Exile (11 page)

The words drew her concern. She knew how much Robert valued his horse. If he was willing to leave Horizon behind, the danger below must be grave. “But the palace guards left the city, didn’t they?” she asked, moving to help hitch the roan.

“Yes, but they will have asked questions, and word will have spread about your disappearance.”

“Questions about Horizon?”

“Aurelia, they won’t just be looking for you.”

Fear shot through her. Of course, she had endangered Robert as well.

“Come on.” He took her hand, guiding her through the trees, and together they strode forward into the basin. As they descended, sounds from below began to rise up: the harsh cracks of gunpowder, the thuds of an ax, the
thunk
of shovels hitting rock. And then everything. Baaing, moaning, squealing, baying, barking, clucking, and crowing. Bawling infants. Screaming youth. The rattle of buckets and pans. The spitting sizzle of campfires in the already fierce midday heat. And the unbroken squall of human voices, crossing from one tone to the next without constraint from walls or barriers.

She held her hands to her ears, aware that the noise was as much an inner cacophony as an outer one, the sharp reaction caused by her long absence from so much sound. “All these people are camping here, on top of each other?” she asked as her sensitive ears began to adjust. “Why?”

“They have no choice.” Robert circled around a cooking fire. “They’re waiting for a pass.”

“A pass?” She followed him and almost ran into a small girl.

Aurelia bent down to apologize, then peered closer. The toddler was half naked, her ribs showing beneath her torn garment, her heel planted heedlessly in fresh bird dung. Aurelia turned to the child’s mother, but the woman looked worn, her hand barely moving as she stirred a pan over the fire, sweat dripping from her forehead.

This was not adventure.

Reluctantly, Aurelia left the toddler behind. “A pass?” she repeated to Robert.

“Yes, no one can cross the Gate without one.”

Then she remembered hearing that there was a monthly limit on the number of people allowed on the narrow mountain path. “You mean we’ll have to wait for all these people to receive a pass and cross over the Gate first?”

“No, Aurelia.” There was something bitter in Robert’s tone. “We aren’t going to have to wait.”

Doubt threaded through her mind. Did that mean he was going to use her name in exchange for the pass? She pushed away the thought.
He asked you to trust him.

She would have liked to know more, but they had neared the narrow entrance in the log walls around the actual city, and a crowd of people had gathered. “Open!” a loud voice from somewhere up ahead called out, just as Aurelia and Robert had reached the group’s center. And suddenly she found herself in the midst of a pressing swarm. The close bodies shoved against her, tighter and tighter, the scents of sweat, soil, and urine ramming into her nostrils.

And then she was through, the crush dispersing into a cramped marketplace. Stalls clustered one upon the other, their surfaces teaming with furs, guns, raw meat, and tools. The ring of the blacksmith’s forge clashed against the pounding of the carpenter’s hammer. And the vendors’ voices battled for customers, despite already exhaustive lines.

Robert made no move toward any of them, instead steering her along the edge of the walls until he and Aurelia had neared the back of the market. “There,” he said, pointing her toward a dark wooden building. The words OFFICE OF LAW were carved into the sign beside the door. “That’s where I’m going for the pass. I need you to wait here.”

“No, I’m coming as well.” She did not like the trepidation in his voice.

“That’s not a good idea. The man in there—they call him the Lion.”

The cryptic comment from three days before came back to her. Obviously it had held more significance than she had realized. She started toward the building.

“I need you to let me deal with him,” Robert said.

She nodded.

Still he refused to relinquish the issue. “I’m serious, Aurelia. I need you to stay silent.”

She glared back.
Enough.
She was not letting him go into the Lion’s Den alone.

Robert cringed inwardly as he led her into the room of pilfered spoils. Crimson, silver, and speckled pelts overflowed the far corner beside an empty jail cell. A pile of gold rings, a diamond brooch, and a jeweled shell-shaped watch rested on the surface of a nearby chest. A rack of specialty rifles lined the same wall, and a half dozen pistols, all with fancy inlay, were scattered on the dirt floor to the left of the entrance. Though none of the weapons matched the engraved ivory-gripped flintlock on the desk of the Lion.

