M
aylien
threw herself down on the muddy ground and rolled under the low canopy of a golden willow, following Bontrang into the natural tent. I entered more cautiously, duck-walking to preserve the knees of my stolen pants. They were already the worse for twenty minutes of climbing walls and running through backyards with the forces of the crown in howling pursuit.
We’d shaken them loose somewhere on the outskirts of the royal preserve by slipping in and out across the borders between crown land and various private estates. Our current hiding place lay on a tiny island centering the miniature man-made lake on the Earl of Anaryun’s city estate—a spot I’d scouted for just such a temporary refuge years ago when I was nosing Marchon House as a venue for killing Ashvik. Luckily, nothing seemed to have changed since then. We’d been able to follow a narrow calf-deep track built for the use of the gardeners and concealed among the lily pads out to the island.
I had no doubt the Crown Guard was still out there looking for us, but they’d gotten much more circumspect about it now that they’d completely lost sight of us. That quiet might also have something to do with the fact that we were getting close to Marchon House and a much greater potential for charges of crown interference with a scheduled challenge.
I’d brought us to the island because we needed to hole up for an hour or two, and the shelter of the willow was perfect for the purpose. Not even crack troops like the Elite and Crown Guard can maintain maximum alertness for very long without dulling their edge. Our chances would look much better if we vanished for a bit before making our next move. It also gave Maylien a chance to finally change into clean dry clothes.
“Sorry about all the running and hiding,” I said. “I really didn’t expect I’d get pinched by an elderly steward for stealing clothes.” I handed them over. “Do you want me to hold anything for you?”
Maylien grinned, her teeth shining briefly in the darkness. then shivered. “I bet you say that to all the girls when you’re trying to get them out of their clothes. Here, take Bontrang. He’s half-frozen. Oh, and you’d actually better hang on to the clothes, too. I can’t strip and keep them off the ground at the same time.”
I took the little shivering gryphinx and stuffed him into the front of my shirt against my skin. He was cold and wet and smelled of soggy cat, and was very, very happy to be out of the elements. He started purring at once, and I rubbed his neck affectionately. Triss, who had come to quite like the little fellow, wrapped himself protectively around the gryphinx as well.
Meanwhile, Maylien skinned out of her ruined shirt and pants, leaving me wishing for better light. She was a beautiful woman, and we hadn’t gotten another chance to be alone together since the keep fire. Heyin had gone out of his way to prevent us. I couldn’t fault him for that, however much it might have frustrated me. Protecting Maylien
was
his job.
“Hand me that shirt.” Maylien took it and slipped it on. “Skirt next. Ahh, much better. Now, what’s our next move?”
“We stay right here for at least an hour. We’ve still got four hours till daybreak and we need to let the heat die down a bit.”
“Well, damn,” said Maylien, and she gave a throaty chuckle.
“What?”
“If we’ve got an hour to kill in here, and we want to have any hope of staying warm and limber while we do it, I’m going to end up taking these clothes right off again.”
Triss let out a derisive snort. “You’d better let me hold Bontrang since he’s still half-frozen, and we can keep watch. Humans would be so much easier to deal with if they had mating seasons like everybody else does.”
Even
the richest neighborhoods have cheap taverns. Little hidden hole-in-the-wall-type places that cater to servants of the high-and-mighty. The Footman’s Step was one such, marked out only by the coach step nailed to a narrow door in the middle of an otherwise blank wall. It was tucked into a little wedge of property between two wealthy estates and had matched its façade to the walls of its well-to-do neighbors in an effort not to offend anyone’s delicate sensibilities.
Normally, it would have been closed here in the brief hours before dawn, but a well-paying private party had rented the front room. So, when I knocked lightly on the door, it was quickly opened. Inside, Heyin and a dozen of his best people waited for us. They wore heavy canvas work clothing of the sort favored by masons and carpenters and had appropriate tools and equipment neatly piled in one corner.
The only thing remotely suspicious about them was that they were carrying more in the way of ladders, rope, and bamboo poles for scaffolding than such a group might normally have. A fact explained by the very real-looking work order they had for cornice repair on the notoriously tall great house of the Duke of Jenua.
“You’re late,” said Heyin. “We were worried. Especially with all the noise and fuss. What happened?”
So we filled him in, minus any description of how exactly we’d killed time under the willow though I’m sure he had his suspicions. One unexpected plus from said time killing was it had warmed both of us up enough to take a quick bath in the lake, leaving us something approaching clean.
“What about you?” I asked Heyin after we’d finished bringing him up to date. “Were you stopped?”
“Twice. Both times they checked faces against a drawing of Maylien with a rune at the bottom.”
“We saw one of those,” I said. “Did they do anything else?”
Heyin nodded and lowered his voice. “It was subtle, and I doubt any of the others noticed since they wouldn’t know to look for that kind of thing, but one of the guards made sure to step on every single one of our shadows. I thought I saw another rune scribed on the sole of his boot.”
Triss squeezed my shoulders and hissed very quietly. I felt more than a little like hissing myself. Instead, I asked, “Is everything ready?”
“Whenever you are,” said Heyin.
“Then let’s go.”
I led the way through the edge of the royal preserve, where we had to move in a series of short dashes and long pauses. Triss and I would scout ahead, then slide back to lead the others forward. This close to Marchon House, the royal patrols were actually significantly lighter than normal though I couldn’t say if that was more to avoid the charge of interference or simply because the outer cordon had soaked up all the available troops.
When we got to the place where the Marchon estate met the royal preserve, we split up. Triss and I led the bulk of Maylien’s guard one way while Maylien took Heyin and a couple of others in the opposite direction. The estate was a large one, and I left the men and women of the guard spaced out along the wall at fifty-pace intervals, each with a length of rope with a metal tool tied to one end. I kept going after I ran out of guards, speeded up even, though I had to climb into another estate to do so. I wanted to put as much distance between me and them as possible before the timesman at the temple of Shan struck the fourth hour.
