She deftly unrolled the parchment across the table and weight it down, exposing a large, detailed map of Lucia. The girl saw him looking, reached overto grab her cloak, and bunched it at the end of the table to block his view. With a mocking smile, she bent over the map, her eyes flying back and forth across the parchment. She then began using a bit of string as a measuring tool, all the while muttering to herself and absentmindedly stroking the side of her face.
“Here… then here… and if we skirt around the lake…”
She pulled out a bit of charcoal from a pocket hidden in her sleeve and began to write what the Prince assumed were shorthand calculations on the wooden surface of the table. He sat up straighter, trying to see, but her strategically placed cloak made the motion useless.
When she was finished, she remained bent over the table, eyes scanning the map and her notes a second time, before finally speaking.
“Two months,” she said. “Give or take a week depending on what the patrols look like around Roarke. And that’s at top speed. If we want to save the horses, we’ll need to factor in another week or two at least.”
“That long?” Tomaz asked.
She nodded and motioned toward the Prince with her head. “I figure he won’t make it easy, and we’ll have to take every back trail and sheep road we know. I wouldn’t bother, since even though he’s going to fight us along the way, we can get him through the Empire with speed, but there’s one variable I can’t predict. Eventually they’ll realize they failed, and they’ll come after him. When, or where, or how, I cannot say, nor I think can you. But they will. And when they do, all seven hells will break loose.”
Tomaz gave a heavy sigh and nodded. “I think you’re right.”
“I don’t know why it hasn’t happened already,” she said. “Maybe we’ve just been lucky and they don’t know for sure what happened. But eventually, they’ll be after us, and this will turn into a race to the finish. No doubt his absence has already been noticed in Lucien, and you know how fast rumor travels. The Tyrant and her brood are going to want to end this as quickly as they can. We’regoing to have to watch our backs every moment of every day from now until Vale, and we’ll have to avoid all main roads and cities.”
The Prince responded with a low, mocking laugh of real amusement and opened his mouth to try to speak around the gag, but before he could do so Tomaz once more lifted him into the air and thrust him headfirst into the brine barrel. When he was brought back up, he found himself hanging suspended in the air, dripping foul-smelling water.
“ARGH!” was the only response he could make through the gag, which was now soaked with a disgusting mixture of salt water, saliva, sweat, and dirt.
“No no,” said the big man, small black eyes twinkling, “my name is ‘Tomaz,’ not ‘Argh.’ Please try to get it right next time.”
He dropped the Prince to the floor—which, from the height of the big man’s arms, was quite a painful distance—and turned back to the girl.
“The Council expects us back in a month,” he said. “Is there any way we could shave some time off of that?”
The girl shrugged. “Using the main roads like we’d planned, a month was reasonable with the horses. But we’ve got to go more than a thousand miles, hauling a reluctant Prince along the way. We can try, but if we get too close to any of the major cities, he’ll make trouble if the rumors don’t,” she said. The Prince almost grunted his approval of the statement, but received a warning in the form of a raised eyebrow from Tomaz and stopped himself. Once he realized what he’d just done, it only made him angrier, both at himself and the Exile. He was a Prince! He should be defiant to his last breath!
But… no. No, he wasn’t his brother Ramael, the Prince of Oxen, to fight something head on and win by brute strength. He would never be able to overpower the big man, particularly not in close quarters like this where he couldn’t maneuver and use his speed. He needed to bide his time. Let them take him where they would until he was free to strike.
“Tomaz, it may take longer, but think of it. We’ve got the Prince of Ravens!”
“So you don’t want to kill him anymore?” the big man rumbled dryly.
“I know how you feel about that, ashandel,” she said. The Prince had the feeling she was choosing her words carefully. “But it’s my job to think from every angle. It’s a viable option.”
“He’s just a boy,” Tomaz reminded her softly. The Prince saw the girl’s eyes narrow and her jaw clench in anger, but she let the moment pass. They shared a short, unspoken conversation, and then they turned to look at the Prince of Ravens as if contemplating what lay ahead of them.
“If you say it’s the shortest time, then it’s the shortest time,” the big man said decisively, in a way that spoke volumes about his utter trust in the girl’s planning. “Now,” he continued, rubbing his hands together eagerly, “do you want to tie him up or shall I?”
The girl chuckled. “Go for it.”
Barely an hour later, the Prince had been properly bound and gagged, tied to a horse, and disguised as a member of the Commons—a particularly poor and shabby one, at that. They had removed his undershirt and forced him into a stained sack-like tunicthat smelled of some kind of animal, and also twisted his feet into a pair of uneven, over-large boots. For a time, he still had hope that when they passed someone, they would be alerted to his plight by his bound hands and feet, but the Exiles threw a large dark brown cloak over him that hid the tightly cinched restraints, and then pulled the hood up high enough to hide his face. He was left with just enough visibility to see what was directly in front of him, and enough range of motion to use his knees to steer the horse onto which they’d tied him.
“Comfortable?” the big man asked cheerfully.
He was not, but his gag was still firmly in place, and he could make the point no more eloquently than with muffled, inarticulate invectives.
There were two horses—the first, an enormous black charger with wild eyes, clearly belonged to Tomaz. The second was a pack horse loaded withsupplies. The Prince had no desire to go anywhere near the charger, and the feeling was apparently mutual. Luckily, it was onto the pack horse, after redistributing some of the supplies, that they had tied him. The girl didn’t seem to have a horse, and he wondered if maybe she just rode the pack horse when she had the need.
The Exiles did not seem at all concerned for his welfare as long as he stayed on the horse, and between the restraints and the hot, scratchy cloak, he knew the ride was going to be decidedly uncomfortable. The beast they had tied him to also appeared to be none too smart, and the Prince had the sneaking suspicion that the girl, who was holding the reins, would make a point of leading it over the rockiest and most uneven patches of terrain.
Yet despite the situation, he could not help but take in, for the first time in his life, the beauty of the world in which he found himself.
They were certainly far away from the Lucien, the capital city of Lucia, and the most incredibly striking evidence of that was the large white-yellow ball of fire that hung in the sky. When the Exiles moved him from the inside of the wooden shack out to where the horses were tied, he gawked at it, open-mouthed.
The shack stood at the edge of a circle of small wooden buildings, possibly an abandoned town, located in the center of a small clearing. The clearing was surrounded by plants as tall as buildings, plants that could only be trees, which he’d seen in memories of other men but never truly considered real. They towered up into the sky.