A thick, swarthy-faced man leaned back in his shabby chair, the black soles of his shoes propped beside that engraved pistol. The curling hairs of his overweight chest stuck out through the open neckline of his beige hunting shirt, and the button on his trousers had been unfastened. “Name your business, or get out,” he said. Robert noted the quick glance to the arched hilt of his father’s sword.

He felt Aurelia stiffen at his side and willed her, desperately, to keep her mouth shut.

“We require a pass,” Robert said, meeting the man’s gaze. His father had taught him never to look down in the face of a bully.

“There’s a wait.” The man pointed his shoe toward a thick stack of parchment on the corner of his desk. “You can add your name or your mark to the list.”

Robert felt Aurelia shift.

“I’m afraid that won’t be convenient,” he replied.

The Lion’s gaze turned again, this time openly, to the arched hilt of the sword. “You have some pressing business in the north?”

“My own.”

The man spit a wad of chewing tobacco into a tin. “That so?’Fraid that reason doesn’t supersede government policy.”

No, of course it didn’t. And neither would any reason Robert gave, though his uncle’s name as the king’s adviser would have done the job well enough, if Robert had dared risk it. “I’m sure we can find something that does,” he said.

Again the gaze moved to the sword.

He would have loved to hand it over, to thrust from his side once more the piercing reminder of his own guilt. But it was still his father’s, and the crest on the hilt would give away his last name as easily as printing it on a piece of paper. He should have left the sword behind, along with Horizon. An oversight he could not correct now.

Robert reached into his pocket and produced a gold coin.

Aurelia’s grip tightened on his hand.

The man spit again. “’Fraid that won’t pull you very far up the list.”

No, but men the likes of this one would take as much as they thought they could get. “How far?” Robert replied.

“Hmm, maybe two, three pages.”

Aurelia twisted her grip.

“Maybe more like twenty or thirty.” Robert broke free.

The man bit into a hunk of beef jerky. “Maybe,” he said, his mouth full.

Robert produced two more coins. He had had only four in his pack the night of the fire, and then had tried giving Thomas two of them as payment for his stay, but when Robert had reopened the pack later, he had found ten.

“Well, that’ll get you about halfway there,” the man chuckled.

Done
. Robert palmed three more coins within his pocket, and placed them each—one, two, three—on the edge of the desk. The Lion smirked, reached into his top drawer, and pulled out a pre-signed strip of paper. “Happens I kept one back for this month,” he said. “Just in case there might be an emergency.” He held up the parchment. “Course that’ll only get you one pass.” He nodded leeringly at Aurelia. “So I reckon the little lady’ll have to stay behind and keep me company. Unless you have somethin’ else to offer.” The gaze returned to the sword.

But Robert didn’t need a second pass. He already had a permanent one, obtained back on the frontier. This man did not need to know that. Robert reached forward, his fingers grazing the parchment.

Then someone else stepped into the Lion’s Den—a tall, lean man wearing a long dusty black coat. And a rope around his waist. Robert let his gaze follow the length of that rope through the open crack in the door.

And knew. Knew he had about three seconds before the crown princess of Tyralt tore the place apart. He snatched the signed pass, grabbed Aurelia by the wrist, and yanked her toward the door.

Aurelia bridled, pulling out of Robert’s grasp. Was this why he had made her promise not to speak? So he could pay this horrible man called the Lion a bribe without fearing that she would interrupt? She would remember this man. She had taken in every crease and mark on his pudgy, despicable face and counted every misbegotten treasure in the room. She would have him arrested. He would pay back every toll he had ever collected, every pass he had ever withheld, and serve out the rest of his life in prison.

A tall lean man with a rope around his stomach jostled past.

She ignored the insult, eager to free herself from this den of greed. Steaming, she turned on her heel.

And it was then she saw the boy.

A child, no more than eight or nine, standing limply outside the door. Head down, his uneven, spiked hair spitting out toward her. His weight tilted on one leg, the other gingerly bent. His ragged trousers hung loose on his hips beneath scarlet chafe marks from the rope around his concave waist.

But these were nothing next to the bright red welts oozing from his stripped torso.

Horror, shock, and rage inflated Aurelia’s chest. “Let him go!” She whirled to confront the man on the other end of the rope.

“Beggin’ yer pardon,
ma’am
,” the lean man sneered. He tipped up his stubbled jaw.

“Release that child!”

Robert’s arm reached for her, but she thrust it away.

The Lion actually chuckled.

