by Guy Antibes
“Wait a moment.”
Sara examined the window casings. One of the windows opened as she had hoped in her original plan. She looked down below, with her hair blowing in the cold wind and found the road that ran along the wall and spotted a carriage parked on the side of the road. She recognized the sandy hair of Klark.
“Duke! Look down from your window to the road below. There is a carriage…”
She didn’t hear anything for a moment or two.
“Klark. He’s looking up at the tower. Fool boy. He’ll get himself caught.”
“My plan, Duke. Although it can’t be carried out as I originally thought since I would be the one to free you.” Sara ran to the open window. None of the guards on the wall looked up at the tower when she waved her handkerchief. Klark spotted the movement, waved back and climbed back into his carriage and left.
“He’s gone now,” the Duke said. “You signaled him—how?”
“My window opens. Doesn’t yours?”
Another chuckle. The captivity must have softened the Duke’s rigid demeanor. “No. I suppose they didn’t want me to jump and kill myself, but if I wanted to do that, a window wouldn’t be a particularly difficult barrier to overcome. Now what?”
“I’m not sure, but I would imagine a maid with rather wide hips will give us our next meal.” Sara would expect Willa to show up at the door, armed. “The width of her hips will hide the rope that we need.” Sara hoped that Lily would have remembered her plan. She had to since Klark had scouted out her exit point.
“Rope? That will mean we’ll have to kill the guard. I have no… Your knife will have to do the deed.”
“Yes it will and we will have to make a passageway between our rooms so you can climb out my window.”
“It’s suicide. Climb down fifty feet to the wall? There are guards there. What will you do to clear them out? They’ll shoot us down with crossbows,” the Duke said.
“I think that the woman with the wide hips might bring along one or two pipe exploders with her.” Sara couldn’t help but smile for a moment, but she couldn’t make this into a game. A slip on the rope by any one of them would be fatal. Sara told the Duke, who whistled. “You are, indeed, making the most of your limitations, girl.”
“Does anyone come up to talk to you?”
“If you mean do I get any visitors? No. Not after the first week. I told them all I know about this situation, which was less than they already did.”
“The troops are already at the Narrows. They did something called a rolling muster.” She didn’t tell him that she had done the same thing with her tiny army as they made their way to Obridge.
“Yes, I supposed they would. Then we have to leave the city as soon as possible and get word to them to take half of the army and head for the Eastern Mountains. I’ve been looking out my window at the rabble they’ve collected as troops. They haven’t even attempted to train any of them.”
Sara hadn’t thought of the training. “They weren’t even giving them food.” Her father’s face intruded into her mind. She didn’t care about him, but she did care about people like Mr. Glimmer, Pol and Natti.
“I suppose the gates are still rusted in place?”
Sara wasn’t well schooled in the military arts, but why put your best men where they couldn’t get to the enemy. “A siege! All of their best men are by the gate. All of this is to bide time while Belonnia attacks from the east.”
“The local troops are just an impediment. They’d get chewed up in any kind of conflict and weaken the ability of Shattuk Downs to fight against a Belonnian takeover.”
“Would your brother truly let that happen if you were held hostage?”
The Duke laughed. “Of course he wouldn’t. Everyone thinks he’s a softhearted ruler. To an extent he is, but he has cultivated an illusion of softness. He isn’t immune to having had to make a hard decision during his reign. I shouldn’t say this, but I demanded that he leave Obridge when he rose to power. I left to help him create a new dynasty.”
“So you did leave my mother?” Sara’s heart dropped. She thought that it was the Duke performing selfless service. What a tragedy.
“You’re one of the few to have seen the memory alcove. Sythy was the only woman I ever loved. It broke my heart that we had to leave her, but I acted for the good of Parthy.”
Sara felt a lump in her throat and could hardly speak but she had to some how get the words out. “Did you know she was pregnant when both of you left her?”
The silence from the other side of the hole brought tears to Sara’s eyes.
