Chapter Twenty-Nine Kian #2
Adela bites at her lips, considering. I can practically hear her thoughts, she’s so open. On the one hand, she’s finally figured out how to harness her magic, and it’s a useful one in a heist, even if it is something that scares her.
On the other, there’s no point in wearing nondescript clothing if we have giant magical bird skulls over our faces as we traipse through the city.
“We have to take them,” she decides. “Just in case we need to pull on our magic.”
When the two women are content that they’ve gone through all the contingencies they can think of, and I can’t bear to sit still for one more moment, I grab a lantern and stand up. “Ready to steal a creature?”
“Steal?” Adela’s tone is brittle. “I think you mean liberate. The order was the one to steal her.”
I love her fire. “So they were.”
Now that we have a purpose—and she’s been fed and warmed—Adela seems to have significantly more energy, and we arrive at the temple quickly. She might actually make it through this long night. And it will be long with the theft of the foal and a trip to the valley ahead of us.
Hopefully after, I’ll be able to apologize and explain better why I hid so much of myself from her.
When we get to the temple courtyards, we go between the Huntress and Pupil temples to the large stables in the back. The three temples share stable, which makes me wonder just how much the other two orders are involved in the theft of the alicorn.
But what would they have to gain from Sarai extorting Adela’s magic?
The stables sit behind the three temples, on the very edge of the city, where Insborough looks out over the sea. Built of a sandblasted limestone and dark timber, they stand two stories tall, with one level for horses and mules and the second for the stable hands who care for them.
The doorways are arched and wide enough to fit a team through side by side. Between doorways are wrought-iron lanterns, currently dimmed to low glows.
It all is rather majestic, as if even the horses of the orders are ostentatious. But at least it’s not a barn built out of ridiculously expensive marble.
We enter through a side door that dares to creak, grateful to find the stable empty.
No one is up and about doing late-night chores. We won’t need to bother with excuses for why two novitiates would come to visit the horses in the middle of the night.
Though if we did, our plan was to abashedly admit to adventurous amorous pursuits.
Inside, the stable is like every other barn I’ve been in—which is admittedly few. It smells of hay and saddle soap and piss. We move quietly between the polished wooden stalls with their brass nameplates.
We know instantly when we find the stall we’re looking for. Not only is Ulric sleeping, half-sitting, half-lying on a pile of feed sacks in front of it, but the stall is the only one that goes all the way up to the ceiling.
We hurry over. The foal is asleep in the corner, curled up with her head tucked under one wing. Adela steps around Ulric’s sleeping form and tries the door.
It won’t budge.
“I can go fetch my lock-picking set,” I suggest quietly.
We don’t think that Ulric will disrupt our plans, but it’s better to not have to test him. The less he knows, the less Sarai can torture out of him.
Adela chuckles quietly. “Of course you have lock-picking sets.” She gets a faraway look in her eyes, as if remembering. “That’s why you knew the door beneath the temple was locked, and that it leads to other temples. You’ve explored it all.”
I flinch even though there’s no derision in her voice. If anything, I think there’s a bit of admiration. But I’m not used to someone knowing who I really am. I keep expecting her to judge me harshly as a liar and a thief.
She wouldn’t be wrong. I’m both.
And worse.
Hopefully she’ll never find out about the skulls, and those will stay an accident of Lathai’s grief in her mind. Burning down the matching hut is unforgiveable.
“We don’t have time,” Adela says, and it takes me a moment to realize she’s talking about picking the lock. “Your aunt and uncle will be at the courtyard soon, and we don’t want them to have to wait around for us or they’ll draw suspicion.”
From the ground, Ulric clears his throat. “It’s not locked. There’s a specific sequence to opening it.” He remains in the same position with his eyes still closed. “Like the way to the valley, only on a much smaller scale. Sarai set it, and she’s the only one who knows it.”
Hearing our voices, the alicorn wakes up. She is instantly in the air, bobbing against the ceiling and the bars of the stall, hitting them hard.
“Well then. Let’s get this little one out.” Between one blink and the next, the front wall of the stall is gone. Goddess, she’s hot when she leans into her power. Not just her magic, but who she truly is. The beating, fiery heart of herself.
