Chapter 37
Her head pounded as she galloped across miles and miles of open land.
Her sore body ached for the familiar comfort of Vetta, not the horse she had stolen from outside a tavern in Vorstrum.
Vetta was safe with Eros in the care of Jack, Sebastian had told her.
None of Hark’s crew had revealed to her yet where exactly the safe haven was, and there was no way in this gods-damned world she would admit her curiosity by asking.
Hours and hours passed, the sun dropping to leave behind a clear night with only the stars to light her way back to Hadalyn.
Her mount, a stallion the colour of autumn, did not fail her.
His legs pounded against the earth, giving her everything he had, for hours, until even her well-accustomed body screamed in protest. She wouldn’t stop now.
She would keep going if it meant bringing vengeance to every man, woman, and child Elrod had captured.
It went beyond politics, beyond faith. This was personal, and it had been festering since the moment the first Kastonian dared to breach Hadalyn’s borders.
The rest Arla allowed herself was brief, and the sleep her stallion fell into did not come so easily to her.
She kept seeing Hark over and over, his knees buried in the bloody snow and that blade flying at him.
She needed to get him out of the palace.
She needed to tell him how it had made her feel to watch him almost die before her.
She couldn’t lose another person she cared about.
The shuffle of hooves dragged her out of her daydream and into the dawn of another day. She would return to Hadalyn, and she couldn’t look back even if she wished. Hark was a prisoner, and his crew wouldn’t act, not with him at risk of being killed should they attempt to steal slaves again.
But she could.
Something had grown inside her – something she was terrified of, something she didn’t understand. But she would not turn her back on them. Not now.
As the wind flowed through her hair, she vowed to get Hark out and end the slave trade. And if Cyrus had known, had really known what was happening, she would take both kingdoms, and damn the consequences.
* * *
Arla breathed a little easier as she rode into Hadalyn. She’d been gone three weeks but it felt like half a lifetime.
Her feet sang as they landed on familiar, worn cobbles.
She didn’t need to look at her reflection in the windows of shops to know how hideous she looked.
She knew blood still stained her hair, and her clothes were filthy and torn from the fighting.
She would not walk into Castle Grey like this.
She needed to play the part of King’s Assassin once more; she needed to be Lady Reinhart; she needed to be in control of every single moment that would take place between her and Cyrus.
Because there could only be two outcomes: he kept his throne, or he didn’t.
She patted the empty sheath at her side and sighed. She hated being without a knife, but there weren’t many places that stocked the razor-sharp blades she favoured.
At least her bow had made it out of the battle and still hung at her back.
A flash of silver in Madam Touse’s shop window caught her eye as she strolled the familiar route back to the castle, wondering if this would be the last time she did so.
She couldn’t help herself. The jewels glittered so delicately, and she could almost feel the silk of the dress in the window. It was actually a gold so pale it passed for silver. It would do nicely, and she would look every bit the threat to the throne she needed to be.
Madam Touse, regrettably, was not working, so Arla hastily handed over the coins for the dress to a young girl she hadn’t seen before.
Touse’s runner boy was there, though, and he offered to take her new dress directly to her rooms at the castle, probably eager for an extra coin.
Arla declined, carefully putting the garment now wrapped in paper into the bottom of the saddlebag slung over her shoulder and handed the boy a coin anyway.
It was all for nothing if she couldn’t be kind.
She wouldn’t let being an assassin harden her into something cruel and deluded.
Arla slipped out of the shop into the busy street, eyeing Halos’s shop across the way.
Something tight twisted in her stomach at the thought of seeing her friend.
What would she think of her now? Halos had hated what Arla did for a living, and that had been before she’d slaughtered soldier after soldier in that camp…
Bells twinkled above her as she entered the shop, her hair loose around her shoulders to hide the worst of the blood in it. Arla strode towards the back of the room where Halos was tending to a woman with greying hair.
‘Be with you in a second,’ Halos called cheerfully, not looking up to see who had entered the shop.
‘Oh, I’m sure I can wash my own hair. I was mainly looking for the soap I like.’