“Can’t do that,” the lean man replied. “He’s a prisoner.”

“I don’t care what crime he’s committed,” she shrilled. “No child deserves to be beaten like that!”

“He’s not a child. He’s a kuro.”

“A
what
?”

The man turned to the Lion. “I swear these settlers don’t have the brains of a wasp.”

“A kuro, gal.” The Lion gave her a foul glare. “A frontier orphan who sold hisself for his keep and then rethunk. But that don’t sit too well with the law.”

“The law! You call this place an office of the—”

“Who do you think you are?!” the Lion roared.

An arm gripped her waist so tight that it forced the air from her diaphragm. Then Robert was literally pulling her out of that vile room. Away from those repulsive scoundrels. From their crass guffaws. And from that helpless, bleeding child.

Chapter Ten

INTENTIONS

ROBERT HARNESSED HIS FEAR AND DRAGGED HER away from the Lion’s Den. She fought him. Of course she fought him. She jabbed him with her heels and battered his shins. She twisted in the circle of his arms and hammered his fingers with her fists. She dug her nails into his flesh and thwacked him straight in the eye with her elbow. Thank Tyralt she had never been trained with a sword, or she would have stripped him of his weapon and won.

Though what she would have won filled him with such dread it gave him the strength to carry her across the blasted marketplace, where every set of eyes hinged upon her. Staring. But there was no time to worry about the undesired attention. The Lion had hirelings. Minions.

Robert hauled her through the log barricade.

“Let me go!” she demanded.

“To the horses,” he replied with gritted teeth.

She shoved on his arms. “Not without the boy.”

“If I have to,” Robert said, “I’ll pack you all the way back to the Fortress.”

“You haven’t the strength.”

He seriously doubted he could drag her another hundred feet. “Test me,” he challenged, then added, “Listen, Aurelia, we’ll talk about the boy, after we get to the horses.”

She wrenched her torso to the side, to no avail. “All right,” she snapped.

He let go. To argue further would undercut the agreement.

She stormed through the wagons, her pace so fast he had to struggle to keep up after the exertion of fighting her, but he was grateful for the speed. She cut a direct line up the hill, and his mind held the same direct route.
Get out. Get out. Get out. Before the Lion figures out who we are.

Aurelia crested the basin, and Robert hurried after her into the trees.

Both horses were still there. “Get on Horizon,” he ordered her. The stallion would move faster, even with two riders, than the roan. And if Robert needed to, he could cut the mare free.

“We’re going back for that child!” She planted her feet stubbornly.

Robert unhitched the horses and tied the roan’s lead to Horizon’s saddle horn. “Aurelia, the palace guards knew if we were alive, we would have to go through that law office. Through
that man.
Do you think he can’t be bought for the life of a crown princess?”

She mounted, and he swung up behind her.

“Giddyap,” he called, and they launched into motion.
I shouldn’t have taken her in there,
he chastised himself. But something, something deep inside him, had wanted her to understand what was happening in that law office, and the impact it had over all the people struggling to make their way north.

“Who was the other man?” she asked, her back stiff.

Robert knew there might be a danger in talking, if someone came after them and overheard their voices. But there was a far greater danger in her choosing to return to the city. They had to circle the entire basin, and he had to convince her, somehow, that she could not save that child. “The man with the rope was a bounty hunter,” he replied, “probably hired by someone on the other side of the Gate to track down a runaway.”

“A runaway from what? They called the boy ... I’m not sure.”

“A kuro. It’s something people do on the frontier.” Robert tried to describe the practice as calmly as he had first heard it explained, though his gut rebelled. “It’s dangerous, being orphaned on the frontier. There’s nothing to fall back on. No schools or orphanages that can take in children. If a family doesn’t make it, then it’s up to the neighbors or acquaintances, if they are willing. An older youth, of course, can make his or her own way. Find work. But a child as young as that boy back there, if no one takes him, has basically only two choices: to starve or sell himself as a kuro.”

Aurelia’s fingers dug into his wrist, just above the reins. “You’re telling me that boy is a slave.”

Robert kept his grip firm. Yes, the boy was a slave, no matter what the law said. There was no practical difference between that boy’s life and slavery. “In exchange for someone promising to provide a living for him—or her—no matter what quality of life that might be, the child offers his or her service.”

“For how long?”

