Chapter 55
Consciousness returned in pieces. Richard’s head throbbed. His knees ached, pinned against wood, and the rope that lashed his wrists at the small of his back dug into his skin. A gag was wedged deep between his teeth, its knot tangled in his hair.
Again, he thought with some irritation. He must have lost consciousness more times in these past two weeks than he had in the past decade.
Wrinkling his nose at the stench of rotting fish and briny harbour water, Richard squinted against the sunlight. The world swam into focus. Mast. Rigging. And beyond it, the silhouettes of warehouses and mooring posts.
The Maiden’s Promise had docked.
Richard tried to stand, but a boot drove into the back of his right knee, and he pitched forward, smashing his shoulder into the deck. Rough hands hauled him into a kneeling posture.
“There. Stay there, eh? No one wants a fuss straight after lunch.”
The Estaran soldier wore the standard blue-and-white livery, the helm fashioned with stag horns. Five more soldiers were dotted about him.
Kaelen.
Richard glanced around, but a scan of the ship didn’t reveal the knight anywhere.
“Master Marek,” said the soldier by the railing. “If you could confirm?”
Richard’s eyes widened as a man came to stand before him. Master Marek. The same silver-black hair tied back from a thin face. The same man Flint had killed and thrown overboard. The ship’s captain.
How? Richard frowned at the merchant’s fine coat. It gaped at the front seam, and within the inner pocket an emerald gem glinted.
The siren’s heart.
Understanding arrived in a cold flood.
The unicorn heart granted Galdran passage between dreams and places. The siren’s heart, then, granted its bearer a different kind of trespass—the borrowing of another face. Flint had not merely seized the shard from Richard. He was using its power.
Marek’s mouth—Flint’s mouth—curved into a thin smile. “Well, gentlemen. He’s awake now. The ballsack who took me hostage and forced me to sail him towards Singers’ Teeth.” He pressed a trembling hand to his brow. “Had I not drugged him and steered the ship back, I’d be food for the sharks.”
The captain—bearded, a scar across his cheek—leaned a knee against Richard’s back. “The city owes you a great deal, Master Marek. We shall see this filth dragged to the Black Pier. He’ll go straight to the lower cells. Such men do not see daylight again.”
“You’re too kind,” Marek murmured, staring at Richard. “If I may beg an indulgence, Captain. A moment alone with him. I find I have a little anger yet to discharge.”
The captain chuckled. “Take all the time you need.”
He barked a command, and the soldiers filed past Richard. The gangway creaked under their weight, and their voices receded along the quay.
The deck went quiet but for the slap of water against the hull. Marek’s eyes—Flint’s eyes—glittered with distaste.
“Hello, handsome. Don’t go worrying. The Knight of Cups is in the brig. Still knocked out.”
Richard glared.
“Ah, ah.” Flint stepped closer and crouched. “Don’t go giving me attitude right now. I’m all out of patience.”
He fisted his hand in Richard’s hair and yanked. Richard’s head wrenched back, neck arched, pain ringing through his scalp.
“You must’ve thought me a fool,” Flint said softly. “Must have thought you’d slipped it past me, and I were the dim country bandit who never twigged?”
Richard tried to speak past the gag, but Flint’s free hand cracked across his cheek. The slap whipped Richard’s head sideways. The taste of iron flooded his mouth as the wound on his lip bled.
“I don’t want to hear it,” Flint hissed.
“Not one fucking word. I knew you were some highborn. I thought maybe some duke who liked a good adventure before returning to the comforts of his manor. But the king? The fucking king? I told you everything. You let me confess my life to you, and inside that pretty head, you must have been laughing. Mustn’t you?
Laughing at the fool of a lowborn who thought you a friend. ”
Richard shook his head vehemently, and Flint’s grip on his hair tightened.
“Know how I figured it out? When Kaelen went looking for you. ‘My king,’ he was squawling in the forest like a lost pup. Must have thought me too far to hear, but suddenly”—Flint clicked his fingers —“it all made sense. Your speech, your command, your fucking perfect fingernails, even how you never flinch from holding hot cups.”
Richard stifled the urge to roll his eyes. Of course, Kaelen spilled the beans. The silly creature.
“And then I let your soldier live.” Flint’s lip curled.
“Did you mark that, handsome? I paid that price cause I’m a man who keeps my accounts.
You gave me back Lyell—ragged around the edges maybe—but he came back to me.
That was a debt I had to return, and you called it square when the Star came down.
