As his weight bore down toward her, she disengaged with her left hand and brought her forearm blade around in a sweeping arc aimed at his throat.
The knife sang through the air and kept going, tearing through Amberesh’s throat and sending a gout of blood spraying across Willow’s face and chest.
She just had time to register the look of stunned horror on Amberesh’s face before his falling body knocked her over, crushing her bad leg under her. She cried out again, and then thunder crashed, and rain began falling as if heaven itself wept over the fallen man. Why would it bother with a waste of air like Amberesh? Willow thought crazily.
Then the full meaning of what she’d done struck her, and panic set in. She shoved Amberesh’s body until she was free, then pushed herself up. Amberesh stared up at her with wide, uncomprehending eyes. She was covered in his blood. She had to get help—but for whom? Amberesh was beyond helping, and she…
She limped to the edge of the courtyard and had to grab onto a skinny pillar for support. Her leg was a long streak of agony, as bloody as the rest of her, and her shoulder throbbed with alternating fire and ice. “Help,” she said, cleared her throat, and yelled, “Help!”
No one answered. Rain pounded the pavement, soaking her and making Amberesh’s blood, and her own blood, stream off her in pinkish trails. She staggered a few more steps, then collapsed. What was she going to tell Catrela? How could she possibly explain herself to the Serjian Principality?
Harder, louder rainfall nearby turned into running footsteps. Someone gabbled at her in Eskandelic. She raised her head and saw a man holding a thick scarf over his head. It wasn’t doing him much good, because it was saturated with rain and dripping onto his enormous nose. He said something else. “I don’t speak Eskandelic,” Willow said. The man touched her bloody shirt, then looked past her at the courtyard. He cursed, loudly, then released Willow and ran away, shouting.
Willow knelt on the pavement and tried to control her rapid breathing. Someone would come. Someone would figure all of this out. She knew she wasn’t thinking clearly, that she should at least get out of the rain, but moving seemed beyond her.
More footsteps. Then someone grabbed her and dragged her to her feet, shouting in Eskandelic. Willow looked at him, feeling too dull to respond even if she knew the language. This man was taller than the first, broad in the shoulders, with longish black hair under a white headwrap gone dark with rain. He wore a sleeveless green tunic whose cheap dye ran in the rain and, strangely, boots instead of sandals.
“You? Who do this?” he shouted in Tremontanese. “You?”
“I killed him,” Willow said. “He was trying to kill me, and it was all I could think to do.”
The man wasn’t listening. With one hand he forced open her left hand, which was still clutching her knife, making it clatter to the pavement. With the other he spun her around and kicked the back of her knee, making her collapse again with a cry of pain as she landed hard on the leg Amberesh had knifed. Then he wrenched her hands behind her back, securing them with ice so cold she let out another short scream. Iron manacles. She ground her teeth against the freezing pain.
The man started speaking in Eskandelic, something long and fluid that harmonized with the falling rain. Then he said, “To stand now,” and hauled upward on her bound arms, sending agony lancing through her wounded shoulder. She stumbled, managed to catch herself, then stood, leaning heavily on her good leg.
More people dressed in the same cheap green tunics arrived, and a few of them worked together to carry Amberesh out of the courtyard. Someone else collected the three knives. The man prodded Willow in the small of her back. “To walk,” he said, and Willow limped away, her mind numb with so many kinds of pain.
The rain let up as abruptly as it had begun, and the wind picked up again, chilling Willow in her wet, blood-drenched clothes. She limped in the direction the man kept prodding her, though she could just as easily have followed the others with their gruesome burden. Probably he just enjoyed prodding prisoners.
Prisoner. She was a prisoner.
Panic swept away the fog she’d been moving in since Amberesh— She stopped, turned around, and said, “You have to send word to the Serjian Principality.”
“To walk,” the man said. He had a knife in his hand, about twelve inches long, and he poked her lightly with it.
