Chapter 14 Silver
Silver
Kiar will not leave me alone.
Which, honestly, is fair enough. I’ve spent most of my time breaking into various places around the castle in an effort to figure out where Merod is hiding, which is the kind of behavior that I would want supervised, too.
But so far I’ve turned up nothing. A surprising amount of doors in the palace are unlocked, which betrays either a high level of trust, a high level of naivete, or a high level of confidence.
I’ve found a few locked doors, though, and I’m making a point of breaking into every single one of them. Disappointingly, so far all the ones I’ve gotten open have been letdowns. No self-important Primes waited within, and no clues to Reltas’s plans.
But there are two specific doors that always prompt Kiar to intervene. One is on the top floor, and the other is tucked away in the basement. When I get close to them, she tends to create a distraction. Usually in the form of a fight. So, clearly, these two doors are my best bet.
I’m working on the top one today.
Dust swirls in the candlelight as I close in on the end of the hall.
A shadow flits through an adjacent room, letting me know that Kiar is watching.
The other guards who roam the castle move in predictable patterns, easy to evade, and there aren’t that many of them.
With the Forest Realm’s depleted numbers, palace security wasn’t high on the priorities list, I guess.
Which is probably why Kiar feels the need to pick up so much of the slack, and she’s proven significantly harder to shake than the rest of them.
This time, though, I’m ready for her. Yesterday when she drew me away from the door in the basement, I was able to linger long enough to determine that the lock on that door is too difficult to pick.
It’s not like the other locks in the palace; it’s something more complicated and ornate. Which means I’ll probably need a key.
Fortunately, I happen to know Kiar has a key ring. One she carries on her person at all times. Which is exactly why I’m going to draw her toward me now.
I reach the end of the hallway, somewhat surprised to find that Kiar’s let me get this far, and kneel in front of the door. When she still doesn’t show, I stick my picks into the lock, making a show of jingling them around.
But when I do that for several seconds and she still doesn’t show, I rock back on my heels and look around, confused.
Was I wrong about the shadow? The hall is quiet, my own breath loud in my ears. But I know she was there. I even spotted her on the way up here. Why would she not stop me this time, when she did all the others? Has she trapped the door or something?
I eye the lock, looking for tampering, but find none. Deciding it’s worth the risk, I redouble my attempts to open it until the lock springs with a satisfying click.
And still, no one approaches.
Does that mean this door is worthless, too? Or maybe something was here before, but now they’ve moved it?
I shove the door open, only to be greeted with Reltas’s personal office. It looks . . . very lived-in. There are papers strewn everywhere, many written in his own hand, and the coat he was wearing yesterday is draped across the back of the chair.
I rise back to my feet, puzzled. This seems worth guarding to me, especially considering how particular Kiar is about protecting her Prime’s personal safety.
After all, I could be slipping a snake into his desk drawer or setting up some kind of ambush, and yet she’s not following me. She’s not here at all.
Maybe it’s just a lucky break. The logical thing to do is to take advantage of the opportunity and start rifling through cabinets and correspondences just to see what I can find.
But I don’t move. Because her absence bothers me. If she’s not here, then she’s been distracted by something more important. And what would she consider more important than this?
Out of the corner of my eye, I see movement in the window at the end of the hallway.
It’s Kiar, sprinting away from the castle and into the woods. For a moment, I get a flash of her expression, just before she disappears into the trees.
She looks . . . terrified.
Without considering it further, I slam the door to Reltas’s office shut and give chase.
If I can break into this room once, then I can break into it again, but whatever’s got Kiar so spooked is only happening right now.
So I rush to the end of the hall, fling open the window, and throw myself into the branches below.
And then the chase is on.
She leads me through the war-torn outer city, winding between collapsed buildings and shattered glass trees. She’s running with a desperation that negates stealth, so it’s not difficult to follow. I’m sure she must hear me behind her, but she doesn’t turn.
Then, suddenly, she comes up short in front of a house with no walls.
Panting, my throat burning, I stumble to a stop behind her.
And there’s . . . Reltas and Mance, standing in the glow of a lantern and staring at each other in weirdly intense silence, as though absolutely unaware of anything around them.
