Does Justus realize he’s just given me the keys to Dante’s fortress?
What a silly question. That man does not commit errors, and an oversight of this grandeur would be the gravest error of all.
Twenty-Three
The moment the cellar door clanks behind us, I pull my wrists from Cato’s grip. Although not bruising, the sergeant is so fraught with nerves that he holds me tight.
“Any chance you could loosen these?” I nod to the tangle of vines strangling my upper body. “I know it’s not your magic, but surely you’ve a nifty blade that can shear through magical restraints?”
“I’m sorry, Fallon, but I cannot—” The sergeant’s throat bobs with a swallow that makes him tug on his shirt collar as though it were choking him. “I cannot free you.”
“Why not?”
“Why not?” He sounds strangled. “You just assaulted the king!”
“Because he stabbed Justus!” I don’t add that I would’ve assaulted Dante either way and that, had I not been distracted by the sight of my dying grandfather, I would’ve assaulted him better. “Wouldn’t you have defended your general?”
Cato swings his gaze toward the tunnel unfurling like a dark throat beyond the locked bars, before assailing me with the full force of his crazed gaze. Clearly, I’ve bedeviled the poor man with my query, which does make me wonder what he’d have done had he been in my situation. Didn’t he swear an oath to Justus Rossi?
“I sensed there was something strange about the general. I mean, the man posing as the general.Merda. I should’ve stayed in that room.” He shoves a hand through his mussed curtain of white hair, ungluing the strands stuck to the perspiration glossing his forehead.
“I’m glad you didn’t, for if you’d stayed, you may have gotten hurt.”
“But at leastyouwouldn’t have!”
“I didn’t, Cato.”
He stares at my dress, so I peer down. Between the coils of green vines, the pale-pink is splattered with droplets of red.
“Not my blood.”
Cato swallows. Once. Twice. After the third time, he says, “You stabbed the king’s eye with an iron blade. It may not heal.”
“Good.”
“Good? What do you think he’ll do to you?” Cato gapes at me as though I’m one crow short of a murder.
The metaphor stirs my pulse and brightens my lids with the glossy design Justus painted on the wall.
My way out.
My way back.
Cato rubs at his brow again. If his attempt is to smooth the furrows there, he’s failing. “He may kill you for this.”
I stare at the walls surrounding me, wondering if I could slip through them? Where would I end up? “I’m useless to him dead.”
“What if he injures you? What if he removes one of your eyes?”
I shoot him a dark smile. “I dare him to try.”
“Fallon, this is no laughing matter.”
“Am I laughing?”
“You’re smiling.”
“Of course I’m smiling.” Since I’m speaking through said curved lips, my words are slightly garbled. “I just dodged getting sexually assaulted by some limp-pricked pureling, Cato. Not to mention that Justus”—showed me the way out—“is not dead.”
