Chapter Four The First Ray of Sunlight
A chill ran down the Prince’s back.
The Death Watch. Could it be?
Obviously, it was a ploy, a gamble by one of his siblings, either to frame another of the Children or to remove him from the capital and prevent him from receiving his Inheritance.
But which of his siblings would make such a bold move?
And could they have actually employed the Death Watchmen?
It would be a risky move, something that could be traced back to them eventually.
The Watchmen cared little about revealing their motives—and they, like all creatures of Bloodmagic, were bound to the Children and the Empress.
And… had they truly intended to kill him?
No. No, that couldn’t be. Take him off the board, remove him for some political purpose, that was all they must have intended.
To kill one of the Children… that was an impossibility.
These Exiled, they were lying to sow the seeds of doubt in his mind.
They didn’t understand how these things worked.
Symanta was part of it at the very least, he realized.
She had delivered the Summons. Symanta, as Prince of Snakes, would have known instantly if she had been told a lie, even a lie of omission.
Whoever had tried—succeeded, he corrected himself—in having him removed from the Fortress at Lucien had gained Symanta’s temporary loyalty.
It was unlikely that she had acted on her own.
This plan was too audacious for her; she enjoyed pulling strings in the shadows. Rikard perhaps?
It didn’t matter. Not yet. What did matter was returning to the Fortress to deal with it. The Children were forbidden from killing one another, and if Mother found out… She would be very angry.
A spasm of fear flashed through the Prince’s mind as he thought of what She might do.
“Release me,” he said abruptly, “and I will allow you to leave the Empire unmolested.”
The word’s pained him, but necessity required that he return to the Fortress as soon as possible, and he couldn’t do that with two Exiles in tow.
“No,” Tomaz responded promptly.
For a moment the Prince was struck dumb by the man’s flat-out refusal.
“I am the Prince of Ravens, Exile,” he said, gathering his wits.
“The entire Empire will be looking for me. They will find me, and you will die slowly and in excruciating pain for holding me. Release me, and I will conveniently forget you. You are lucky I am even offering this once. I warn you, do not refuse me again.”
The Exile girl gave him a strange look, but neither of them spoke.
“What?” he snapped at her.
“You almost made me believe you,” she said. She and Tomaz exchanged a glance and then she shrugged, turned, and began to tear a blanket into strips with her dagger. Seeing this, the Prince realized that he might not actually be in control of the situation.
“What are you doing?” he asked, his voice controlled but his mind shaking.
“Binding you.”
Partly out of anger and partly out of fear, the Prince lost control of himself.
“ENOUGH!” he roared, his voice cracking out like a whip, using what he’d learned watching Rikard marshal his troops.
“You will release me, and you will go! You will be grateful that I am offering you this mercy, and you will forever remember the glory of the Empire on which you have turned your backs!”
The girl had jumped back from the blanket and stood staring at him with wide eyes. For an instant, the Prince thought he had won as she sheathed her dagger; she took a step forward, her eyes locked on his, her mouth slack. Triumph surged through him.
But having focused all of his attention on her, he completely forgot about the big man holding him, and the next thing he knew, he had been lifted into the air, turned upside down, and dunked headfirst into a barrel of salty brine set next to the table.
The water burned as it rushed up his nose and filled his mouth, choking him. For a brief second he fully believed that the big man meant to drown him, but just as the thought crossed his mind he was hoisted back up into the air, sputtering and coughing.
“He’s just a boy,” he heard the man say, “even if he’s a son of the Empress. A boy that needs to be taught some manners.”
Once more he was dunked into the barrel, and once more the salty water burned his eyes, his nose, his throat. He was pulled back out, given time for a single hacking, wheezing breath, one that ripped through his lungs like fire, and then he was again submerged.
After the third time, he was pulled up and dropped onto the wood floor, his knees and elbows striking the hard, unyielding planks and sending streaks of pain through his arms and legs.
As his head cleared and his ears drained, he heard laughter and saw through teary eyes the girl doubled over, arms wrapped around her stomach.
