The Bandit King

Except it was not a misjudgment. She was right to accuse me thus, though she may not have known how right. My heart turned traitor to match the rest of me and cracked inside my chest. “No.”

“That,” she observed, “is not an answer.” And with a swirl of her skirts, she turned as if truly meaning to leave me to the darkness.

She did not believe me.

“Vianne—” Her name almost choked me. “Vianne, no. No.”

She paused next to the door, and there was a faint fading hope that she was merely playing her hand again, feinting at her exit to force a cry from me. She had never been one for those games at Court, and was even less now.

Her head turned slightly, that was all, and she spoke over her slim shoulder with a noblewoman’s air of dismissal. “I am reserving most of the papers di Narborre lost for another turn in the game. Sooner or later the Council will call for you, and I have no doubt you will be set free. I will not be able to avoid it.” She took in a sharp, sipping breath. “So. Plan my death well, should it come to that pass. For I would wish it to mean something.”

“Vianne—” The quick tongue I had never possessed when it came to her failed me utterly. “I—”

“I bid you farewell,” she said formally, and swept from the cell. The door clanged shut, the lock catching itself. Her footsteps faltered as she reached the end of the hall. Mayhap her vision was blurred with tears, the same tears that would be uselessly spent on a pillow or a kerchief instead of on my shoulder.

Her guard, whoever it was, said something in a low, fierce tone. Twas Jierre, and he had heard it all.

Dear gods. I had never been one for prayer before, fashionably irreligious like most of the Court. Yet I found myself pleading, as if the Blessed were petty bureaucrats and I a supplicant for some sinecure or another.

The coldest part of me settled into its corner, the meat inside my skull nimbly running, running like a courser. This is salvageable, the cold part said. She needs you. You will be free and able to prove yourself to her soon enough.

How long was I to cling to salvageable before I turned loose of such wreckage, opened my veins or took a draught of poison? No, poison was woman’s work, unfit for a nobleman. Falling on your sword was the accepted practice in Tiberian times.

The chains clattered like the cries of the Damarsene damned. There was no sword to fall on here. There was merely the ghost of her perfume, and something shifted inside me.

I was not ready to die just yet. I would cling to the wrack and ruin until until she sank the knife in my chest herself. There was nothing else.

Chapter Eight

The hour of dinner came and went. A long endless witchlit time, and I had lost all sense of hunger by what I judged to be morning. I lay on the cot, planning, the torch’s sorcery-fueled flame a living breath in the silence.

There were other components to that silence, too. I do not know just when it began, but of a sudden I became aware of a vibration in the stone walls. Had I not grown up in this Keep I would not have noticed.

What is that? The instant I framed the question, I knew. A sick weakness filled my stomach.

It was the thunder of battle.

Dear gods.

Why had she not sent for me? Or had I been forgotten? It was not like Vianne to offer hope to a man, then snatch it away. She had said I would be freed.

Eventually.

If the city and the Keep fell before someone thought to come fetch my errant self, would I even be remembered? And my Vianne, alone in the midst of the fire and rapine of a citadel’s fall.

The thought brought me up with a clash of metal. I worked the stiletto free and drew forth the pins from the small hollow in its slim hilt. The cuff-locks were easy enough to coax open, working the pins in and slipping tumbler by tumbler; this requires only a great deal of patience and time undisturbed by a guard.

I had the latter in abundance, but the former wore thin.

I remembered the thief who had shown me this trick. Driath, remanded to the King’s justice for the murder of a drab, taught me much. As long as he had new skills to impart, he was safe from the noose.

But no man’s skill is infinite.

The day he hanged, I was in the crowd, safe in a ragged cloak and a broad-brimmed, battered drover’s hat. I do not think he remarked me. I saw his mouth move before they hooded him, but I am fairly certain it was not to curse my name. He had far greater reasons to curse, and had never expected me to save him.

At least, I hoped he had not.

The memory of his close filthy cell and his nasal whisper as he coached me in the ways of lock-tickling and other useful things rose as I worked. He did not teach me how to knife a man quietly, for by the time I came under his tutelage I had already learned that skill. He did teach me small tricks to make the knifing easier, and a thief’s way of hunting a victim, fat-pursed or not.

Of all my teachers, he was by far the calmest. Even then, I was cautious. I had learned, by then, not to turn my back on a man no matter how securely he was restrained.

Of such small habits and gentle lessons are a Left Hand made.

I was not too filthy. Unshaven, rank-smelling, yes. But at least I had possessed a slop-bucket. Once I freed myself of encumbrances, the next step was—

The cuffs parted and I hissed out through my teeth, rubbed-raw flesh underneath exposed to cruel air. Hedgewitchery may keep a body clean, but Court sorcery will not. It will not even mend the simplest of life’s daily annoyances.

The vibration in the Keep’s white stone walls, once attended to, was impossible to cease hearing. I eased the screeching door open and peered down the hall. The witchlight torches were sputtering; I had barely avoided being locked down here in the dark.

I did not take the route my parents and Vianne had, though the aching in my bones all but demanded I follow my Queen’s steps. Yet I would not serve her best by being an idiot. When next I appeared to her, it would have to be in such a manner that my actions were unquestionably loyal.

So I turned, and plunged deeper into the Keep’s recesses.

Chapter Nine

I do not think another living soul could tread the route I took from donjon-dark to the West Tower. I was somewhat taller and broader at the shoulder than I had been the last time I retreated in this manner—twelve, and fleeing Pere’s wrath. As usual.

My son must be above even the appearance of such things!

And my mother, in her gentle way: Perseval, he is a boy. Intercession I craved and was shamed of at once, for a man does not hide behind a woman’s skirts.

That was something my father said often as well.

So it was a collection of dusty half-remembered passages, navigating by memory and touch in some dark places, until I found the spiraling, forgotten stone stairs rising through the disused part of the West Tower. There was precious little chance of attack from this quarter since the Keep’s back was to the cliffs, but my father would have posted guard in the parts of the Tower still accessible from other areas of the Keep.

He believed in being thorough.

Three-quarters of the way up the Tower was a gallery where I could see the Keep and the city below. This would give me valuable information—and also, in that gallery, there would be water. At least, if the pipes had not