“From what the messengers were saying, you saved your men when it looked as though you were all going to die. I think that probably counts for something. Come on, let’s get you to your rooms to clean up.”
Sebastian shook his head. “I have to go to my mother. I have to explain everything that happened.”
“After we make sure that you aren’t bleeding to death,” Angelica said, and then had another moment where she seemed to realize what she was saying. “I’m sorry, but it’s just worry. Your mother will have heard the reports from the messengers by now, and I’m sure she’d want to make sure you’re whole. Besides,” she wrinkled her nose slightly, “even her son can’t go in front of the Dowager in that state.”
Sebastian knew that Angelica had a point, so he kept hold of her arm as he made his way to his rooms, leaning on her probably more than he should have. At the door, he started to pull back, but she kept a grip on him.
“Oh no,” she said. “Not until I’m sure that you’re safe.”
Sebastian frowned at that. “That wouldn’t be—”
“Proper?” Angelica asked. “Don’t worry, Sebastian, I’m not about to seduce you when you can barely stand. And it isn’t as though my reputation needs to be protected.”
She laughed at it as if it were nothing, but then her expression turned more serious.
“Besides,” she said, “there are things I need to talk to you about.”
They went inside, and Sebastian ducked behind a dressing screen to clean his wound as best he could. He removed his shirt and set to work with a bowl of water, cleaning away the blood from the edges of the wound and gently peeling back the cloth he’d used to cover it.
“Here, let me help with that,” Angelica said.
“You can’t…” Sebastian said, shocked that she would be there like that.
“Oh, don’t be silly,” she said. She took the washcloth from him and dabbed at the edges of the wound, making Sebastian hiss in pain. “Sebastian. This isn’t some neat little dueling scar. A little further over and you might have been killed!”
“I shall have to ask the enemy to be more careful next time,” he said. He took a fresh shirt out from a drawer, pulling it on so that at least he might be covered and there might be some propriety there.
“Or they’ll have me to answer to,” Angelica said with a smile.
This was a side of her that Sebastian hadn’t seen. He was so used to her being arch and formal, fighting her way up through the realms of the court in a battle that was still vicious for all that it was fought with words rather than knives.
That reminded him…
“You said that there were things you needed to tell me,” Sebastian said. He saw Angelica look away. “What is it?”
“It’s about Sophia,” she said. She sounded worried. “I don’t… maybe I shouldn’t say anything, but I thought you would want to hear it from me, rather than just as a rumor.”
That caught Sebastian’s interest. He guessed that it would be something to do with the House of the Unclaimed. Perhaps people at the palace had finally worked out where she’d come from, or they’d heard about the things Kate had done there.
“What happened?” Sebastian demanded.
He saw Angelica take a breath. “She… came back here. She was dressed very strangely, almost… if it had been anyone else, I’d have said that she was dressed like a courtesan. She was angry too. She had a knife, and she was talking nonsense about how much she hated you, and how she needed to find you.”
Sebastian shook his head. “That doesn’t sound like her.”
“I know it’s hard to believe,” Angelica said. “She seemed so gentle when she was here, but it seemed… it seemed as though something had happened to her, and she blamed you for it. There’s more though. She couldn’t find you, but she found Prince Rupert.”
Sebastian’s jaw clenched at the thought of all the ways that could have gone. He knew his brother.
“What happened?”
“They say she attacked him,” Angelica said. “She couldn’t find you, so she hurt him instead. It might not be true, but… well, Rupert was hurt, and the guards were alerted. They were chasing after her.”
Sebastian kept shaking his head. None of this sounded like Sophia. Yet… how well did he really know her? He hadn’t even known who she was until Laurette van Klet painted her. Was it possible that she really did hate him?
Just the possibility of it felt as though it broke something in him. It felt as though the world was slipping away, the ground below dropping into a pit of loneliness and pain from which there could be no escape.
Sebastian felt Angelica’s hand settle on his shoulder.
“I know it’s hard,” she said. “I know you cared about her, but whatever happened between you, maybe it’s for the best. What did happen?”
Sebastian shook his head. He couldn’t tell anyone that. “It doesn’t matter.”
“No,” Angelica agreed, “it doesn’t. You still have your future in front of you, Sebastian. She’s just some angry girl who can only react with hatred. Now, we’ve probably kept your mother waiting long enough. You should go to her.”
“I should,” Sebastian agreed. “She needs to hear this from me.”
“And who knows?” Angelica said. “Maybe she’ll have some news for you too.”
CHAPTER TWENTY TWO
Sophia ached as she worked to push the cart out of yet another rut with the others. She’d thought that the roads around Ashton were uncomfortable, but the further north they went, the worse the roads seemed to get. The Dowager clearly didn’t care to spend money on roads she would never tread.
Right now, Sophia wished that she had.
“Almost… there,” she said, as the others pushed along with her. Even Sienne the forest cat had jumped down, lightening the load more than a little. The cart rumbled forward, pulling out of the deep hole in the road that gripped it fast enough that Emeline had to run to grab the reins before they lost it.