His cheeks started to burn, and he opened his mouth in fury—but before he could speak, a rough piece of cloth was slipped neatly between his teeth and tied off around the back of his head.
He let out a muffled sound of protest, but the big man ignored him and tied his hands together behind his back, using wide strips of fabric from the shredded blanket.
“No use talking if you can’t keep a civil tongue in your head,” he said.
The Prince began to shout muffled retorts through the coarse wool cloth, using the worst language he had ever heard from the Commons. However, when he realized how undignified he looked, he stopped and instead sat in sullen—dignified!—silence, watching the Exiles murderously.
How dare they?!
As the girl’s laughter tapered off, the big man examined him with a critical eye. “What if we take him with us?” he mused.
The girl straightened up, looking surprised. But then she too eyed the Prince with a bold, frank stare.
“I know what you’re thinking, ashandel,” she replied.
“The Elders would love a chance to interrogate one of the Children, if that’s really who he is.
Particularly Ishmael. So would I for that matter.
But we’ve got more than three fourths of the Empire still to cover until we’re back in Vale—and how are we going to sneak him past Roarke of all places to get him there? ”
The big man shrugged and smiled. “Not my job to figure it out, is it?”
She rolled her eyes.
“You wanted to scout this far into the Empire even though I said it was foolish to come twice in one year,” the giant rumbled.
“I’m enough of a man to know when I’ve been proven wrong.
Foolish or not, your gamble just paid off.
I don’t think either of us can crack him,” they both glanced at the Prince, who was following this conversation quite avidly, “and that means we either let him go or we take him with us.”
“Or we kill him,” the girl said. The Prince stiffened at the cold calculation that had entered her voice, and from the look on her face he was entirely certain that she did indeed mean this as a viable option.
Memories of his brother Geofred, the Prince of Eagles, hatching a plan came to mind.
She had the same cold, distant, objective look.
He just hoped she wasn’t as ruthless.
Abruptly she turned and crossed the room to the corner next to the door and knelt on the wooden floor. She pried up a loose board, heavily warped by time and weather, from under which she pulled a number of items, chief amongst them a large roll of parchment and two travel-sized paperweights.
She deftly unrolled the parchment across the table and weight it down, exposing a large, detailed map of Lucia.
The girl saw him looking, reached over to grab her cloak, and bunched it at the end of the table to block his view.
With a mocking smile, she bent over the map, her eyes flying back and forth across the parchment.
She then began using a bit of string as a measuring tool, all the while muttering to herself and absentmindedly stroking the side of her face.
“Here… then here… and if we skirt around the lake…”
She pulled out a bit of charcoal from a pocket hidden in her sleeve and began to write what the Prince assumed were shorthand calculations on the wooden surface of the table. He sat up straighter, trying to see, but her strategically placed cloak made the motion useless.
When she was finished, she remained bent over the table, eyes scanning the map and her notes a second time, before finally speaking.
“Two months,” she said. “Give or take a week depending on what the patrols look like around Roarke. And that’s at top speed. If we want to save the horses, we’ll need to factor in another week or two at least.”
“That long?” Tomaz asked.
She nodded and motioned toward the Prince with her head.
“I figure he won’t make it easy, and we’ll have to take every back trail and sheep road we know.
I wouldn’t bother, since even though he’s going to fight us along the way, we can get him through the Empire with speed, but there’s one variable I can’t predict.
Eventually they’ll realize they failed, and they’ll come after him.
When, or where, or how, I cannot say, nor I think can you.
But they will. And when they do, all seven hells will break loose. ”
Tomaz gave a heavy sigh and nodded. “I think you’re right.”
“I don’t know why it hasn’t happened already,” she said.
“Maybe we’ve just been lucky and they don’t know for sure what happened.
But eventually, they’ll be after us, and this will turn into a race to the finish.
No doubt his absence has already been noticed in Lucien, and you know how fast rumor travels.
The Tyrant and her brood are going to want to end this as quickly as they can.
We’re going to have to watch our backs every moment of every day from now until Vale, and we’ll have to avoid all main roads and cities. ”