“I once suspected, but she quickly married Featherwood and I tried to put her from my mind as much as I could. I,” there was another pause, “I nearly asked you twice while you were in Parth. I’ve not grown into a very, uh, accessible man over the years.” His voice had become more hoarse.
She so wanted to call him Father, but couldn’t bring herself to say it. How utterly ridiculous that they would be having this conversation through a hole in the tower walls. “My hair and eyes tell me that I’m a Passcold and not a Featherwood.”
“But not your heart?” That wasn’t the Duke Northcross she knew.
“I don’t know. My life has been going round and round in unexpected ways since my mother died.”
“I dearly would have loved to go to the funeral, but by the time I found out, she had been buried. I visited her grave last summer before I left Belting Hollow.” Sara could hear him sigh.
“I recognize that you are my real father, but don’t worry, I won’t make any public claim.”
“We can talk of that later. I’m hungry. I wish we could share our meals and talk through the night, but these are, uh, difficult circumstances. After the sun is up, we will work on our passageway and perhaps Klark can show that he is the man I think he is.”
Sara slid down the wall. The conversation had sapped her energy. He might be hungry, but Sara rose and lay on her bed, watching the sun set from her window. Large candlesticks were in the room, but no candles were available to light up her evening. Sara didn’t even bother to use her magic to light up the room. Guards might know she had no means to light the candles and return to investigate.
She put her hand to her eyes and rubbed them. Sara thought of the charred wreckage of Brightlings and thought that a lack of light might be a blessing to Ben when he returned to Belting Hollow. She wondered if she would ever be able to return.
~
The morning light intruded on Sara’s sleep—a sleep filled with dreams of betrayal by her father and Vesty while her mother scolded her every move. She yawned and finally found the appetite that had eluded her the previous evening. With the food cold, she ate enough to keep hunger at bay.
She called for Duke Northcross, but he probably hadn’t woken up. She began to chip away the plaster with the bread knife left behind on the tray, not wanting to dull her knife anymore than her efforts of the previous day had done. The work proceeded more quickly than she thought after the hole reached a certain size so she could use a metal candlestick to break up the plaster and smash the lath. Still, the Duke slept through all of the pounding.
She frantically began to remove the wall piece by little piece. He couldn’t be that deaf! Could he be sick? Poisoned? Sara had to know. Eventually, she opened a hole large enough to begin kicking out the wall on the other side. She put her head through the wall to find the Duke’s room empty.
~~~
Chapter Twenty-Four
The Death of a Duke
This would never do. She continued to kick and pull and pound the wall until she had a hole large enough for the Duke to crawl through when he returned. Picking up the plaster and lath, she shoved them back down the hole until she had cleared his room of debris. Sara moved a high dresser from the opposite side of the room to cover her hole. She grabbed the cloth that covered his food. He had eaten quite a bit. Could they have taken him out in the early morning?
She dabbed water on the cloth
and used it to wipe up all of the dust so that a casual examination of the room wouldn’t reveal the Duke’s escape route into her room. She broke a hole into the thin wood of the back of the chest so she could pull it the rest of the way into place. Her plan seemed like a good idea, but her shoulder began to burn while she slid the chest. It took her another fifteen minutes to get it positioned with her other arm.
The pain in her shoulder continued to build and Sara lay back down on her bed. She tried to concentrate, but the pain took rational thought away. Her labors might have undone the healing. She worried about the Duke and then began to worry about herself.
Sara woke to pain as she found herself trying to roll on her aggravated shoulder. She sat up in bed and her eyes went to the mess in her room. Could the Duke be back? She forced herself off of the bed and knelt at the hole and called. There was no reply.
She spent the next few minutes cleaning up her side of the hole. The door would cover up half of the opening. Would Willa arrive with her next meal? Questions rolled around her head as her shoulder continued to throb, forcing her to bed again. She couldn’t leave without the Duke and now she probably couldn’t even escape.
