Before being ushered from the school grounds in manacles, Rohn pronounced Masters Vashar and Stromwell chief regents in his absence, and charged them with ensuring that operations proceeded without deviation. He did so in a booming voice from the front courtyard, with nearly the entirety of Talonar’s occupants looking on, as it became clear that a sizable faction was preparing to join Kylac and Xarius in pursuit of Captain Traeger’s prisoner escort. Even so, it took Master Stromwell’s beefy hand and a personal rebuke from Rohn himself to collar Kylac and prevent him from following when Traeger’s pikemen prodded his father through the front gates.
Only when the day’s duties were finished was Kylac permitted to make his way to the royal prisons, where word held it his father had been delivered. Not surprisingly, he was denied entry by a bullish master jailor, who would allow only that Rohn was a guest in the complex’s central tower—the Gilded Cleaver, as it had come to be known. A cage typically reserved for accused nobility, the jailor pointed out, bestowed with comforts beyond his father’s station. Rohn’s treatment would be better than he deserved.
“Even if he’s innocent?” Kylac asked.
The jailor had a barking laugh. “Show me a blue-feathered pig, I’ll show you an innocent man.”
He fared no better the next day, or the day after that. His father would be permitted no visitors lest they be approved by Magistrate Aarhus or King Galdric himself. Rohn had counselors and advisors already working that tract—men who did little more than grumble of petitions and precedents and patience. Whispers filled the school’s halls, but Kylac could find nothing substantial in any of them. Vashar and Stromwell were as blind and deaf as he. While sympathetic to Kylac’s concerns, they preferred to focus on the duties they’d been assigned, and urged him to do the same.
By the third day following his father’s arrest, Kylac was seriously contemplating an unauthorized incursion into the Gilded Cleaver. A perilous proposition, he knew—not only for himself, but for the damage it might do to his father’s chances of formal pardon should the act be perceived as an escape attempt. And yet, how long could he stand idle when they might be torturing his father toward a confession even now?
He was deliberating privately in one of the open-air wards, working through a series of leaping and climbing exercises on the labyrinthine porcupine tree, when Brie entered the yard below with a hand rake and a pair of pruning shears. Kylac gave her a moment to retreat upon spying him there, up in the tree’s highest rungs. When she knelt instead amid the hedges of evenshade and thanesbloom to one side, he knew with a spear of hope that her coming was no accident.
A series of drops, tucks, and descending flips brought him to his feet at the tree’s base.
Where have you been? he wanted to demand, but had learned well enough the foolishness—and unfairness—in that. Instead, he approached tentatively, drawing to a stop a pace away, where he commenced stretching. “Been wondering when someone was going to trim those hedges.”
Brie kept her gaze in the dirt. “Any word of your father?”
“Little of note. And none I can trust.”
“What are you planning?”
“Who says I’m planning anything?”
This time, she spared him a look—the sort meant to remind him that she was not a fool. “The servants think him guilty.”
Kylac bristled at the implication. The evidence against his father had likely been planted—quite possibly by one of his own servants. “And you among them?”
“He did not deny it, as I recall.”
“My father is a fighter, not a murderer.” Rohn had killed, yes, but only that one time, as far as Kylac knew—under circumstances in which most men would likely do the same. He had confessed the matter readily to his young son without any clear reason to do so, and had in no way profited from the act. Hardly the earmarks of a professional assassin.
“Your master sees people as mechanisms, nothing more,” Brie said, as a branch snapped beneath her shears. “He speaks of us as bony frameworks, sacks of fluid, bundles of sinew. Would it truly surprise you to learn he might advance himself through the death of another?”
“He has no need of coin, as you may have noticed.”
“Have you ever asked yourself why?”