She was not swallowing any of this. He loved that about her. Only a handful of people Robert knew, his mother among them, reacted so strongly to the concept of kuros. There was, after all, the dreadful alternative. Starvation was a hard death.

“Legally, for the rest of his or her life.” Robert gently brought his chin onto her shoulder. “Though I’ve never seen a kuro over fifteen years old.”

“They run away.” Her tone rang with justice.

He wished he could let her believe that. It would make it easier for him to keep her here, safe on Horizon. But those children deserved to have the truth told. “More often, they’re sold into an apprenticeship.” He lifted his chin and lowered his voice. “Or shot.”

Her body shuddered.

“For stealing property,” Robert rushed to explain, “or breaking a contract. Either is a legal defense. It is,” he said, referring to the entire practice, “exactly as awful as you think it is.”

She was choking. “Slavery.” Her voice vibrated. “Tyralt has
never
allowed slavery.”

He knew she was reciting one of the Rules, one of the tenets Tyralt had been built upon, taught in every classroom across the kingdom.

“My father cannot condone this.” She was shaking.

“He hasn’t ended it.”

“Does he know about it? Do you know if he knows?!”

Why would His Majesty care about a handful of orphaned children out on the frontier?
That was how Mr. Vantauge had responded to Robert’s identical question; he had said it bitterly, making it clear that he thought the king should care, but that it was not reality, and his son would have to learn to live with that.

The young woman in front of Robert looked as though she had no intention whatsoever of living with it.

“It’s against the law,” she said, reaching for Horizon’s bridle.

Robert clutched the reins with his right hand and grabbed her wrist with his other. “Not here.”

“Yes, it is.”

“Aurelia—”

“I’ll go all the way back to the palace if I have to.”

“So the guards can kill you in cold blood?” It was rough, his response, and if she hated him for it, that was fine.

She relinquished the bridle. He could see the moment when the truth hit her: that no amount of yelling or denial would save that boy’s life.

But she was not like Robert’s father. She did not absorb that reality and allow it to harden her.

Instead her body began to shake, as though physically rejecting the idea. “No,” she whispered. Robert knew she was not answering his question. “No, no, no, no, no.”

He reached for her, but she held him back.

For a moment he doubted whether he should have told her, whether he should have brought her north, whether he knew her at all. Then her empty fingers clenched into a fist, the knuckles of her hand white as she pressed it to her forehead. “I can’t ...,” she finally said. “I can’t allow slavery to exist in Tyralt. I won’t.”

It was what he had needed to hear, not enough, but a statement of faith: that one day she would change things.

Her shaking turned to a shudder, and Robert wrapped her in his arms as she cried.

They rode north, breaking free of the Asyan Forest and entering the Fallchutes River Valley, here a wide, grassy plain in both directions; but this, Robert knew, was seduction. The valley was a wide mouth leading into a shrinking ravine known as the Crevice, until ultimately only the steep mountain rock of the Quartian Shelf would line the dramatic plunge of the Fallchutes River into the frontier.

At first, wary of followers, he kept her to the less-traveled eastern side of the river. Then when he had no other choice, he spent his seventh gold piece, an exorbitant fee, hiring a ferry. He and Aurelia joined the flow of other travelers headed north, those fortunate enough to have escaped the claws of the Lion. This did not, however, ensure anonymity.

Her Royal Highness seemed driven to strike up as many conversations as she could. He was stunned by the revelations she obtained from people she had barely met, people running from debt and poverty, loss and oppression. Robert found himself torn. He admired her skill and desire to learn, but he had hoped the would-be settlers would provide her with sufficient camouflage.

She betrayed that hope at every stop. At Fort Laiz, she exposed a trader for trying to sell a lame horse. This was followed by a heated discussion on water rights at the Fyonna Trading Post. And then a conflict at Kezlar Township concerning the practice of selling flawed materials to travelers.

Robert valued her need to fight injustice. But her failure to blend in terrified him.

By the time they rode up to Fort Jenkins, he longed to detour around and head straight for the Gate. However, darkness had fallen. And the high, rapid sound of a set of pipes and the spirited romp of fiddles skirled through the warm summer air, joined by the joyous shouts, stomps, and whistles of a dance in high swing.

