Chapter 4
Crossing Kastonia would not be as easy as she hoped. It never was.
It had been months since she had been sent out of Hadalyn on a job, and with the shipments going missing, Kastonia had introduced new laws regarding travel through the kingdom.
All citizens – whether native or not – were to be presented at court if they wished to move between the borders either side of the kingdom.
Arla had never heard something so ridiculous, and had she been sent on this assignment by herself, as she had requested, she would have taken no heed of the strange new laws and their infringement on her anonymity.
Even Hark looked reluctant to be riding into the centre of the kingdom, his fingers twisting in Vetta’s mane when he thought Arla wasn’t looking.
She was. It was her job to know weakness and what it looked like.
Hark didn’t want to be here.
Kastonia, despite its reputation for being poor and close to collapse, was a pretty kingdom.
They had travelled through miles of meadow and countryside, and Arla wondered how the country had managed to become so poor when it had acres and acres of land suitable for farming.
The only answer she could conceive was that the Kastonians were lazy.
It only worsened her mood and led her to her thoughts of the people who had butchered her town.
Now, the pair coaxed their weary horses down a cobbled road and into the town of Larkire.
At least we can rest tonight.
The palace loomed up ahead, too beautiful for such a wicked kingdom.
Its spires reached high into the sky, gold blinking wildly at their peaks which shone stupidly bright against the grey stone.
A balcony overhung the front of the palace, a red and gold banner strung tightly against it.
For a kingdom that claimed such dreadful poverty, they had not let the palace lose an ounce of its splendour. Arla loved it immediately.
There were gates ahead, huge iron structures that seemed impenetrable.
The cobbled road they travelled would lead them right to the foot of those gates, winding through the stone buildings that made up Larkire.
Where there had been an abundance of green and trees in the meadows close to the border with Hadalyn, there was not a whisper of it in the centre of the town.
The buildings were harsh stone structures and the rock was crumbling in places.
People huddled on the corners of streets that branched out like lungs – too many people for these decrepit buildings – and the air was thick with lingering smoke and the stench of slums. It reminded her of the back alleys of Hadalyn; places where the vultures lurked, waiting to pounce on anything that had carelessly wandered into their piece of town to die.
But those were the edges of Hadalyn’s town – the back alleys and side streets that were reserved for the poor.
The people here, downcast and wary of the two visitors on horseback, huddled in plain view of the palace, in the centre of the city.
Good. They deserve it.
She couldn’t bring herself to regret thinking it.
Was this what would have become of Hadalyn had the Kastonians succeeded in bringing it to its knees?
Even with the jobs Cyrus sent her on, Arla had never entered Larkire, especially in daylight, so the state of it …
it came as a shock. She had expected poverty, but not … this.
She kept her eyes forwards, wringing her fingers in Eros’s mane as she had watched Hark do. But she wasn’t nervous. No, she welcomed the chance to challenge any of them who dared cross her path. She wanted to show them the might of Hadalyn’s Royal Assassin. It was they who had made her this way.
Being in Kastonia had never bothered her this much in the past, but then again, she hadn’t had to conform to ridiculous rules such as checking in with the royal court on her previous assignments.
It was an insult, really, that she would have to declare herself when the Kastonian king had requested Cyrus’s help and asked for Arla to be sent.
Why should she disclose her movements when their king had instructed them to begin with?
It didn’t make sense, but then, she had seen little of Kastonia that did make sense – from their lush, fertile land free of crops and farms, to the richly decorated palace that bore enough gold on its spires to feed the country for a year.
The streets were becoming busier as they approached the gates to the palace grounds, and Eros tensed beneath her.
‘It’s okay. This is your home,’ she said under her breath, resting a palm on the horse’s neck to settle his unease at the growing crowds.
Before she could understand what was happening, Eros reared, spinning in such a fashion that Arla was forced to grasp his neck just to keep herself atop the stallion.
