“Baffin intends to betray you,” I said. “When you are at the end of your usefulness.”
Incarnadine glanced from me to the note again. She lifted it between two fingers, apparently unbothered by my revelation. “He wants you hung before dawn.”
“I overheard him say—”
“I am well aware of my position with the Grand General, but he would do better to be aware of his position with me,” Incarnadine replied. She caught Graves’s eye and nodded.
I found myself being hoisted from the chair. My terrorbroke. I fought back, kicking and shouting, and was hurled into a wall for my trouble.
Thankfully, I may spare the reader further coverage of my indignities, for at this point my story takes a far more important turn. One that involves a certain Guild soldier and the shadow that crossed the high, narrow window.
Glass shattered. There was an explosion, a cloud of choking smoke, and the crash of a door. Screams began, and gunfire. I kept to the floor as the initial barrage of shots flew, then staggered upright and bolted for the door.
Smoke wafted across my path. I was forced to divert, narrowly avoided a club to the head, and thudded into someone.
Dark blond hair. Shocked, relieved eyes. Large hands, pulling me closer, then pushing me onwards, up a slippery set of mossy stairs and into the cold of a Dockside afternoon.
My attention tore, divided between the fact that Lewis was charging up the stairs at my back and Madge was waiting calmly beside a carriage just down the street. Her husband stood at her side, one hand raised and making absent movements in the air in a mannerism I recognized from Pretoria. Protecting them inside a skew of time.
“Not you!” I burst out in frustration.
Madge frowned, an emotion I could not read flicking through her. This transitioned into a shout of rebuke as someone tackled us from the side. I heard Lewis’s voice, too—so familiar and so outlandish, so out of place—as I was dragged away in a sudden mob of shouting, riotous strangers.
“Go!” another voice shouted in my ear. Mr. Harden. I stumbled, not from shock—there was too much to be shocked about now—but from the cramped state of my legs and my impractical clothing. “Run! What’s wrong with you?”
Someone jostled into me and I nearly fell. Harden caught me, not at all gallantly—it was more of a flailing snatch. Still this saved me from knocking myself senseless on the rail of the riverside balustrade.
“Curse it,” I heard Harden mutter. Then I was in the air, a shoulder slammed into my stomach again, and I found my face in the small of his back.
I would have protested if there were any air in my lungs, not to mention the rush of blood to my head. I was close to passing out when Harden set me on my feet, leaning me against a wall like an umbrella before he staggered back, pushing sweaty hair from his eyes.
“What’s wrong with you?” He panted. His words might be callous, but his gaze was anything but. “What’ve they done to you?”
“Nothing, no,” I dismissed. My head ached and I knew my face must be red as a cherry from all the blood pounding in my skull. My hair was in my eyes, annoying and tickling and stiff with sweat. “I was locked in a trunk in the Grand General’s study for the night, that is all.”
An outraged “What?” burst from him.
He asked me something else, but my mind was slurring away, back through the streets. Lewis. Was there any possibility he had been a figment of my imagination, a result of chaos and dehydration and stress and longing? He could not truly be here,with Madge.
“Why was Lewis with her?” I felt myself ask.
Harden still panted, fingers buried exasperatedly in his hair. Then a whistle came from the next street over, evidently some kind of signal, for he straightened. He fumbled for a knife and quickly slit my bindings, kicking them into a gutter, then offered me an open hand.
“Let’s get somewhere safe, then we can talk,” he said, his voice firm and kind.
I cleared my throat, blinked unexpected moisture from my eyes, and let him lead me away.
A Note to the Reader:
Regarding Reunions
Pretoria and I arrived in The Sarre on a picturesque summer’s day. We descended the gangplank in our voluminous Sarren trousers, pale cotton shirtwaists and snug vests, sunhelmets in place and laced boots echoing on the white-washed boards.
I had seen much of the world by this point, including other warm southern nations, but the sprawl of Sarre Grand lit a fire in my chest. Copper roofs sparkled in the sun against a flawless blue sky. The breeze off the ocean was cool, the black stone of the quay warm. Steamships and sailing vessels of all sizes packed the waters right up to the port’s three massive bridges, one spanning each of the three rivers which emptied here into the sea.
The city was built not only on the banks of the rivers, but on the bridges themselves. I do not call them ‘massive’ without reason. Each was three times the length of our steamship, with colossal pillars sunk into the riverbed. Buildings of up to four stories clustered atop them, marvellously painted shutters and strings of laundry peppering the black stone with color.
The bridges were a marvel of ancient engineering—or so the animated academics who had entertained Pretoria and I over breakfast had proclaimed.
