Chapter 42
The streets behind the market were empty. Most of Vexmara was still crammed into Antlershield Square, and the narrow lanes that wound east lay quiet but for the slap of Richard’s boots on flagstone and his pulse thundering in his ears.
Behind him, faint but rising, was the rhythm of bootfalls. Many bootfalls. The Estaran guards had cleared the square, and now they were flooding through the side streets.
Organised, Richard thought bitterly. It would have taken his own soldiers double the time to get through that square’s throng.
His hood slipped, and he yanked it forward again without breaking stride. The houses here were tall, pressed shoulder to shoulder, ivory-stoned and balconied. Richard rounded the corner at full pelt.
And slammed into a firm chest. He pitched backwards, arms windmilling, but a sturdy arm caught him at the waist and pulled him close.
“By the gods! My—”
“Have you no sense?” Richard fisted the front of Kaelen’s tunic. “You are running straight towards them.”
Kaelen’s hood was also drawn, his bow looped around his back, and sweat beaded his temples. He tightened his grip on Richard’s waist.
“Then, you must not be with me. Go left, and I shall draw them away—”
“Do not be ridiculous.” Richard seized Kaelen’s hand. “Come.”
They ran. Hand in hand, fingers laced so tightly that Richard’s knuckles ached.
Richard’s mind raced ahead of his feet, sorting through what he remembered of Vexmara’s eastern quarter—he had walked these streets once with a delegation, half-listening to a guide, and now he cursed himself for every word he had not bothered to remember.
“My king, please.” Kaelen tugged at their hands, breathless. “If we are taken together, you—”
“I am not leaving you,” Richard said through pants. “Hurry.”
They turned a corner, and turned again into a row of merchants’ houses. A washerwoman with a basket on her hip flattened herself against a pillar as they shot by. Richard’s lungs burned, and he couldn’t help but notice that Kaelen matched his pace despite having longer legs.
A wider street opened before them, flanked by terraced houses with pillared porticoes and bay windows. Richard whirled into a smaller alleyway, and—
his stomach plummeted.
The alley ended in a wall. At least twelve feet high, covered with brown ivy, with no gate or opening. The sides were walled off.
Kaelen unsheathed his sword and faced the alleyway’s entrance, shielding Richard with his back.
The bootfalls had multiplied. They echoed, seeming to come from every direction at once.
Richard drew in a deep breath. There was no other option. He would have to unveil himself as the King of Ardenia and plead leniency for Kaelen. Marius would not dare to touch him, though they’d not be sailing to Singers’ Teeth —
A scrape of metal made Richard’s head snap down. Three paces to their left, set into the paving, a grate had lifted. It tipped sideways, disappeared into the dark below, and through the hole, a small, hooded head poked up.
“Well, whatcha waiting for?” the woman hissed. “Come on!”
Richard shoved Kaelen towards the hole. Kaelen sheathed his sword and went first, dropping into the dark. Richard followed, planting both hands on the lip of the opening and swinging his legs through. Once he was through, the woman slid the grate back into place.
A click. The lattice settled. Richard and Kaelen had to crouch to avoid scraping their crowns on the ceiling. Above, bootfalls thundered into the dead-end street.
Richard’s breath hitched. Through the iron lattice, he could see the moving shadows of legs. Six pairs, perhaps seven. Clipped commands—‘Spread out, check the doors, search the houses’. The footsteps retreated, and the street above fell quiet.
The hooded figure raised her hand, manifesting an orb of light that spilled a yellow glow around them.
Richard’s brows rose. A sorcerer.
She stood no taller than Richard’s shoulder, lithe, and as she lowered her hood, the light caught a shaven scalp, stuck-out ears, and hazel eyes too large for her face. Richard’s first thought was that she resembled an older version of the pixies in his childhood storybooks.
His second thought was that he’d seen her face on every gatepost in Vexmara.
Nyx. Leader of the Broken Stag.
She tilted her head and appraised them with a twist of her lips.
“Right.” Her vowels bore the flat cadence of the Lowmarket gutters. “Move yer feet. Up this way. We’ve a walk.”
She started down the tunnel, and Richard followed, ignoring Kaelen’s half-whine of protest. The passage remained low-ceilinged, forcing him and Kaelen to dip their heads, and smelt of damp. Every so often, a grate above let down a square of daylight.
“Don’t speak,” Nyx said over her shoulder. “Sound travels up through them grates. Wait till we turn.”
The tunnel forked, and Nyx took the left branch without hesitation. It forked once more, and she took the right. After the seventh turn, when the daylight overhead had grown infrequent, she rounded on them.
“Now. Which one of you absolute fucking lackwits put an arrow in Pedron?”
Kaelen rubbed his nape. “I did.”
“Brilliant work, you donkey.” Nyx jabbed a finger up at Kaelen’s chest. “Old Pedron was going to die anyway. Every minute he went on cooking was another minute somebody else in that crowd decided they hated Marius enough to do something about it. And you put a fucking arrow through his ribs.”
“I will not ignore such cruelties.” Kaelen’s jaw set. “Had I stood by, I could not call myself my mother’s son.”
