Chapter 3
Dinner with Halos was always chaotic.
Arla loved it more than anything in the world.
She had barely made it inside the door of her friend’s little house, which was situated not far from where Arla had once lived with her parents, when she was accosted by Neb and Ettie, their hands sticky and grasping, whilst Halos busied herself cooking what looked to be a chicken.
Condensation moistened the windows, their wooden frames rotting and weak, and there was a stack of unwashed pots and a fire almost burnt out in the grate.
Parchment littered the kitchen table along with half-sewn dresses for Ettie and odd gloves that were missing their partners.
Halos fussed and mumbled under her breath, shouting for Neb to come away from the door as she took from Arla the loaf her friend had collected on her way over.
‘Sorry, sorry. Absolute chaos, as usual, but we’re nearly there.’
Arla took a seat on a rickety wooden chair, the cushion atop it now so thin it may as well have been a dinner mat.
‘We can do chaos, can’t we, Ettie?’ Arla said, scooping the child onto her lap before she could pull the tablecloth and its contents to the floor.
Halos’s cottage felt like home in every sense of the word.
Although Arla had an affinity for beautiful, expensive things, she never felt so at peace as when she was sitting in her friend’s kitchen surrounded by trinkets and wooden toys and mess.
The two women had spent long summers in here as children when Halos’s mother had been alive, helping her peel potatoes and earning sweet freshly baked pastries as a reward.
Arla’s parents had frequented this house, too, the two families so ingrained in one another’s lives they might as well not have been separate at all.
This house had always been busy, so full of life and chaos, just as it was now.
Despite the madness, though, Halos was an excellent cook.
Dinner passed by too quickly and the twins were put to bed with only a little fuss. Halos placed a mug of tea in front of Arla just as the sun began to set. ‘So how are you? Actually. No lies.’
Arla’s breath hitched, though she didn’t know why. Perhaps because her friend cared. Perhaps because her friend had been there through everything. ‘I’m good. Dreading going to the border with Stappen but … I’m good.’
‘You can tell me if you’re not, you know.’
Arla couldn’t meet her friend’s eyes. She knew Halos would listen to everything, even the things that kept her up at night, the nightmares and the grief that came in waves even after all these years.
‘I passed by my parents’ house on the way here. I didn’t think it would still hurt.’
Halos reached her hand across the table and rested it atop Arla’s. ‘I don’t think it will ever stop hurting.’
Halos knew that all too well. Her grandmother and her ancestors before that had been kept as slaves by the previous kings of Hadalyn.
Halos had grown close to her grandmother after her mother died in the battle of Grey Hill.
One result of the war was that the act of slavery was abolished, and those four years before she died, during which Halos’s grandmother had been free, had imprinted themselves on Halos’s soul.
Arla knew her friend still grieved her mother and grandmother deeply.
‘We learn to live with it,’ Halos said gently.
Arla smiled weakly. Yes, she was learning to live with it.
She just wished she didn’t have to. She wished she didn’t feel the need to tell Halos again that some days she had to fight with herself to get out of bed.
That some days she disappeared for hours just to walk or train until her head was clear.
That sometimes she wished desperately that she’d had some other family, some distant relative, even, who could have taken her in and maybe her path would have been different.
‘Enough about me,’ Arla said, plastering a smile on her face that she was sure Halos wouldn’t buy. ‘Tell me about you.’
‘Well,’ Halos began, ‘I was thinking of taking the twins down to the Canus this summer and teaching them how to swim like we used to. Ettie will pick it up easily, I just know it, though Neb might need a little persuasion. Oh, and you know the man who works at the blacksmith’s?
Well he was in the shop the other day helping me fix up one of the chairs… ’
Arla let her friend speak until there was nothing left to chew over between them. She left Halos’s cottage with a lightness in her heart that she experienced as a kind of relief from her usual shadow and darkness.
* * *
Arla’s new dresses were perfect, and the pages of the latest book she had started reading made her smile as she sat curled beneath a woollen blanket beside the fire in her rooms at Castle Grey.
She wondered what Hark was doing to prepare for tomorrow. Perhaps he was drinking his body weight in whisky at one of those taverns he favoured, or maybe he’d lured a pretty girl back to his rooms.
