Chapter 39
I was at the top of the inn's stairs when the sounds downstairs quieted down.
The common room, which had been at a normal level of late-evening noise, quieted. Conversations didn't stop. They just became careful and muted.
I hesitated. What had happened? Then I heard the telltale clip of a guard’s boot.
Shit.
He’d told me to pack, and I hurried to the room. The door was locked. Larana and Baxley must still be downstairs. Where was Nicco? I hadn’t looked around when I came in. I’d headed straight for the stairs and gone up.
“Fuck.” I looked over my shoulder, biting my lip. My cloak was inside, my money. My pack.
I tried the door to the room they were in, but it was locked too.
“Shit, shit, shit.”
Larana appeared at the top of the stairs, her expression doing the flat, alert thing. She looked at me. I looked at her. She was at our door within moments and unlocked it, so both of us could grab our stuff. My cloak settled around my shoulders with familiarity, and I relaxed slightly.
“Let’s move.”
Baxley was at the bottom, talking to the innkeeper in a low, unhurried voice.
The innkeeper was a broad woman who looked like someone who valued a quiet establishment and was reassessing the guests who had threatened that peace.
She glanced at us, then at the common room, where the two guards were talking to a table of men, their backs to us.
"Back door," Baxley said, without looking at us. He jerked his head slightly toward the corridor that ran alongside the common room. "Kitchen."
"What happened?" Larana asked, very quietly.
"Later," Baxley said. "Go."
“Move, Amarya,” she whispered quickly.
I moved toward the kitchen, with Larana at my back.
“You there, stop.”
I didn’t turn around, and it wasn’t until I was in the kitchen, a large, hot space that smelled of the evening's cooking, that I realized she wasn’t behind me.
I hesitated. There was a kitchen boy who looked at me with the wide eyes of someone who had decided this wasn't his business and was very committed to that decision.
I looked between him and the back door. The back door was bolted. He hurried over to it, and it was open in seconds.
I didn’t hesitate again, and I stepped out through the door and into the cool Florlunia night.
A narrow lane ran behind the inn, between the building and a low stone wall. I turned left at the end of the lane, jumping back when a shadow moved in front, and then saw that Nicco was already here.
“Where are they?” he asked quietly.
“They saw Larana. I don’t know where Baxley is. How did you get out?”
“Front door.” He said it like it was obvious.
“Should we go—”
“No. Keep moving.”
We moved fast through the back streets of Bloomreach, not running, not yet, but the pace just below running that covered ground without announcing itself.
"What’s the plan?" I asked.
"Horses are at the inn,” Nicco said. "We keep a low profile, and we head out before first light. Hopefully, they’re waiting for us.”
I almost stopped walking. "We leave them?"
"If they’re not there, we’ll come back for them later, or not at all."
“Nicco! We can’t leave—”
He grabbed my elbow and brought me to a stop. “They’ve been in there all evening, and anyone sitting there can vouch for that. Me and you? Not so much.”
His cold stare bore into mine, and I nodded. “Of course, you’re right.”
“Good girl.” He looked over his shoulder. “Come on.”
We turned down a narrower street. The buildings here were older, closer together, and the lamplight thinner. I was reading the town as we went, trying to remember the way back in case we got separated.
Which was why I saw them before Nicco did.
Or at the same time. It was hard to tell with him.
Two figures at the far end of the street. Not guards, the quality of their stillness was wrong for guards. Guards moved with the purposeful stride of people who had been given a task. These two had the stillness of people who had been waiting.
I knew that stillness.
"Nicco," I said.
"I see them."
Vorn's men.
Not the ones who'd left the square, these were different ones. That meant Vorn had brought more people south than I'd known, and they'd been watching long enough to know where we were staying and to get ahead of us when we moved.
Better trackers than any of us had given them credit for.
They came at us fast, and there was nowhere to go that was faster, so we didn't run.
What happened next was something I couldn't have fully described afterward.
Not because it was confusing, it was very clear, just hard to describe.
