Chapter 8 #2
He pushed her back, lunging and lunging as she blocked each swing of his blade, gritting her teeth against the strength he had drawn from gods-know-where that was now shuddering through her sword.
Fire burned within her, eager for the challenge, grateful for it.
It had been too long since she had faced a worthy opponent.
‘Come on! This is not the notorious assassin we’ve heard spoken of in such terms,’ he mocked, twisting easily out of the lunge attack she made.
She hadn’t wanted to truly hurt him in training; holding back was her normal now because it was rare that anybody could ever coax the need for actual skill from her.
Tunnelling down into the anger and resentment simmering inside her, she ground her teeth together before launching into a series of moves so quick and deadly that she doubted anybody but her could keep track of where her blade was.
Wrong, though. Hark met every swing of the sword, not even grunting as she threw her weight into the attack.
‘There she is.’ Hark grinned.
He was a blur, as though the world had melted away around them whilst they danced the deadly steps of combat. She’d had little experience of sparring with somebody as skilled as her – almost better, even – and her arms were straining under the power flowing down her blade.
The blow to her shoulder sent her sword flying and pulled a hiss from between her teeth.
‘That’s not training, you prick,’ she growled through the pain, already preparing herself to move the shoulder back into place.
It had been troublesome since it had first been dislocated during the early days of her instruction for the King’s Guard.
It now had a habit of sliding out of joint at the slightest of knocks, and every one was painful.
‘Can’t handle a little pain, sweetheart?’ he jeered at her, twisting the blade in his hand before hanging it up on a wooden rack against the wall.
‘I handle pain just fine. It’s you I can’t stand,’ she spat, gritting her teeth as she lined her shoulder up against the doorframe ready to lurch forwards and knock it back in.
‘What are you doing?’ Hark started towards her, shock rippling his handsome face at the realisation of what she was about to do.
‘Squeamish, Stappen?’
‘There are healers that live in the hills, Reinhart. Proper healers who can sort that for you.’
‘You didn’t seem concerned when you shoved the hilt of your blade into it,’ she muttered, using her words to conjure up the courage needed to endure the few seconds of pain that would bring immediate relief.
‘The women in the mountains are proper healers – the old kind. The ones who use magic to fix you!’ he snapped, and Arla could have sworn she saw what looked like worry appear on his face before it was quickly squashed.
‘Don’t be so bloody stupid,’ she scoffed.
‘I won’t listen to this nonsense about magic, dragons, and gods anymore, Stappen!
These ignorant, ignorant superstitions are what got my family killed in the first place!
Ugh, gods!’ she yelped as her body slammed into the doorframe.
Blinding white pain stole her breath from her lungs, and it took everything she had not to throw up at the sensation of her shoulder slipping back into place.
She rolled the joint a few times, and then, content that it wasn’t about to slide out again, she met Hark’s eyes.
‘I’m not the one who killed them.’ His voice had dropped so low that it pricked the hairs on Arla’s arms. This was dangerous, dangerous ground.
‘No, but your blood still runs Kastonian,’ she spat, turning away and stalking from the room.
* * *
Sneaking out of and into buildings now came as naturally to Arla as breathing, and it didn’t take her long to scale the huge stone walls surrounding the palace and slip into the bustle of the townsfolk.
She could have disappeared if she’d wanted.
She could have left the kingdom through the dozen or so routes she had mapped and used before to sneak through the place.
But it wasn’t in her blood to run from a fight, and gods would this be a fight if she had any say in it.
The Kastonian royals were hiding something, and snooping through the passageways and eavesdropping on conversations between servants was not going to give her answers.
People would, though. She knew enough about court to know that secrets belonging to castle walls often leeched into the population like a plague. If she could stomach the stench and the revulsion at being near the scum that had tried to burn her home to the ground, she would find answers.
Arla meandered through the puddled streets, stepping over suspicious liquids that made her nose wrinkle until she found herself passing under a shadowed, half-dilapidated archway with that wretched dragonhart symbol carved into it.
Before her eyes had even adjusted to the lack of light in the abandoned building, she could hear a mumbling beneath the ground.
