cautiously. No one else seemed to be paying her any attention; everyone was lost in their own personal jobs. And anyone who didn't know what they were supposed to be doing just picked up a weapon and carried it about like they did.
Ciara jumped back as another body tumbled from the sky, landing upon its knees as if it were praying. Anyone would have thought he was looking to Argur for help in the coming battle, except the broken neck caused his head to flop backwards as the lifeless eyes gazed heavenwards.
Grasping her own little dagger, Ciara uttered the prayer her father taught her when she was little, "Guide my arm that it may find its target, and guide my mind so that I may know my target." Slowly, her hands grasped the wooden ladder, climbing up the ramparts while trying to not listen to the growing clamor of metal smashing into metal beneath her. If they were trying to search for her and Aldrin, they were doing a very poor job of it.
As her head poked above the platform, she watched her shadow man rise up from his crouch, stick his dagger into the chest of the final guard and toss him over the castle wall. He turned to stare at her and nodded solemnly. "I was worried you might have flown, little Nachtegaal."
"Who are you?" she asked, standing upon the wall and looking over the edge into the rustling trees below.
"Taban," he said smiling, "but that name means little here. Come." He crouched back into his murdering stance and inched along the wall, his form vanishing into each shadow from the brick parapets and then appearing as he crossed the threshold.
Ciara followed suit, dashing from darkness to darkness and doing her best to not look down. "Why are you doing this?"
He chuckled again, a voice that echoed across the emptying ramparts, "You do ask much, don't you? If you ever met God, you'd ask him why he gave the peacocks such lovely feathers, yes?"
"If I met them, I'd probably ask the gods if I got the other bastard just as good," she grumbled, the cold winds buffeting her skirt and threatening to toss her body off the wall.
Taban chuckled again, his voice slipping into the distance as he worked the high wall's edge like a second home. Even in the plummeting darkness she could still make out snippets of him, short hair recently cropped, a careful choice of leathers muddied a deep brown and green to move silently in. Somewhere in the shadows were probably features, perhaps even striking, but under the circumstances, she was more concerned with surviving and trying to not accidentally walk off the wall and fall to her death.
A series of shadows crossed the back of a raised hand; Taban was signaling her to stop. The illuminated hand fell to the ground as he shifted his weight incrementally forward. Ciara blinked
into utter darkness, only the sounds of hundreds of harried voices drifted from below as well as the bursting of her heartbeat.
Taban slipped his murder weapon into his teeth and silently stood. Grabbing a hold of the edge, he climbed to the highest point of the wall. Barely two feet across, it offered a breathtaking view, especially as one slipped and smashed to pieces on the forest ground below. But he hugged the edge like a cat, sliding into the eternal darkness upon it without making a sound.
There!
Ciara tried to stifle a response to a man sniffling his nose from deep within the ink in front of her.
Taban held his breath and watched with calculating eyes as one of the black armored ones marched forward, quiet boots designating his status. A scout, and a rather important one by the shinier bits of metal upon the rivets. Hubris upon their part to proudly wear gold buttons. Or perhaps stupidity, they go so well together in soup.
The scout walked cautiously forward, sensing something amiss in the world before him. There should be guards here, some of the bumbling donkey conjugators the local rube hired. And the air felt heavy, it was displaced by something foreign.
Any guard who didn't want to get anything of his stabbed that night, would have called out "Ho! Who goes there?" and having thoroughly given away his position, scampered back to a warm drink and a good deck. The scout, being a terrible guard, silently removed his longsword, his eyes upon the slight tremble in the air before him. As his boots inched forward, he failed to notice the man standing directly beside him who could be dispatched with a push. All his senses were straining for the...dress, definitely a dress, lost upon the northern wall.
Ciara spotted the buttons coming at her and froze, holding her breath that she not accidentally reveal Taban hovering on the wall's edge like a lunatic. She gurgled a small bit, to keep the man's attention focused on her as Taban soundlessly fell behind the scout. Slipping back, she tried to vanish deeper into the darkness to keep him guessing; but the man must have stolen the eyes from an owl.
The King's Blood Page 18
