Chapter 40
CHAPTER FORTY
THOMAS
“We are stronger than we think, and also more fragile. Listen to your body, because nowhere else can you find an accurate assessment of your limits.”
~ Matri’sion lesson
T he boy shifted from foot to foot as I pulled on my boots, my bones protesting the movements. “…and I think she’s bleeding, ” he told me, yet again. “And she’s dressed like us. ”
My heart sank.
I arrived to find Audrey had already been moved into a tent. I heard rustling from within and the occasional low murmur from an older woman.
Chay lifted a hand. He wasn’t wearing a tabard, and his shield, at his feet, was studded with arrows.
“How’s the road back to the city?” he asked me. “Passable at night?”
I assumed he meant on horseback. “I don’t have enough riders. What happened?”
“Brigands,” he replied. “We were trying to be less conspicuous.” That was the story behind his lack of tabard? I saw the wide-eyed youngster lingering by the fire and didn’t question him further. “Isolde’s still out there. She’s sick.”
My heart ached for the lady. “Is she…” I cast my eyes toward the tent again.
“She bought us time to flee,” Chay said, his voice neutral. “Audrey wants to return immediately. Isolde will be on foot.”
My bones could attest to the dip in temperature but not to whether they’d find a live woman or a corpse. “You’re thinking to return to the city, get aid, and take them back to the site?”
He nodded. “Bliksem is fine for the journey, and I know where to go. Isolde’s horse will make it to the city, but much further and she’ll be harming her. But there are other horses.”
The lady had been on Isolde’s horse? Before I could get the details, she emerged from the tent, her expression eerily reminiscent of the Duke when he was a hair’s breadth from a full-blown rage. A bandage was neatly tied around her upper arm, and her skirts were a few fingers too short for the length of her legs.
I caught the look the cook sent me as she, too, emerged. Whatever had happened, we didn’t need rumors exaggerating the cost to the lady. If it was known she’d worn a different skirt home…
“Thanking you for waking me, lad,” I told the boy. “Could you get my horse ready, please?”
“I’ll get you some torches,” the cook said primly, and made herself scarce.
“Thomas, you don’t need to do this,” Audrey said, shaking her head. “We’ll be safe on the road back.”
“They’ll do without me for half a day,” I told her. And the thought of seeing Sandra made me glad. I didn’t like to think of her huddled in a dark corner, waiting for the terror to subside before it was safe to emerge.
By the time tomorrow night rolled around, I was going to be an exhausted shell of a man, but that wouldn’t change me overmuch.
It took me only a few moments to tap a few people on the shoulder so they’d run it without me whilst I was gone. By the time we got to the horses, they’d been fed, watered, and were ready for the short trip to the city.
I suspected Chay left the arrows in his shield as some sort of proof of their trials. It worked, too. No one looked too closely at Audrey’s skirt with the bandage on her arm and the arrows in his shield.
Audrey’s saddle had been switched to a man’s, but I didn’t comment. There must’ve been reason for her own to have been replaced.
“How are…people?” Audrey asked as we set off. “Everything.”
“Well,” I told her, because she wasn’t going to hear much information, and I didn’t want to share delicate details within earshot of half the camp.
She nodded, her eyes locked on the road before us. I let the two of them ride abreast and followed along behind, making the most of the light of their torches for my nervous horse.
The road between the city and the tourney grounds had been immaculate before the tourney and maintained during the festivities, but that was weeks ago now. Rain and use had seen holes develop in the road. Stones jutted up, and puddles had softened patches to mud. It wasn’t a ride through the orchard, but it wasn’t a well-lit, cobblestone street, either. The two of them obviously weren’t worried about the risks each of those holes provided, but I wasn’t the world’s greatest horseman, and I had no shame in that. My two feet had carried me further than those two had ridden, of that I had no doubt.
I was relieved when the city walls came into view. The roads were silent, and the gates were down, but they’d open for her. They should have search parties out, too.
But when we made it to the heavy wood and steel gate, no one responded to my shout of “Hoy, friends!” or “Raise the gate!” and I wasn’t announcing the lady’s presence at the top of my lungs, just to have any listening ears squirrel away that information.
The three of us stood there in the quiet of the night.
“I didn’t see anyone along the wall,” Audrey said softly. “Did either of you?”
“No,” Chay said.
I’d been watching the road. “They’ve probably got search parties out.”
