Alvantes's scheme, such as it had been, was a dead loss. No last-minute reprieves or eleventh-hour rescues would be forthcoming. There were only two ways I was leaving that cell, and one of them would end on the headsman's block.
It might be hopeless, it was almost certainly suicidal, but my options had narrowed to just one.
It was time I put my plan into action.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Getting the shackle off my ankle was easy enough.
The lock was ancient and showy, constructed to look sturdy rather than be difficult to overcome. In fact, the harder part had been unpicking my shirt collar for the lock picks concealed there. I was almost disappointed no one had bothered to search me more thoroughly. They'd confiscated my cloak and found the loose picks in its pocket, they'd patted me down from head to toe, but that was all.
If I'd been relieved at the time, I now found it worrying. Either the Royal Guard were incompetent or they were profoundly confident in their wider security. In that case, the shackle was little more than ornamentation. It was the layers of locked doors and armed men they relied on to keep me in place.
Then again, there was another explanation, perhaps even more likely. With our execution so imminent, they'd assumed we'd have no possible time for escape.
I felt duty-bound at least to try to prove them wrong.
I spent a minute massaging circulation back into my ankle. Across from me, Alvantes sat with his eyes closed, as he had since his father left. I doubted he could be sleeping, but he was so perfectly still that it was hard to judge. I'd have expected my sympathy for him to have dried up by now; it surprised me to realise it hadn't. There'd been something peculiarly affecting in hearing him be torn apart so thoroughly and yet so nonsensically. If Alvantes's father had been determined to convey how little his son's death meant to him, there were pithier and less senile ways he could have gone about it.
Which led me to the question I'd be agonising over. Did I try to take Alvantes with me? Of course we despised each other, but there was a definite divide between that and leaving him to die. Anyway, there was no denying he'd make a useful ally. However little he knew of the palace, it would beat my plan of blundering at random until I stumbled upon a way out.
All well and good. But something told me Alvantes was unlikely to approve of my interventionist approach to incarceration. He might be just obstinate enough to have his head chopped off out of some misplaced sense of duty — and if he wasn't usually, his father's speech could have tipped the balance. Shut up and die with dignity was exactly the kind of message a man like Alvantes didn't need to hear.
The truth, though, was that I couldn't very well leave him. If I should ever meet Estrada again, even I'd have trouble explaining that one. Alvantes? The last time I saw him, he was in a cell waiting to be beheaded. I'd have asked if he wanted to escape with me, but it seemed rude to wake him.
I crept over, all ready to wake him with a tap to the shoulder. At the last moment, his eyes snapped open. They glided quickly over me, absorbing my unfettered ankle, the empty shackle loose upon the flags behind.
'Damasco,' Alvantes said softly. 'Whatever you're doing, stop it now.'
'Don't make this more difficult than it has to be,' I hissed back. 'I'm escaping. If you don't like it, fine, stay here and give my regards to the executioner. But nothing you say is keeping me in this cell.'
'Gods damn it! If you try and leave now, you'll ruin everything.'
'Much as I hate to put out the noble folk of Pasaeda, I'm sure I'll learn to live with myself somehow.'
'Things aren't how you think. You need to trust me. Just listen…'
'Wait… you lost me at trust. Whenever I do that it never ends well.'
Alvantes obviously wasn't going to be convinced, and there was no way I'd risk letting him persuade me. Maybe he had some grand scheme in mind; maybe he was just suicidal. Either way, I was through chancing my life on the whims of others. Waiting for death in the royal dungeons of a foreign land, that was where trust had led me.
Still crouched, I scampered to the door. Now that I'd begun, now that my plan was in motion, I was twitching with barely contained fear and tension. If I didn't keep moving, I knew I'd lose my nerve altogether.
Of course, there was a small yet significant flaw in that logic. My plan was more or less a plan in name alone.
The chain bolted to my shackle was unusually generous. Whoever had determined its length had either been a humanitarian devoted to the consolation of prisoners or had only had an exceptionally long chain to hand. Even shackled, I could have crossed our cell from corner to corner.
It was long enough that with the door open, it would reach outside. It might even be long enough for the shackle to be snapped closed around a certain guard's ankle. If it was, I might have a fighting chance of getting past him.
'Damasco.'
Then again, it was a hundred times more likely that he'd hear me picking the lock, opening the door, sneaking up on him or all three, and jab a sword into some part of me that didn't function well with metal stuck through it.
Still, it was that or try to fight him with a lock pick.
'Damasco!'
Was it even possible to turn the lock without the guard hearing? Slipping my picks into the keyhole, closing my eyes, I focused all sensation into my fingers. There was no way this would be as easy as the shackle. No one made cell doors easy; fiendishly complicated was more the fashion. It was going to take every ounce of my skill and ingenuity…
Unless the lock was already open.
Well, that was undeniably strange. Poorly made shackles were one thing. Open cell doors were quite another. That went beyond the pale of careless security.
'It's unlocked, isn't it? Will you listen to me, damn it!'
My mind was awhirl. Something was bafflingly wrong here. Alvantes clearly knew at least a little of what was going on; logic demanded I stay and listen. But an insistent voice told me that whatever it was I wouldn't like it, and the shriek of my instincts drowned out everything else. I'd been caged. Now I was almost free. Who cared about hows and whys? Fate had thrown me a bone and only a fool would ask what it had come out of.
There was no handle on this side, of course. However, the lock casing was a broad iron sheet that slightly overlapped the wall. When I teased my fingers round the plate and pulled, it came easily, revealing a chink of wavering light. I tensed, fear drawing tingling fingers down my spine. I gripped the open shackle in my right hand, the edge of the door in the other. Striving for an impossible compromise between silence and speed, I drew the door towards me.
A choked, dry wheezing met my ears. Even as I registered it, it turned into a derisive grunt. Another wheeze, another grunt…
The guard was snoring.
He was dressed differently to those I'd seen upstairs, in baggy trousers and a jacket of leather covered with brightly glistening studs. His helmet, knocked off-kilter where his head rested against the bare stone wall, had tilted over one eye. A spear rested beside him, and a curved short sword hung at his hip. His expression of unassailable peace contrasted oddly with the cacophony of rasps and snorts coming from out of his mouth.
Perhaps the sensible precaution would have been to draw his sword and slit his throat. But whatever else I might be, I was no killer. Anyway, I was sure enough of my light-footedness that I knew I could get past without him waking. From the sound of those snores, I could probably have herded cattle past him.
I darted a last glance back at Alvantes. Having given up trying to persuade me, he was now fumbling with his own shackled ankle. Perhaps he thought he could get it off by sheer, brute strength.
He looked up when he felt my eyes on him. 'Damn it, Damasco!'
I had no doubt he was privy to facts I lacked. Why else the open door, the sleeping guard? Yet nothing about that fact made me want to stay and listen. Alvantes, after all, had gotten me into this fix. His no-good king was the
