Chapter 18 #2
I steered Pain after him, heart high in my throat, ears straining for that deadly cry of witch!
– but if it came, I was no longer close enough to hear it.
We were out of earshot within moments. Brainne and its hills were a blur around me, low wooden houses glowing in the sickly green-and-orange light of sunrise, cobblestone streets covered in squashed flowers and spilled beer – the remains of First Fruits, and thank hell and its misty halls for it, because at least a good part of the populace was still in their beds to sleep off their hangovers.
I could only hope most of the guard corps would be similarly indisposed.
Jay’s startled lips were still moving soundlessly in my mind’s eye.
Mists take me, what had I been thinking?
They knew. They knew. A secret I’d clung to since the day Aranc first wrapped his hand around my throat and told me I was his to wield – a secret I’d killed to keep, and now they knew, Estien’s greatest gossip and the little knife-slinger who talked and talked and talked as soon as you got a single pitcher of beer into him.
Which meant the guards would know. The court would know.
The whole fucking world would know that Aranc’s little bird and the nameless witch on the run were one and the same person, and sweet hell below, I had not been ready to ever become that much myself again …
A gloved hand grabbed my reins.
Only then did I realise Durlain was no longer riding ahead of me.
‘Keep your eyes on the road.’ The bite in his voice, just a fraction out of breath, suggested more trouble than the ice-cold focus on his face did. ‘To the left here – they’re coming after us. What the hell happened?’
The blare of a horn echoed behind us, deafening in the morning quiet of a sleeping city.
Fuck.
You know what they do to your kind …
‘I ran into Jay.’ My words emerged in staggered pants, barely audible over the clatter of hooves. ‘In the stables. He was going to alert the others, so I used my runes to shut him up, but then—’
Durlain jerked towards me in the saddle. ‘You did what?’
The incredulity in his voice cut deeper than my own self-reproach – the gut-punch realisation that even the prince of many faces had expected better of me. ‘I know it was stupid. If I’d had a moment to think …’
‘Flames have mercy.’ He sent a glance over his shoulder, then turned back to me, something a fraction bewildered in his eye. ‘I’d recommend doing that more often – thinking less. It seems to significantly improve your ideas.’
I gaped at him.
He didn’t meet my gaze, looking back one more time, then steering Smudge into an unpaved alleyway to our right. Pain followed without any instructions, which was just as well; if she’d waited for me to act, I might have cantered all the way to the other side of Brainne before my mind caught up.
The passage was so narrow that we had to slow down to ride side by side. The muddy street was a blessing, though: the sand muffled the sound of clattering hooves enough to pick up the shouts of guards five, ten streets away.
Improve your ideas.
‘Say that again?’ I stammered, ten whole seconds too late.
Durlain’s lip curled a fraction. ‘Surely you don’t expect me to compliment you twice?’
‘Why would you compliment me even once?’ The houses on either side were close, their wooden walls thin-looking.
Some last care for consequences was the only reason I managed to keep my voice down.
‘I put a whole damn garrison on our trail! The birds might be after me, but everyone will be after a witch, and—’
‘You didn’t hear me say we aren’t in deep trouble,’ he interrupted, nose wrinkling as we passed a dark side passage stinking pungently of piss.
‘But we’d have been in far greater trouble if you had obediently stood back and let the little pest kill you – so I’m rather pleased you didn’t wait for permission to fight this time, if you care to know. ’
Oh.
Oh, hell.
The image of those merciless fists returned, the trails of icy mist glittering as he punched into human flesh again and again and again.
‘Alright,’ I stammered, not sure what else to say to that – because it had sounded suspiciously like a second compliment, yet I doubted he wanted me to take it as such.
I didn’t even know if I wanted to take it as such.
He was not my ally, and he was not my bloody friend. ‘Um. Do we make for the north, then?’
He cocked his head, mouth thinning.
Shreds of shouting voices drifted across the thatched roofs around us – no, behind us, I realised with a hollow, plummeting sensation in my guts. The sun was rising to my left. Which meant we were riding south. Which meant—
‘Oh, no.’ My mouth went dry. ‘You told them we were returning to that hell-cursed estate, didn’t you?’
The twitch of his lips was short, swift, and unmistakably furious – an expression that was to smiles what poison ivy was to flowers. ‘I did, yes.’
