But it was too late. She hadn’t even gotten the cloak halfway over one shoulder by the time the first figure emerged from the stairs. Every muscle in Ayla's body tensed. Niel shouldered in front of her, brandishing the knife. She recognized his older brother.
There were two people with Sir Corin. One was a red-haired knight, lean and in his early twenties, wearing embroidered court clothes that seemed at odds with the longsword on his hip. The other was a plump blonde woman of a similar age, her hair braided and her dress simple, bearing a basket over one arm. All three of them stared in wide-eyed shock at Niel, Ayla, and the body of the nobleman on the ground beside them.
“Well, that’s one problem taken care of,” Corin said, breaking the silence.
“You’ll have to kill me,” Niel rasped. “You won’t touch her. She—”
Corin held up an iron key, small in his large, scarred hands.
“Do I look like I’m here to fucking kill you?” he said. “Put down the damned knife, Niel. We don’t have much time.” Ayla exhaled hard, knees weakening.
“Why, so you can take me to be executed?”
She couldn’t blame Niel for his stubbornness, after everything he’d been through. She was scared too.
“I’m getting you out of here,” his brother growled back, dark eyes glinting. “Drop the knife and give me your hands. I’m sorry Hannes got here first, but I came as soon as I heard.”
Niel snorted in cynical disbelief.
“You told him I was here, didn’t you? When you went to Ashbrin.”
“He’d be dead already,” Corin said, his voice cold and far calmer than Niel’s. “He wasn’t at Ashbrin. But I still learned what I needed. Why didn’t you tell me, Niel?”
“You?” Niel asked disbelievingly. “You’re the last person I trusted to have my back.”
Ayla knew a standoff when she saw one. She stepped around Niel, and held her palm out towards Corin.
“Would you give me the key, please?” she said quietly. Niel’s brother barely even looked at her as he dropped it into her palm. Tension crackled between the two men as Ayla turned and fit the metal teeth into the band around Niel’s left wrist.
“Do you honestly think if I knew, I’d have ignored it?” Corin asked.
“You made your loyalties clear.” Niel stiffened as Ayla cracked the left shackle open. The knife was still in his hand. She moved carefully around it as she fit the key into the shackle on his right wrist.
“And did she know?” Corin asked. “Did our aunt know?”
“We’re taking too long,” the pretty knight with red hair commented. He was of a height with the two brothers, but leaner, and had a less brutal look about him. “The Queen knows you’re back, Corin. She’ll be summoning us all at any moment.”
The blonde woman put her hand on Corin’s bicep as she passed him. She paused two feet in front of Niel.
“Will you let me touch you?” she asked, her voice soft. “To treat your wounds.”
Niel stared at the other woman for half a second before his eyes slid to Ayla’s. For a moment the unpleasant thought crossed her mind that he looked like a cornered dog, ready to lash out if anyone came closer. But he had come to trust her, just as she had come to trust him. He’d just lived out a nightmare, and if Niel didn’t know who or how to trust right now aside from her, Ayla could be the one to see him through it.
She sized up the blonde woman, and the way the two other men were standing; the looks on all their faces. She wasn’t sure she trusted them, not fully, but she believed they were there to help. It wasn’t a trick. You didn’t break a prisoner from a jail without risking your own neck.
“Please do,” Ayla said to the blonde woman. “The shackles cut into his wrists.”
The woman met Niel’s eyes again, as if waiting for him to give his own permission. Niel nodded to her, slowly.
Niel kept hold of the knife as Ayla peeled his sleeves up to his elbows. The blonde lady set her basket on the dungeon’s ground and squatted down, sorting through it with brisk efficiency. Ayla knelt more slowly and tried the key on the shackles on Niel’s legs. Blessedly, it worked. She stood and saw the woman was cleaning Niel’s wrists with a square of bandage, soaked in some sort of herbal-smelling ointment. Dried blood and grime came clear of the skin, leaving behind the seeping red lines of the inflamed wounds.
“I need to know if she knew,” Corin repeated.
“Why does it matter?” Niel’s voice was tight, as if the cleaning hurt, but he stood perfectly still through it, his shoulders and arms as stiff as if he’d turned into a tree.
“Because it would change everything.”
“She knew,” Niel said.