“No, this is a mistake,” Willow said. “Serjian Principality. They’ll tell you I’m—” She stopped. What would they tell the guards? No one knew Amberesh had been following her. No one knew he’d threatened her life, or that she’d killed him in self-defense. No, what this looked like was the killing of a son of one of the most powerful principalities in Eskandel by a foreign woman, and Willow was in serious trouble.
The man brought his blade up to point at Willow’s chest. “To walk,” he said, in a more menacing tone. Willow turned around and walked.
They passed through the center of Umberan, drawing all sorts of attention. Willow didn’t meet anyone’s eyes. There wasn’t any point. None of them could help her. Or could they? “Someone tell the Serjian Principality to come to the—where are you taking me?” she said over her shoulder. The man was silent. “Are you taking me to prison?”
“To walk,” the man said. “Is to talk not.” Willow felt the cold silvery streak of his knife press against the side of her throat. Willow shut up.
The street they ended up on was broad enough for three ox carts to pass side by side without brushing one another, paved with those same large round-edged bricks that were outside the Serjian Residence’s neighborhood. It was lined with buildings like piles of cubical blocks, faced with marble and decorated with enough gold to make Willow’s skin burn. In Aurilien that gold would have been picked clean by scavengers ten minutes after construction was completed. The men carrying Amberesh’s body went around the side of one of these buildings, but Willow’s captor prodded her in a different direction.
They walked down a short flight of stairs and into a low-ceilinged corridor of rough granite lit by smelly lanterns behind green-tinted glass. The corridor continued for more paces than Willow could keep count of. Her head hurt, her shoulder throbbed, and her injured leg had gone numb half a mile back. Just as she realized the corridor sloped gently downward, her guard grabbed her bound wrists and brought her to an abrupt halt. Willow blinked, and saw there was a door in the wall beside her, almost invisible, its lock plate rusted iron.
The guard sheathed his knife, then yanked the pendant off over Willow’s head, followed by her neck pouch. When she protested, he slapped her hard across the face. He next took her belt pouch, then patted her all over, briskly, with no sign that he enjoyed it. “You have to tell the Serjian Principality,” she said. “Tell them what happened. They’ll make you let me go. Serjian Principality!”
The guard shrugged and spun her around. A lock clicked, and the freezing manacles were gone. Willow rubbed her wrists vigorously. “Tell them—”
“To inside go,” the guard said. He brought out a giant iron key and inserted it into the lock, and the barely visible door swung open, revealing darkness. The guard shoved Willow, who stumbled through the doorway and fell to her knees. She scrambled around, but it was too late. The door shut, and she was alone in the dark.
Part Five
Chapter Thirteen
She lay in the darkness, breathing in the smell of stale piss and wet stone. Her injured leg throbbed a counterpoint to her shoulder, which burned alternately hot and cold. She shifted her weight, hissed involuntarily at the pain that shot through her body, and lay still again. With her cheek pressed against the rough stone floor, she should have been at eye level with the crack under the door, but there was no light, no breath of cooler air. The cell was hot enough she felt she was being broiled alive. Drops of sweat rolled off her forehead and prickled under her arms. She closed her eyes. It wasn’t as if she needed them.
Grunting with pain, she got her good arm under her and pushed herself to a s
itting position, then had to lean against the invisible wall until the dizziness passed. It was no cooler sitting up, though she thought she felt a draft of warm air from above. Possibly they didn’t want prisoners dying in here before they could be properly executed.
The stone walls absorbed the sound of her labored breathing. She heard nothing else, no passing footsteps or screams of agony. The silence was more frightening than either of those things would have been. She rubbed her fingers against the damp stone of the wall. Its grittiness reminded her of a room she’d once rented, though that had had plaster walls rather than stone, but both had a texture that rubbed off on her fingers and smelled sour, like boiled cabbage. Her stomach tried to growl at the idea of food, but she hurt too badly to feel hunger.