Adela smirks. “Bet Sarai’s going to be thrilled she pushed me to learn that.”
Unfortunately, getting rid of the wall of the stall holding a terrified wild creature who can only kind of fly has less-than-ideal results.
The alicorn dashes out of her stall, smashing into a wall of tack, knocking down finely kept bridles and a leather saddle oiled to a deep sheen. They crash to the ground, loud.
I grimace and look up at the ceiling, to where the stable hands’ rooms sit just above us. I hear the faint squeak of a metal bedframe and hurry to dampen the lanterns at this end of the hall.
It’s not fully dark. That would be too suspicious, but if someone does suddenly come down the stairs to investigate, maybe they’ll assume the stall with its missing wall-and-door combo is just another nook for tack or straw. The stables have plenty of those.
Adela and Ulric hear the squeak, too, and stop trying to catch the alicorn.
We all freeze, straining to listen. But there’s no more sound of movement.
Praise to the Spinner if it’s just a light sleeper rolling over.
If it’s not, and they are also awake and listening carefully, we need to hurry. Silently.
Grabbing a handful of hay, I creep close to the foal, who has found her way to an open bag of oats and is happily munching away.
“That’s straw,” Adela whispers, “not hay.”
I look at her blanky.
“It’s for bedding, not eating.”
“Huh.” I toss the straw down and move quickly forward, hoping to snatch her, but her head whips up, and she startles away, kicking an empty silver pail. The pail flies and hits a trough, clanging.
“Shhh, shhh, shhh.”
Adela steps forward and tries to calm the foal. For a moment, I think it’ll work. The foal takes a tentative step closer, but then we hear footsteps above us. They cross overhead, moving swiftly in the direction of the staircase.
“Hide!” I say, and point Ulric to an empty stall. He dashes in, then carefully swings the door mostly shut.
I duck into one of the dark nooks between the wall of the barn and some stacked-up bales of hay, or maybe straw, pulling Adela with me.
She’s trying to reach the foal, who’s hovering near the high ceilings.
But where there’s a chance the foal might not be seen high above a stable hand’s gaze, there is no chance Adela would be missed.
I tug her down, until she’s half-sitting on my lap, a slightly distracting and enjoyable weight in the midst of the chaos. I’m half-tempted to kiss her neck—just a peck—but I’ll certainly get swatted.
At least if we’re found, the amorous activities excuse would be an easy one to buy.
There’s not much we can do about the foal, but the moment I see the stable hand pop out of the stairway, I worry less.
He’s just a kid, maybe thirteen or fourteen.
I get the sense he got shoved out of bed to check on the noise, because he’s wearing a nightshirt and his boots, shuffling down the aisle of the barn with half-shut eyes.
He looks around blearily, and I think he’ll simply turn around and go back to bed when he pauses. He squints at the far end of the barn where the foal’s stall is, trying to see in the darkness.
“Kian! The stall door!” Adela says.
I groan, not knowing how to put it back at the moment. Right now the stable hand looks confused, as if he doesn’t quite know what’s wrong, but if I suddenly pop a whole part of the wall with a door back into existence while he’s looking, he will definitely suspect foul play.
I could throw something past him and make him turn in the opposite direction.
I look around, but there’s nothing with enough heft within arm’s length. Still, I’m scrabbling through ideas of what I could try when smoke starts pouring out of one of the lanterns on the other end of the barn.
The stable hand runs over to it and grabs a blanket, waving it at the fire, which only manages to stoke it higher.
“Fire!” He yells into the night, no doubt to rouse his fellows upstairs. “Fire!”
When no one comes immediately, he hurries to the stairs and starts clomping up them.
This is our chance.
I pop the door back into place while we climb out of the pile of hay. Ulric is in the aisle already, waiting.
“Thank you for the distraction,” Adela says to him. Of course the fire was Ulric. And here I thought my prayers might have suddenly meant something to the goddesses.
“But how do we catch her?” Adela looks around, frantic for a solution.