I moved, and I fought. I used my sword and my staff in the narrow street with the economy of someone who had been doing this since her brother taught her, someone who had never once been allowed to be bad at it because in Crystallese, being bad at it meant death. Or worse.
Nicco was beside me, then ahead of me, and then somewhere I couldn't track without losing focus on my own situation.
It was loud for a while, then it wasn't.
The two men were down. Not dead, or mine wasn't. The other I didn't examine too closely.
But the noise had been enough. Bloomreach was a town with guards looking for two people, and the backstreets of any town carried sound in ways the main roads didn't. I could hear boots on cobblestones coming from two different directions.
"Nicco—"
He grabbed my hand. “Move.”
We ran away from the fallen, and he led me around a corner, then another, and I remembered Bloomreach wasn’t large, and we were running out of streets.
I heard the sound of boots.
Nicco was beside me, closer than I expected, close enough that I stepped back instinctively and hit the building wall behind me. Nicco came with me.
I looked up at him in confusion and saw him looking down at me, his expression one that I recognized. That calculation, that momentary frown, the arrival at a conclusion before I had processed what the question was.
The boots were getting louder.
He moved. His hands came up to my face — both of them, warm and certain — and he tilted my chin and kissed me.
It wasn’t to be misinterpreted. He kissed me the way he did everything, with complete certainty.
His mouth was warm. Warmer than I expected, warmer than anything had a right to be, and for one suspended moment, my entire world narrowed to that warmth and the slight pressure of it and the way his thumb moved once against my jaw — barely, barely — as if checking that I was real.
I didn't know what to do. I'd had nothing to measure this against.
My hands found the front of his shirt without my permission, my fingers curling into the fabric, holding him close.
He kissed me like he had time for it, which was a lie, and I knew it was a lie even as I stopped thinking about anything else.
His lips were unhurried. It was present, deliberate, a thing being done properly in the time available.
His tongue licked my bottom lip, and I jerked at the unexpectedness of it.
I felt his smile as I leaned back in, wanting more, and with his mouth still moving over mine, I tentatively tasted his bottom lip.
Nicco made a sound, a low rumble in his chest, and he pressed me harder against the wall, his hand leaving my jaw and tangling in my hair.
His lips were soft. So strange for a man who was so difficult.
Warmth moved through my chest that had nothing to do with magic. I felt the slow exhale of months of almost and not yet and not this and I don't know resolve into a single moment that was already ending.
It lasted the length of a breath, or longer, or no time at all.
My first kiss.
And it felt like a goodbye.
I knew that even as it was happening. I knew it the way I knew the lodestone found north without deciding to, without meaning to, just as a fact my body had accumulated somewhere in the weeks of knowing him.
Two people pressed against a wall who were not running from guards. That was the risk he took, the calculated risk.
The sound of boots moved past us, not stopping to consider us, and I heard them rounding the corner.
Nicco stepped back.
His hands left me.
I looked at him. At those warm brown eyes in the lamplight, steady on mine, and something in them I'd never seen before, and then it was gone.
“I—”
“Let’s go.” He took my hand and pulled me forward, his hand sliding up my arm to grip my elbow like before.
We rounded another corner, heading back to the inn when we walked right into the two men who had been with Vorn.
“Shit.”
The point of a sword was at my throat.
“Not so smart now, are you?” the other one said.
Nicco jerked me back, and I felt the scrape against my throat. He lunged forward, his sword in hand, and I scrambled for my own sword as the one who’d held his sword to my throat thrust forward.
I was defending myself quickly, but he was better, faster, and had a longer reach.
He knocked my sword free, and just as I thought he would strike, Nicco’s arm wrapped around his throat, pulling him back. His eyes were on mine as he quickly checked me over.
“Mine,” he growled into the man’s ear, just as he slit his throat.
“You there! Stop!”
I turned and saw the guards rushing in from both directions. There were too many. I looked back at Nicco in panic. He looked over my shoulder, his eyes narrowing.
“You!” came the shout again.
