Chapter 24
After the voices of Baffin and the woman faded, I used my captivity to contemplate the depths of my misfortune.
I was quite pitiable, I decided, locked in a box and at the mercy of my people’s greatest enemy.
All my plans, all my determination—they could not break me out.
Lewis was a world away, I had selfishly exposed Harden to danger, and the artifact? Perhaps it was wholly lost.
And now it seemed Baffin would use my death at the hands of the Zealot Queen Incarnadine as a tipping point in Harrow’s conflict, forcing the Guild to act and giving himself an excuse to move against them.
But why would he give me up before I had led him to the artifact? I conjured and discarded a dozen scenarios, but ended up with two possibilities. Either he deeply believed I’d given the box to Harden, in which case my skills at lying were to be commended, or he had found it elsewhere.
In the end, his reasoning did not matter.
I needed to escape the trunk and get back on course, but I would have to wait until the lid opened again.
I could only hope that Harden had overpowered Wake, and the Silver hands that found me would help me, rather than Leech away what little strength I had.
An indeterminate length of time passed before the lid of the trunk lifted. Unfortunately my escape plans were thwarted by the fact that I was asleep when it happened, having slipped into blissful unconsciousness where cramped muscles, gnawing hunger, and impending murder could not torment me.
The next thing I knew, I was being carried over someone’s shoulder, as tenderly as a sack of barley. I could barely breathe, due to a shoulder in my gut and a bag tied over my head.
I was tossed unceremoniously into the back of a carriage or wagon. No one spoke, but after a clattering journey I was hauled out again. I sensed us descending stairs, felt a waft of damp cold, then a wash of warmth.
I was deposited in a chair. Light and a matted tangle of hair blinded me as the bag was hauled off, and I faced my intended killer.
I pushed my hair away with bound hands and squinted.
The infamous face of Incarnadine peered back.
She bent over before me, hands on her knees as she examined me in turn.
Her eyes were an uncanny green, green as southern waters under a warm sun.
Her hair was a simple brown, pulled up under a bowler hat.
She wore a practical walking ensemble in a slightly faded plum, the jacket currently unbuttoned to show a plain blouse.
She was, according to the papers, around forty-five, but looked younger—a gift of her soft, round cheeks.
I met her gaze until the moment stretched too long. Discomfited, I leaned back in the chair and glanced at the other occupants of the room.
There were half a dozen. I recognized one from the papers, a Zealot lieutenant known as Mr. Graves. I had taken the name for popular nonsense but now that I saw him in person, with his pale skin, heavy shadows under his eyes, and thickly muscled upper body, I found it apt.
“Rushforth,” Incarnadine muttered, straightening. “He wants me to kill a Rushforth. Not that I am opposed, but I do tire of our Grand General pretending I am his lapdog.”
“You could not kill me,” I suggested. I found I felt particularly brazen, in a numb, harried sort of way that made my blood light and my wits shallow.
“Are these hangings and such not overdone? Whipping a dead horse, as it were. The masses are desensitized. My suggestion would be not to involve death, though I understand if you feel a casual beating might be necessary. I make a fine ransom. And do you know what money buys? Guns! Explosives. Better hideouts.” At the last, I looked meaningfully around the room, which was a bare cellar that stank of floodwaters.
“No, I want to kill you,” Incarnadine replied, her voice so calm and cool even Madge might have shivered. She continued to take me in, seeming particularly unimpressed by my rumpled gown. “It’s not often I have one of your kind in reach.”
“My kind? I hate the Guild as much as you do.”
“I very much doubt that.”
“I’m a Rogue. I am trying to stay away from them.”
“You are the worst of your kind,” she replied. I had struck a nerve and found myself regretting that under the intensity of her glare. “You, assured of your value, the value of your power and your blood. Your worth. And yet you run and hide, withholding that power.”
“You sound like a Separatist,” I said.
She smiled, her eyes lightening a fraction. “I was one, for a time. But they consider themselves above a powerless human, even if I was born onto the same blood they were.”
I paused. “Pardon me?”
“I was born to Guild parents,” Incarnadine stated.
Her people looked on, unsurprised. This was no secret, it seemed, within her underworld.
“But I have no power. A failed experiment of their monstrous breeding regime. So, I know you. I know your kind. I know your family. We are two sides of the same coin, you and I. You, born with power, I, without. You, elevated, I, cast aside. But at least I have done something with my life instead of hiding.”
“Bombing civilians is truly something to aspire to,” I snapped. My skipping, agitated mind slowed with these revelations, the complexities of the situation mounting.
The head of the Zealots was not simply the figurehead of ignorant discontents. She had lived inside the Guild. She was informed, intentional, and her crusade was personal.