It sounded like … hundreds of voices beneath her feet.
She descended down a set of worn stone steps that took her beneath the city, holding her breath as damp warmth choked her lungs and slithered over her skin.
At the bottom of the stairs she stopped and looked around her in amazement.
Dozens of awnings had been assembled into makeshift stalls selling meat, trinkets, and what she assumed was medicine in brown glass vials.
A sprawling market stretched before her, an entire city hidden beneath Larkire.
There was a distinct smell of sweat and meat and an unfamiliar scented smoke that Arla suspected was the result of whatever herb a group of men were puffing on in the corner.
There was fighting somewhere, too – she could hear the chants, the cheers, and the booing; could almost see the exchange of coins between grimy hands.
She herself had fought in pit fights against men bigger than her just to work off the waves of anger that often overwhelmed her.
She suspected Larkire had the same predisposition to the illicit violence.
Torches were lit and burning at regular intervals between the makeshift stalls, and shafts of light trickled down from cracks in the ground above them. The whole place sang of lawlessness.
It was perfect.
Arla dipped between stalls, biting her lip against the rough elbows that dug into her sides, and the passing of illegal powders into hands that quickly hid them away.
Animals were being traded, too – creatures that had been banned in Hadalyn for their viciousness.
A particularly feral, mountain cat roared at anyone who got too close as they peered through the bars of its cage.
She recognised it as a species that hailed from the Kingdom of Glacit on the continent.
It didn’t take her long to identify a dark corner overlooking what appeared to be a gambling ring. She knew more than just coin passed between hands here, and wondered, briefly, why Elrod hadn’t sent guards to disperse the underground market.
‘Drink, miss?’ A young boy appeared at the table she claimed for herself, shifting from one foot to the other as he awaited her response.
‘Ale. Please,’ she quickly added, pressing a coin into his rough, work-worn hands. It would pay for his silence. She was too odd for him not to speak of when he collected her drink.
Groups of men hasty to gamble their few remaining coins came and went from the tables around her, some decidedly happier than when they sat down, and some she didn’t think would make it through the evening as they lost everything to a poorly played hand.
Just as she was despairing of learning anything relevant or juicy – the patrons too engrossed with their games to bother discussing the poor state of the country – a new group arrived to occupy the table closest to her, and there was not a card or coin in sight.
‘Died in his sleep I heard.’
‘No money for a healer. Couldn’t get a message out to those in the hills either.’
That was odd. It was the second time in the space of a day that she had heard of the women in the hills. Magic healers, Hark had said.
‘Maybe if the king hadn’t taken everything for himself, the apothecary might have had the supplies to help,’ a gravelly, hacking voice snapped over the rim of a glass.
‘What do you expect? The dragons left. The gods abandoned us. What little there is goes to who can afford it. Don’t say you wouldn’t have done the same.’
‘But there was nothing left to take. Whatever wealth the king has now, it comes from outside. This poverty is a curse from the gods.’
That much she knew. This wealth had not been within Kastonia’s walls before the attack on Hadalyn. The gold, and the food, and everything else had to have come from elsewhere. There was nothing left to be taken from a kingdom already suffering.
‘The dragons would have fixed this. They’d have asked the gods to stop it all,’ one of the women began. ‘If those bastards in Hadalyn had just let us in … if they’d let us into the catacombs—’
‘But they didn’t,’ the rough-voiced man from before interrupted. ‘They didn’t, and we’re worse off for it.’
‘It’s not their fault,’ a small voice chimed in.
A thin, scar-faced man sat half-hidden from Arla’s view at the table, nursing a tankard of ale that looked likely to render him entirely useless tomorrow.
‘The dragons were weak after a battle between the gods a century ago. You’ve read the books.
You can’t deny it. They couldn’t stay here and I doubt they’d have chosen their resting place to be beneath Castle Grey if they’d had a choice about it.
They didn’t abandon us and neither did the gods.
It’s not their fault they’re too weak to keep serving us. Let them be.’
A battle between gods?
She didn’t believe a word but it was the first time she’d heard of it. No one in Hadalyn had ever spoken of such a battle taking place.