The thought left a bitter taste in her mouth.
Hark Stappen was a private man, his affairs a mystery even to Arla, who had made it her sole mission to discover everything there was to know about him.
He left Castle Grey from time to time to travel back to Kastonia – likely to report to his king on his findings inside Hadalyn, though Arla had made sure there were no secrets Hark could discover that she didn’t already know – and a memory sprung to the forefront of her mind.
It had been late one night in the middle of summer. The air was balmy and perfumed with the scent of roses, and the sun had set only a couple of hours before Arla had seen Hark riding out of Castle Grey at breakneck speed.
It had been strange enough for her to saddle her own mare and follow.
He had ridden hard and fast, and Arla was sweating with the strain of keeping up with him.
What would be important enough for Hark to ride so hard for Kastonia?
Nothing odd had happened in or outside of Castle Grey in recent days, and Hark had been positively relaxed over dinner when he’d declared he was riding for Kastonia in the morning.
He’d said nothing about disappearing in the middle of the night.
Arla’s mare, Vetta, was sure-footed and silent, though not even the gods could hide her forever, and the closer they galloped to the border between Kastonia and Hadalyn, the thinner the trees became, until there was nothing to hide Arla from giving chase.
Hark turned in his saddle and spotted her immediately.
His face was pinched, and his hair was slick with sweat as he pulled up his horse and waited for Arla to approach. Her own chest heaved with the effort of the gallop, and she was glad Hark didn’t give her a second to begin speaking before he tore into her.
‘Why the fuck are you following me? I told you I was leaving. I don’t need an escort, assassin,’ he sneered, his own chest rising and falling rapidly.
Arla swallowed, straightening in the saddle. ‘In a hurry, Stappen? What’s so urgent you need to leave in the middle of the night and push your horse to the point of collapse?’
His eyes narrowed, his fingers clenching and unclenching on the reins as his horse pawed the ground. ‘None of your business.’
Arla scoffed. ‘Wrong, it’s exactly my business. Where are you going so quickly?’
Something changed in Hark’s eyes, something too quick for Arla to place, but she was sure it was too similar to regret. ‘It’s nothing that concerns you. Believe me.’
His voice was soft, and it was … strange. It wasn’t often that Hark backed down to her, and, given that nothing indeed had happened in Hadalyn that would require him to leave so quickly, Arla’s mind jumped to the next possible conclusion.
‘You’re meeting a girl, aren’t you? Does your king hate you so much that he’d send you to live away from your lover?’
She regretted mocking him the second his eyes turned stony, and he tugged his lip between his teeth.
‘As I said,’ he muttered. ‘It’s nothing that concerns you.’
Arla was already turning Vetta back towards the town. Fine. If Hark wanted to almost kill himself making it back to his secret lover in the middle of the night, who was she to stop him?
She kicked her horse into a canter and called back over her shoulder. ‘I hope she’s pretty, Stappen.’
The memory burst when a piece of wax-sealed paper slid beneath her door accompanied by a sharp knock, and she almost screamed in frustration.
Arla had worked too many days in a row to warrant being sent on a job this late at night, and her hair was currently clean.
But this was what she had signed up for, wasn’t it?
What she had worked every day for the last nine years to achieve.
She wondered – often – if her parents would be proud of her, or if they would be disgusted with what she had done to ensure she could spend her evenings in front of a fire with maids tending to her as if she were royalty.
The crackle of a flame jolted her from her thoughts, and she sighed as she closed the book and placed it lovingly beside the half-drunk tea on the table beside her.
Arla didn’t bother reading the note before dragging her leather assassin’s uniform onto her body, and ritually strapping the array of blades she had come to think of as extra limbs into their correct places.
Only when she was sure she carried enough weapons for whatever assignment Cyrus had for her, did Arla pick up the thick, creamy paper and set off in the direction of the town.
* * *
Whatever this target had done to piss off Cyrus must have been significant.
The man walked with the air of someone used to getting his own way, and the expensive fabric of his jacket informed Arla that he was likely one of the few wealthy enough to live on Grey Hill.
He must have done something especially irking to the king to warrant sending Arla after a noble.