"I wish I could take the blame, if it would ease your pain, Repentance." He put both arms around her and squeezed her against his chest. "I never told anyone," he whispered.
"My Lady?" Tigen said, his voice thin and shaky.
She pushed herself away from Sober. Tigen stood as white as the wall behind him. She shouldn't have screamed. She'd scared the poor boy out of his wits.
"My Lady?" he said again.
"I'm sorry I scared you, Tigen."
"One day ... one day ... I was by Mist Lake, and I heard you talking to someone."
Oh no.
"I heard you say that the king was sick and he only took you because you reminded him of someone he knew."
She groaned. It couldn't have been Tigen.
"Later when Gaylor and Baeler were calling you a whore, I told them that you weren't our old-uncle's concubine."
And so she would die.
She had befriended a little overlord boy and made him want to defend her honor, and now she had to pay with her life. That's how it worked when you went against the order Providence had set for your life.
She would die and what would she leave behind? She'd screamed at Sober, blaming him, and by doing that she'd laid a burden on Tigen that would likely crush him. Now when she was hanged, Tigen was sure to blame himself. He would grow up thinking he'd as much as slipped the noose around her neck.
She reached out to him and he came into her arms. "Tigen," she whispered as she hugged him. "I love you. I don't care who knows it. I don't care that you're an overlord boy and I'm a lowborn girl. I love you because you're good and loving and kind. You didn't do anything wrong."
She wept into his hair for the second time that week.
When she released him he was still white, but he gave a brave, trembling smile. "You're not a lowborn girl, though. You're an overlord lady."
She touched her neck. "Not that anyone can tell."
Color flushed back into his cheeks and he squirmed around, all excited, like a piglet at feeding time. "Everyone will be able to tell soon enough," he said. "We have clothes for you. You will wrap the turban around your head and all people will see is your eyes. Your light eyes. They don't look like slave eyes. You could look like an overlord from Norbank."
"What are you saying?"
"I'll be your slave," Sober said. "And Tigen will be your younger brother. No one will suspect."
"We are to kidnap the prince's son?"
"Only until we get out of the city. We'll send him back when we get to the wall."
She shook her head. "It's too risky. What if you get caught?"
"I'm not leaving you here, so there's no sense in arguing."
"How am I going to get out of the dungeon?"
Sober pointed to Tigen. "Who else knows all the hidey holes in a palace if not the young prince?"
"Tigen, you know a way out of here?"
He puffed his chest out.
"We leave now?"
Sober put a hand on her arm to hold her back. "We'll be back tonight. We don't have much time so listen carefully. When we come back and open your door we won't have a key. We're going to knock the handle off. Tigen knows how to do it. But the floor of your cell is set to slide back into the wall if the door is opened without a key. It's an escape deterrent. The lake lies right beneath your floor, and if you fall in, you'll freeze immediately. Do you understand?"
She nodded. And shuddered. She knew about the lake. Tigen had told her he fished in it.
"When I open the door, you need to be prepared to jump over to me."
"But I can't run away. My family—"
"—will be fine," Sober said, finishing her sentence for her. "I've taken care of everything. We've got to go before the dungeon master gets suspicious. We'll be back with the clothes, and everything you need. Trust me."
And he and Tigen were out the door.
In the quiet after they left, Repentance stared at the square of light on her floor, thinking.
She couldn't run. By law, after he executed her, the king could take a sister or a brother to replace her.
But she was sure he wouldn't hurt them. He wasn't vindictive. He loved her overlord father and he had been learning to love her. He wouldn't take any pleasure in punishing her family after she was dead.
Running was different from an execution, though. He might feel forced into going after her family to publicly humiliate her. To show that no one could escape from him without paying a heavy price. He was so determined to punish disobedience, so as not to appear weak.
And Sober couldn't run, either, or his parents would be forfeit to his mistress.
But Sober said he'd worked it all out. She had to trust him.
He told her to be prepared.
So she would prepare.
Reaching her hand into her pocket, she felt her little parchment book and her char-stick, and she counted her buttons with her fingertips. "One, two, three. There we go," she whispered. "All packed."
Love gives birth to courage. It turns the smallest of lizards into mighty dragons.
~Professor Pottamous Scroll, Harthill University
Chapter 29
Sitting on her lava cloth in her dark dungeon cell, she stirred the buttons in her pocket around with her finger, and she laughed and laughed and laughed.
She'd come up the mountain with nothing. Once there, she'd