When the bell rang, I started counting to a thousand. I needed to give our planned distraction time to work. With the ringing of the bell, each of the guards I’d left behind would be noisily throwing their tool-weighted ropes over the wall, then dragging them back to the top, which would make a sound like so many grappling hooks being pulled tight.
After that, they were supposed to scatter and meet back at the Footman. Some of them were bound to be picked up by the Crown Guard, but that was a price they’d all agreed to pay if necessary. Since none of them was carrying anything illegal, the worst they’d get was a light beating and a couple of weeks in jail for trespassing. And, if Maylien won her duel, she could bail them all out as soon as she was confirmed as Baroness Marchon.
At the end of my count, I silently placed a light ladder against the wall—a single bamboo pole with shorter lengths driven through it to form rungs. I went up and over the wall, carrying a second ladder, which I placed on the other side. I left them both in place since we wanted them to be found.
We also wanted to leave the thickest possible shadow trail for Devin, so instead of my taking control, Triss covered me as I dashed a couple of hundred feet into the grounds. That presence would strengthen the spoor he left behind. At the end of the dash, we dodged left and right as though we’d encountered a couple of patrols. Then we turned and ran back along a slightly different path to my ladders. The goal was to make Devin think Maylien and I hadn’t been able to get past the guards and had backed off to come in from another angle.
Maylien was actually on the far side of the estate, coming in by a completely different route. If all had gone according to plan, she was already over the wall and in the company of her spy within the house—the chief cook. The cook was going slip her into the house with the morning deliveries. Easy enough to do since they’d already been thoroughly checked at the main gate of the estate. Then she would take Maylien to a hiding place in the kitchens to wait for the dawn.
Heyin would get rid of Maylien’s ladder and take care of Bontrang for the duration. No familiar could be trusted to stay out of a fight if his companion’s life was in imminent danger, so Bontrang had to be kept away from the duel.
After our run-ins with the Elite and Crown Guard, we’d argued about my part in the next bit of the plan. Maylien wanted me to get clear so that I wouldn’t encounter whomever the king chose to send as his witnesses to the duel. She suspected Deem and possibly a second officer of the Elite—people who would happily try to kill me given any chance. She’d already made me swear not to interfere with the duel as long as it was conducted honorably, and now she figured I was better off out of it completely.
I’d insisted we stick to the original plan, with me providing a backup in case of treachery, and I’d refused to be budged. So, after using the neighbor’s decorative trout stream to break my shadow trail, Triss and I doubled back to the estate and made a second climb onto the wall, this time using a rope and a leather-wrapped grappling hook.
Then we made our slow and painstaking way to the house by moving from tree to tree and touching the ground as little as possible. Since the whole estate was crawling with Sumey’s guards, it took Triss and me the better part of two hours and three major backtracks to get within sail-jumping distance of the house, which had its compensations. The spring was starting to fade, but many of the trees were still in bloom. The smell of the myrtle and flowering pears was particularly lovely and made doubly sweet by the very real chance that this was the last time I’d ever smell them.
I ended up about thirty feet up a grand old katsura, perched on a branch a bit bigger around than my thigh. The leaves chattered quietly away in the predawn breeze, a lovely but dangerous sound, as it masked the noises made by the patrolling guards below. After half an hour of waiting for a good gap, I concluded that the timing was never going to come out right for a clean jump.
That left two choices. Jump anyway. With the rain still coming down, there were no stars to blot out, and I was all in gray and black—not easily visible against the backdrop of Triss and the darkness above. Or, remain fully enshrouded and drop to the ground to slip between patrols on foot, which would leave a trail for Devin. Either way, I needed to make my move. Dawn was coming on fast. If not for the clouds, the sky would already have begun to lighten. For about the millionth time, I wished that Triss and I had a good way of communicating under these sorts of circumstances. Then I jumped.
I landed on the narrow ledge of a second-floor window and stayed there for a few seconds while I checked to see whether anyone had noticed. If so, they were playing things mighty casual, so I headed for the most difficult of the possible routes up this side of the house. I felt pretty sure that at this late hour, Devin would already be in place for the duel, but I wanted to confuse my shadow trail just in case.
At the top I perched myself on the narrow strip of lead roofing that lay between one of the house’s many chimneys and the wall I’d just climbed. I wanted to give Devin a little more time to get in place if he hadn’t already. The duel was supposed to take place in the hour after dawn in the receiving garden out front, between the main house and the forward-thrusting wings. I knew it well from my attempts to catch a king there once upon a time.
Devin’s problem now was quite similar to the one I’d had then. If he intended to provide a backstop for Sumey’s sword-handling skills, he needed a place to hide. Somewhere from which he could both watch and act if the duel started to go wrong. He had four major constraints. First, he had to stay hidden from any Elite witnesses. I didn’t think that any deal Sumey had cut with Deem would extend to ignoring the presence of a former Blade—the enmity between Blade and Elite just ran too deep.
Which led to Devin’s second problem. He needed to not get caught. There are a very limited number of ways to affect a witnessed sword duel from a distance. The constraints get even tighter if you can’t use magic because the witnesses are also mages. He couldn’t just nail Maylien with an arrow in the back or push her onto Sumey’s sword with a spell. The scandal would finish Sumey as thoroughly as losing the duel would. And that would be true even if she were able to convince people she hadn’t ordered her sister’s death herself.
That left Devin an extremely short list of options, all of them small and inaccurate over any distance. I was figuring a blowgun loaded with tiny pebbles from the carriageway. Delivered with the right timing and to the right target—an ear, say—the distraction could easily prove fatal, and the pebble would effectively vanish among its mates.