Chapter 26 Thessia
Thessia
“Are you quite certain he cannot ride upon my shoulder outside the hood?”
Ario’s plaintive inquiries on the subject of Benjamin’s riding position had accompanied them for much of their stealthy walk
through the seedy wharves of Vestriya’s capital, where they had returned from the Pale Palace with the recovering prince.
“He’s fine inside,” Thessia promised Ario patiently while the prince fidgeted with the heavy garment covering his entire upper
body. Peering into Ario’s hood, Thessia could just discern the faintly glowing eye stalks of the snail. “He likes the dark,”
she reassured Ario.
“She is right,” Hugh murmured. “If anyone sees you and your conspicuous pet, they’ll recognize you.”
Ario humphed. “What’s so dreadful about that anyway? Then they would know my parents are deceiving their fair realm.”
He was not incorrect. The Vestriyan king and queen continued to have their scribes report that Ario remained in the Pale Palace,
his condition not improving. Worse, the gloomy reporting was gathering sympathy for the supposedly grieving royal couple,
parents who might lose their second son on the heels of the death of their first. The positive press had silenced the indignant
voices who would have joined Ezio’s coup.
“Your parents would send assassins after you,” Thessia reminded him. “Right now, the Pale Palace is covering for us all.”
Ario frowned. “I’d wish danger on my tail over hiding my snail,” he rhymed grumblingly.
Hugh led them up seawater-slickened stairs where one grimy dock ended, returning them into the narrow, shadow-cast streets
of the city. Rumprats skittered across their path, fleeing under wooden doors darkened with soot and splintered from decades
of overuse.
“Why did your brother want to depose your parents?” Hugh asked, as if to distract the prince.
It worked. Ario startled. In response, he gestured to their surroundings. “Look around you. See how hard the lives of these
people are?” he inquired earnestly.
Thessia did look. Under the wharf’s granite sky, she saw what ever-present danger and her own complicated situation had led
her to ignore. Fishmongers huddling in the cold while they knifed open their catches with crooked fingers. Exhausted manor
servants hustling from stall to stall under the weight of their woven satchels. Men wandering the docks without destination,
their hungry eyes haunted.
“Crime runs rampant in much of our realm, hidden behind the gilded facades of the richer districts,” Ario continued, quiet
fury in his voice. “Our parents do not care that so many of their people suffer in poverty. Ezio did. He was going to change
things. He would have looked out for our people the way he looked out for me. They only wanted me to be spymaster because
I was a joke. Ezio was the one to make me look . . . dangerous. He protected me.”
His voice broke, and tears sprang into his eyes. His grief was not like the poets depicted—he did not wail or tear at his
hair or collapse to his knees.
Thessia knew it was because the wound was too deep. He’d had no proper chance to mourn his brother. Right now, he needed time, care, perspective. Not . . . questing.
Sympathy softened her. “We’ll find proof,” she reassured him. “You can win Ezio’s people to your side.”
This stopped Ario in the middle of the stone-walled street.
“Me?” he exclaimed. “You want me to be k—”
Hugh interrupted him urgently. “Cook, yes,” he said, loudly cutting off the prince’s exclamation for the fishermen passing them. “Cook for our party. Yes, you
would make an excellent cook, wouldn’t you?”
Ario reddened. “No, I would be awful!” he exclaimed. “My brother deserves justice, but someone else should be the . . . um,
cook.”
“Perhaps we can discuss this when we reach the safehouse Celine arranged,” Hugh replied gravely, “because right now, I fear
we are being followed.”
Forgetting herself, Thessia whipped around very conspicuously to look for whomever Hugh had noticed. But Hugh was there, grabbing her hand, pulling her forward hard to stop
her erratic surveillance.
He drew her around the next shadowy corner, his harp callouses rough against her soft skin.
Hastily, he released her, like he’d realized they needed to hold hands no longer. They shouldn’t, in fact.
Hugh’s abruptness—or perhaps the pink invading Thessia’s face, embarrassment feuding with lingering heat—did not escape Ario’s
notice. “Using my former spymaster skills, I did overhear the healers gossiping that the pair of you broke up. Ezio would
have been so proud of me.” He sniffled. “Are you . . . doing okay?”
The young prince did not sound scandalized or—even more remarkable still—like he was looking for poetic inspiration in the
depths of their lovelorn emotion. He was sincerely checking on them.
“We didn’t break up,” Hugh amended roughly. “We were never officially together—”
She cut him off. “Is now really the time?”
Ario scoffed grandly. “Time is no lord over love,” he pronounced.