She tried to stand, but her leg wouldn’t support her. It felt slick with blood when she gingerly touched it, and the long cut burned when she moved. She reached across with her good arm and tugged at the seam of her sleeve, tears of pain trickling down her face as she jogged the painful wound in her shoulder. The stitching was finely done, and she cursed whoever had made the shirt so well. Her Tremontanan clothes would have come apart with practically no effort. She tugged harder, ignoring the pain.
Finally, she heard a couple of threads tear, and wormed one finger into the hole to widen it. More threads parted, then, with a ripping sound, the sleeve came loose from the shirt. Carefully she worked it off her arm, then used it to bind her leg. It felt marginally better when she was done, and she wished she had some way to bandage her shoulder, but it was throbbing now thanks to her exertions and she didn’t want to make it worse.
She got on her hands and knees and made a crawling circuit of the room, one hand occasionally brushing the wall to orient herself. She felt no metal other than the hinges and lock plates of this and the neighboring cells, and it made her feel blinder than the darkness did. Feeling out the dimensions of the cell wouldn’t help, but she felt desperation whimpering at her like an injured dog, growing more insistent with every moment. Movement let her tell herself she was doing something.
After a few halting steps, her hand came down in a puddle, splashing up a nose-clenching whiff of ammonia. She shook her hand to rid herself of the piss, then wiped it on her trousers and clenched her back teeth together to keep from vomiting. That probably wouldn’t make the cell smell worse, but it felt like defiance, like proving to her captors that Willow North couldn’t be defeated so easily.
She kept going, not sure what she was trying to achieve—it wasn’t as if she could get out of this place—and realized she’d circled the little room twice just as her shaking arms threatened to give out. She sat back against the wall again and tried to calm her breathing. Her shirt clung to the wound in her shoulder. She thought the bleeding might have stopped, but she was afraid to touch it in case she made it start bleeding again. Her ears rang with a faint, high whistle she could hear even over her breathing, the sound that comes just before unconsciousness. She lay down on the stinking floor, feeling around first for more puddles, and closed her eyes again. This wasn’t defeat. It was a temporary setback, nothing she couldn’t handle.
She fell into a waking stupor, unable to sleep for the pain of her wounds, but too exhausted from the fight and the heat to stay fully conscious. Someone would come for her eventually, and she would make that person send to the Serjian Principality. If they even care. You killed Amberesh, you ruined Gessala’s life, you were complicit in Imara’s flight…they might just let you rot here.
“You stupid chit,” Nan said. “Get up and stop lazing!”
“Yes, Nan,” Willow said.
Nan was hazy in her vision, bending over Willow and shaking a fist in her face. “You think that’s clean enough? I said scrub it, not give it a swipe and a promise!”
Willow felt a twinge in her shoulder as Nan struck her with her cane. “Just like your father, you are. Never saw a bottle he didn’t like the bottom of. You’re going to be just like him.”
“Shut up, Nan, you’re dead,” Willow whispered. Nan struck her again, but it was a phantom blow, and Willow closed her eyes against the vision.
Others came to her, one at a time, Rufus and Albie and Marion and dozens of other friends from Lower Town, most of them saying things that in her brief moments of lucidity made no sense. Gnawing aches in her belly told her she was hungry, that time really was passing somewhere outside the cell, but soon they vanished along with the nagging pain in her leg and shoulder. Far away in her mind, a tiny voice shrieked that she was becoming dangerously dehydrated, that blood loss, heat, and hunger were weakening her, but it was an easy voice to ignore, stupid and ineffective and completely unable to do anything to help her situation.
She waited for Kerish to come, if only because he was going to say ‘I told you so.’ Everything he’d ever warned her about, all his fears she’d scoffed at, and now they’d come true. “They don’t lock you up, they cut off your hand,” she protested, but Kerish was gone and he was never coming back, because he was a Serjian and all the Serjians hated her for killing Amberesh.
The thought made her heart ache worse than her shoulder, and she sobbed, wishing Kerish were there so she could apologize for caring more about midnighting than she had about him. And now it didn’t matter anymore. She ran out of tears before she was done crying, and sat with her forehead against the wall, heaving great dry-eyed sobs until she drifted back into befuddled hallucinations.
