The Prince of Ravens

  Chapter Eight: Banelyn

  The next few days passed with no further incident, for which the Prince was very grateful. He didn’t know what had passed between the girl and the giant when they were alone in the woods, but by unspoken consent the Prince was allowed to ride unbound. He expected the girl to demand that now that he could move about freely he and she should take turns riding the horse, but she didn’t. Instead, she chose to walk, and more often than not was off in the woods scouting ahead or behind, claiming when the Prince asked that she moved better without a clumsy beast of burden beneath her.

  “Ride if you want,” she said, “my own legs are good enough for me.”

  “Very well,” the Prince said simply, not understanding but not particularly caring.

  “I’ll be ranging ahead, Tomaz,” she said, ignoring the Prince, which was what she did now as long as he wasn’t talking to her. Sometimes even then.

  As she left, Tomaz chuckled quietly and pulled his charger back to walk beside the Prince’s horse, which shied away from the huge stallion before calming itself.

  “What’s funny?” the Prince asked, perhaps a touch too eagerly. He had decided to try to keep up the friendly rapport that he had established with Tomaz until they reached Banelyn, though he didn’t know exactly how to do so.

  “Nothing in particular,” Tomaz replied with a friendly smile, “just remembering something she said many years ago.”

  There was a long pause in which neither of them spoke, and the Prince feared that would be the end of the conversation. For some reason he could not bear silence today, and so he asked the first question that came to mind:

  “How long have you known her?” he asked, the words coming out slightly too quickly. Tomaz, however, appeared not to notice and replied in his customary slow rumble.

  “Since she became an Exile.”

  The Prince, surprised, looked over at the big man, who appeared to be lost in thought.

  “How long ago was that?”

  The giant looked about to respond, but then caught himself and turned to the Prince with a smile.

  “Long enough. It is not my story to tell.”

  And with that the conversation ended, and they remained silent for the rest of the day’s journey, even though the Prince tried to come up with something to say multiple times. It was infuriating - he had grown up a natural at court politics, and yet he couldn’t hold a conversation with a simple Baseborn Exile. It was baffling.

  The next few days continued much the same, with barely any conversation on any of their parts. Tomaz taught the Prince a few more impromptu names of trees and plants, and though the Prince tried to appear interested, Tomaz soon realized he wasn’t, and so the lessons ended. The girl was gone most of the day, apparently having taken it upon herself to do most of the scouting. She returned only for brief intervals to speak quietly to Tomaz, and then at night when they made camp.

  A few times the Prince caught her looking at him across the fire at night. As soon as his eyes met hers, though, she looked away, and either engaged Tomaz in conversation or else made an excuse to walk away from the fire. The looks varied - some were oddly subdued and thoughtful, as if she were waiting for something, while others were angry and uneasy, as if she were impatient for that something to happen. The Prince wasn’t sure what to make of this, but as he remained unbound he told himself it was none of his concern. Neither of them were his concern after they reached Banelyn and he made his way into the city without them.

  And finally, that day came.

  Close to noon, they emerged from a dense thicket of trees to find themselves on a ridgeline that overlooked a city. It was still miles distant, and it would take them the rest of the day to arrive there, but the Prince felt anticipation rush through him and suddenly his nerves were on edge.

  Even from a distance he could tell that the city must be Banelyn. It was located at the center of an enormous fork made of three well-paved stone roads, each wide enough, it was said, for a dozen carts to travel abreast. One road curved off to the east eventually, once it crossed the river lands, and led to the city of Formaux, the seat of his brother Tiffenal, the Prince of Foxes. The road that led north went to the city of Lerne, nestled in the rolling hills that spread through central Lucia, the seat of his sister Symanta. And finally, and perhaps most importantly, the road that led south eventually ended in Roarke, the seat of Ramael, the Prince of Oxen, and also the end of the Empire.

  The city of Banelyn itself could more properly be called a city within a city. Or better yet, a city within a city within a town. The middle city had been built when his Mother, with Rikard and Geofred by Her side as Her right and left Hands, had begun to solidify Her rule of Lucia, and began Her second great conquest of the southern realms. The original wall of Banelyn, known as the Black Wall, had been built to withstand both time and attack, and as such had never fallen to any enemy. From where he sat his horse, the Prince could see the top of it, rising out of the city like an enormous black stone curtain, forming a large parallelogram around Banelyn City, which was a city devoted almost entirely to commerce. It was unparalleled in the rest of the known world, and was the source of various expressions along the lines of: “I bet I couldn’t even find it in Banelyn,” or “Well, we could always move to Banelyn.” Inside this wall was Banelyn City proper, where lived the Elevated, the High Blood, and the Most High Blood, who owned the city and the lands surrounding it. Toward the center of the city proper was another wall, inside which only the Children and the Most High could go. This Inner City was made of towering stone structures that stretched high into the air, spearing the heavens with their spires. Unlike the Black Wall, these buildings had never felt the touch of the Empress, and as such had been worn down and rebuilt over time. The Prince had heard that they came nowhere close to rivaling the majesty of the Black Wall, but were still tall and powerful, and some, the Cathedral of the Empress among them, breathtaking in their own right.

