The King Slayer Part 14

"Majesty." I spin around, dip into a hasty but always clumsy curtsy. "My apologies. I did not mean to speak out of turn. But these are..." I fumble around the foolish niceties, unpracticed of late. "Trying times."

Malcolm blinks at me, twice and fast, as if he's clearing something from his eyes. "No apologies necessary." Then he nudges my arm and points behind me. "Look."

A single tiny bird made of flame flits through the sky, zigzagging its way to the prison gate before alighting upon the square iron lock. The metal begins to glow a faint red: It's melting. With a wink, the bird disappears and though I can't see, I know the gate is now unlocked.

"Was that our signal?" Malcolm whispers. "She doesn't mean run now, does she?"

I hesitate. The guards are still playing bowls; they're not thirty feet from the gate. If we run now they will see us, but we may not get another chance.

"My lord," I say. "Run."

We make it five steps, maybe ten, when it happens: A rumble, a crack, and the front door of the guardhouse is blown wide open, flames pouring from within.

"Ho!" a guard shouts. They all drop their stones and rush toward the building. But they don't know what to do, not really; they stop halfway there, heat and confusion making them wince. They don't see us so we keep running.

Twenty feet from them. Ten. A glance at Malcolm confirms he's slowing down. I reach for his sleeve, yanking it hard just as a wall of fire erupts beside us, tall and wide and crackling hot. The entrance is free and clear in front of us. There's a pounding of footsteps as Keagan appears and the three of us sprint through the gate. She pulls it shut and with another handful of red-hot flames, she melts the lock, trapping the guards inside. I can see the fire rising higher and higher into the sky.

"We can't leave them there," I say. "They'll burn, the prison will burn. John-" I turn around; I start to go back. Keagan swipes her hand through the air and at once the crackling red sky turns black once more. I can't see it but I can smell it: the lingering scent of smoke, the acrid stench that reminds me of Tyburn, and of death.

"I said I wouldn't hurt anyone." She s.n.a.t.c.hes the back of my cloak and pushes me into the field, away from Hexham. "And I'm of my word."

"But the smoke-"

"Will clear. It's not enough to incapacitate. But I can't have you running back in there. We've got fifteen minutes, I wager, before they figure out what's happened. We need to be long gone before then."

I lead them over dark, sloping meadows and through brackets of trees to reach the crossroads where I'm to meet Schuyler. We have to stop a few times for Malcolm to catch his breath. He said the fall didn't hurt but the way he favors one leg tells me different.

Judging by the position of the moon, already beginning to dip west, it's maybe two in the morning. I'm not due to meet Schuyler until five. But when we come upon the intersection of two small roads and the low, broken stone wall nearby, I'm not at all surprised to see him lounging there, a pale silhouette against the night sky. He sees us approaching and hops off the wall, his boots crunching against the frozen gra.s.s.

"Well, you've really done it now, bijoux," Schuyler says by way of greeting. "Breaking this lot out of jail, practically burning the place down. I don't recall this being part of our plan."

"Believe me, it wasn't."

His eyes land on Keagan, bright and menacing. "You're trouble," he says. "I don't like trouble."

Keagan laughs, not afraid of him in the slightest. "You're a revenant, are you not? By my measure, I should think you live for it."

Schuyler turns from her laughter to face Malcolm. But Malcolm does not flinch, does not step away.

"And what of you?" Schuyler says. "Do you plan on causing me trouble, too?"

"I don't answer to you," Malcolm says levelly. "In the future, I'll thank you to address me as sire. Or lord. Or Majesty."

"I'll be in h.e.l.l first."

"You're a revenant, are you not?" Malcolm repeats Keagan's words and the sarcasm in them. "By my measure, I should think not even h.e.l.l will have you."

"Enough." I step between them. "If this is to work, and G.o.d knows that's question enough, it'll be without your childish bickering."

