Nick dragged his feet, slowing Arit.
“What?” his mate asked. “Do you want to spend your evening trapped in Benjic’s chapel of ancestral tacky, festering in reminders of who and what you lost? No? Then let’s go.”
“I’m the crown prince. The last Marisek. We don’t sneak off,” Nick reminded himself—and his mate. “Even when running away is safer, we stay.”
“This time, you run.”
Picking up his pace to match Arit’s, Nick slouched. He drew up the hood as much as possible to conceal his face. “Where are we going anyway?”
“Someplace more private. Where you can breathe.” As they neared the transept’s junction with the nave, Arit nudged him closer to the wall where massive statues lining the corridor obscured their approach. Halting behind a free-standing bronze of Lyncus, the doomed lynx god of the north, Arit checked on guards lazily turning away the curious at the corner of the opposite wall. “Officials, support staff, and servants expect us to move together as a couple, not a single person—you’ll go first.” Spying a forgotten cleaning caddy in the shadows, he snatched it by the handle and shoved it at Nick. “Here. Keep your head down and slip through the barricades blocking the northern wing. That area of the cathedral is falling apart; no one will search for us there. I’ll be less than a minute behind you.”
Nick’s forehead grooved into a V. “This is stupid.”
“Yeah.” Arit waggled his eyebrows. “Be impulsive and unpredictable with me.” He nodded toward the crowd. “Go.”
Against his better judgment, Nick went. He slouched, pulling the hem of his coat around him to conceal the showy dress clothes specifically created to inspire and impress cynical capitol toadies during his visit. Instead of meeting the gazes of the workers rushing to and fro or acknowledging the power players who sailed through the bedlam, Nick stared at his feet, his grip on the handle of the caddy tight as he slinked toward the chest-high barricades on the other side of the junction. Veterans of the White Army stationed to guard the transept containing Benjic’s chapel side-eyed him when he passed, but they didn’t raise the alarm. They let him go. The milling crowd jostled Nick, but Arit was right. With his hood shadowing his face and the cleaners he dutifully carried, no one recognized him or cared.
He edged around the barrier without raising an alarm.
He crept farther into the dim northern wing, dirt and rock that had fallen from the disintegrating fa?ade gritty under his wingtips. Since the barricades only climbed as high as his chest, Nick hurried down the corridor, counting on the dark interior to hide him. Thin light from transom windows lining the ceiling highlighted whirls of dust stirred as Nick passed. Clusters of statues in marble, bronze, and wood blocked his way, but he discovered a narrow gap through which he could circumvent the collection of discarded gods. He carefully steadied his balance as he hurdled the chipped wing of a headless falcon soaring up from the base of a column. How much of the tribes’ cultural legacy rotted in wanton neglect here?
Navigating to the other side of the jumbled statues, Nick smothered a dusty cough, but these darker reaches of the decaying northern wing were worse. Broken furniture—most certainly antiques—joined crates of molding books stacked in towers that reached Nick’s shoulders. Paintings leaned, forlorn and forgotten, against the plaster walls. Someone had tried to drape tarps over some of these rejected treasures, but a thick layer of grime covered everything canvas and plastic didn’t protect. The footprints his shoes left in the gritty powder accumulating on the mosaic floor, itself a showpiece and a work of art, confirmed to Nick that no one had walked this part of the cathedral for years.
He started at a grunt behind him and swung around, caddy raised to deflect the first blow, but only Arit had followed him. Nick’s mate pushed from his crouch, having jumped through the gap Nick had discovered. His mate rubbed his hands together, brushing away dirt and debris. Wide-eyed with curiosity, his gaze swept their surroundings. “Huh,” he said, voice low—too low to draw attention from the bustling crowd they’d left behind them. “Weird.”
Nick beetled his brows. “What?”
“Judging by the dirt, no one has bothered the northern wing since before the war.” Arit shrugged, muscles rippling under his leather jacket. “Odd it wasn’t looted.”
“Priestesses would’ve guarded the capitol cathedral with their lives.” The faithful hadn’t lifted a finger for their emperor, had chosen to throw the weight of their support behind the rebels according to the histories and news reports Nick had studied. Then the elders had turned on the church and withdrawn support shortly after the war had been won. Nick fingered a portrait marred by several jagged tears. “Most of this stuff appears to be damaged.” His mouth quirked, his bitterness saddening him. “Not valuable enough to steal, I guess.”
Wending a cautious path through the debris, Arit joined him. He squinted at the painting. “Isn’t that Co-regent Stennick? Your grandsire’s mate?”
“Possibly.” Nick sighed. “Father despised him. Stripped the palaces of every trace of both Stennick and Emperor Gaelis when they died.” Perverse humor surprised a chuckle out of Nick. “Father wouldn’t have appreciated the irony of the tribes scrubbing him from history, too, but I do.”
“Rebels killed him, but they couldn’t erase your father from history.” Arit’s heavy hand landed on Nick’s shoulder. “No more than Emperor Eton could wipe out the evidence of his sire and father before him.” He squeezed. “The tribes remember.”
“They hated us.”
“Not anymore.” Arit nudged Nick toward the dark, gaping maw of another chapel doorway. “C’mon. I bet one of these alcoves is still outfitted with usable pew to sit.”
The first chapel they entered had been filled with trash, and the second wasn’t much of an improvement, littered with a hodgepodge of broken chairs, scarred benches that creaked alarmingly under Arit’s weight, and three-legged tables. The farther from bustling activity in the nave they searched, the more promising the results, though. In the chapel near the end of the transept, they found what they sought. After he and Arit muscled aside a massive cabinet missing one of its four doors, they created enough room to squirm inside a space showing the same, tired neglect of the entire northern wing, but the cabinet must have blocked the accumulation of trash and debris because a lone pew, a spiderweb of cracks disrupting the marble, occupied the sanctuary. Nothing else. Tapestries, grimy and tattered, still graced the stone walls, though, and a single stained-glass window depicting the mating flight of the virgin hawk goddess Milan filled the room with riotous and incongruously happy color.
Gingerly perching on the bench until he was sure it wouldn’t disintegrate beneath him, Nick sat.