Thessia and Hugh’s gazes found him. It was just that his poetical sentiment was . . . rather good.
Like he knew it, Ario proudly put his hands on his hips. “You’d really have me give up my poetry for . . . cooking?”
Thessia laughed. “Who’s to say you cannot do both?”
“Sorry,” Hugh cut in.
Was he grouchy about Ario’s line of romantic questioning? Thessia wondered.
“We must flee,” he insisted with unusually stern intensity. “We really are being followed.”
When he glanced over Thessia’s shoulder while directing them around the next street corner, Thessia was able to follow his
gaze, glimpsing—okay, yes, there really was a hooded figure pursuing them.
Assassin? Spy for the king and queen? Whoever it was, she and Hugh needed to keep Ario safe and out of sight.
The small square into which they exited was thronged with people. Fishmongers hoarsely hawking the whitefish and pincerlings,
the scuttlesnails and pestleshells they carried in wicker contraptions over their heads. Thessia moved quickly with her friends,
and glancing once more over her shoulder, she saw no sign of their hooded pursuer. They stole nervously into the passageway
on the square’s opposite end, where open ocean waited on one side—
Rounding the corner, Thessia realized their mistake.
The hooded man stood in front of them, his grin visible from under his cloak.
They hadn’t lost him. Of course not. He probably knew Vestriyan streets like he knew the map of scars on the hand holding
the curved knife he drew from his robes. They were right where he wanted them.
Thessia was so sick of being right where people wanted her.
Hugh felt the same, evidently.
In the very moment the hooded man rushed forward, Hugh pushed Thessia hard off the path. Flinging her hands out in front of
her—finding nothing, no purchase, only empty sky—Thessia flew right into the ocean.
“Swim!” her husband shouted. “Now!”
Thessia wanted to. When the cold water hit her, shocking her senses, she went under. She resurfaced sputtering, struggling.
Her waterlogged cloak was heavy, the dense fabric constricting her limbs like the grotesque tentacles of some monstrous depthwalker.
Panic gripped her, the grimy salt water rising past her lips while she gasped, thrashing, fighting the soaking cloth—
Hugh was there. He dove in, perfectly, like a Mythria Games competitor, then an instant later emerged next to her.
“I’ve got you,” he promised, his dark hair lashed to his face. “Just breathe.” He ripped her cloak off, freeing her from the
constraining fabric.
Just breathe. Thessia could only obey.
Hugh held her up above the surface, giving her the chance to fill her lungs, to calm her pounding heart. She searched the
surface of the water frantically for the prince, but only the lurching shapes of the boats moored in the crowded harbor surrounded
them.
Oh, Ghosts no. Without Hugh’s strong embrace, Thessia herself would likely have drowned. Their charge, their objective—they couldn’t possibly
have let him . . .
Then she glimpsed the prince on the docks. The hooded man was close . . . but had not reached Ario. Instead, their pursuer
was clutching his foot, yelping.
“You broke my foot!” he shrieked.
Ario covered his own ears, looking utterly mortified, while their pursuer hobbled off, weeping. Following Hugh, Thessia swam to the dock, where they heaved themselves up onto the wood. “What in the realms . . .” Thessia started to say.
Interrupting her, Ario, who looked rather seasick, vomited very suddenly into the ocean.
“For the record,” he managed miserably when he’d finished, “I did not break his foot. Oh, how horrid. Unimaginable. I only broke his . . . his . . .” He gagged. Thessia hastened out of the way,
fearing more princely puking. “His toe!” Ario wailed.
Hugh, visibly confused, patted Ario on the shoulder. Thessia understood the import of the confession, however. “You used your
magic for us,” she said.
Ario nodded, his color starting to return. “And it was as terrible as I remember it. Just ghastly. Disgusting. The poor man.”
“He likely was paid to kill you,” Hugh reminded him gravely.
“And now he’ll never receive the money he needs to set his toe!” Ario replied. “How awful!”
Swallowing her laughter, Thessia put her hand comfortingly on the prince’s other shoulder. He did not react to the seawater
her wet hand seeped into his cloak. “Thank you for stopping him,” she said earnestly. “I know how much you hate using your
magic.”
Her gratitude eased the prince’s illness, which was fortunate—Thessia did not wish to get vomit on her remaining clothes,
now soaked. The filthy ocean water of Vestriya’s harbor was bad enough.
“Yes, well,” Ario managed. “I owe you. You saved me.”
Thessia started to smile.
Then she was wrenched backward, heavy hands pulling her hard onto one of the boats docked nearby. She opened her mouth to