Malcolm blinks, that bewildered look again. He's never understood me, that's true, but he understands me even less now, outside the palace and outside his rule; outside the part he's written for me that I no longer play.

Schuyler reaches down, picks up several canvas bags I didn't see before. He tosses one to Keagan, who catches it with ease, and the other to Malcolm, who doesn't. The bag hits the ground, spilling its contents all over the gra.s.s: clothes, a waterskin, a bundle of linen filled with food, and a cache of weapons.

"Fifer's idea," Schuyler says, before I can ask. "I told her what happened. She's still angry with you, so don't get it in your head that she's not. But she said you couldn't very well take these two into Upminster looking like that. So she packed some provisions." He pulls out another carefully wrapped package from his bag and hands it to me.

"Your lady did this?" Keagan's already rifling through her bag, grinning as she pulls out bread, cheese, and an array of fruit. She crams an apple into her mouth, groaning as she chews. "She is kind, delightful, an angel."

"She is absolutely none of those things," Schuyler says shortly. "Now hurry up and eat. We need to get as far as we can tonight, in case the Watch decides to come after us."

Fifer may still be angry with me, but it doesn't escape my notice that she packed my favorite foods: strawberries and cold quail and soft bread and hard cheese. It didn't come from the camp at Rochester, that's for certain. I'm filled with unexpected warmth at the lengths she must have gone through to get it.

Malcolm, Keagan, and I eat quickly-revenants don't need to eat-then repack our bags before making our way through the Mudchute and its wide-open fields, broken only by the occasional farm or cl.u.s.ter of livestock. We walk until the sun begins to rise, the gray sky turning orange and yellow around the edges, until our eyes and backs droop with exhaustion and cold.

We come upon a small, recessed valley near a small brook, under a copse of trees. It's enough to shelter us from the wind and the rain that's beginning to leak from the leaden skies. Schuyler pulls a tarp from his bag and strings it across two trees. Keagan conjures a blast of heat to dry the damp gra.s.s, then a low, smokeless fire that heats the s.p.a.ce to the warmth of a summer's day.

We stretch out along the ground, tucking our bags beneath our heads. The warm air, the crackle of the fire, and the patter of rain on the tarp soothe and relax me. My lids droop, and I'm nearly asleep when he whispers my name.

"Bess."

My eyes fly open. Malcolm's voice, soft and close to me, even in daylight, makes me stiffen. Across the clearing, Schuyler watches me carefully.

"Are you awake?"

I could say nothing; I could say Go to h.e.l.l. He's no longer the king and I'm no longer his mistress: I am no longer beholden to him and I owe him nothing. But the habit of obeisance is too ingrained now; the pattern too set. I don't know any other way of interacting with him.

"I'm awake." I pull to a sit beside him. His arms are wrapped around his knees, and he's s.h.i.+vering despite his woolen cloak and the warmth of the air. "Is there something the matter?"

"No," he replies. "Not entirely. There's just something I want to ask you. Something I need to know."

The uncertainty in his tone makes me cautious. "Of course."

"Why didn't you tell me about the herbs? The ones you were arrested with," he clarifies, as if he needs to. "I could have helped you, if you'd told me. I could have done something."

As if he hadn't already done enough.

"What could you have done?" I say instead. "You were the king, a persecuting king. I was a witch hunter. I made my living enforcing your laws. I wasn't going to lay them at your doorstep."

"You were more than a witch hunter to me." His eyes and his words are pleading. "You are more than that. And I thought-hoped-I was more than the king to you. You could have told me," he insists. "I would have done everything I could to save you."

There's a world of malevolent navete in his words. He couldn't save his throne, he couldn't save himself, he couldn't save his own wife. How could he have saved me?

"You could have saved me by leaving me alone," I say, honest at last. "I was fifteen when you first summoned me. I was frightened, and you were king. I had no business being your mistress, but you left me no choice."

Malcolm opens his mouth, closes it. Across the fire, Keagan's eyes join Schuyler's, the pair of them watching us in mute fascination.