I darted forward, but a strong hand grabbed my cloak and jerked me back.
I looked ahead, expecting to see Nicco charge forward to help me. Instead, he melted into the shadows of a doorway. The way only Nicco could. Present, then not present, the dark simply absorbed him as if he were one of its own.
More guards reached me.
I stood in the street with two bodies on the ground and no companion, and apparently, a very clear description that matched the woman with long dark hair who had been seen in the square earlier that evening.
I didn't run. There was nowhere to run to.
My magic surged, and I forced it down. I definitely did not need that kind of attention right now.
They took my arms. I let them. I looked up once at the doorway where the shadow was.
Nothing there.
Just the dark, indifferent, and ordinary, as if nothing had happened in its back streets tonight worth noting.
The guards didn't waste time.
My sword was snatched up and gone before I'd thought to grab it. My belt knife followed. Someone patted down my cloak with the practiced thoroughness of someone who had learned that people hid things in obvious places.
They found my purse.
"That's mine," I said.
Nobody responded.
One of them crouched over the two bodies in the street with a lamp, examining them, and I heard the distinct sound of a man deciding which problem required immediate attention and which could wait. He stood and looked at me.
He decided the dead could wait a little longer.
"I didn't—" I started.
"Save it," the one holding my right arm said. Not unkindly. Just tired. Someone who had heard every excuse before and been moved by none of it.
They walked me through Bloomreach.
I was escorted through streets now empty, with a guard on each arm, one in front and one behind, and the feeling of being very visible in a place that had decided not to see me.
The garrison was on the north side of the town. A stone building, older than most of what surrounded it, with the architecture of a place built to hold rather than to house. The door was iron-bound. It opened from the inside when one of the guards knocked, which meant someone had been watching.
Inside, the air smelled of lamp oil and damp stone, and of a building that didn't often open its windows. The guard behind the desk looked at me with professional blankness and began writing without asking my name. Beyond him, a low-ceilinged corridor with doors on either side.
One of the doors was opened, and I was put inside.
The door was locked behind me.
The cell was small. Not cruel, just small.
A stone bench along one wall, a blanket recently washed enough to be acceptable, and a narrow window set high in the wall that showed a rectangle of dark sky.
A lamp in the corridor outside cast thin strips of light through the bars in the door across the floor.
I sat on the bench and looked at the strips of light and thought, I was alive. That was the first fact, and it was a good one.
I was in a Florlunia garrison cell on suspicion of… what, exactly? The dead men in a back street. They'd find Vorn in the fountain square before morning, which meant several dead men were linked to a woman whose description I matched. That was a significant problem.
I had no coin. No weapons. No pack. I had my cloak, which they'd searched but not taken from me.
I had my magic, which hummed in my chest with that small, patient warmth — quiet, present, and waiting.
I had the memory of a kiss, and I was absolutely not going to think about it in a garrison cell in Bloomreach, because thinking about it would require feeling things, and feeling things right now was a liability.
Especially for a man who let me get captured.
I pressed my palm flat against my sternum. Held it there for a moment. The gesture's familiarity soothed me.
The lamp in the corridor shifted as someone passed by the door. I watched the light change and settle, thinking about exits, the window's construction, and how long it would take someone to notice a missing prisoner versus how long it would take to cut through stone.
Too long. Both answers were too long.
I lay down on the bench, pulled the blanket over myself, and stared at the ceiling.
Somewhere in Bloomreach, or on the road south of it, three people knew roughly what had happened and were deciding what to do about it.
I thought about Baxley. He’d be confused and eager to get me back. I thought about Larana, hoping her blonde hair would help her get out of a killing she didn’t commit. I thought about warm brown eyes assessing the situation in the lamplight, then going carefully blank.
And leaving me.
The stone bench was hard and unremarkable, and cold. I'd slept on colder surfaces than this.
I closed my eyes.
I was going to need sleep for whatever came next, and whatever came next was coming whether I slept or not, so I might as well sleep.
I was sure it wouldn’t look so bleak in the morning.