She had originally thought that being taken prisoner might lead somewhere. She had found the Duke and actually talked to him about their situation. Sara wanted to think about life after Stonebridge, but her shoulder and the Duke’s absence wouldn’t allow her to wonder what would happen. Her thoughts tumbled back to her own predicament. How could they take the Duke from her when she had the opportunity to take advantage of the situation? Getting close to the Duke’s room enabled them to escape. Everything operated smoothly until the Duke disappeared and she re-injured her shoulder dragging that heavy chest.
Sara tried again and again to focus on the future, but the pain in the shoulder really began to bother her. She tried to think about the past and reuniting with Ben Featherwood. But now that the Duke had all but recognized her as his daughter, the prospects of a peaceful truce no longer felt important. She shook her head to clear her thoughts, knowing that the pain had muddled her thinking.
In a sense she felt free of Ben Featherwood, yet what advantage did such a liberating thought give her in the current predicament? She sat up and began to pace in her room. When she went to bed, she could remember thoughts of Shattuk Downs. She ended up napping and when she arose, the desire to live at Brightlings had completely deserted her and traced the start of that feeling with her midnight conversation with Natti. She gingerly moved her shoulder. It definitely had settled down to a dull ache.
A knock at the door threw her out of her reverie.
She ran to the door so she could stand in front of the hole. It opened to reveal Willa Waters, dressed as a Stonebridge servant, carrying in a tray. A maid’s cap covered her iron-gray hair. The Guard stood at the door, not interested in Sara or Willa’s actions in the room.
“Where’s the Duke? Is he in the next room?” Sara said.
The guard chuckled. “No. He’s not in the next room. Did you two tap to each other?” His face took on a smug look.
Willa jostled Sara. “Sorry, miss. This is my second tray up here tonight and here I wore another’s dress. This is too long and, wouldn’t you know, I trip on it all the time.”
Could she have delivered a tray to the Duke’s new room?
“You’ve been told not to talk, wench!” The guard squeezed Willa’s shoulder, making her wince.
Willa brought in a chamber pot and took Sara’s. She walked towards the guard, and threw the contents into the guard’s face. The man’s hands went to his eyes while Sara slid her knife into the Guard’s stomach pointing it upwards towards his heart, as Choster had taught. She immediately felt sick at what she had done, but she had to save her real father. Sara pulled on the guard’s tunic and let him stagger into her room as Willa closed the door. Then she used her own knife to stab the guard twice. Sara now knew how hard it could be to kill a man. The guard shuddered and lay still.
Sara’s shoulder bloomed again in pain.
“You’re shoulder’s hurting again,” Willa said as she took the cloth from the old tray and laid it over the man’s face. “He won’t need this.” She took Sara’s knife out of the man and cut a strip of cloth from his shirt. Willa took a small can with Peppen’s salve from her pocket and spread it on her shoulder. With it bound more tightly, the pain subsided.
“Where’s the Duke?”
“Two floors down. I served him first. Let’s get him as soon as I rid myself of gifts.”
“Gifts?” Sara could feel the ache subside and excitement build as renewed hope took hold.
Willa pulled out two pipe exploders encased in soft cases with ties, a gun, a box of balls and powder and began to unwind two lengths of thin rope at her waist. Finally she pulled out three sets of gloves.
“You did need a large dress,” Sara said, feeling like they now had a chance to save the Duke.
Sara strapped an exploder case to her thigh and cut a hole in her dress for access. Willa ripped off her maid’s dress to expose riding clothes.
“Take me to him,” Sara said after she loaded the gun.
They eased out of the room, looked for guards, and then they hugged the outside wall to keep anyone seeing them if they came up from the bottom of the tower. Willa stopped at a door.
Sara clearly heard Goldfields yelling, berating the Duke.
“Is there anyone else in the room?” Sara said.
Willa could only shrug. Sara pulled out her knife and held the gun pointing upward. Willa took her position on the side of the door with her knife held downward while Sara grabbed the doorlatch.