She was talking to her childhood friend Amaris about some game they’d both loved when Amaris cut off mid-word and vanished. Half a breath later, the door ground open, stone on stone, and Willow covered her eyes against the horrible glare of the lantern-lit hallway. A man in a green tunic shouted at her in Eskandelic. “Do you speak Tremontanese?” she choked out, then fell into a coughing fit because her throat and tongue were too dry to make her words heard.
“Out,” the man shouted. Willow tried to stand. Her arms and legs shook so badly she could barely get to her knees. The man cursed and came into the cell, grabbed her bad arm and hauled her up. Willow screamed, a weak, thready sound that went nowhere. The man slung her up against the wall and took a close look at her shoulder. He muttered something in Eskandelic, then said, “Come,” and put his hand under her other arm, not as harshly. Willow blinked away tears of pain and hobbled along with him.
The green-glass lanterns of the corridor, still stinking of the sour-fish odor of whatever fueled them, made the guard look corpselike. Willow didn’t want to know what they turned her into. The walls looked dull, as if they’d been painted over by something that absorbed the light rather than reflecting it with the myriad glints of specks within the granite. The cell doors all fitted the walls so closely she wouldn’t have known they were there if she hadn’t sensed their hinges and locks. No wonder she hadn’t heard any screams. She shuddered despite the heat.
At the end of the corridor was a heavy door, black with age, banded with dark iron. Beyond she sensed more doors, set closer together and more numerous, with brass knobs and locks rather than freezing iron. Not cells, then. Willow was so grateful she hardly minded when the guard slapped another pair of iron manacles on her, though this time her arms were bound in front. The freezing chill was almost welcome after the stifling heat of the cell.
The guard unlocked the door and shoved Willow through. She stumbled, caught herself on the wall, and staggered forward into another corridor. This one was lit by clear white Devices, but was as narrow as the first. Willow counted hinges: ten doors along this corridor, plus another one at the far end. “Where are you taking me?” she said, enunciating clearly.
The guard just prodded her again. She walked down the hall, assessing each room: silvery steel knives, some silver or bronze or gold jewelry, assorted metal objects she didn’t have names for. Occasional fragments of conversations came to her ears, muffled enough that she couldn’t tell what language they were in. She was lightheaded enough that the sounds filled her with elation, this simple e
vidence that she wasn’t alone in the prison.
She was so preoccupied with counting someone’s belt purse—fifteen ryad, seven obat, two galt—that she hardly noticed when the guard unlocked the door at the end of the corridor and marched her inside.
The windowless room, dimly lit by Devices instead of smelly lanterns, was cool by comparison to the hallways and downright chilly after the heat of her cell. The low ceiling, and the lack of light, made it feel like a cave someone had set up home in—a rough, unpleasant home. Benches lined the walls adjacent to a pair of iron-bound doors that looked capable of stopping a riot. A few men and one woman sat there, their hands manacled as Willow’s were. A couple of men in green tunics stood near each prisoner, their hands placed loosely on their knife hilts. They eyed Willow as if thinking about how they’d stop her if she tried to escape.
A tall desk roughly knocked together out of unfinished wood, the least elegant thing Willow had ever seen in Eskandel, stood opposite the doors. It was chest-high to Willow and was paired with an equally tall stool on which another guard sat. He was fatter than the others and his face shone with sweat. He alone didn’t look at Willow when she entered. His attention was all on the man standing in front of him.
Kerish.
Kerish turned toward her when the door opened, and a look of such terrible fury crossed his face that Willow felt lightheaded again. She’d never seen him look that angry and she’d never dreamed he’d turn such a look on her. Tears prickled her eyes again, but she blinked them away. Crying wouldn’t change anything. Though his being here made no sense. If the Serjians wanted her punished for killing Amberesh, they’d just leave her there—unless they wanted to carry out that punishment personally, which Willow could see Janida doing—
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