“Yes, but I want to make sure you have a path. I have the feeling that by now our friend the Prince is known to be alive, and they may also suspect he’s making his way to Banelyn with or without company.”
“That is if the Death Watchmen left record of where they were going to hunt for him. Is that likely?” She turned to look at the Prince.
“No,” he responded truthfully, trying to keep up the façade of being helpful for just a little while longer. All he needed was for the big man to leave him and the girl alone. “Death Watchmen are notorious for following a trail to its end and only reporting once the task is complete.”
“The assassination you mean,” the girl muttered, though there was no heat in it. She seemed preoccupied, and had not the Prince been so lost in his own thoughts he would have found that peculiar. But as it was, he let it go, still trying to will Tomaz to leave.
As if on cue, the big man finished tying off his charger, dumped his bags at the base of a nearby oak tree, and pulled the hood of his long gray-and-brown cloak up and over his head, obscuring his face and the hilt of his greatsword.
“I should be back before sunset,” he rumbled, and with that he remounted and urged his horse in the direction of the city.
The Prince dismounted as if in a dream. Everything felt suddenly too slow, as if it was all happening to someone else or was part of another man’s life that he could only just remember. The Exile girl turned to set her packs by Tomaz’s, and the Prince’s gaze fell on the pair of short swords they had taken from the dead soldiers after the fight with the Death Watchmen. Time passed slowly andyet quickly, and after a few minutes, he knew Tomaz was out of hearing range. The girl still had her back turned and was riffling through the packs looking for something. The Prince reached out and grabbed one of the short swords, everything still fuzzy and confused. The sword had been well oiled by Tomaz, and when he drew the black metal from its sheath there was no sound.
He knew from his training that to hesitate once an action was in motion was to fail. As a son of the Empress, as one of the Children, he had been conditioned from a very early age to set aside all feeling and to simply and effectively follow a plan of action. And so, very calmly, without hesitation, he came up behind the girl and raised the sword.
But at the last second, she turned, and as her green eyes met his, he paused. The sword hung in the air for a second too long, and in that time the shock and surprise that crossed her face disappeared. Coming back to himself, he brought the sword down, but the girl was no longer there.
He spun, striking for her again as she nimbly dodged away, but he sliced through only air. Her hands fell to her hips, and suddenly her daggers were in her hands, and the Prince knew that he needed to end this fightnow.
Without pausing to consider his actions, he turned and hurled the short sword, end-over-end, at the girl. Taken completely by surprise, she jerked her daggers up in front of her face and just managed to deflect the sword, which went spinning into the forest.
But the Prince didn’t even spare it a second glance. Instead, he stepped forward, feinted left, turned right, and struck the girl in the gut.
With awoosh, the breath rushed out of her lungs, and she staggered back a step, staring wide-eyed at the Prince, mouth open in disbelief and…
Fear.
He felt something lurch in his stomach, but his body moved mechanically, and in quick succession he struck the girl’s wrists, kidneys, and the nerve that ran up the side of her neck.
She fell to her knees, paralyzed. Her hands fell limply to her sides and the daggers dropped from her twitching fingers as she stared helplessly up at him.
As he looked at her, his chest began to ache, and once again he faltered.
Don’t stop now—you’re almost free!
With a clenched fist, he struck her temple, and she fell to the forest floor.
For a long moment he stood over her. Some time passed—he wasn’t sure how much— and he just stared at her, unable to look away. Slumped over as she was, she looked almost dead.
He came back to himself with a start. He needed to move, and move now, before Tomaz returned. There was no time to reflect or think. He needed to reach the Seeker. Once there, everything would be well. He would contact his Mother and he would return, triumphant, having passed the test and proved himself worthy.
Turning, he made his way to the pack horse and pulled out the strips of fabric that were left over from his bonds. Wrapping them together, he moved to the girl and tied her hands together behind her back, then lashed her feet together in as intricate a knot as he could manage, and finally tied her to a tree, feeling all the while a kind of vindictive satisfaction in doing to her what she had so often done to him.
He finished as quickly as he could and pulled away. Time was of the essence. As he turned to go, he happened to look down and see the girl’s daggers. He might need a weapon, and these were of much better quality than the short swords, not to mention easier to conceal even though they were uncommonly long. He bent and reached for one.
Searing pain raced through his hand, up his arm and into his head as he grasped the hilt. His vision dissolved into swirls of white smoke, and it felt as though a blanket had been pressed against his eyes, ears, mouth and nose, blocking out every sense of the world around him. Paralysis crept into his lungsas he tried to breathe, forcing his hand tighter about the burning hilt. With a supreme effort of will he let out a cry and released the dagger.
He staggered back several feet and fell to the ground, watching in alarm as the dagger smoked in the grass where it had fallen. He looked at his hand and saw that an outline of the hilt had been burned into his skin. As if activated by his sight, the wound began to throb with a sickening intensity.
“Shadows and light!” he cursed. A twig snapped off to his right, and his whole body surged with energy as he whipped around. But there was nothing there, only a small, furry creature; some kind of bushy-tailed rodent that quickly climbed a tree.
He re-saddled the pack horse. He decided to take nothing with him but a full waterskin. He left both short swords behind—they were too recognizable as the weapons of Death Watchmen—and then mounted the beast. With a quick kick in the ribs, he sent the horse speeding away, leaving the girl and the remnants of their camp behind.
***
After the Prince of Raven’s betrayal, the Exile girl named Leah lay at the base of the tree to which he’d tied her for a long time. She regained consciousness sometime later, and though her first instinct was to sit up straight and look around for the shadow-cursed princeling, she remained still, knowing the wave of nausea that followed head trauma would hit her soon.
Just as she had expected, as her body woke up, her stomach began to do backflips, and her vision swam even though she had yet to open her eyes. For a moment or two she let the feeling wash over her, then she slowly sat up and took a deep breath to still herself. The throbbing in her head continued, but the nausea in her stomach quickly passed.