“They’ve probably not set the Watch properly,” Audrey said, her tone icy. “It’s too cold for her to be out overnight. If she was healthy, and they hadn’t had a mage?—”
“Raise the gate!” Chay bellowed, and the lady winced.
“They had a mage?” I asked hesitantly. “Are you sure, my lady?” Mages weren’t found in brigand groups.
“Not like I’ve seen them,” she told me grimly. “I didn’t get a good look at them, but they blasted us with air and looked to be gliding.”
A chill went through me. I held my torch up, studying the arrows on Chay’s shield again. The wind around me screamed, and it smelled like snow. My heart worked like a smith’s hammer against my chest. “We need to get in.” There was no way to get her in those walls, though. They were impenetrable. But we had to find some way.
“Do you know that sort of mage?” Audrey asked me.
I focused on keeping my tone even. “Mayhap, my lady. We should ride to another gate.”
Chay lifted his torch to the side. The land was clear, the grass trampled from the tent city that had sprung up during the tourney. Now, it was a field of muddy pits and furrows.
“Sorry,” he said, sounding anything but. “I’m not taking Bliksem through that in this light.”
But urgency was clawing at me. “We can walk them.” We wouldn’t be expected to move alongside the walls, would we? And we might stumble across someone on duty who could raise the gates, too.
“Someone is just as likely going to patrol past,” Chay disagreed.
Terror drummed. “We need to get inside the walls.”
“He’s right,” Audrey said in a monotone. “The longer we’re out here, the longer Isolde is out there. Do we wait, or do we go get her ourselves?”
The thought of heading toward that mage…
“She bought you time so you could flee,” Chay said bluntly. “That was her wish. She gave us instructions on how to do it.”
“So you go back!” she told him furiously. “I’m safe, now!”
He was so unmoved that I suspected it wasn’t the first time he’d heard that demand since they’d fled.
My skin crawled. “I’ll go,” I told her, ashamed to hear my own voice crack. I cleared it, hoping she just thought I was sick. “I’ll go at sunup, with others. We’ll find her.” We’d need the dogs. I didn’t tell the lady that, though. “I’m sorry, my lady.”
When she turned to me, there were tears on her cheeks, but her expression was fixed in a compassionate smile. There was something deeply unsettling about that. “I understand,” she said, but I didn’t know what she understood, or why she looked like an effigy of a demon attempting to disguise itself as the Wife.
She climbed nimbly from her saddle, not slowed by the injury to her arm. I followed her lead, my knees clicking and grinding, bracing myself to walk. The big knight and his proud pony could sit here and be too fancy for the fields. The lady and I knew how to make things happen.
She was pulling a length of rope from the saddlebags, though, sniffling quietly, dashing tears away. “How many knives do we have?” she asked in that monotone voice.
Puzzled, I watched as Chay shook his head. But she wasn’t looking at us. Two big, wicked-looking hunting knives appeared from those saddlebags. “Whose bags are those?” I asked them. Chay looked at me for a moment, his expression unreadable, then shrugged.
“Mine until Isolde gets back,” Audrey said, working with the rope.
“If you’re trying to make a grappling hook, no you aren’t,” Chay told her. “That’ll never hold you.”
“I’m used to that,” she told him with another unladylike sniff, then she tested the strength of her knot with a hard tug.
My heart ached for the child. “I know you’re scared,” I told her, like I would’ve if she were one of my girls. “But look on the bright side. We’re here and healthy. As soon as someone comes by, we’ll rouse a search party.”
She didn’t respond but set to work on the second knife, knotting it a little further along from the first.
Chay blew out a long breath. “Pretty sure this place’s whole claim to fame, aside from your father, is that it’s impossible to get into,” he said, frustration in the words. “This is ridiculous, Audrey, even you know that.”
She tugged on this knot, too. “Going to tell me I can’t do it?” she asked, monotone again.
“Far be it from me to speak facts. That rope won’t even reach the top.”
She didn’t respond, just paced a short distance away, and started to swing it as if it was a grappling hook.
“Does she know you were set on by Southerners?” I asked Chay quietly as she let it fly, and it fell short, hitting the stone with a loud clatter and falling to the ground.
“Yes.”
She’d know, then, that they wouldn’t be inclined toward mercy. My heart sat heavily as she set her feet, eyed the top of the wall, and started spinning her makeshift hook again. “That maid’s the only one the Duke let her be close to,” I told him, hoping his frustration might mellow some if he could understand. “I bet she’s been a right pain in the backside, but…”
Chay sighed and climbed down to stand beside me, shoulder to shoulder. “We can’t let her go back out.”