“How much further?” Cora asked.
Sophia didn’t have an answer for that. Whenever they passed travelers, they asked the direction of Monthys, so they knew that they were heading in the right direction, but there was no sense of how far it was, only the endless road.
It had been the same way for days now, with the going only getting tougher as they traveled. Weather that had been fine as they had set out had now turned to nearly constant rain and wind, so that even finding dry wood for a fire was hard some nights, and there were moments when Sophia felt as though she’d been dunked in a river. When that happened, Sophia pulled herself closer to Sienne, enjoying the soft warmth of the cat’s presence close to her.
There were other, more difficult aspects to having the creature traveling with them. They had salt beef in one of the barrels, but only so much of it, and Sienne still wasn’t strong enough to hunt for himself, even if he did hop down from the cart at the sight of rabbits by the road. It meant that they had to hunt small animals as they went, and Cora turned out to be surprisingly good with a short hunting bow that Emeline pulled from the cart.
Sophia was surprised by how well she got along with the two girls. In the orphanage, it had always just been her and Kate, and anyone else was suspect because of the violence of the place. In the palace, Cora had been her friend, but with everyone else, she’d had to keep her real self hidden. Here, it felt as though she finally had the space to enjoy the simple moments of friendship, whether it was laughing at Emeline’s attempts at singing made up songs as they went along, or enjoying Cora’s wonder at finally being somewhere outside Ashton.
Even so, she found herself wishing that they could find her parents’ old home. She wanted to find out how much truth there was in the words of Laurette van Klet, and just what had happened to her family. It seemed as though every day brought fresh obstacles.
Right now, the obstacle was a river.
They had crossed rivers before, but this was deep and fast flowing, imp
ossible to risk fording. Sienne walked up to the edge of it then turned away from it, hopping back onto the cart in obvious disgust at that much water.
“What now?” Cora asked.
“There will be a way to cross,” Emeline said. “There always is.”
Sophia had to take her word for it, and to be fair, Emeline was the one who had spent the most time on the great river running through the city. They set off parallel to the bank, choosing to go downstream on the basis that the route upstream sloped too sharply, and Sophia hoped that it wouldn’t be too long before they found a way across.
It took less than an hour before they came to the spot where a ferry sat by the bank, a long rope strung across the river to hold it in place and allow those using it to pull their way to the far bank. It didn’t look like the safest way to cross a river, but Sophia couldn’t see any other options, and at least the ferry raft looked large enough to hold their cart.
They dismounted to lead the horses onto it with the cart behind them. The rope was a thick, hempen thing that felt to Sophia as if it would tear at her hands with every pull on it, but she and the others gripped the thick rope and strained against it to haul the ferry forward.
On land, they could never have moved the cart like that. Whenever they’d been stuck in a rut, it had taken all of them and the horses too. On water, it wasn’t easy, but it was at least possible. They pulled themselves forward for minute after minute, crossing the rapid flow of the river.
There are people over there, Emeline sent to her. I can feel their thoughts.
Sophia stretched out her own talent, and sure enough, she could pick out the thoughts of a trio of men, all waiting with a kind of vicious anticipation. Even as she spotted them, they stepped out onto the far bank. She heard Cora gasp, and realized that she should probably have warned her about what was coming.
The men wore rough-spun clothes, and had the bulky set to them of farmers, although the knives they held and the masks they wore across their lower faces said that they were robbers. One, in particular, had the roughness to him of a man who had seen too many fights, while the other two seemed younger. Brothers perhaps, drawn into this because the eldest had decided it. Sophia snorted at that thought. Kate would never do what Sophia said simply because she was the eldest.
“Stop where you are!” the oldest one yelled. “There’s a toll on this river, and you’ll pay it, or we’ll cut the rope and leave you to it.”
Sophia stopped, along with the others. She glanced around at the river. It was flowing fast now, and she suspected that if the rope were cut, they wouldn’t just drift safely to shore.
“We’ll drown if that happens, won’t we?” she asked Emeline.
Emeline nodded. “Probably.”
“We can just head back,” Cora suggested, but Sophia knew that wouldn’t work. These men could cut them loose whichever way they headed.
Instead, she turned her attention to the men.
“What’s the toll?” she demanded.
She could feel the satisfaction roiling off their robbers. Their leader cocked his head to the side, considering it. Sophia could see some of the things he was considering, but if he dragged them to shore to try to do any of them to her and the others, she’d kill him. She’d felt a mind like that before with Rupert, and she wouldn’t let another close.
“Any coin you have!” he said at last, obviously guessing the dangers.
They didn’t have much. They’d traded for some using the beer that had been on the cart, and Emeline had a little anyway, but even so, it amounted to a couple of dozen Royals, no more than that. When they tossed them across the open water, though, the men there looked at them as if they’d found a fortune. Perhaps here in the countryside, it was.
They laughed and put the coin away, and Sophia thought that they might simply leave then. It was what the two younger ones wanted, thinking of an inn with a broken wheel for a sign. The older had other ideas, though. If he couldn’t get them to shore to have his fun, then…
“No!” Sophia yelled, as he reached for the rope. “Cora, Emeline, hold on!”
