Chapter 30
The northern border was a barren place, all rocky outcrops and angry cliff faces.
The small amount of vegetation there was had been hardened by frost and covered the ground in thorny shrubs.
It was at odds to Vorstrum and the rest of Kastonia – a world away from Hadalyn, too.
There had never been anything much up here – a handful of buildings used as soldiers’ outposts and only inhabited a couple of times a year.
There were small villages that cropped up from time to time, the buildings all wooden and temporary and usually arranged around a firepit some poor soul had likely spent hours trying to coax into a flame.
The villages never lasted very long – rarely more than a year.
Overall it was a miserable, soul-sucking place.
Arla’s heart pounded against her ribs, the adrenaline bubbling in her veins at what they were about to do. Or maybe she missed how close Hark had been pressed against her side just a few moments before?
They crouched a short way from the camp behind barrels filled with something that smelled sour and metallic. She didn’t want to know what was in the wretched things, but they provided a shadowed corner where she could sit and wait out of the way.
The crew had split up, following Hark’s orders with no complaint. Arla wondered how this operation functioned when he wasn’t around.
Arla could make out the slaves slowly and quietly disappearing into the shadows of the cliffs that formed the perimeter of the camp.
More importantly, she saw that nobody seemed to notice.
The crew were discreet, and they were pulling men, women, and fucking children out of the grip of Kastonia, and sending them in Jack’s direction.
Where they would go next she didn’t know.
She didn’t like being kept out of the plotting and planning; the lack of control was making her twitchy.
She watched more slaves disappear, and now that the edges of the camp were thinning out, revealing gaps in the rows and rows of slaves being counted and moved, Arla saw that the soldiers were beginning to talk.
‘Didn’t have you down as the superstitious sort,’ Hark murmured from beside her behind the barrels, glancing at the brooch on Arla’s cloak.
‘Perhaps your gods will spare us some luck if I wear it. Besides, it’s pretty.’
A smile tugged in the corner of Hark’s lips. ‘Vain as ever.’
A crack cleaved the air, slicing through to her heart and rocking her on her heels.
A yelp followed the noise, and Arla felt her blood run cold at the terrible sound, a sound she hadn’t thought she would ever hear again following the days after the storming of Castle Grey.
She narrowed her eyes, barely containing the tears of anguish that clawed at her eyelids.
‘Easy,’ Hark murmured.
‘They’re whipping them,’ she choked out.
A warmth spread through her fingers as Hark’s hand covered her own. His skin was more tanned than hers, and she was surprised at the softness of it. She had seen how he wielded a blade so the smoothness, the lack of callouses, surprised her.
‘I know,’ he said softly, his ice-blue eyes becoming the colour of steel in the low light. He was as pained as her and somehow that made this whole thing worse. She made as if to move and found him tightening his grip around her fingers.
‘You can’t,’ he hissed.
‘I will not stand here and watch them be tortured. I won’t do it.’
‘Just wait. Please, wait.’ Gods, she didn’t want to listen to this, but he was pleading with her.
‘I won’t leave them,’ she said gently, her fingers going slack in his.
‘I’m not asking you to, Reinhart. But not today. You can’t save everyone. You can’t save them all.’
Gods, didn’t she know it. Had she been good enough she would have been able to do something to save her parents that day, to save Hadalyn’s people from the terror and destruction that had swarmed their kingdom. To save them all.
You were a child.
Her eyes locked with his. She didn’t like the thing that was passing between the two of them. It was too similar to understanding, to kindness, to friendship. She hated Hark Stappen.
But now he was so close, his lips parted so perfectly she could lay her own against them—
Enough.
She made herself look away; made herself look towards what was happening in the camp as more and more slaves disappeared, until all of the group they had discussed on the way here had been removed from captivity and were hopefully on their way to safety.
Arla felt her shoulders visibly relax, the tension easing out of her now that they’d succeeded without being caught.
She had wanted to be involved, of course, had wanted to make her mark, but Hark had told her no, and looking now at how seamlessly his crew worked together she acknowledged that he’d been right. She had needed to sit back and observe.