“The risk is too high,” I agreed softly. The rope clattered again. She jogged over to it, yanking it fiercely. “You were smart to remind her of Isolde’s wishes.”
But he wasn’t mollified by my soft words. “She doesn’t need to be there when they find Isolde’s body.”
I was relieved to hear he was thinking along the same lines as me. Grim reality was better than dangerous optimism. “It might be hard to convince her to stay. I could ask her to help at the hospital. It’ll keep her busy.”
“And get her sick. No. We need to think up something closer to home to keep her busy.”
I dug out my hip flask, offering it to him. The light from the torch in his hand flickered over the metal surface, showing the rose my wife had paid dearly to have engraved on the surface. Chay shook his head, so I unscrewed it. The cider was body temperature and tasted like coppers, like it always did from this flask. I loved it all the same.
“Mayhap Sandra,” I suggested, keeping the words soft. “I could tell the lady she needs company. Do you think that would entice her?”
“I’ve no idea what entices that woman,” he said, in such a way that I looked at him hard. The planes of his face were harsh in the bright light, the growth on his jaw light and shadows under his eyes dark. “No,” he breathed. I followed his gaze as he said, louder, “Wild horses, woman, what are you doing? ”
She was off the ground already, feet scrabbling for footholds, hands locked around knife-hilts. The blades were buried deep in the cracks of the wall.
There was no way she’d make it to the top. “Get down!” I ordered, not realizing I spoke to her like one of my own until the words were out of my mouth. Chay was already at the wall, hovering beneath her, I a few steps behind. My heart was in my throat. I could see the pale flecks of stone where she’d cut herself a foothold at my eye height. “My lady, that is not safe. ”
She didn’t say anything. The rope dangled above her, hooked as it would’ve had it been a proper grappling hook, at least from the look of it, and my heart sat in my chest like a lump of ice as I watched her pull a knife from the stone.
One of her feet slipped, and she leaned in close to the wall, her breathing deep and quick, her eyes turned upward.
Neither Chay nor I said anything as she found purchase with her unsteady foot higher and drove the knife in again, using it like a climbing spike.
I closed my eyes.
Southern mages, dead handmaids, plague, and a guard who couldn’t or wouldn’t maintain the peace.
We needed to leave this city. Even the appearance of safety was gone, now.
The whisper of rubble falling made me look again. She was higher than she’d been a moment ago, but not even halfway to the bottom of the rope.
I tossed my shield away and braced myself to catch her. Beside me, Chay did the same.
From the corner of my eye, I saw movement along the wall, and hope surged through me. “There’s someone to open the gate!” I called, my heart in my throat. “My lady!”
“Who goes?” someone shouted.
“Raise the gate!” I called back, feeling sick, unable to take my eyes off her as she reversed her progress, finding the holes she’d used already, the same footholds.
The lone figure broke into a jog just as the little lady slipped.
Time stopped, just as it had when Beatie had tumbled off the edge of the drain and into the water below last winter. And just like then, I stayed back, trusting others to fulfill their role. I was in the wrong position, and I couldn’t remedy that. If I’d moved, I would’ve knocked into Chay, who was in the perfect position.
She caught herself, though, with a noise of pain through gritted teeth, then skidded down the wall. I remembered the local butcher’s boy holding my little girl up, covered in algae and ready to cry from the terror of it.
Just like Beatie, when Audrey finally hit the ground, she was shaking and breathing heavily.
“Show yourselves,” the man above the gate called.
He was on the other side, away from the little lady’s makeshift grapple. Hoping we wouldn’t need to explain that, I grabbed Chay’s torch and strode over to the horses, holding the light to my tabard. “You’re looking for us,” I called up.
A moment later, I heard the wheel turning.
I glanced over in time to see the lady knock away the hand Chay offered to help her up, standing on legs that visibly shook. She went to her horse and took hold of the saddle horn, then let it go and took the reins, still gulping in air and expelling it in what could’ve been pain or distress.
“We’re going to get her,” I promised Audrey, feeling the cold biting at my fingers. The ground was soft beneath my boots, though, not frozen. I’d heard tales of it opening and swallowing men whole. “It’s going to be okay.”
Still making those strained noises, she nodded and led us into the city, her hands white-knuckled on her handmaid’s reins.