We’re settled. There’s nothing between us now. ”
Flint released his hair, and a second slap almost toppled Richard onto his side.
“So don’t you fucking dare,” Flint snarled, “look at me like you’re better than me.
You stuck-up, spoiled, milk-fed prick. You’ve had every bastard thing in the world handed to you on velvet, and it was you who made Master Aldwin hurt us—” He broke off, his chest heaving.
“Should I have your man tortured? Should I do to him what you did to Lyell? An eye for an eye, and send him home to you broken, if I bother returning him at all.”
Richard arched a brow. He knew a bluff when he heard it. If Flint had truly intended to torture Kaelen in retribution, he would have bound Richard to the mast and made him watch. He would not have left Kaelen below decks. He would not have called the Estaran guards.
Something about Richard’s nonchalance must have irritated Flint, for the bandit’s hand cracked across his face a third time. Richard’s head lolled from the blow. He dragged it back up, ear ringing and cheek swollen.
“I’ve sold this ship,” Flint hissed. “The Maiden’s Promise sails for the Kelpane Isles within the hour with a new captain.
Captain Sallow—he’s a pirate, you know. Puts on a respectable face in public, but he’s as ruthless as they come.
Once he finds Kaelen in the brig, he’ll brand him and keep him as crew—a bit of muscle to handle the lines and scrub the deck.
He’ll not be letting your man go home again. ”
The image Flint painted, Richard was sure, was meant to gut him. And yet—
Kaelen, who at eighteen had swung a fist at a foreign prince, then squared up to a grizzled warrior with one broken arm.
Kaelen, who at nineteen, barely higher than Richard’s shoulder, had battled a basilisk and won.
Kaelen, who now stood tall and strong and could slay five men in a stroke of his sword.
Kept as a pirate’s servant?
Richard chuckled. It came out muffled, and his shoulders trembled.
Flint gawked. “What the fuck are you laughing at?” He seized Richard’s jaw, nails digging into his cheeks.
“You think I’m playing, do you? Let me make it plain.
The Estarans will take you to the Black Pier.
You’ll be locked, handsome, in their deepest cells.
There are men in those cells who have not seen the sun since their old queen died.
You’ll rot in the dark, with the seawater coming up through the stones. ”
Richard waited until the grip slackened before he started laughing again.
It was not, he supposed, Flint’s error. How was a bandit to know the meaning of a king to a nation?
Flint thought, perhaps, that the Ardenian court would mourn their sovereign and shrug.
Flint did not know the High Council, who, for all their faults, would never surrender their king to a mere disappearance.
Flint did not know Dain Haramont, who would gather the generals and wage war against Estara until he had Richard retrieved, even if it meant both realms on fire.
Flint did not know Elara, Corwin and Briony, who would not rest until their brother was with them.
Richard stopped laughing. That was a nice thought. No matter the grief and anger between them, his siblings would not let him go. He knew it as sure as he knew their faces.
Regardless. Kaelen would have the brig’s door off its hinges the instant he awoke. Kaelen would come for him.
Richard smiled.
How lovely to be held dear by so many.
“What?” Flint demanded. “What’s so bloody funny?”
Richard shrugged. He peered at the bandit, trying to convey the words he wished he could speak.
I am sorry.
Flint sneered, but it was marred with a shadow of uncertainty. “Stuck-up little shit. Laugh yourself sick for all I care. The rats’ll be at your toes soon enough. I’ll think of it warmly, I will. It’ll keep me right through winter.”
He turned on his heel, boots clacking against the planks.
Richard watched him go. The leader of the Raven’s Guild. The bandit. The traitor.
The only person to tell him that love and bedding were not the same road.
They’d meet again, Richard was sure.
Another thought struck him, and he groaned into the gag.
Yes, they’d meet again. He needed that siren’s heart back.
* * *
The soldiers marched Richard off the gangway and up the docks with his hands bound.
They moved in a brisk knot—captain at the front, two soldiers flanking Richard, two behind, occasionally tugging the leash around Richard’s neck.
The cobbles evened as they passed beneath an archway into the lower markets.
It was a bustle of people sweltering in the noonday heat.
A woman haggling over eels. A man advertising his lobsters. A shoemaker arguing with a customer.
It was, Richard mused, the perfect place for an escape. He could shoulder the guard on his left, grab a spear and run. In such a crowd, if he ran fast—perhaps overturn the fish barrels to trip the guards and duck under the vegetable cart—he might make it.