I could already feel a noose around my neck.
“We do not bomb civilians,” Incarnadine replied sternly. “Separatists do.”
“I thought we were being honest with one another.”
“We were, and it was cathartic,” Incarnadine said, letting out a short breath. “You will be the most noteworthy Entwined I’ve ever killed.”
“I am honored,” I said, but wavered. My bravado was failing—I had to get it back. Rallying, I lifted my chin and asked, “How am I to be murdered?”
“Do you really want to know?”
“I have considerable stakes in the venture.”
Incarnadine tilted her head slightly to one side. “You are one of those, I see. All jest and bravado, until the noose is around your throat.”
Her words elicited a rise of terror, momentarily overwhelming. But my expression did not waver.
There was a knock at the cellar door. One of Incarnadine’s lackeys opened it and exchanged a word, then closed the door again and handed a note to Incarnadine.
She stepped away from me and read the missive. She turned partially away, but I caught a flicker of irritation in her eyes. The light from the lamp cut across her face and throat. She would have made an imperious mage, if that throat had not been devoid of threads.
A greater sense of dread came upon me. But up through that mire swam one clear thought. One possibility of, if not salvation, perhaps division, and reprieve.
“Baffin intends to betray you,” I said. “When you are at the end of your usefulness.”
Incarnadine glanced from me to the note again. She lifted it between two fingers, apparently unbothered by my revelation. “He wants you hung before dawn.”
“I overheard him say—”
“I am well aware of my position with the Grand General, but he would do better to be aware of his position with me,” Incarnadine replied. She caught Graves’s eye and nodded.
I found myself being hoisted from the chair. My terror broke. I fought back, kicking and shouting, and was hurled into a wall for my trouble.
Thankfully, I may spare the reader further coverage of my indignities, for at this point my story takes a far more important turn. One that involves a certain Guild soldier and the shadow that crossed the high, narrow window.
Glass shattered. There was an explosion, a cloud of choking smoke, and the crash of a door. Screams began, and gunfire. I kept to the floor as the initial barrage of shots flew, then staggered upright and bolted for the door.
Smoke wafted across my path. I was forced to divert, narrowly avoided a club to the head, and thudded into someone.
Dark blond hair. Shocked, relieved eyes. Large hands, pulling me closer, then pushing me onwards, up a slippery set of mossy stairs and into the cold of a Dockside afternoon.
My attention tore, divided between the fact that Lewis was charging up the stairs at my back and Madge was waiting calmly beside a carriage just down the street.
Her husband stood at her side, one hand raised and making absent movements in the air in a mannerism I recognized from Pretoria. Protecting them inside a skew of time.
“Not you!” I burst out in frustration.
Madge frowned, an emotion I could not read flicking through her. This transitioned into a shout of rebuke as someone tackled us from the side. I heard Lewis’s voice, too—so familiar and so outlandish, so out of place—as I was dragged away in a sudden mob of shouting, riotous strangers.
“Go!” another voice shouted in my ear. Mr. Harden. I stumbled, not from shock—there was too much to be shocked about now—but from the cramped state of my legs and my impractical clothing. “Run! What’s wrong with you?”
Someone jostled into me and I nearly fell. Harden caught me, not at all gallantly—it was more of a flailing snatch. Still this saved me from knocking myself senseless on the rail of the riverside balustrade.
“Curse it,” I heard Harden mutter. Then I was in the air, a shoulder slammed into my stomach again, and I found my face in the small of his back.
I would have protested if there were any air in my lungs, not to mention the rush of blood to my head. I was close to passing out when Harden set me on my feet, leaning me against a wall like an umbrella before he staggered back, pushing sweaty hair from his eyes.
“What’s wrong with you?” He panted. His words might be callous, but his gaze was anything but. “What’ve they done to you?”
“Nothing, no,” I dismissed. My head ached and I knew my face must be red as a cherry from all the blood pounding in my skull. My hair was in my eyes, annoying and tickling and stiff with sweat. “I was locked in a trunk in the Grand General’s study for the night, that is all.”
An outraged “What?” burst from him.
He asked me something else, but my mind was slurring away, back through the streets. Lewis. Was there any possibility he had been a figment of my imagination, a result of chaos and dehydration and stress and longing? He could not truly be here, with Madge.
“Why was Lewis with her?” I felt myself ask.
Harden still panted, fingers buried exasperatedly in his hair. Then a whistle came from the next street over, evidently some kind of signal, for he straightened. He fumbled for a knife and quickly slit my bindings, kicking them into a gutter, then offered me an open hand.
“Let’s get somewhere safe, then we can talk,” he said, his voice firm and kind.
I cleared my throat, blinked unexpected moisture from my eyes, and let him lead me away.