“Oh!” Ulric pulls a peppermint out of his pocket.
“Hankering for a sweet?” I ask. Like now’s the time.
He hands it to Adela. “The stable master gave it to me earlier when they saw me fighting to calm her. Said the horses often like them, but by the time we went through the nightmare of catching her in the valley and then the cage, she wouldn’t come near enough to take it from me.”
“Perfect.” Adela hurries over to the alicorn with the candy in her outstretched palm. Curious in the way babies of all species are, the foal drops from the ceiling slightly, wanting to see what’s being offered. She lands on wobbly legs.
Above us, we hear the scrambling of feet as others undoubtedly hurry to shake off sleep and put on clothes and boots.
The alicorn sniffs at Adela’s hand, then takes the peppermint with her thick, sensitive lips. Adela scratches at the spot between the foal’s wings with one hand and holds on to her mane with the other.
She nods to us. “Let’s go.”
Ulric takes a step forward, and the foal tries to bolt. Thankfully Adela holds firm, taking one of the little creature’s wings in her hand and holding her mane tightly.
“I’ll stay behind,” he says. “She’s too scared of me. I’ll cover for your absence.”
I think of the way Sarai lashed us when Aunt Ujvala stole some of Brother Victor’s gems. I owe him an apology when all this is over.
“I don’t want you to have to suffer for the alicorn being gone.”
He points to the dragon skull on his face and then looks at the fire. The smoke is thick and stings our eyes. It flickers to almost nothing. “I’m too powerful to punish now.”
I don’t point out that Sarai had him threatening his closest friends and a defenseless creature just hours ago. But that’s for Ulric to figure out.
“Be safe, friend,” I say. “Protect yourself.”
We hear hurried footsteps on the stairs, and with a whoosh, flame shoots up at the bottom of them. “Go.”
We do. Adela guides the foal, and we slip through the door, closing it behind us.
I watch Ulric upend the bucket of oats and scoop up water from the trough. He hurries over to the stairs as if he’s just discovered the fire. He douses the flames just as we close the door.
“Rope?” Adela asks me.
I hold some up that I grabbed when we ran by the wall of tack. The habits of a thief are hard to break. Especially when you don’t want to.
“Thank the goddess.”
Adela tells me where to place my hands, and I hold on to the alicorn as if my life—and hers—depends on it. Because they do.
If a baby alicorn suddenly shows up flying over Insborough, Sarai’s going to have a whole lot of questions, and eventually someone will slip, or break.
No one can survive torture and stay silent forever.
Well, almost no one. My parents did. They never gave up the family, though it would have likely saved their own lives.
Thankfully, Adela is fast. She knots the rope into a harness that she slips over the alicorn’s head almost instantly. We maneuver through the courtyard.
We arrive at the meeting spot to find Aunt Ujvala and Uncle Jamie waiting.
We work together to quickly unload the trade goods and the fake goods, and then Adela climbs up. She tugs on the rope-tied bridle, and the foal follows easily.
One peppermint and suddenly Adela is trustworthy. Who knew that’s all it took?
Aunt Ujvala gapes. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen her face so alight with joy.
She looks like a little girl who’s seen her first pony.
But of course, she is in a way. Only my parents had ever entered the valley regularly.
Aunt Ujvala was only there for a couple of days, hiding in the forest. Even if she’d been there for a month, it’s rare to see a baby creature with the birth rates so low.
Let alone an alicorn.
“What’s her name?” Aunt Ujvala asks as they get settled in the wagon.
“She doesn’t have one yet.” Adela strokes the alicorn’s nose and considers. The foal blinks wide black eyes in contentment. “I think Tani. For her mama.”
“It’s a good name,” I say.
Adela lies down in the back of the wagon and gently places an arm and leg over the foal. Partly for comfort and partly to contain her if she spooks.
When Tani doesn’t seem to object, Adela nods, and I cover her with a heavy woolen blanket, then pack in bags of potatoes and crates of books and other mundane goods.
It won’t hold up to close inspection, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned growing up in a smuggling family, it’s that very few people look at things closely.
As Adela says, thank the goddess.