Chapter 20
HARK
For a moment, he’d been concerned.
If he was being truthful, she looked exhausted.
His concern had quickly given way to impatience, however, as he waited for the clock to hit eleven so he could finally meet his friends and hear what they had to reveal about the state of the kingdom and what was happening regarding the extraction of the slaves.
Gods, she was going to kill him when she found out. He’d seen the deadly fury bubbling behind those coffee-coloured eyes, and for a moment he’d been worried about what she was capable of. He’d seen her do terrible things, and he had never seen her falter. Ever.
There was a part of him that wished he’d told her. Ages ago. Having someone like that on his team…
But though he’d never seen her falter, the thing about Reinhart was that she was unpredictable.
There was no guarantee she wouldn’t go charging in and demand an army from her king.
She’d blow it all. Every hour he and his friends had spent trying to help …
well, it would all be for nothing if Arla breathed a word of it.
He slipped out of the tavern a few minutes before the bells started ringing, melting into the crowds and disappearing down side streets and alleys to eventually emerge on the fishing docks.
They were small, and honestly, he was surprised they had cared to build docks for the number of boats that bothered to land here.
The cove was barely a lake, only accessible by a deadly narrow river filtering back to the sea somewhere.
It was littered with shipwrecks and jagged rocks – too dangerous for the trading ships or even larger fishing boats.
But they were quiet and away from the bustle of the crowds, and full of shadows and dark corners to hide criminals and trade in illicit affairs.
Perfect, then.
‘About time, Stappen. We thought you’d lost your way in Reinhart’s bed.’
The bastards.
He couldn’t hide his grin as they pulled him behind stacks of wooden pallets reeking of fish and damp.
‘You should know me well enough, Seb, to know that lying with the Hadalyn girl is the very last thing I would ever do,’ he chuckled, pulling his friend close and slapping an arm around him.
‘We know you well enough to bet on you being smitten with her already.’ Another shadowed figure laughed at this. He couldn’t remember the last time he had seen all of them together.
‘Where’s Kase?’ he asked, only making out three figures in the dark.
‘Here,’ a gentle voice said from behind him, revealing the silver-haired, slim-framed girl he had conned into his service.
Here they were, all four of them. His crew.
‘What have we got?’ Hark asked, eager to learn what his friends had been up to in his absence. Kase had revealed almost nothing when she’d met him at Larkire, insisting they’d explain once he made it to Vorstrum.
He had missed his friends. The assignments at Castle Grey had kept him for longer than he liked, and he often worried that they might forget he was part of the gang at all.
He tried, of course. Those days when he said he was returning to Kastonia to report back to his king had almost killed him when he never, in fact, returned to Larkire and rode through the night to help his friends.
It was a wonder Arla hadn’t seen straight through the lie.
She’d almost caught him once. Had followed him all the way to the border between Kastonia and Hadalyn and it was luck that he’d spotted her before she could ruin everything he’d been working on.
‘Not much I’m afraid,’ a tall, dark-skinned man admitted, edging closer so the moonlight illuminated one side of his face.
‘Don’t be so negative, Jaz,’ Sebastian snapped. ‘We’re getting more out each week. It’s just … difficult. They don’t want to trust us.’
Hark had thought it might be like this. The slaves most likely wanted them dead, what with them being Kastonian and all; he couldn’t expect them to realise that his crew were their rescuers, not their captors.
‘Anyone get hurt?’ He wasn’t sure he wanted to know. He’d put them in danger by asking them to do this, and there wasn’t a day that passed that he didn’t wonder if his friends were safe.
‘Jack had a run-in with one of them. Thought he’d snapped his spine the way he carried on.
’ Seb laughed, but Hark found it hard to temper the flare of worry and anger at his friend’s misfortune.
Jack had stayed quiet, and when he inched closer so that the light washed over him, Hark had to grit his teeth against what he saw in the face of his friend.
Jack had been fit, muscled, and deadly when Hark had last seen him months ago.
Now he leant heavily on a cane, and the ramrod-straight spine he had always maintained was hunched over.
He looked like a feeble old man. Only his hair, still a sandy-blond abundance, gave any indication that he was in his twenties.
Even Jack’s eyes looked old and misty, as though he was looking through stained glass and struggling to see them clearly.
He looked … addled. And given the type of mission Hark had sent them on, there was only one thing that could have done that to him.
‘Fuck, Jack. I’m sorry—’
‘Oh, stop it,’ Jack said with a curse, waving the cane at him. ‘I’ll find a healer once we’re done. they’ll draw the magic out, I’m sure.’
Gods, he hoped so.
This was why mortals couldn’t have magic. It broke them. It made this whole thing just pointless, and Hark didn’t know what was possessing the kings to keep going. Unless…
Unless they’d found a way to hold it.
Fuck.
‘I’ve missed a lot, I take it,’ Hark said with a sigh, running a hand through his hair and scanning the faces of his friends.
Each of them stared back, unblinking, ready to take an arrow for him if he asked.
What had he done to deserve such loyalty, such trust?
It was indeed a blessing from the gods to have friends such as these.
‘I think you’ll want a drink, Stappen.’
He thought so, too, and as much as he despised the thought of being seen, especially in a tavern, drinking with these—
Gods, he didn’t even know what people thought they were. He’d been away too long, and now the thought of a cold drink in his own kingdom was too good an offer to pass up.