The Princess and the Blood of Eternity

Chapter 18: Time to Wake from the Dream

The hike to the palace went as well as could be expected. Quinn watched the city of Mont Qerath pass by in the glow of an early dawn.

Cassandra led the way, hand on the rapier at her waist, and her face angry enough to scare rocks. Lilith walked behind the older woman, hugging her heels as if her shadow could offer protection. Boulder followed closely behind, injured and labored, and last in line came Quinn with Ural's sword resting heavily on her shoulder.

The small group stepped lightly as they passed through a maze of cobblestone streets. The air smelled fresh with hints of early morning city life: fresh bread from a bakery, coal smoke from a blacksmith's chimney, and hints of brine and pitch leftover from the docks.

It was the smell of life, of thousands of people and their individual homes, meals from the previous night, bedpans recently tossed into the street, and the general stink of unwashed bodies. It was a city.

The brisk morning air was humid enough for her to see her breath. Sunlight had yet to appear over the building tops, meaning their way was being illuminated by the rectangular glass lanterns built on metal beams driven into the sides of the cobble street. The tiny oil-fed flames bathed the landscape in a weak orange that reflected off the naturally white granite buildings.

Many of the structures were at least three stories tall and built upon a wedged foundation in order to keep the flooring level on a slanted landscape.

From offshore, the dense city had a way of looking uniformed, but it was at the street level where the complexity of the city came to life. They had odd-shaped structures wedged between two opposing buildings, filling gaps, or random dead-end alleys where one of the odd-shaped buildings closed a gap. Every corner of every street had a purpose. Patios to small vegetable gardens, sheer walls covered in green ivy, grape vines threaded along stone railings that doubled as a barrier to their neighbor for the sake of privacy.

For Quinn, the familiar visuals and old insecurities helped to stem off the terror. Staying calm was an exercise of restraint. Her thoughts ran a mile a second. Had something really attacked them? Of course it had. The details were so jumbled; it was difficult to sort the facts. And it happened so fast. Ural's dried blood on her hands and arms provided physical hints of what her mind tried to dismiss.

She remembered a thing had attacked them—she remembered Marius barreling into it and shoving it an insane distance into a nearby building. She remembered the dust, the blood... all of it.

The rest, she couldn't be sure. Frowning, she tried to scrub away the dried blood by grinding and scraping her fingernail across her skin. What'd happened to Cleo? His recovery on the beach and now this, this violent streak. She didn't know if he was even the same person. The way he'd handled the sword, cutting into the creature and the distant look in his eye.

Adjusting her grip on the hilt, the weight of the sword surprised her. And Cleo had given it to use as protection? She'd be lucky to get it up in time to block. Then again, maybe he had given it because of a need to be rid of it. Maybe he hadn't changed all that much.

In the past, he'd been hesitant to carry a weapon at all. The notion had been both admirable and foolish, foolish since their trade and travels carried them to all sorts of places. Across the oceans, to lands and people unknown. Unfamiliar customs were not to be trusted. Quinn had learned that the hard way several times in her life.

Ural had always proven to be enough of a deterrent, but more importantly, their ship had proven fast enough to outrun all the problems they encountered. And they avoided the problem areas of the world. War was only profitable to the less scrupulous traders. The last thing they wanted was to have their ship confiscated or sunk, or their crew pressed into service.