Chapter 24
The princess was a breath away from screaming again.
Tamsin could tell. She had the sight memorized by now—the gulp of air, the flash of teeth. The way Serafina’s mouth parted on a howl.
With a groan, Tamsin put her head back against the elm behind her. “Please,” she muttered. “Don’t.”
The princess released her breath of air on an exasperated huff—not a scream, thank God—and whirled to face Tamsin.
Tamsin winced and closed her eyes, because looking at the princess was like staring at a small, evil sun.
“I am trying,” the princess said, in the patient tones one used with a child, “to find Zenobia.”
“I am aware of that.”
“Or, failing that, some assistance.” Tamsin couldn’t see her, but she could feel the princess put her petite elegant hands on her petite elegant hips. “Perhaps it is not apparent to you that we are in some danger.”
Tamsin was pretty damned cognizant of that fact, yes. Her face was sunburned, and she hadn’t had a drink of water in some time, and she had a broken fucking leg. They were being hunted by mysterious sinister assassins, and she, Tamsin, could not, at this particular juncture, walk. Or move at all.
It had been five days since she, Princess Serafina, and Zenobia had been snatched right out of the harbor in St. Petroc’s.
Tamsin had been whacked across the face with something hard and blunt—by the splinters near the enormous goose egg on her forehead, she suspected it had been a wooden plank—and she’d been bleary and confused for half a day thereafter.
She had only faint recollections of a dank ship’s hold, her mouth dry and her head aching.
Some blissful cool sensation against her bound wrists.
Just as she’d got her wits about her again, she and Serafina had been plucked off the ship and tossed into a miserable, filthy closed coach. Zenobia had not been permitted to enter the carriage, and the sound of her furious barking had trailed them for nearly an hour.
It was at this point that the princess had started screaming. I will kill you all! she’d shrieked. I will tear your flesh from your bones with my teeth and redden my nails with your blood!
Their captors—Verdura’s henchmen, Tamsin supposed—were far gentler with Serafina than they were with Tamsin.
Serafina had not been knocked over the head, despite doing everything in her power to tempt such a fate.
When the driver banged on the carriage box and entreated the princess to keep silent, she’d refused to comply, only screamed until she and Tamsin both had been gagged.
It had added a pleasant little soupcon of imminent suffocation to their general torment.
Honestly. The woman was a nightmare.
They’d been in the coach for the better part of a day when Tamsin had managed to get her hands free.
She’d yanked off her gag and the princess’s too—despite her reservations about the prudence of such an action—and had had the mediocre pleasure of watching the princess’s mouth work reluctantly around the words thank and you.
They had argued, in hushed, furious whispers, about the wisdom of leaping from the moving carriage.
Tamsin had been against it. They weren’t, so far as she could tell, in immediate danger.
Had assassination been their captors’ goal, it could have been accomplished that first night in St. Petroc’s with an ease that made Tamsin sick to think of.
She’d made a very practical and reasonable case for waiting until the carriage stopped and mounting their getaway then.
The princess had been all for leaping. “Why,” she had hissed, “would I stay with Verdura’s thugs a second longer than I must?”
“Because we don’t know where we are? And we’re in a moving vehicle? And if they see us leap out, they’re going to bloody well stop and throw us right back in?”
Serafina’s extremely regal and cogent rebuttal had been to break open the door and hurl herself out of it.
Tamsin had gritted her teeth and launched herself after the princess.
They hadn’t been seen. The coach had trundled on, unaware its captives had fled.
It would have been a fairly successful escape attempt, except for the fact that Tamsin had broken her leg when she’d landed.
At least, she thought it was broken. She’d swooned—a terrible and embarrassing experience that she hoped never to repeat—and had woken beneath the elm tree to a pain in her right ankle she couldn’t wrap her mind around.
Luckily, it had stopped hurting an hour or so ago. Unfortunately, she’d also started shivering, and she couldn’t hear very well, and her vision kept getting odd and gray as she looked at the princess’s tiny, irate form. None of it boded well.
“You should go,” Tamsin said. Her voice came out raspy, and her eyes were still closed. She didn’t feel particularly inclined to lift her lids.
“I beg your pardon?”
For all the words were polite, Serafina still somehow sounded as though her tongue were made of acid.
Tamsin forced herself to open her eyes. The princess was standing halfway between the elm and the road. Her waist-length black hair was sweaty and snarled, and for the first time it occurred to Tamsin that the woman must have dragged her to this shaded spot.
“You should go,” Tamsin said again. “As soon as they realize we’ve gone, they’ll be back this way searching for us.”
A muscle flexed in the princess’s angular jaw. “I await Zenobia.”
“Oh for God’s sake.” Tamsin dropped her head back against the tree, which seemed more comfortable by the moment. “You mean to get yourself killed over a bloody dog?”
“Do not speak her name.”
“I didn’t.” She gritted her teeth and tried to keep her eyes open.
The princess stepped closer. Her olive skin was sun-flushed. In the last rays of daylight, her hair looked like shimmering onyx.
Tam suspected she was succumbing to some brain fever, no doubt occasioned by whatever had happened to her right ankle. “I’ll watch,” she got out. “You go hide yourself. Find a hayloft or a pub or something. Don’t—tell them who you are. I’ll wait here for Zenobia.”
“Oh yes. A perfect plan. Then you will give Zenobia the direction of my hayloft, and when the men with guns return, you will subdue them single-handedly.”
“Single . . . leggedly. Perhaps.”
The princess did not laugh, because fiends possessed no sense of humor. She said: “I am not leaving.”
Tamsin groaned. Her eyelids seemed impossibly heavy, and she let them fall with some relief. “Fine. Have it your way. Come along, assassins. We’ve put out a welcome sign for you, right here under this goddamned tree.”
But the princess was not done. She was, somehow, at Tamsin’s side. Her small hands wrapped around Tamsin’s biceps, and she leaned in.
She smelled of rosewater and caraway, Tam thought dizzily. Which was absurd. She ought to smell of brimstone.
“I am not leaving you,” Serafina hissed into Tamsin’s ear. “Brace yourself. This is going to hurt.”
It did. It hurt spectacularly, extravagantly. As the princess dragged Tamsin deeper into the woods, Tamsin’s ankle transformed itself into a molten iron bar made of piercing agony.
But the pain was short-lived. Tamsin took a gulping breath, looked up into the princess’s face, and then—to her intense and everlasting regret—swooned again.