Kase, Seb, and Jaz would be coming back any moment now, today’s mission complete, and they could go back and plan for another raid tomorrow. They’d keep going until Kastonia didn’t have a single slave in their possession.
Sudden shouting ripped her attention back to the camp and a commotion that was unravelling down there. Hark tensed at her side, his eyes wide as he scanned the scene with her, trying to unpick what exactly was happening.
Kase was visibly upset, her arms waving, her feet shuffling with no clear purpose as Kastonia’s soldiers began to move through the crowds of slaves, right towards the heart of their crew’s operation.
‘Fuck,’ Hark whispered, shifting beside her.
‘What’s happening?’ she murmured, though Hark could have no better answer than she herself as they watched the carefully constructed plan come undone.
Soldiers moved through the crowd, approaching Jaz and Kase, the swords they now unsheathed reflecting the weak sunlight; Sebastian was isolated from them by the crowd but no less at risk. This … this wasn’t supposed to happen. The group was supposed to stay close to one another. Tight. Careful.
But Sebastian was shoving slaves behind him in the direction of the extraction crew, not caring how many he dragged.
None of the slaves he reached for were today’s intended targets.
Arla could only watch. And wait. And chew her nails short as the soldiers moved closer, their bodies swallowed up by the mass of slaves, becoming a writhing, invisible wave amidst the crowd so that she could hardly tell the soldiers were embedded within it at all.
Kase stilled, the proximity of the soldiers too dangerous to risk drawing attention to herself and Jaz.
But Sebastian didn’t falter for a moment. He shoved every man, woman, and child he could reach back through the crowd towards the rockface. Jack would be hiding there somewhere, ready to direct the slaves where they needed to go.
Yet Arla couldn’t take her eyes off Sebastian and the determined strides he took through the crowds; couldn’t take her eyes off the soldiers closing in.
They had to have realised what was happening now, had to have guessed that the same crew that had been responsible for stealing their slaves had infiltrated the camp.
‘Fucking leave them,’ Hark chuntered under his breath, the muscles in his jaw tense as the commotion surrounding Sebastian grew and … then the soldiers broke through the crowd.
There was a heartbeat during which Arla thought she might be forced to watch Sebastian’s head be cleaved from his shoulders, but then the soldiers came to a halt before him.
That heartbeat was over as quickly as it had arrived, because when Sebastian began hauling slaves behind him, the soldiers launched for them with a waspish vigour, their fingers wrapping around the wrists of any flesh they could.
And then they disappeared.
The slaves winked out of existence, as if the world had swallowed them whole.
Arla didn’t have time to consider what in the gods-damned hell had just happened because chaos consumed the landscape.
Kase hurtled towards them, silver braid flailing and a wicked grin splitting her lips.
‘Kase,’ Hark growled, already tugging on Arla’s hand to make their escape.
‘Little problem,’ Kase called, no longer caring how loudly she was shouting or how visible they were to the soldiers now shouting orders behind her.
‘It doesn’t look little to me,’ Hark grumbled, his grip on Arla’s hand never wavering as they careened through the valley and up the steep slope towards the top of the cliffs.
Her legs burned with the strain of the ascent, but she pushed through the pain to keep pace with Hark.
She was King’s Assassin; he’d never let her live it down if she revealed her rigorous training programme had not prepared her for sprinting up steep rockfaces.
‘We got them! All the ones we wanted!’ Kase shouted over the pounding of their feet and the hollering of the soldiers now giving chase. ‘But Seb wanted to get the next group—’
‘Of course he did,’ Hark growled, tugging harder on Arla’s hand. Gods, she hated running.
‘And then they had to do that fancy, light-flicker thing and that was it, they were on to us,’ Kase continued.
‘What are you talking about?’ Arla bit out, trying to keep her breathing even despite the strain her body was under and the loose gravel under her feet. She’d seen those people disappear; she wanted answers now.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ Hark shot back. ‘Where are the others?’