As his hooves reconnected with the cobbles, she saw Hark draw a blade from somewhere – she wasn’t sure where since she hadn’t seen him carry one – and swing the metal so wildly that she was surprised when the throat its tip now rested against did not shower them in a spray of crimson.
‘You touch that horse again and I will drive this blade through your throat and string you up over the gates.’
There he is.
It had taken two years for him to reveal himself, but here he was. The violent, skilled soldier hiding beneath the polite and charming ambassador.
Arla had never seen Hark look so fierce, his ice-blue eyes darker than usual as he held his blade steady against the young man’s throat.
‘Give me one reason why I shouldn’t run you through right now,’ he growled.
The haggard male shifted under the tip of the blade presented at his neck, but he didn’t look scared. Not as he should do. Arla wondered if the people of Kastonia simply didn’t care what happened to them anymore.
‘You left us, too,’ the man said, staring Hark down as if he could turn the blade on its wielder.
‘Excuse me?’ Hark glowered, a brow rising in what Arla could see was the beginning of his undoing.
‘You left us too, Stappen. You left us like the dragons and the gods before them. You left us for the kingdom that broke us.’
It was … pitiful. But Arla could feel the tether on her temper beginning to fray.
How the man could declare that Hadalyn had broken Kastonia was beyond her.
It was them who had attempted to crush Hadalyn!
And to believe that Hark had abandoned them?
Was one measly ambassador that important to the citizens of a country on its knees?
The oddness of it threw Arla off so greatly that she almost missed the thief – a light-haired, skinny man – tinkering with the gold buckles on Hark’s saddlebags.
The dagger was out of her hand before the first buckle could slide free of the leather strap on Vetta’s saddle.
It met the thief’s sleeve with a thud, pinning it to the leather of the saddle before the pickpocket could gasp. Arla had never been more thankful that Hark had been atop Vetta, and not some other beast that would surely have spooked at the knife embedding itself in the tack.
Hark turned slowly, his blade still levelled at the first man’s throat, but his attention flitted between Arla and the thief now clutching his hand to his chest. A twisted, cruel smile spread over Hark’s face, turning him into something deadly and wicked.
The crimson arc that Arla had been expecting upon the revelation of Hark’s hidden violence, now materialised, not from the man who had accused Hark of abandonment, but from the man who had attempted to steal a gold buckle from a Hadalyn horse.
Life as personal assassin to the crown had hardened Arla against most things, and she was the last person to be squeamish, but even she winced at the spray of blood from the man’s neck as Hark slit his throat and dropped him where he stood.
‘Let it be a lesson that if any of you attempt to steal from your king – or Hadalyn’s – you will be met with appropriate force.’
Every set of eyes in the crowd lowered immediately, no one daring to incur the wrath of Hark and his violent display of strength.
‘Reinhart!’ Hark called, gesturing with his head for Arla to go ahead.
She squeezed her heels into Eros’s sides and the horse carried her through the parting crowd and onwards to the palace gates. Hark’s actions had stunned her into silence and complicity, and Arla was surprised at her lack of words in response to something that should have roused a thousand.
The gates began to open immediately, the groan of the metal loud over the murmurings of the crowd. Hark had scared them, but they didn’t look surprised in the way that Arla was. Did the Kastonian ambassador demonstrate his deadly skill set often?
‘That was … unexpected,’ Arla murmured as Hark halted Vetta beside her, both cautious while their backs were to the crowd as they waited for the gates to open wide enough to squeeze the horses through.
‘No, it was exactly what was expected. You should have been alert,’ Hark muttered back, his eyes fixed ahead on the looming palace. Arla clenched the reins tighter.
He was right, and that was worse. She should have been paying attention. The men atop horses believed themselves too important and too invincible to be targeted in broad daylight. How the tables had turned.
‘You know I could slide this blade between your scapulars before you finish blinking,’ Arla shot back, earning her an arched brow from the ambassador, soldier, guard – whatever Hark Stappen was.
‘Perhaps. I could have slit your throat before you finished that sentence and yet I haven’t. So I ask, Reinhart, what would be your point?’