Nyx raised a brow at him, then at Richard, who shrugged. What did she expect him to do?
“He is always this way,” Richard offered.
“A soft-hearted little arse is what he is. Don’t know shit about how a rebellion eats.
” Nyx shook her head, though a grin tugged the corners of her mouth.
“Aye, well. The mercy of it weren’t lost on Pedron, I’ll give you that.
Even if it means my band’s going to have to hide deeper with all those soldiers out prowling.
” She turned and began walking again. “Come on. Faster. We’ve another ten minutes. ”
Richard hurried to follow. So this was how the rebels moved through the city. The underground movement was truly underground. “These tunnels. They are sewers?”
“Were sewers. Hundred years back, before they built the new system out the harbour side. These ones got sealed and forgotten. We been opening ‘em back up where we need ‘em. Useful, and that.”
“Extraordinary,” Richard murmured.
The tunnel widened, narrowed, then widened again and curved. Sounds reached Richard’s ears—low voices, clinking pottery and the boil of water—and the corridor opened into a spacious domed brick room, vaulted high.
The original purpose was clear. A junction, where four or five old drainage channels had once converged into a single great basin.
But the channels themselves were now boarded shut, resulting in a round hall lit by a dozen oil lamps.
Bedrolls lined the walls, a long table stood at the centre surrounded by benches, and a copper pot hung over a brazier whose smoke vanished up a black flue.
Seven people occupied the chamber. A red-bearded man at the table, peeling potatoes. Two women bent together over a map. A wiry teenage boy mending a shoe. A grey-haired woman sharpening a sword on a whetstone. And from the opposite alcove were two more indistinct shapes.
Every head in the room snapped up, and Richard found himself the target of several glares.
“Don’t you lot pull faces,” Nyx said. “The big one’s the clever clogs who put an arrow through Pedron, so the king’s hounds are sniffing hard up east-side, and I’d rather not feed ‘em. The other one”—she jerked her thumb back without turning—“is with him, and they’re with us. For the afternoon at least.”
The red-bearded man pointed with his knife. “And who are they, Nyx? What if they be spies?”
Nyx dropped onto a bench. “Ask ‘em yerself. They’ve tongues.”
Richard tried a smile. “I am Richard. This is Kaelen, my companion. We travel with the Ardenian troupe billeted at the Cup and Crook. Circus folk. Performers. We are due to play in the castle tomorrow evening.” He inclined his head.
“We are deeply in your debt, madam, for our lives. I assure you, there are few who despise King Marius more than I.”
From the shadowed alcove came a derisive laugh. It was—Richard realised, goosebumps prickling his skin—awfully familiar.
A man’s smooth, court-accented voice filled the dome.
“Circus folk. Oh, that is quite wonderful. Ladies, gentlemen, and assorted brigands of the realm”—the speaker pushed himself off the wall and ambled into the lamplight, a second bulkier figure trailing at his shoulder—“allow me to present to you His Majesty King Richard of Ardenia, and his ever-loyal hound, Sir Kaelen. A circus indeed.”
He dragged back his hood.
The face beneath was older than Richard remembered, with a new hardness about the jaw, and a trimmed beard. But the rest of it, Richard knew. The crimson curls, now cut short. The arrogant cheekbones. The haughty sneer.
Prince Alaric of Estara.
Richard gaped, his thoughts stuttering to a halt. Kaelen let out a curse and wrenched Richard behind him.
“You,” Kaelen spat.
“Yes, dog. It is me.”
Kaelen lunged with startling speed. The bulky shadow at Alaric’s shoulder stepped in to intercept, and Richard’s stomach flipped to see the cauliflower ears, the crooked nose, the hefty shoulders. Sir Varkos.
Kaelen’s fist smashed into Varkos’s jaw with the full pivot of his hips. Varkos’s head snapped sideways, and he toppled with a grunt. Stepping over his body, Kaelen seized Alaric’s collar and slammed the prince against the alcove’s wall.
“If you are thinking,” Kaelen snarled, “of trading him to your father—if you have so much as whispered of him to anyone else—I shall gut you.”
Alaric bared his teeth. “Take your filthy hands off me, you vermin. Seven years it’s been, and I see you’re still the rash fool you were.”
“Kaelen.” Richard hurriedly slotted himself between the two and shoved Kaelen away. “Stop this.”
“That’s bloody right!” Nyx yelled from the table, daggers twirling.
“Listen, you tall lout. I’ll say it the once.
You don’t start fights in my house. You don’t draw steel in my house.
You don’t lay a hand on Alaric, or on Varkos, or on a single soul under my roof, or I’ll be feeding you and your kingly friend to the eels in the sewage. That plain?”
“Plain,” Richard said quickly. When Kaelen continued to glare at Alaric, he stomped on the knight’s foot.
“Plain, my lady,” Kaelen muttered, swivelling to meet Nyx’s gaze.
“There’s enough bloody fighting going on above our heads without you two starting fresh down here.” Nyx slid the daggers up her sleeves. “Now, sit, and let’s us chat like civilised folk.”
“Yes,” Alaric said sourly, fixing his collar. “Let’s.” He gave Richard a flat look. “Hello, betrothed. Did you miss me?”