‘Meeting us at the Bloodstone. Or dead.’
Questions pulsed on the end of Arla’s tongue, but before she could voice them, Hark gave a sharp tug to her hand, yanking her to the right as they reached the top of the slope.
She didn’t know how she had missed it before – the rolling woodland spanning out before them.
Some assassin she was. Still they kept running, drowning out the distant shouts of the soldiers.
She hadn’t seen where Jack had taken the freed slaves, and she couldn’t shake the annoyance that they’d left him to get all those people to safety on his own. Unless…
She and Hark were a distraction.
The irritation at being used as bait pushed her legs forwards, her feet flying over roots, and dips, and something that snapped with a sound, too, like bones breaking.
It had all taken her by surprise, and she couldn’t help wondering, as their feet pounded the packed earth, what that said about her and about her suitability for her job.
She’d lost control of this quest, and she was being kept in the dark about things she should have seen before they unfolded.
Was Hark right? Was she too confident in her own abilities?
She’d gone unchecked for so long in Hadalyn that she hadn’t truly thought it possible that someone might be able to catch her out.
Trees blurred past them in a smudge of green and brown, and her lungs burned. Her ankle screamed at her for the strain she was subjecting it to with every footfall. There wouldn’t be any lavender oil or hot baths to soak it in later.
Just as she began to think the trees were an endless, rolling prison called up by the gods, Hark pulled her into a clearing, coming to a stop that had her almost barrelling into him.
The clearing was an odd shape, with awkward angles and trees jutting into it at irregular intervals, but the thing that had drawn her eye immediately and on which Kase now rested an arm as she bent double, gulping in huge gasps of air – ha!
Not as fit as you think you are, then – was a large rock, about the size of a small child, protruding out of the ground.
Its surface was worn smooth from what she guessed were thousands upon thousands of hands gliding over it, though a brown, rust-like stain marred the top.
Arla had dealt with enough of those stains to recognise blood and therefore to conclude that the rock against which Kase leant was the aforementioned bloodstone.
‘Anybody care to explain what the fuck that was all about?’ Arla snapped, throwing the blade she had strapped across her back to the dusty, leaf-strewn ground.
She whirled on Hark. ‘If you think for one minute that I’ll stand to be used as bait in your little schemes without being informed first, gods help you I will walk away from this right now and bring the might of Hadalyn down upon you! ’
Kase, thankfully, remained quiet as Hark stepped up to Arla, his eyes shining with a threat in which she was all too ready to engage.
‘If you wish to blame anyone, blame me and me alone. You do not speak to them that way, and you certainly do not threaten them with an army. They have done more for our kingdoms than most, Reinhart.’
It was … regal, the way he spoke; a voice that commanded respect and obedience that she would be stupid to challenge. It didn’t stop her trying.
Hark must have seen the challenge in her eyes, because without breaking their gaze he said to his three friends, ‘Kase, go with Seb and make sure there are no surprises waiting in the trees. Jaz, firewood. We’re stopping here tonight.’
She heard each of them move, not a question or challenge from any of them as she held Hark’s stare.
Only when they could no longer hear footsteps did the cord between them snap.
His hands were on the front of her shirt, pulling her up so she had to stand on her toes to keep any sort of contact with the ground.
‘You ever threaten me or my friends with an army again, I will cut that pretty little throat and leave you bleeding on the ground of another kingdom,’ he seethed, his breath hot on her face.
She summoned every hour of training, every minute of footwork, every second of fine-tuned deadliness and wrapped it around her so that even she couldn’t identify the seam between herself and the king’s most lethal weapon, ready to go to war with Hark Stappen and let him know exactly how it would feel to bleed.
But in that moment, something inside her broke.
She sagged against his grip, wrenching her eyes from his to stare at the toes on which she was balancing so precariously.
‘Okay,’ she whispered.
‘Okay?’
‘Okay.’ She shrugged, pulling herself free and turning her back on him.
She didn’t want to do this anymore.