In front of me, Kiar is shaking.
“You brought her here?” she demands. Her voice is harsh and piercing, and both Mance and Reltas flinch as it cuts through the stillness of the moment. Almost like they’ve been caught doing something they weren’t supposed to.
I narrow my eyes. What did we interrupt?
Reltas’s head whips toward us, and his expression flies through surprise, guilt, and anger before hardening into something impassive. “I did not bring her here,” he says through gritted teeth.
But Kiar presses on as though he didn’t speak.
“You don’t even let me come here. In fact, you don’t even tell me when you come here, even though any time you do this could be the time that you give in.
I only knew tonight because I paid some kid to tell me whenever you went into the woods just so I could try to get here fast enough—”
“I never asked you to do that.”
“—only to find her standing cozily across from you, staring into your eyes, right next to a pile of freshly overturned dirt. Her.”
She jabs a finger in Mance’s direction and I don’t like the aggressiveness with which she does it, so I slip a knife out of its holster, just in case.
You okay? I mouth to Mance. She moves her head in a jerky motion that is neither a yes or a no and then lifts one shoulder in a shrug. Which is not especially clear.
“I did not invite her,” Reltas repeats. “I didn’t ask her to be here at all. Although, it’s . . .” He swallows like the next part is difficult for him to say. “. . . probably good that she was.”
I tense, my whole body snapping to attention.
Partly because, if I’m honest, I don’t really like the intimacy of whatever we’ve stumbled on here any more than Kiar does.
But mostly because Reltas is badly misreading the source of Kiar’s anger.
She wants him to be safe, yes. That’s why she ran here with such desperation.
But she very specifically wants him to be safe with her.
Kiar makes a noise in the back of her throat.
It starts as an incredulous sound of protest but quickly morphs into something harsh and frustrated.
She lashes out, and I’m moving before the dagger even leaves her hand, striking it aside with my own thrown blade and then flinging myself into the space between Kiar and Mance, roughly where the front door of this broken home used to stand, another knife at the ready.
“Hey,” I snap. “You’re not mad at her, so don’t take it out on her.”
“Are you volunteering instead?” she snarls. Before I can answer, she charges me, all swinging limbs and flashing metal.
I let her, taking the brunt of the attack in my abdomen, only just twisting away from her slashing blade.
We grapple for a minute, with her making sharp, angry movements and me mostly dodging.
But her assault was fueled by emotion, so she’s not as precise as she normally would be.
She’s not really trying to win, just trying to hit something.
I manage to disarm her and trip her in one motion and she sprawls into the dirt, wincing as she clutches her stomach, which she must have landed on wrong.
Reltas takes a step forward, only to be pinned in place by the look on her face.
For a moment she just lies there, breathing hard and glaring at the three of us. Then she flips back onto her feet and takes off running into the woods, like a beaten animal retreating to nurse its wounds.
Reltas levels a stare at me that I really don’t think he has the right to deliver before taking off after her.
But just as he gets to the tree line, he casts one more look back at Mance.
Their gazes latch on to each other for a heartbeat and something passes between them that makes me stiffen.
Then he’s gone, leaving Mance and me alone in the empty ruins.
I open my hand, looking at the keys I just lifted from Kiar’s pocket, expecting to feel victorious.
But the way that Mance and Reltas looked at each other plays on a loop in my mind, spoiling any sense of triumph.
Slowly, I put the keys in my boot without mentioning them.
Then I take my time retrieving and sheathing my blades before turning to Mance fully, only to feel a pang when I realize that she’s not even looking at me.
Instead, her gaze is focused on the patch of woods Reltas disappeared into, her mind clearly running after him.
I don’t even know if she registers that I’m still here.
Self-consciously, I stuff my hands in my pockets. “What exactly did we walk in on here, Mance?” I ask in a low voice.
It takes a full second for her to tear her eyes away from the trees and focus on me, and even when she does she’s not fully with me. “I don’t . . . really know,” she says. “I’m not sure I want to talk about it.”
I clench a fist. “So you two have secrets now?”
She flinches. “Not . . . secrets, just—”