“You can refuse.”
“I’m in the game now, and even if I tried to, they’d never let me leave. Surely you see that. Even you, with Ro’s words so intimate on your tongue that you might as well have—” He breaks off and presses a hand over his mouth as if appalled at the words that just burst from his lips. “I didn’t mean that. I’m sorry.”
I grab my clothes off the bed. I can’t do this. I am going to cry and I hate crying, and I hate myself.
“I beg you, Your Gracious Majesty. Protect my father. Lord Gargaron will come to see him as a threat because you trust him and your sister respects him. That is all I ask.”
He catches in a breath, like I’ve punched him. “You’re using my kingly title. You’re ending it, aren’t you?”
I can’t get words out in answer, but it doesn’t matter. He’s not done stabbing me in the heart.
“It’s best this way. In the palace they’re already calling you ‘the king’s mule.’ Even my own guardsmen say it when they think I’m not listening, and it makes me sick to hear it, especially after I made it clear I never want that word used. The palace ladies are sharpening their knives to go for your throat the instant you’re vulnerable or alone. And I’m sure my uncle is already plotting to get back at you for saving your mother from right under his nose. I can’t be with you every moment of every day and night, no matter how much I want to.”
I try to say his name but it won’t come.
“So it is better to end it now, because I could not live with myself if I knew you’d been killed because of me. If I know you’re safe, I can endure the rest of it.” He speaks with the knell of finality. “Go. That is our royal command. Leave this city and never come back.”
There is nothing else to say, so I don’t try to say it. I bolt from the room and stagger to the door, where I dress hastily and clumsily. It’s like I am walking on all those sharpened knives as I descend the stairs. Guards in royal uniforms stand in the darkness of the ruined compound. They say nothing but I know exactly what they are thinking.
“May we go, Captain Helias?” My voice comes out in a snarl. My cheeks are hot and my hands are in fists.
“We must wait for His Gracious Majesty to depart first.”
The captain draws me out of sight so I don’t have to watch as the king exits the pavilion, but I hear every footfall as he walks away draped in a silence that shouts as loudly as an accusation.
When at last Helias and I make our way back through the ruined palace, he makes no attempt to engage me in conversation. His loyalty is to the king, and he must cover our tracks so no one knows His Gracious Majesty has visited a place where he is vulnerable. Kalliarkos can never be so vulnerable again, and I realize all at once that this tryst was his way of saying good-bye. He already knew it had to be over, because he wants me to survive.
My heart is so full of pain.
I walk to the wagon, with its palm-wood barrels for carrying wine and beer. I wonder if there is anything in them, a delivery yet to be made. Probably Helias recruited this wagon off the street, and of course as a Commoner the driver could not say no to a Patron officer whether or not he decides to pay the man. “Take me to the Warrens,” I say.
“General Esladas told me you will be departing Saryenia in advance of the expected arrival of the enemy army.”
“That’s right. I hope you will defend the king with all your might, Captain. The siege will be a dangerous—”
I break off, sensing an unexpected movement as I would on the Fives court, where I have to be aware of other adversaries. Just as I turn to see who has come up behind me, a sack is pulled over my head.
I try to twist free, then kick. A shoulder rams into me. I am thrown so hard to the ground that my voice is knocked right out of my throat. I can’t even cry out.
“Doma!” The Efean driver grunts, gurgles in pain, and his body thuds on the pavement.
Hands grope me with brisk efficiency, taking the knife Mother gave me and binding the coarse sackcloth against my mouth. It is all I can do to shift to breathing through my nose so as not to suffocate from sheer terror. I’m rolled onto my stomach. With a desperate surge of strength, I try to crawl out of their grasp, scraping my chin and belly. They wrench my arms behind my back and bind them. They truss my legs from knee to ankle. I’m gathered up like a sack of grain and slung onto the wagon.
My head bumps a hard edge. I smell the dregs of wine gone to vinegar. Next thing I know I am shoved headfirst into an empty barrel, crammed in with my knees up to my chest and my back pressed against wood. Through the gag I try to plead please please but the cloth is tied too tightly.
They hammer the lid into place.
14
The wagon’s jolt forward slams my head so hard against the side of the barrel that I actually begin to whimper like a wounded animal. I can’t move. I can’t move.
Please help anyone help please.
The gag bites into the corners of my mouth. Its coarse fibers stick in my throat and I am heaving up bile but it has nowhere to go. I’m going to choke on my own vomit. Even Kal didn’t grasp how quickly the people who hate me would strike. That his own captain would be complicit in an ugly palace plot. I should have known better than to think I could belong in a world in which I am nothing but trash to be carted away. I’m going to die. I’m going to die.
Terror explodes through my mind, gaining power as I fight bonds I cannot break.
Calm down. Calm down.
I imagine myself on a Fives court. I imagine spinning Rings, each one moving at a different speed, and how to time the rings’ turning so I leap from one to the next in that gap where the two face each other open on. I run the Fives in my mind as I often did while lying in bed at night, working over and over through the mazes of Pillars and across the moving stones of Rivers. I count my breaths in and I count my breaths out and I let the counting become my entire existence.
I am not here, my body battered ceaselessly against the sides of a barrel, caught in a trap I didn’t see coming. I am Spider, and I am running the trial of my life.
Eventually we stop. The barrel lifts, shifts, and slams down so hard that I black out.
When I surface again, I am upside down, head pressed at such an awkward angle against the bottom of the barrel that I think my neck will break. Frantic, I twist my body so my knees are braced in one place and my shoulders in another to ease the pressure. It takes every bit of concentration I have to hold this position, but during training, adversaries learn to endure long holds as they build strength. I will endure this. I will endure.