Her suggestions weren’t taking hold. He just kept coming! The other riders pulled up their horses, looking confused.
Rhianne snatched up her reins and kicked the gelding, hard. He surged into a startled gallop, but the other horse had momentum and caught up quickly. Her attacker seized her gelding’s reins in one hand and her wrist in the other.
“Imperial Princess?” He smiled wryly. “There’s quite a price on your head. Men!” he called to the other riders. “Get over here and help!”
“I’m not interested . . . ,” one of them began uncertainly.
“Yes, you are! Get over here, and that’s an order!” He turned to Rhianne. “Your tricks work on them. But they don’t work on me.”
“You’re not wearing a blood mark,” said Rhianne.
“It seems I forgot to wear mine this morning,” said her captor as the other riders trotted their way.
The prison guards came with a dog, which sniffed around every corner of Janto’s cell. After that, Janto’s days bled one into the other, a shapeless mass of close confines, inactivity, prison rations, and a knot of dread he couldn’t dislodge from his gut. He began to understand why prisoners scored the walls to mark the passage of time. He’d already become a little confused about whether it had been five days since Lucien’s visit or six.
He had Sashi to keep him company, at least some of the time. The ferret stayed in the hypocaust during the day. At night, he left the sterile tunnels through one of many rat holes he’d found to hunt rodents in the palace’s storerooms or gardens or sometimes all the way out in the woods. This involved putting enough distance between him and Janto that the connection between them was lost, temporarily disabling Janto’s shroud magic. But with Janto locked up, there was no alternative. Sashi insisted he was stealthy enough to travel without the shroud, especially at night, and this appeared to be true since by morning he was always back in the hypocaust, regaling Janto with his tales of adventure. Then he would sleep most of the day.
Suddenly, the key rattled in the lock. Janto, still manacled to the wall, sat up on his hard bench. He didn’t think it was dinnertime yet, but one could hardly tell in this place, and he was seldom hungry, though eating did at least give him something to do. The door opened, and he looked for his jailer.
Rhianne stood in the doorway.
Gods, she was beautiful. Disheveled and unhappy, her eyes all bloodshot, and it didn’t matter. When he looked on her, the whole world fell away. His throat seized up—he didn’t know what to say. She shouldn’t be here. It meant she’d been captured and would be forced to marry Augustan.
Then he saw the man behind her, gripping her arm. Emperor Florian.
“Janto, I—” She yelped as the emperor did something to her arm and dragged her away.
Janto tried to rise from his bench to see where they were going, but his manacles didn’t allow him to do so. He sat as quietly as he could, his heart thudding wildly in his chest. He cocked his head and tried to listen. He could hear them moving—more than two people. Perhaps some guards as well as Rhianne and the emperor. Were they leaving? No, they seemed to be entering a room down the hall from where he was. There was talk, but he couldn’t make any of it out. Only the men were speaking, not Rhianne.
He heard what sounded like a blow and sat up very straight. Then came another blow, followed by a small cry from Rhianne.
She was getting another set of stripes.
He huddled against the wall, wincing as the blows came faster. Why had he not gone with her and protected her from discovery? Why had he not saved her from this?
26
Rhianne sat in Florian’s office, leaning forward so her bandages didn’t touch the chair. Her back was a searing wall of pain. Florian frowned at her from across his hardwood desk. Lucien was with them too, for what purpose she could not guess. He wasn’t making eye contact with anybody, and he looked awfully uncomfortable. He sat on the same side of the desk as Rhianne but apart from her, his knees angled toward the door, as if he wished he could make a run for it.
“My patience is exhausted,” said Florian. “You will sign the marriage contract, and you will sign it now.”
Rhianne shook her head. “I’m not marrying Augustan.” She needed to get this waste-of-time meeting over with so she could find out more about Janto. Why had Florian shown him to her? Had he been sentenced yet, and could she possibly get him out? He must have been captured recently—her people never held spies for long. Lucien would know.
“Foolish girl,” said Florian. “Do you think I picked Augustan for you by accident? Do you think I don’t know what you are? Do you think I don’t know what
The hair rose on the back of Rhianne’s neck. She lifted her eyes to meet her uncle’s.
“You were a wild, rebellious girl who grew into a wild, rebellious woman. No surprise—I knew your mother well, and you’re just like her. I knew you would need a stern, no-nonsense husband, one with a reputation for bringing to heel the laziest, most dissipated soldiers in the ranks—”
“Rhianne is neither lazy nor dissipated,” protested Lucien.
“If he can tame the worst of my soldiers, he can tame Rhianne,” said Florian. “So. You’ll either sign, and we’ll have a lovely imperial wedding with all the trimmings. Or I’ll forge your signature and throw you on the boat with Augustan. We’ll forgo the wedding, and he’ll do what he must.”
Rhianne sat speechless. How was she to choose between those two horrible options? And Soldier’s hell, what was she going to do about Janto?
“Oh,” said Florian, “Lucien has some alternative plan he wants to present to you.”
She turned to her cousin with pleading eyes. Could he really help her?
Lucien swallowed. “Don’t get your hopes up. It’s not much of an alternative.” He took a deep breath. “We’ve captured a Mosari man—he’s down in the prison. I asked Florian to show him to you because I believe you’re familiar with him.”
Rhianne’s heart beat faster. How much should she confess to? “He was a slave. He used to teach me the Mosari language in the Imperial Garden.”
“Yes, well, as it happens—I know you weren’t aware of this, but it turns out he was a Mosari spy named Janto.” Lucien pulled some papers out of an interior pocket of his syrtos and handed them to her. “We caught him at the docks, trying to leave the country with these in his possession.”
Rhianne studied the papers. They were written in Mosari, and hastily so. She couldn’t make the writing out very well. There were a lot of numbers, and some place names. She picked out
“It’s a rough copy of a military document. The point is he’s a spy and he’s been sentenced to death. I know you were fond of him at one time and might prefer he didn’t die. Is that so?”
Rhianne nodded.
“Now it seems to me that you have something Florian wants, your signature on the marriage contract and willing participation in the imperial wedding. And he has something you want, the life of this man. I thought a trade might be brokered between the two of you.”
Hope surged within Rhianne. Of course! She’d have thought of it herself if she hadn’t been panicking and fogged with searing pain. She would trade her compliance for Janto’s life.
“What?” said Florian. “I cannot spare the life of an enemy spy.”
“Can you not?” said Lucien. “We could use a forgetting spell on him so he remembers nothing of what he learned here, and then exile him to Dori. He’s Mosari. His country is already conquered and no threat to us. Why not show mercy in this one case?”
Rhianne looked Florian in the eye. “I’ll sign the marriage contract in exchange for the Mosari man’s life, but under no other condition.” Exile to violent, unstable Dori, an island cursed by the gods, wasn’t ideal, but she would