"It's not true," he says finally. "I invited you to my chambers, yes. But you were free to say no. You were free to go anytime."

All I can do is look at him. Because the idea of me saying no to him, to any of it, is so impossible that I know not even he can believe it.

"I knew you were hesitant," Malcolm admits. "But I thought, at least at first, that you were simply nervous. I wanted so much to put you at ease, and I thought I did. I thought we were becoming friends. And then I thought-" He breaks off, swiping a hand across his jaw. "It's something else I didn't see, isn't it?" He says this last part more to himself than to me.

"Your Majesty-"

"Don't call me that."

"But you're the king." He says nothing to this, so I add, "You are the king."

"Then as the king, I dismiss you," he says. "You're dismissed." He gets to his feet and walks from the clearing into the rain, away from Keagan and Schuyler, and away from me.

THE NEXT TWO DAYS ARE a blur of walking at night and sleeping during the day. Since he dismissed me, Malcolm has said little, if anything, to me or to anyone else. He keeps to himself: sleeping alone, eating alone, walking alone. But his silence is a warning to me, and I'm always alert to where he is, what he's doing, what he might do next.

Through Fifer, Schuyler tells us that the Watch knows we're gone, but they don't know where. They suspect Keagan and Malcolm have made off for Cambria, and they've sent a contingent of men after them. Most of Harrow believes I've defected, that after what I did to John I saw my opportunity to leave Harrow and took it. They believe Schuyler simply deserted, and neither Fifer nor Nicholas stands to correct them.

By the morning of the third day, we've pa.s.sed the barrier of Harrow, marked by a dozen signs graffitied with etchings of skulls and crossbones, flames and crosses. From here it's a single day's walk southeast through Hainault and the southern tip of Walthamstow into the city of Upminster. We reach the outskirts just as the sun begins to dip below the horizon, and here we make camp for the night.

At dawn, we eat the rest of Fifer's carefully packed food, drink the last of the water. One by one we dash behind a copse of trees and change into clothing packed especially for this part of the trip.

For Schuyler and Malcolm there are coa.r.s.e woolen trousers, muslin tunics, scuffed boots, and unshaven faces. For Keagan and me, threadbare brown woolen dresses and plain leather slippers, our hair stuffed beneath white linen caps. We look simple, as nondescript as servants. Specifically, Ravenscourt servants.

Underneath our clothing, though, we're anything but. All four of us are strapped with weapons: knives in our boots, tucked in belts beneath our dresses and tunics, and for me, the Azoth, secured in a sheath tied around my waist under my skirt. I can feel it calling to me, the invitation to violence hot and thrumming against my skin, not an altogether unpleasant sensation.

"We've been lucky thus far." Keagan grimaces as she adjusts the ties on her cap. Without her short, wild hair on display, she looks more like a girl, a young girl at that, and she knows it. "Since we left Harrow, we've seen and heard nothing. I don't mean to be alarmist, but this doesn't seem right to me."

Schuyler, standing off to the side checking and rechecking his weapons, looks to me. "You think Blackwell knows we're coming?"

I consider it. I thought we had the element of surprise when we snuck into Greenwich Tower all those months ago, dressed as guests for the masque. I thought we had him fooled when all along, he knew. He was just waiting for the right opportunity.

"I don't know," I admit. "I thought we'd run into something, at least. Troops, guards... when I was a witch hunter, Blackwell had us patrolling every night, in every village within a fifty-mile radius of Upminster."

"Well, the laws are different now, aren't they?" Schuyler says.

"Not that different," I reply.

We pick our way through tiny hamlets, down the varying mud-soaked high streets lined with half-timbered buildings and stone cottages that grow progressively larger and more densely packed together the closer we come to the city. Still, nothing seems out of the ordinary. Men and women going about their daily lives: merchants pus.h.i.+ng carts, laundry maids lugging baskets, doors and shutters open in each tavern and shop we pa.s.s. So far, it would appear that we're not being followed. But I think of the masque again, how everything seemed welcoming then, too.