The young woman broke into a delightful smile, her teeth a dazzling white against the deep brown of her skin. Arla loved her. That smile had been a salve to more than one type of wound in the past.
‘Why am I not surprised to find you looking like … that?’ Halos asked, waving Arla to a chair. ‘How did it go? Did you bed Mr Stappen in the end?’
Something in Arla’s chest clenched at Hark’s name, a clench that meant too many things at once for her to focus on.
She realised now just how close they’d become since they’d left Hadalyn, and that without his shadow she felt cold and vulnerable.
She felt like she could burst into tears at any second and she wouldn’t have the strength to stop.
‘What’s wrong, Arla?’ Halos asked, suddenly serious as she worked the soap into Arla’s hair, cursing as her fingers ran over the egg-shaped lump on the back of Arla’s head and the crusted blood coating it.
‘Things didn’t go well,’ Arla said gently, not afraid to tell Halos everything. And, truthfully, she really needed to speak to someone, if only so they could convince her she wasn’t completely crazy.
‘Hark’s in trouble, and I’m going to do something dangerous to get him back.
It’s going to save a lot of people but …
is that bad?’ she whispered, scared of the words that had been looping in her head for hours.
It occurred to Arla that she never really gave much thought to how old she was.
How young she was. She felt like a child now, more than she ever had.
‘You’re a good person that terrible things have happened to. So, if you need to do something stupid, if it means people get hurt because you’re trying to save others … it doesn’t make you bad. You’re the one person I’d want at my back, and if you need something, Arla, you only have to ask.’
Her friend really was too sweet. Arla couldn’t tell her about the slaves; she wouldn’t incite that fear in her friend. Besides, she was going to stop it all. She was going to remove that Kastonian bastard from the throne and set free every man, woman, and child under his imprisonment.
Arla cleared her throat. ‘The only thing I need from you, Halos, is to make my hair smell beautiful and look even better.’
‘Consider it done.’
‘Where are the twins?’
‘Asleep, finally. They’ve been terrorising my customers all day,’ she chuckled, and Arla felt her heart swell with love for the two toddlers.
‘Magic’s real,’ she whispered, the sound barely reaching her own ears. She didn’t know why she said it, but she needed Halos to know. She needed her to understand what she’d seen so that her friend wouldn’t think her mad when she inevitably found out what Arla had done.
‘I know,’ Halos whispered back, and Arla didn’t know if she was shocked or not to hear her friend say it. They’d never spoken about it at great length, but Arla had always assumed Halos held the same view as she did about magic, and dragons, and the whole lot of it being made up.
‘Crazy, isn’t it? That some people are born with that in their blood?’ Arla said softly, for the first time really marvelling at such a possibility, at the sheer beauty of it.
‘Don’t you think everybody has a little piece of magic in them, Miss Reinhart?’
Arla’s body went cold. That voice. Raspy, full of phlegm. The greying hair she had seen on the way into the shop. She turned her head to meet the eyes of the stranger she had spoken to at the market outside Vorstrum, the night she’d drunk far too much and ended up in Hark’s bed.
‘What?’ Arla gaped in disbelief at the woman staring back at her.
‘Do you wonder how your friend can work wonders with hair and skin when others can’t? Or how your knives have never missed a mark? How Mr Stappen’s way of avoiding death confused even you at the border? Everybody has a little bit of magic inside them, Miss Reinhart, if only you know where to look.’
Arla didn’t know what to say, and the unwelcome prick of tears behind her eyes came on so suddenly she couldn’t stop the lone tear that rolled down her face.
‘I don’t know what to do,’ she whispered, her voice breaking.
Blood magic must run through the woman’s veins.
How else could she know everything that had happened to Arla?
The dragonhart brooch was still in the pocket of her trousers, a symbol of the old religion and everything she had spent her life disbelieving.
She was certain, now, that it held its own sort of sentient magic.
It was always warm beneath her touch and she’d felt drawn to it in a way that made sense now.
‘I already told you where the power lies, girl. Use your head, Arla Reinhart. It has not failed you so far.’