  The Outer City, the city spread out around the walls of what was historically Banelyn City, was actually three very large towns that had sprung up outside the walls. No one was allowed to pass beyond Banelyn’s walls who was not a favored merchant, tradesman, or one of the High, and so, over the years, the lower classes who lived outside the walls had built second-hand shops, teetering inns, and rickety wooden houses that had melded into a haphazard city of its own that was like a wooden maze. This Outer City was broken into three large sections, each of which was centered on one of the Black Wall’s three Gates: the Lerne Gate, the Formaux Gate, and the Roarke Gate, named after the primary trade objective toward and from which goods flowed. For first and foremost, Banelyn was a trading city, and was important because it was located almost squarely at the center of the Empire, and as such served as the Empire’s central trading hub. If Lucien was the head of the Empire, Banelyn could very well be called its heart, and the roads that led from it the arteries that fed the Empire’s life blood - trade - to all corners of Lucia.

  And somewhere in that mess, thought the Prince, is the Path of Light that will lead me to the Seeker, and then -

  But his train of thought was interrupted by Tomaz.

  “Shadows and fire, it always takes my breath away to see that sight. It’s a beautiful city.”

  “If by ‘beautiful city’ you mean a cesspool of corruption, then yes, it is.”

  The Prince, by now used to the way that the two Exiles came and went with barely a sound, managed not to jump when the girl spoke from right behind him, but only just.

  He looked at Tomaz and saw the Exile staring at him, still atop his charger. It took him a split second to realize the giant expected him to be surprised.

  “Banelyn,” he said, trying to play it off as though the sight had struck him momentarily dumb. “You … you’ve brought us to Banelyn.”

  “Yes, we did,” said the girl.

  “Why?” he asked, keeping his demeanor calm and collected. Inside, however, he was filled with a sud
den mix of conflicting emotions.

  Banelyn, it’s there, right there! I need to go to it, I need to …

  But he would wait. He had waited this long, he could wait a little longer. He needed to make a clean escape, needed to make sure Tomaz and the girl couldn’t follow him, or at least couldn’t catch up to him until he was safe inside the city, and preferably safe inside the Seeker’s lair. And then, once he was there … once he was there things would be worked out. They had to be. There was nowhere else for him to go.

  “We need supplies,” Tomaz said, dismounting. With a sudden thrill that jolted through his body to the tips of his fingers and toes, the Prince realized this would be his chance. They were making camp here for the day.

  “We aren’t going closer?” he asked.

  “Why would we?” the girl asked, looking at him suspiciously.

  For a moment, the Prince panicked and cursed himself for speaking without thinking, but then his instincts took over and he found he was speaking to cover his tracks before he had even thought it all through.

  “I’m not sure … I suppose I’m just so used to traveling until dusk that stopping to camp at noon is … alien to me.”

  Tomaz grunted in what the Prince felt was agreement, and began to unsaddle his horse. The answer seemed to please the girl, who grimaced and began to unpack the food.

  “If there was anywhere else to go, we’d keep going. But any closer and we run the risk of being found by a patrol and any further away we’d be too far to make the journey in half a day.”

  “Speaking of which, I could make it there and back by sunset.”

  “You?” the girl asked Tomaz. “I thought I was going, I always go.”

  “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?”

  “Not at all,” the Prince responded truthfully, trying to keep up the façade of being helpful for just a little 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 tree - an oak - 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 moved off into the shadows and was gone.

  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 and yet 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 the Prince drew the length of black metal from its sheath there was no sound.

  The Prince 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 black, he did pause. 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 out of his way to the left, 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 fight now.

  Without pausing to consider his actions, he turned and hurled the short sword, end over end, at the girl. Taken completely by surprise, the girl flung her daggers in front of her face and just managed to deflect the sword, which went spinning into the forest; the Prince didn’t even spare it a single glance. He ran forward, feinted once, and struck the girl in the gut.

  With a woosh the breath rushed out of the girl’s lungs, and she staggered back a step, staring wide-eyed at the Prince, mouth open in an “o” of 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 into the Prince’s face.

  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 the girl on the temple, and she fell to the forest floor, unconscious.

  For a long moment he stood over her, looking down at the body. Some time passed, he wasn’t sure how much, in which he simply 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 remaining 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 latched her feet together in as intricate a knot as he could imagine, 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 now. As he turned to go he happened to look down and saw the girl’s daggers. He might need a weapon, and these were of much better quality than the short swords the Death Watch soldiers had left behind, 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. He felt paralysis creeping into his lungs as he tried to breathe, forcing his hand tighter about the burning hilt. With a supreme effort of will he let out a cry and dropped 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.

  In a matter of seconds he had re-saddled the 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. Wi
th a quick kick in the ribs, he sent the animal speeding away, leaving the girl and the remnants of their camp behind him without a second glance.