Chapter Ten #2
“Your Highness,” I said, keeping my voice low and keeping the impatience I was feeling out of it. “I have my orders to get you and your son Taran onto the shuttle and wait there. I promise you we won’t take off without him.”
“I’m sorry, but no. I-I won’t get on that cart. I can’t explain it, but I have a bad feeling about it.”
I didn’t want to have to put hands on him, but damn it, I had my orders. As I hesitated, thinking of what I should do, Taran came up beside his father and put a hand on his shoulder.
“I’ll ride over with you, Majesty. I know the carts look a little rickety, but we came up this road on one, remember? We’ll get across in no time and then we’ll wait beside the shuttle for Larz—how would that be?”
He sighed and finally agreed. “All right, but I can’t shake this feeling, like something is wrong.
” He moved closer to the cart anyway, and I quickly stepped up beside him and helped him climb aboard.
But before Taran could climb up beside us, he suddenly snapped his fingers.
“I forgot something. Let me run back upstairs and I’ll be right back. ”
“No, Taran,” I said. “Whatever it is can wait.”
But he darted away without listening and ran back into the palace before I could stop him. Afraid that Janos might stage a similar mutiny if I left him there alone, I decided to stay with him and shouted for one of my guards to go and fetch Taran.
“Bring him back down here, even if you have to use force,” I told him. He turned away, and I called out to him, “Just not too much. He’s not a prisoner. Be careful with him.”
He snapped off a salute to me and disappeared through the huge, front doors.
The guard reappeared a few minutes later, half-leading, half-dragging a mutinous looking Taran behind him.
Taran’s face looked the same as it always did—stubborn, angry and bad tempered.
I jumped down off the cart to confront him.
“Sending your guard after me was completely unnecessary, sir,” he shouted at me. “I told you I forgot something. I would have come right back.”
“And what, pray tell, was it that was so damned important that you’d keep us all waiting?” I tried to keep the irritation from my voice, but I was afraid I wasn’t too successful.
“My long coat. Well, it’s not actually mine. I borrowed it from Luc Dimitri, you see. I have to return it to him.”
“The damn thing is illegal. Not to mention ugly. You don’t need it, and you’re not taking it with us. Message Luc Dimitri and tell him to go to your room and get his own damn coat.”
“That’s just rude. I’m the one who borrowed it.”
“Yes. To wear it to a conference where it could only insult King Davos and all the Tygerians here. A brilliant plan, Taran. Really stellar.”
“I didn’t think about that. I wasn’t trying to insult anybody. I just like the way it looks.”
“I decided I’d rather walk across the bridge,” said Janos from right behind me, startling me a little. When in the four hells had he gotten down off the cart?
This was like herding those damn fat, furry little creatures with the sharp claws and squashed-in faces that the Consort Blake kept in his private quarters.
He called them “cats,” or “Persians,” and he’d purchased two of the things from one of the Nilanium traders that brought him his food supplies.
Those two cats had quickly fornicated and turned into seven, and then the female had become pregnant again, not long after those babies were born.
But that was when King Davos had finally put his foot down.
The cat things were all neutered, and all the babies were distributed among the king’s ministers with strict orders to neuter them, too, when they got old enough and to not to allow them to reproduce again, else the kingdom would eventually be overrun with the alien species.
Only the original two were allowed to remain in the palace—along with one “kitten” that Blake had insisted on keeping.
All of them were getting fatter and lazier every day, it seemed, and they strolled around like they owned the place.
They had to be constantly removed from sunning themselves in the windows of the throne room, not to mention the king’s office, and they had the nerve to look aggrieved about it as they were being carried out.
I took Taran’s upper arm in one hand and Janos’s in the other, sternly reminding myself not to grip them as hard as I wanted to. “Come along then. I’ll walk with you across the bridge, since you don’t trust riding on the cart and it can follow us across.”
“Once we’re safely on the other side…” the consort said.
“Yes, yes,” I said, unable to keep all the impatience I felt with this assignment out of my voice. Perhaps I’d made a mistake taking this position with Prince Mikos. I was an Imperial warrior, damn it, not a babysitter for the fractious and unruly child and consort of a rebellious prince.
I soon found out that they both made mincing little steps compared to my stride, and I had to keep slowing down and continuing on more slowly.
It was extremely irritating and taking way too long.
We’d gone hardly a quarter of the way across the bridge when we heard a loud, ominous cracking sound.
I stopped going forward immediately and Janos gasped loudly.
A section of the bridge ahead of us had begun to sway slightly in the strong wind blowing across the chasm.
Dropping Taran’s hand, I grabbed for the railing and looked over the edge.
Far below, I could see the muddy-looking ribbon that was the river hurtling through the canyon.
It was a fast, brown, churning froth of mud and debris from the recent storms, and it was battering the rocks below.
I looked around frantically, realizing we were no longer over solid rock but suspended now over a terrible drop on this sagging, swaying bridge.
The damn thing shuddered, and I could see the far side beginning to pull away from its moorings.
“Run!” I yelled and turned to do just that, tugging both of them behind me.
The consort wasn’t moving nearly fast enough, so I tucked him under my arm and began to race for the side we’d just come from.
Thank the gods, Taran was running beside me, trying to keep pace with me, but he was injured and soon he began to fall behind.
“We have to move faster!” I shouted at Taran as he began losing ground, unable to quite keep up with my longer stride.
I shifted Janos to my shoulder, grabbed Taran’s arm and began to haul him and drag him along beside me back the way we’d come.
I could literally hear the shrieking of the lumber on the bridge as it splintered and gave way behind us, and the boards beneath our feet began to ripple.
We were close enough now that I could see the frightened, alarmed faces of my men on the edge of the bridge, their hands reaching out for us.
I heard another ominous cracking sound and thought I felt the slats of the bridge trying to give way under my feet.
I stopped and plucked Janos off my shoulder and threw him with all my might toward one of my men, who bravely risked his life to lean out and catch him in midair and pull him back to safety with the help of the other men who were holding onto his waist. Taran, who had continued to run, was by this time a few steps ahead of me, so I grabbed him up in my arms as I passed him and we lumbered forward together, as the bridge literally began to disintegrate beneath my feet.
At the last possible second, I picked him up and jumped for the rocky ledge where the bridge had once been firmly attached, as strong, eager hands reached out to catch us and haul us up onto firmer ground.
I felt like falling to my knees and kissing it. Heaving in one breath after another, I managed sit up and pull Taran over on his back to peer down into his pale, scared face. “Taran, speak to me! Are you hurt?”
“N-no…I-I think I’m okay.”
I pulled him into my arms frantically and just held on, running my hands over his body to make sure he was all in one piece.
We had very nearly died, and all I could think about was that this was the second time I’d almost failed in my duty and lost him forever.
I vowed that this time would be the fucking last.