Which had been a fine strategy when we still had enough time to get out of the city before the birds set after us.
Now the net was closing, guards were getting involved in large numbers, and with our path leading loudly and publicly north, what were the chances they weren’t already checking every single individual leaving town in that direction?
‘Shit,’ I said.
Durlain didn’t bother to throw me a look, coat billowing around his back as he prodded Smudge back into a canter.
Even between these dingy, filthy houses, even fleeing for his sorry life, he somehow managed to look poised and regal as ever in the saddle – back held straight, chin held high, a silk-and-amethyst shadow blissfully untouched by the messy realities of daily human life.
I didn’t feel regal or poised as I sped after him.
I felt like a feral alley cat about to bury her teeth in someone.
‘Are we trying the east gate?’ I managed to grind out as I caught up with him again, even though we weren’t riding east, even though we had passed three or four turns to the left that he’d barely granted a glance.
But it seemed the only option of sense we had left.
West meant riding farther away from our destination for the night, with no guarantee we’d find a safe bed elsewhere, and south …
South were the wastelands.
South were all the reasons Brainne was called the poisoned city.
Durlain did not reply, and he did not change course.
‘What are you doing?’ We finally reached the end of those narrow back streets and emerged onto a broad square, the embers of a bonfire still smouldering at the centre.
Behind us, yells echoed over the eerily quiet town.
Before us, the hills surrounding Brainne rose beyond the rows of thatched roofs.
‘You know about the bloody marshes, don’t you? You can’t—’
‘I know about the bloody marshes.’ There was a gleam in his eye I hadn’t seen there before.
A disconcerting luminescence to his pale skin, as if the glow of sunrise was consuming him from the inside out – the look of a fire about to erupt.
‘Which is why we’re riding south. Do you have something you can wrap around your face? ’
To protect my lungs.
Because even the air in that toxic, bubbling hell was deadly.
‘We’ll drown!’ I had to shout to hear myself over the deafening beat of hooves against the cobblestones; the horses had broken into a gallop. ‘Or dissolve! Or boil to death! I’d rather …’
He threw a side-glance at me, dark hair whipping around his face. ‘You’d rather what? Be tried as a witch? Face Aranc’s wrath?’
Hell.
It would be so comforting if once, just once, he would be hopelessly, laughably wrong.
‘Do you at least have a plan?’ The city gate loomed ahead, an unimposing relic from the time before an overeager provost had turned a valley of farmland into the swamp that lay beyond – yet right now, it seemed no less deadly than the gate to Niflheim he had opened the day before.
‘If you’re just planning to ride into that mess and hope for the best—’
He was reaching for his bag at full speed, pulling out something that looked like a heavy scarf followed by one of his dark silk shirts. ‘I always have plans.’
‘You also like risks more than any healthy person should!’
‘Thraga …’ Finally he slowed down, to Smudge’s visible annoyance – one bend away from that cursed gate, and behind us, thundering horse hooves were coming closer at horrifying speed. ‘I have no intention of drowning. Trust me.’
Trust.
From his ruthless lips, the word sounded about as alien as the notion of love.
I swallowed, tasting the acrid stench of the marshes in the back of my throat, and bitterly said, ‘Words famously spoken by people one really should not trust.’
It made no sense to argue. I didn’t have a choice here, and we both knew it – it was gambling or dying, and even drowning would be better than anything Aranc could come up with.
All Durlain needed to do was remind me of it, and that would be the end of the matter; hell, he could ride on without a word, and I’d probably end up following, too.
Instead, he was silent as he closed his bag, thrust the scarf into my lap, and began folding his shirt into a makeshift mask.
‘You do realise,’ he said, the calm in his voice strangely stilted, ‘that I’d doom my little sister to a lifetime in Lesceron’s hands by drowning today?’
Cimmura.
Always Cimmura.
It wasn’t a reassurance, exactly. But he wasn’t forcing me to come along. He wasn’t threatening me. He wasn’t riding off and leaving me to fend for myself.
For a man like Durlain Averre, I supposed that could count as kind-heartedness.
Behind me, Brainne was waking up. Before me, disaster was waiting.
‘Fine,’ I choked and picked up his scarf as I prodded Pain back into motion. ‘Let’s go.’