Upminster seems the same as it was the last day I was here, the last day I walked free. A good deal better, actually, because today there are no protests, no crowds, no burnings. The air is filled with the scent of mud and dung, leather and livestock; the sound of shouts and laughter, wheels on cobblestone.

I glance at Schuyler. I know by the set of his shoulders, rigid and tall, that he's listening, picking through the minds of those around us, trying to pluck danger from the air as if it were petals on a breeze. Keagan, too, is on guard; her dress and her cap and her girlish, freckled face belie the hunt in her eyes, the way she looks to every corner as if she expects to be ambushed.

"I hear nothing," Schuyler says, before I can ask. "Everyone around us, they seem calm. No anger, no deceit, at least not above and beyond the usual. See that bloke over there?" He jerks his head at the merchant on the corner leaning on his broom handle. "He's trying to figure how to tell his wife of twenty years that he's leaving her for a boy of twenty years. Meanwhile, his wife"-he flicks his finger at a woman across the street lounging against an empty door frame, eyes closed and looking vaguely ill-"she's working up the nerve to tell him she's fifteen weeks gone with her fifth baby, only this time it's not his."

"Trouble won't appear before us," Keagan says. "It'll creep behind us, in shadows and around corners. It'll show itself the moment we look away, believing we're safe."

"Where to, then?" Malcolm asks. "If danger is everywhere?"

"A secret's safest place is in the open. So that's where we go: into the open." Keagan lowers her voice. "We're going to walk straight through the front gates of Ravenscourt."

"Excuse me," Schuyler says. "I was listening for sound advice. But what I really heard was the ramblings of a lunatic."

"There's no sense in subterfuge," Keagan says. "There's magical protection all over this palace, everywhere we turn. You don't see it because you're not meant to. The lanterns atop the gates? The flames are enchanted to flare green if they detect deception. The statues that line the promenade? They're hexed to come alive and attack."

I think of them: the stone knights on horseback bearing swords, the gryphons carrying staffs, the horses fitted with horns on their heads as pointed and deadly as lances.

"I've seen them jump down and skewer men through the chest," Keagan goes on. "I've seen them take to the sky, only to plunge down and pluck men from the street, carrying them G.o.d only knows where."

Schuyler and I exchange a rapid glance.

"You didn't tell us it was like this," I say to her. "You only told us about the gargoyles."

"If I'd told you, would you have changed your plan? No." She answers for me. "It would have changed nothing."

We walk along the Severn River, the waters frothy with activity: wherrymen carrying pa.s.sengers on skiffs close to sh.o.r.e; fleets of larger s.h.i.+ps clogging the deeper waterways, masts high, sails fluttering in the salty gray sky. Cut through the Shambles, a bankside maze of narrow, dark alleyways full of taverns and tabling houses, drunks and bawds. Malcolm draws his cap over his eyes to avoid recognition.

Finally, we emerge onto Westcheap Road, the large, main thoroughfare that leads directly to Ravenscourt, teeming with people and livestock, merchants and patrons. We pa.s.s the once-crowded square at Tyburn, now empty-no people, no scaffolds, no chains-all the way to palace gates, wide open but hardly welcoming.

Ravenscourt is large, the biggest of Malcolm's-now Blackwell's-royal palaces. Built from red brick and stone with depressed arches, elegant tracery, soaring stained gla.s.s windows, and its many flag-topped towers and spires, it sprawls across fifty acres alongside the banks of the Severn, a forty-bedroomed home to the over one thousand members of court.

The last time I stood here it was among men and women protesting, shouting against the king; they even had sledgehammers, breaking apart the stone tablets that hung from the iron posts, tablets that declared the laws of Anglia. Those tablets are gone now, along with the laws, along with the king, along with reason.

