He thought about lying. He thought about strangling the emperor and dying a moment later. “Yes, Majesty.”
“That’s what I thought. Given what happened in Abyek, it’s obviously her.”
“It could be another…”
“No, no, the prophecy is pulling at her, Captain. Remember what the Soothsayer Saw: The sixth mage in the room with the others. She can no more resist fulfilling the prophecy than I can resist those sugar cookies with the jam centers. I am curious, though, what could she possibly have against markets?”
“Markets are where people are, Majesty.”
The emperor beamed up at him. “That was remarkably insightful, Captain. Well done.”
His skin crawled under the emperor’s approval.
“I can’t weaken the door any further until we’re ready to go, or it’ll fall off its hinges the next time the guards open or close it.”
Danika clutched Stina’s hand below the edge of the table. Their quiet conversation hopefully looked as much like comfort as the words Jesine murmured into Annalyse’ hair, arms around her, rocking her back and forth. There had already been weeping and wailing enough to satisfy their captors, and Stina had spoken only for Danika to hear.
Only Danika remained to hear.
Kirstin was dead.
She winced as Stina tightened her grip. Nodded, although she wasn’t sure at what. “Can you finish tonight?” Would Kirstin still be alive if she’d asked that two days ago? Should she have pushed harder?
“No.”
“No?”
“I couldn’t have gotten through the door before Kirstin died. The question was all over your face, Danika. This wasn’t your fault. Or mine, although we’ll both blame ourselves. If I work the night through, I can have the door in pieces before morning. But I can’t guarantee how much time we’ll have to get clear of the palace after that.”
“Then we’ll have to use the time we have.”
“The nets…”
“Our mage-craft isn’t all we are.” Danika drew in a deep breath and let it out slowly. “It never has been. We get out of this prison, we disappear into the city. It’s a very large city. We worry about the nets later.”
“The Pack?”
The Pack locked in small dark cells, howling, starved, tortured.
“With the nets on, with them nearly mad with pain and unable to change, none of us are strong enough to control them. It’d be a massacre. Which I’m not against,” she added as Stina’s gaze darkened, “provided the right people die, but wearing the nets we can’t ensure that. We’ll come back for them.”
“Your word, Alpha.”
“My word.” She hadn’t realized she’d raised her free hand to touch her chest until she felt the ridge of the scar under her fingertips. “Right now, I’m worried about what happens if there’s a guard in the hall when your door comes down.”
“He’ll be right outside my door, won’t he? And, thanks to you and Kirstin, he thinks I’m harmless. That should slow him down considerably.” Stina’s lips drew back off her teeth. “Our mage-craft isn’t all we are. It never has been. I’ll deal with him.”
Two or three Tardfords would have fit into Karis with room left over for Bercarit. Lessons on the Kresentian Empire taught that the capital had originally been built within a loop of the Vone River, but over the years that loop had been entirely enclosed by the city. When the sun rose, the yellow glow of the lights had been replaced by a yellow pall of smoke, hanging thickest over the closely packed buildings nearest the water.
“The Mage-pack has to be in the palace,” Mirian muttered, trying and failing to pick out individual buildings. “They were taken because of Emperor Leopald’s Soothsayers, so he’d want to keep them close.”
“The palace is on the east side of the river. The only direct way in from the west is by the Palace Bridge, but it’s heavily guarded and there’s an old portcullis gate that’s still fully functional on the palace end. Rumor has it the bridge itself was designed to break away and that the mechanics are so precise even a child could operate it. The empire is always the enemy,” Tomas explained when Mirian turned to stare at him. “Junior officers work out ways to defeat it. According to Harry, you can’t take the palace by force; it has to be subterfuge. He suggested once that we could get the entire Hunt Pack in by pretending to be a dog show. Not one of Harry’s better ideas,” he admitted after a moment.
There were two other ways across the river—the Bridge of the Sun, south of the palace, passing directly in front of the Grand Temple of the Sun, or the Citizens’ Bridge to the north.
“We’d need to cross over two thirds of the south city to get to the Citizens’ Bridge. It’s too far, and these boots hurt my feet.”
“Forgive me if I’m weighing your feet against having you skinned at the last minute,” Mirian told him, stepping around a section of broken cobblestone. The puddle filling the hole was green and bubbling intermittently in the sun. “We’re taking the north bridge and staying away from anything that looks like it might be or had ever been a market.”
They stuck to narrow residential streets of narrow red brick houses older, dirtier, and at least two stories taller than the houses in Abyek. The first floor started half a story up, and they learned they could judge the neighborhoods by the seven steps leading up to heavy wooden doors. On those blocks where the steps were whitewashed to a gleaming contrast with the brick, every trace of coal dust removed, stern-faced women with their sleeves rolled up, watched them pass from first-floor windows or from the tops of the steps themselves. While they didn’t seem likely to scream abomination, they weren’t pleased about strangers. Children too young for school played quietly.
“Alphas by committee,” Tomas bent to murmur in her ear.
Mirian laughed, able to feel the weight of their gazes even if she couldn’t see their faces.
On blocks where the whitewash was worn or the steps were so close to the same dirty color as the brick that Mirian could barely make them out, babies screamed behind open windows, children ran happily up and down the street with balls or hoops, and the dogs quieted only as they passed.
On some streets, the spaces between the steps had been filled in with small shops—tailors, seamstresses, shoemakers, cabinet makers, ironmongers, undertakers, coffee houses, bakeries, taverns. Once a small school where a dozen children around five or six repeated the Imperial alphabet. Every now and then the bricks gave way to a wrought-iron fence and small courtyard and a Temple of the Sun. A few of the temples were old enough they’d clearly been built for other gods, before Leopald’s grandfather had brought the empire out of the darkness and under the Sun.
“How can they live like this? All crammed in so close together?” Tomas muttered as they turned sideways to slide past a knife grinder’s cart. “It’s like that room in the shelter, only with more smoke and way too much cabbage. I think my nose has gone numb. There’s no air; the buildings are too high and the streets are too narrow and…Horse.”
It took Mirian a moment to figure out what he meant. Then she heard the clop, clop of hooves against the cobblestones, squinted down a street to the right, and saw an elderly bay not much larger than the ponies at home, pulling a cart full of coal. When the cart stopped, the driver rang a bell and people swarmed out of houses and shops carrying metal buckets as the driver moved from the seat back into the box. The horse lowered its head until its nose nearly touched the road. Mirian thought it looked more bored than exhausted.
It certainly didn’t look like it cared there was a predator standing on the corner.
“We’re downwind, if she even has a sense of smell left. But we need to be careful. If a horse panics in these kind of close quarters, people will get hurt and we’ll be blamed.”