Before Robert had even finished hitching the stallion, Aurelia had been whirled away into the festivities. She was laughing, her head thrown back, excitement rampant on her face. A far cry from the elegant, fuming princess he had witnessed less than three months ago at her sister’s coming-out party.

The thought set Robert stumbling, and he seated himself on a rare open seat, the unoccupied half of a hay bale. She was so
alive.
Kicking her heels. Twirling. Not at all concerned with how people would view her.

Though here, just as everywhere else, people were drawn to her. Not just the men, who had begun to form a line to dance with her, but the women and children as well, pulled in by the sheer joy on Aurelia’s face.

She was a stunning revelation in contrasts. One day fighting mad, the next spinning in glory. It was right, he thought, that she could see both the beauty and the starkness of this region. So many people shuttered themselves from one or the other, letting the darkness embitter them or the light blind them to the flaws. Somehow she saw both.

She isn’t a Falcon anymore,
he realized. For years he had called her that, a nickname only he had used. And cherished. But not once on this entire journey had he felt compelled to refer to her by the old moniker. There was something royal in the name and strong, but not ... free.

Not as free as the young woman dancing before him.

“H’llo there.” A man in a blue vest and cocked hat interrupted Robert’s thoughts, blocking his view. “Would ya be willin’ to give up yer seat fer a grandmother?” He pointed toward a slender woman with a long white braid down her back and a catacomb of laugh lines on her face. Her foot was tapping, and her arms were swinging to the music.

“I told ya that’s not needed,” she said.

But Robert stood at once, and the man disappeared.

The woman did not sit down. “Sorry ’bout my grandson. He’s off his head at the moment for a piece of gold petticoat.”

Robert slipped into his frontier dialect. “That’s all right, ma’am.”

“Lad like you, what’er you doin’ sittin’ over here on a hay bale?” she chuckled. “Find yer own shade of petticoat.”

Robert’s eyes went right to Aurelia.

“Ah, she’s a red one in a brown facade, isn’t she, boy? Line’s a mite long, though.”

Robert sighed.

“Course there’s a fine blue one over there”—the woman pointed at a girl with a sapphire skirt swirling up around her coffee-dark legs—“and a yellow charmer over there.” She motioned toward a petite, dimpled figure spinning with her arms over her head.

Aurelia’s laugh sailed out from the dance floor, and Robert’s eyes instinctively returned.

“Mm-hmm,” the woman chortled. “Course you could jus’ join the line. Or then maybe you could try dancin’ by with one those other petticoats on yer arm and see if the color yer lookin’ for don’t bend in yer direction.”

“Might at that.” Robert grinned and asked the woman her name.

“Well now, most folks refer to me these days as Grandma, but was a time when I was Stella May and a fine shade of petticoat myself.”

Robert held out his palm. “May I have yer hand fer a dance, Stella May?”

She burst into her own special ring of laughter and accepted his offer, then led him straight out into the center of the fray. “And where are ya from, lad, and which way are ya headed?”

He dropped into a quick, well-rehearsed response, saying he had been a courier for a wealthy man and was intent on making his own way on the frontier. A new life.

“So this is yer first trip north then, lad?” Her eyebrows quirked at him.

He nodded.

Aurelia swirled past without glancing his way.

“Myself now,” said the older woman, “I’ve been across the Gate four times. Spent almost a decade on the frontier.”

The song stirred itself up to a high finale, then broke, but the woman’s feet were still tapping, so Robert twirled her into the next tune.

Aurelia had moved on to her fourth partner.

“Ya know, lad,” the woman said, “there’s lots of folks as head to the frontier to start new lives. When I first went over the Gate, the talk was we’d all starve and end up trapped over there on our lonesomes, but every year there’s more folks. Even talk ’bout a princess.”

Robert almost ran into the man playing the pipes, an act which elicited a slur of notes and a rude shout from the musician, but the woman just laughed and continued, “’Twas all the twitter two months ago when folks were sayin’ she’d run off with that boy from the palace. But then, when they started sayin’ he wasn’t from the palace a’tall but from the frontier, well, you know that made fer all manner of speculation. Course most folks don’t think she’d have the wherewithal to make it north. They think she prob’ly run off with her frontier boy to some fancy court somewhere.”

That was a good rumor. He should encourage it.

Aurelia’s feet danced past once again, and Robert tried very hard not to look up. Partner number six.