"Your highness." Alasdair's nod was cursory, but he looked worried. "Is this wise?"
"Very little I do is wise, but I'm afraid it's necessary. If you're going to be my bodyguard, you'd better get used to it: As you yourself noted, I'm a target. After you, my lord."
Sir Alasdair turned back to face the door and pushed it ajar. Then he surprised her.
The front hall of the country house was roughly rectangular, perhaps forty feet long and twenty feet wide. The grand staircase started at one side, climbing the walls from landing to landing in turn, linking the two upper stories of the house. At the very moment the door opened, the floor held at least nine porters, servants, guards, cooks, maids, and other workers unpacking the small mountain of supplies that Lady d'Ost had rustled up seemingly out of nowhere to furnish the Countess Helge's entourage. Gunnar was two-thirds of the way across the floor from the door to the blue room, deep in conversation with another fellow, both of them in the livery of guards of the royal household.
Miriam had expected Alasdair to approach his prey directly. Instead, he stood in the doorway for a couple of seconds, scanning the room: Then he broke into a run. But he didn't run towards Gunnar-instead he ran at right-angles to the direct line. As he ran, he drew his sword, with a great shout of "Ho! Thief!" that echoed around the room.
Why did he-Miriam raised her pistol, bringing it to bear on the Ferret with both hands-oh, I see.
At the last moment, Alasdair spun on his heel before the porter he'd been threatening to skewer-the fellow was frozen in terror, his eyes the size of dinner plates-and rebounded towards the Ferret, who was only now beginning to react to the perceived threat, reaching for a side arm-
"Freeze!" Alasdair shouted. "She has the better of you! Don't throw your life away!"
Miriam swallowed, carefully tightening her aim. He knew I'd drawn. And he deliberately cleared my line of fire! When am I going to stop underestimating these people?
The Ferret's face, framed in her sights, was corpse-gray. "Raise your hands!" she called.
The Ferret-Sir Gunnar, he's got a name, she reminded herself-slowly raised his hands. Sir Alasdair stood perhaps six feet away from him, his raised saber lethally close. A healthy man could lunge across ten feet in a second, with arm's reach and sword's point to add another six-the Glock holstered at Gunnar's belt might as well have been as far away as the moon. If you've got a gun and your assailant has a knife, don't ever let them get within twelve feet of you, she distantly remembered a long-ago instructor telling her.
Miriam took a shuffling step forward, then another, feeling for solid footing with her toes. It got easier to ignore the sensation of her heart trying to climb out through her mouth with practice, she noted absently.
"Disarm him," she heard Sir Alasdair tell the other guard, who glanced nervously over his shoulder at her-at her-then hastily pulled the gun and the sword from Gunnar's belt.
Miriam risked lengthening her stride. Her breath was coming hard. Amusement and hysteria vied for control. She stopped when she was about fifteen feet from her target. "Who sent you here?" she demanded.
"I'm not going to plead for mercy." The Ferret's eyes, staring at her over the iron sights of her pistol, seemed to drill right through her. "You're going to kill me anyway." He sounded curiously resigned.
He'd beaten her, once, to make a point: Obey me or I will hurt you. That he'd been following orders rather than giving rein to his own sadistic urge made no difference to Miriam. But-hold a trial. And accuse him of what, exactly? Of being her jailer after Henryk had violated Clan law and process by not executing her for what she'd done? If she gave him a trial, stuff better swept under the rug would come out. Kill him out of hand, and her enemies-the ones who'd tried to have her raped, or killed, or maimed several times over the past year-would find a way to make use of it, but at least he wouldn't be able to rat her out. Likely they'd use it as evidence of her instability or anger-anger was always a good one to pin on a threatening woman. But it was nothing like as damaging as what he could reveal.
She licked her lips. "Not necessarily." Don't tempt me struggled briefly with a moment of revulsion: Life is too damned cheap here as it is. "Restrain him." The other guard was already loosening the Ferret's belt. "Lower your arms. Slowly."
The room was very quiet. Miriam blinked back from her focus through the sights of the gun and realized all the servants had scurried for cover. Smart of them. "I hold him covered," Sir Alasdair said conversationally.
"Oh. Thanks." She blinked again, then lowered the gun and carefully unhooked her finger from the trigger guard, which seemed to have somehow shrunk to the gauge of a wedding ring. The guard worked the Ferret's arms behind his back and tied them together with his own belt. She glanced at Sir Alasdair. "Tell him what I told you to do with him. I don't think he'll believe it, coming from me."
Alasdair kept his sword raised. "Her highness ordered me to send you a very long way away from her and make sure she never set eyes on you again. Her exact words." His cheek twitched. "I don't have to kill you."
"Highness?" Gunnar's face slumped, defiance draining out of it to leave wan misery behind. "So it's true?"
"Is what true?" she asked.
"You're carrying. The heir."
She stared at Sir Gunnar. "You didn't know?"
"My lord did not see fit to tell me." He was pale, almost greenish. Miriam stared at the blue eyes set in a nondescript face, the balding head and wiry frame, trying to remember how scant seconds ago she'd looked at them and seen a monster. Who's the real monster here? she asked herself.
"It's true," she told him. "And what Sir Alasdair told you is true. You don't have to die; all you have to do is stay the hell away from me. And tell us how your name got on that list."
"What list?" He looked away, at Sir Alasdair. "What the hell is she talking about?"
"Why are you here? Look at me!" Miriam shifted her grip on her pistol.
The Ferret turned his head, reluctantly. "What list?" he asked again.
"The master roster of available bodyguards for council members," Sir Alasdair rumbled. "You were right at the top of it."
"As if I shouldn't be?" Gunnar snorted. "What do you take me for?"
"Wait," said Miriam. "What did you do for Henryk? Officially?"
There was a pause. "I was his chief of security. Officially.
" Ah. "And unofficially?"
Gunnar made a small shrug. Now that he wasn't staring down the barrel of a pistol held by an incandescently angry woman he seemed to be recovering his poise. "The same. I was his chief of security. Until the Pretender did for him."
"Right." She glanced at Sir Alasdair. "Maybe you'd like to tell him what I asked you first."
"Highness, I think he can guess." Alasdair's smile was humorless, and it wiped the nascent defiance right off Gunnar's face. "I am ordered, and empowered, to act with any necessary force in defense of your person. Do you consider this man a threat to your person?"
It was hard to look at the Ferret's frightened face and still want to see him swinging from a tree. It had been tempting in the abstract, but ven Hjalmar was the real villain of the piece, and beyond her reach if he was indeed dead; in the clarity of the moment she found the Ferret pathetic rather than threatening, an accomplice rather than a ringleader. "Right now… no. But he knows things. And I don't trust where he's been, why he's here. It stinks." She glanced at Sir Alasdair. "Escort him from the premises and make sure he doesn't come back, but don't kill him. I need to talk to you later, but first I have other work to do." Her cheek twitched as she looked back at the Ferret. "Payback can be a bitch, can't it? Have a nice day."