She heard Goldfields cursing. The handle turned. She let out an involuntary gasp as Goldfields struggled with a piece of paper waving in front of his face. He grabbed the attacking page and looked at her, his florid face opened in surprise. He angrily crumpled it and threw it away.
“What are you doing here?”
“I’ve come to get the Duke.” She looked at Northcross, his face filled with angry bruises and blood running down his nose. Ropes bound him to a heavy chair.
Northcross stiffened up and drily said, “He’s under the mistaken impression that he’s going to kill me. I was in the midst of irritating Hardwell when you decided to visit.” That was more like the Duke she knew. Sara barely had the time to register that Duke Northcross was using his magic to antagonize his attacker.
Goldfields backed away and pulled out his sword. Sara didn’t have time to brace herself and fired her gun. She flew backwards and knocked Willa down so they both sprawled out on the landing. The only thing that kept her from falling down the stairs was the bannister.
“Untie him!” Sara said as she fought through the pain that had reignited in her shoulder and hip. She’d have to remember to hold the gun with her other hand until her shoulder healed. She watched as Willa cut the ropes.
Northcross took the napkin from his tray and wiped off his face. He took Goldfields’ sword and plunged it into the left side of his chest.
Voices bubbled up from below along with the sound of boots on the steps. They would be upon them before they could even get to the seventh floor. Sara had an answer for that. She pulled out the exploder and removed the wire. She tried to move it back so she could throw it but couldn’t.
“I’ll take that,” Northcross said and threw the pipe exploder down two levels. No explosion.
“That one didn’t work,” Willa said, matter of factly. “I’ll make it work,” Sara said. She walked down the stairs until she could see the pipe. She thought of Ben’s face and, easily finding the anger she sought, pointed her finger at the pipe. The explosion knocked her back and shook the stairway, filling it with smoke.
Sara looked over the banister and saw a stairway blown apart and flames began to lick the stairway below. Sara willed a fireball. It sat in her hand, not burning, and tossed it underhand down to the lower stairway. The guards had lost ready access. “Up, we must go up
,” she said, staggering towards the stairs. “There’s a fire that may move upwards.”
Northcross helped her as Willa followed them with a long knife in each hand. Once in Sara’s room, Northcross put her on the bed and spied the hole.
“You really did it. All by yourself!” the Duke said.
“I had to reach you, but…” she left off the rest while she strapped on the last of their pipe exploders, reloaded the gun and then took off the exploder and gave it to him.
“I meant projecting the flame. You have hidden talents, rescuer.”
“Take this. My shoulder won’t let me throw it very far. It’s to be used to clear off the wall.” She glanced out the window. “Klark’s in position.”
The Duke held the exploder in his hands. “You are full of surprises.”
Willa broke the other pane of glass from the outside of the open window to keep the shards from warning the guards on the wall below. The Duke tried to get the straps on, but his leg was too big for the straps and put it in a deep pocket in his coat.
Pushing the Duke gently aside, Willa tied one end of the rope around the thick window frame and put on her gloves.
“These have extra leather on the inside to keep you from tearing up your hands,” Willa didn’t hesitate. “No one on the walkway.” She let herself down the rope.
Sara followed. She grabbed the cloth on the tray on her table and folded it up. She took a deep breath and put it between her teeth, biting as hard as she could as she climbed down. Sara would handle the pain as well as she could.
She held on to the rope from above with her good hand and let the rope slip through her dress where she grasped it with her injured arm. Wells had taught her how to lower herself down vertical shafts in the mines when she was younger. The pain didn’t stop, but she concentrated on walking herself down.
Her descent seemed to last forever as her world began to fill with pain. Peppen’s salve did nothing for her injury now. She dared not to look down. If she let go of the rope, she’d fall to the stone pavement below. It seemed like hours but she finally made it to the wall. Still no men were at the walls. Sara looked up as the Duke slid down, grabbing the rope as if his life depended on it. She knew it did.