"Keep moving," Keagan says without breaking stride. "Don't slow down, don't hesitate, don't look around. Keep your mind blank, as empty as you can. Whatever you do, don't think anything violent."

"What about the lanterns?" I look at them lining the promenade before us, the flames within stirring softly, each a different shade of yellow, pink, red. "You said they turn green if they pick up deception. They'll change color the moment we walk through."

"If you're walking into Ravenscourt, your mind is already set to deceive," Keagan says. "It's the degree of deception it's attuned to. Cheating husbands thinking about their mistresses will get a pa.s.s. Would-be regicides posing as servants won't-unless they're not thinking about it. So think about something else. Anything else."

"How do you know this will work?"

"I don't," Keagan says. "Now stop talking, stop thinking, and move."

We pa.s.s through the gates, our pace quick with false confidence. Two red-bricked columns, each four feet wide and ten feet tall, are capped with a stone capital and, atop that, a stone lion. They're still; sentinel, all but for the eyes: They roam the crowd around us, all-seeing and unfeeling. Magic crackles around me everywhere I look. The flags atop the spires flap merrily against the gray sky, although there is no breeze. Ravens circle through the air, dipping and wheeling above us like storm clouds, their eyes not yellow but bloodred: hexed and knowing.

Keagan clenches her hands into fists, the only sign of her distress. Schuyler hums something off-key, a song I don't recognize. Beside me, Malcolm whispers. I can't make out the words, but something about their rhythm sounds familiar.

We reach the main entrance and step through the arched door into the central courtyard. The danger here is palpable. I can smell it in the air, sharp with smoke from the kitchens that smells like a pyre. I can hear it in the march of boots on cobblestone; the footsteps of courtiers, pet.i.tioners, pages, and servants that sound like the Inquisition. Trouble is everywhere, surrounding us. We are drowning in it.

A fountain lies in the middle of the courtyard, white marble and inset with spouts in the shape of lion heads. When Malcolm was king, the fountain poured red wine all of the day and night; he thought it would be amusing. And it was, with the crowds and the laughter and the constant merriment that surrounded it. Now the merriment is gone and the fountain runs empty, the lees of the wine dried into the marble like rails of blood.

Schuyler abruptly stops humming. Before I can think to wonder why, I hear it: shouts, a thunder of heels, a low murmuring of panic from the men and women around us that rises to a shrill. I whirl around to guards, a half dozen armed and in black, marching toward us, the crowd parting around them like ants before a boot.

Malcolm fumbles for his knife. Schuyler's song turns to a rapid litany of whispered curses while Keagan stands rooted to the spot, her fists curled tight. Only I can see their marbling: orange, red, white; fire at the ready.

The guards descend on a man beside the fountain standing not more than five feet from us. He starts to run. The men give chase but before they reach him, a cloud of the ravens I saw earlier pour from the sky in a swirl of oily feathers, the air rent with their shrieks and dusty, foul stench. They knock him to the ground, rending his navy robes to tatters before turning their claws and beaks to his eyes, his mouth, his face; his screams adding to theirs.

"Go." Keagan's voice is a hiss in my ear. "Now."

We walk-nothing draws more unwanted attention than a run-through the crowds who watch the scene before them in horrified fascination, to the archways that line the four sides of the courtyard, four to each wall. We pa.s.s through the third opening that leads into a dark shadowed hallway.

None of us speaks as we delve deep into the labyrinth that is Ravenscourt-past the lodgings, the offices, through the gate yard, and finally into the kitchen wing. We pa.s.s the cofferer, the wine cellar, the spicery, the pastry house, and the meat larders until we emerge outdoors again, into the narrow, dark, cold alley I was steering us toward: Fish Court. It runs directly beside one of Ravenscourt's many kitchens, where fresh fish caught from the Severn are brought and stored, hence the smell and the name. Schuyler and Keagan throw their hands over their noses, and Malcolm clamps a hand over his mouth to stifle a gag.