“Stop!” Adare screamed. “Stop this!” Nausea churned in her gut, horror obliterating all pain. “Stop!”
It was pointless. The mob, on the edge of murder only moments before, had crumbled, forgetting Adare entirely. All they wanted was escape. Panicked men and women stumbled into her horse, clutched at her legs, scrabbled at her bridle or saddle, tried to lift themselves clear of the violence. One man seized her by the knee, cursing as someone behind him, a boy not much older than ten, tried to shove him aside. Clinging desperately to her saddle’s cantle, Adare thrashed with her trapped leg, flinging the man free, then kicking him in the face with her boot. He screamed, nose smashed, then went down beneath the feet of his fellows. Not dead, but doomed.
People dove into the small streets off the Godsway, cowered in doorways and storefronts, scrambled onto the plinths of the statues to get above the mad, killing press, and all the time the soldiers drove on, sun flashing off arms and polished armor, weapons rising and falling in the day’s late light, over and over and over.
Finally, one soldier, smaller than the others, but closest to Adare, raised his cudgel, pointing at her.
“Here!” he bellowed over his shoulder. “The Malkeenian! We have her!”
It was hardly necessary to shout. It was over, Adare realized, just like that. The Godsway, ablaze with noise only moments before, had gone horribly, utterly quiet. The soldiers were closing in, but Adare barely noticed them. She stared, instead, at the dead.
Dozens of crumpled bodies littered the ground. Some moved, groaning or sobbing with the effort. Most lay still. Here was a dead boy with his arm twisted awfully awry, like a bird’s broken wing. There was a broken woman, her shattered ribs thrusting white and obscene through flesh and cloth alike. Blood pooled everywhere on the wide flagstones.
The short soldier kicked his horse forward through a knot of corpses, men and women who had died holding on to each other, then reined in next to Adare. She thought briefly of running, but there was nowhere to run. Instead, she turned to face the man.
When he pulled off his helm, she saw that he was panting, sweating. Something had opened a gash just at the edge of his scalp, but he paid it no mind. His eyes, bright with the setting sun, were fixed on her.
“Were you so eager to see me dead,” Adare demanded, surprised that her voice did not shake, “that you cut a path through your own people?”
The soldier hesitated, cudgel sagging in his grip. He glanced down at the bodies, then back at Adare.
“See you dead?”
“Or captured,” she replied cooly. “Clapped in irons.”
The man was shaking his head, slowly at first, then more vigorously, bowing in his saddle even as he protested. “No, Your Radiance. You misunderstand. The council sent us.”
“I know the council sent you,” Adare said, a sick horror sloshing in her gut. It was the only explanation.
“As soon as they heard, they sent us, scrambled up as quick as they could. You took a horrible risk, Your Radiance, arriving in the city unannounced. The moment they heard, they sent us.”
Adare stared at him.
I am a fool, Adare thought bleakly, the truth a lash across the face. She was covered in blood, her face hot with it, sticky. She scrubbed a hand over her brow. It came away soaked.
“How badly are you harmed, Your Radiance?” the man asked. He was worried now, on the edge of fear.
Adare studied the blood, bright against her darker palm. She watched it a moment, then looked down at the flagstones, at the bodies strewn there, dozens of them, crushed to death, eyes bulging, limbs twisted in the awful poses of their panic.
I am a fool, and people have died for my folly.
They’d been ready to kill her, of course. Probably would have, if the soldiers hadn’t arrived. It didn’t matter. They were her people. Annurians. Men and women that she had sworn both privately and publicly to protect, and they were dead because she had thought, idiotically, that she could return in triumph to the city of her birth. She had thought she risked only her own life.
So very, very stupid.
“You’re safe now, Your Radiance,” the soldier was saying. He had slung the cudgel from his belt, was bowing low in his saddle once more. The others had arranged themselves in a cordon around her, ten men deep. What foe they expected to hold back, Adare had no idea. “You’re safe with us,” the soldier said again.
Adare shook her head, staring at one corpse splayed out on the ground. It was the woman, the one person in the crowd to whom she had spoken, brown eyes fixed blankly on the sky.
“Safe,” Adare said. She wanted to cry, to puke, to scream, but it would not do for the Emperor of Annur to cry or scream. “Safe,” she said again, more quietly this time, that single syllable rancid on her tongue.
8
Gwenna stood in the bow of the Widow’s Wish, squinting toward the horizon. Though it was clear overhead, storm and the coming of night had bruised the eastern sky a livid purple darker than the sea itself. She couldn’t make out any land above the low, shifting swells, but the seabirds perched in the rigging meant they were close.
“We’ll take the smallboat from here,” Gwenna said, turning to the ship’s captain.
Quen Rouan raised his bushy brows. “I wouldn’t recommend it.”
“I wasn’t asking for your recommendation.”
Gwenna had nothing against Rouan. Twelve days on the ship, and he’d treated her Wing with respect, even deference. He’d handled his vessel well through the squall that kicked up east of the Broken Bay, kept his men firmly in line, and didn’t ask questions. Gwenna had watched him, one calm afternoon, dive into the water with a rope around his waist to retrieve an albatross feather floating on the waves. For my daughter, he’d said after the men had hauled him back aboard. She’s never seen one. Rouan was a good sailor. A good captain. Maybe even a good man. Which was all the more reason to try to keep him from getting killed.
“I don’t know how much you were told about this particular run…,” Gwenna began.
Rouan held up a hand to forestall her. “I go where I’m told. That’s it. This time I was told to deliver you to the Qirins, and the Qirins are still at least thirty or forty miles east, depending on how much time we made up today. I’ll know as soon as the sun drops and the stars come out. Whatever the distance, it’s too much to cover in a smallboat.”
Gwenna snorted. “Gent and I rowed a dory a hundred miles once, and that was before I turned thirteen. The distance is the whole point, Captain. Ships that get too close to those islands haven’t been coming back.”
“I understand there is risk,” Rouan replied, stiffening, glancing east as though he expected to see topsails cresting the waves.
“Well, there doesn’t have to be. Not for you. Get the boat in the water, and we’ll be out of your hair.”
Rouan hesitated. Gwenna could read the pride in that hesitation, the reluctance to leave an honest job unfinished, the unwillingness to run from an unseen threat. He was brave, but he wasn’t trained for this.
She made her voice hard. “I’m not asking, Captain.”
He met her eyes a moment, then nodded brusquely, turning to bark orders at the half-dozen men on the deck. It was a good crew, and before the sun had slipped much farther down the western sky, the boat was bobbing in place, small hull bumping up against the larger vessel like a duckling against her mother. Two barrels of gear-food, mostly, and water, and extra weapons-had been packed a week earlier, and it took no time at all for Talal to secure them beneath the thwarts of the boat.
“You’ll want the sail,” Rouan said. “At least partway.”