He cut the rope, and Sophia felt the raft lurch, freed from the control the line gave it. She heard the horses whinny in fear, and she started to search the cart, looking for anything that it might be possible to use as an oar. The best that Sophia could think of was one of the last barrels, and she tore at it, trying to break it apart.
“We need oars,” she told the others, and they joined her, pulling at it. Already, the raft was spinning away downriver, caught by the current. Finally, the barrel broke, and Sophia gripped one of its slats, using it as a paddle as she pulled at the water.
“Not against the current,” Emeline said, joining her. “Aim for the bank.”
Cora joined in, each with a makeshift paddle trying their best to steer the course of the raft. The water splashed over the side, and Sophia felt sure that it must tip, but it didn’t. Slowly, by inches, they pulled it in toward the shore. It helped that they had only been a short distance away when the rope was cut, a few dozen strokes of the oars.
It made what the bandit farmer had done seem almost forgivable. Almost.
Finally, they made landfall in a scrape of wood against rock. They drove the cart forward, not caring that the horses were terrified by it. They thundered onto dry ground, and Sophia called Sienne to her with a flicker of her thoughts, daring to breathe again as she held her.
“We’re safe,” Cora said, obviously barely able to believe it. “It’s over.”
Sophia shook her head. “It isn’t over.”
If they’d just taken the money, she might have left this alone, but cutting the rope… that could have killed them. She couldn’t let that go.
***
It took two hours to find the inn with the broken wheel sign. It was just a normal small inn, in the middle of a village barely big enough to warrant it. Sophia pulled the cart to a halt in front of it, tying the horses in place. She stood outside for a while, listening in the way that only she could listen, and planning.
“Emeline, Cora, go around the back,” she said when she was sure that she understood what was going to happen next. “The men have rooms here. I want you to steal back what they took while I distract them.”
“And what will you be doing?” Emeline asked her.
Sophia didn’t have a good answer for that. “I’ll be going in the front.”
It sounded like the kind of thing her sister might have done, but Sophia wasn’t thinking the same way. She wasn’t going to charge in and fight, but she wasn’t going to leave this either. She was going to find another way. A clever way. She’d done it at the palace, after all.
When she walked in, all the eyes there turned to her. She’d half-expected, half-hoped that. This was a small village in the middle of nowhere, after all. Farmers in from the fields were drinking, but only a few so far. Sophia was just interested in the trio of figures toward the back, drinking more and gambling among themselves with a portion of the stolen money.
They stared at her now, and without their masks they looked younger. There was still something cruel about the eldest of them though. The younger two looked at Sophia as if they’d just been caught shirking by their mother. The older one looked as though he’d just found an unexpected rabbit in a trap.
“What’s wrong?” Sophia asked. “Didn’t expect to find me here after you tried to kill me?”
“You’ve no proof of that,” the older one said. “No point even trying to go to a magister.”
Sophia laughed at the thought of her getting anything like justice from a court that would probably give her back to slavers the moment it saw her.
“I don’t do things that way,” she said. She nodded to the game. “I thought I’d try getting back what I’m owed a better way. You like to gamble?”
“Aye, I like to gamble,” the oldest said. “But what have you got to gamble with?”
Sophia swallowed. “Myself. You were thinking about i
t at the river, weren’t you? You wanted me. One night, against what you have here.”
She could see him considering it. He wanted it. The question was how much.
“What game?” he asked.
“A guessing game. You put dice under your cup, and I’ll guess odd or even. If I guess right, I win the money. If I guess wrong…”
She let that hang, giving him time to think about it.
“All right,” he said. He pushed a pile of money into the center of the table, then started to arrange dice under an upturned cup. Sophia watched him calmly, thinking about the next part of it. “Ready.”
Sophia tried to make it look like a guess. She made it look as though she was agonizing over it, rather than just picking it from his mind. In the end though, she just said it.
“Evens.”
She watched him redden as she lifted the cup away for the others in the inn to see. She plucked up the coin quickly, putting it away. She turned to leave…
…and felt his hand fasten on her arm.
“Double or quits,” he said. “You against twice the coin.”
The others there murmured. His brothers looked at him as if knowing what a bad idea it was. One started to speak, but the eldest cut him off.
“Shut up,” he said. “You wouldn’t even have money without me.”
He put a pouch down on the table.
“Very well,” Sophia said. She knew she shouldn’t do this, but by this point, it wasn’t about the money.
Again, he arranged the dice. Again, Sophia watched his thoughts carefully.
“Even again,” she said. “But you’re planning to tilt the dice as you lift the cup. Don’t try to cheat me.”
She reached out, snatching the cup away. Just as fast, she lifted the money pouch. She stood then.
“You’re done here when I say you’re done here,” he said. “You think you get to come in here and just take back what I stole? You think you get to walk out of this? The game doesn’t matter. I’m going to take you, and—”
“There’s someone I’d like you to meet,” Sophia said, interrupting him calmly. “This is Sienne.”