The Bounty Hunter

Chapter Thirty Two

Chapter Thirty Two

Back in the dungeon Finred had succumbed to his worry; it had been hours since Safita had been grabbed by two guards and hauled away and they could only guess what had happened to her. In the back of his mind, and he was sure it was in the back of the others’ minds as well, loitered the tormenting thought that they had killed her; Lassirus had sworn that he would kill them and Finred, for one, didn’t doubt it. He felt sickened at the knowledge that she was mostly likely dead or enduring excruciating torture and it was making him extremely irritable; reigning in his anger was a losing battle and the heavy silence of Nell and Favia wasn’t helping. It wasn’t lost on him that they would die unless they managed to get out of their current situation and he knew that he would have to be the one to come up with a plan.

Suddenly the deafening silence that had hung over them almost unbroken since Safita had been grabbed was broken and Finred spun around in surprise. “What?”

“You said my sister condemned you to something worse than death before… but surely you’ve just met?” Nell’s curiosity was eating away at him and he’d obviously been puzzling over the relationship between the prince and his sister nearly as long as Finred had been puzzling over a way to get them out. “There’s so much I don’t understand,” he muttered, “why did she spend ten years trying to escape being seen as a criminal?”

“Over ten years,” Finred corrected. He wasn’t sure if she had ever told him exactly how long she had been living in the Outlands but Arthan had told him that she was not much younger than Favia and, between the age he believed she must be and his memory of the young girl being saved from the death sentence, he had worked out that she must have lived in the Outlands for at least fifteen years. He hadn’t been very old when he had seen the small girl sentenced to death for stealing and Finred barely remembered what had actually happened or what he had said to his father when he had stumbled in on the trial by accident as he ran around the building; what he did remember was his anger when he found out that she had been sent to the Outlands instead – even in his youth he had known that that was tantamount to a death sentence anyway, and a far less pleasant one. The younger Thannaerus, in a fit of pique, had screamed and shouted at his parents, railing against the laws of the country and ordering them to change them or he would refuse to become king; when they hadn’t he had stormed into his room and refused to come out until, hours later, Arthan had told him that the girl had been found and returned home.

It was only when he met Safita that he learned that had never happened.

“Of course it was,” Nell replied. “She was gone for sixteen years and three months,” he continued, his voice barely more than a whisper, “and I don’t know anything about what she did while she was gone.” Suddenly Finred realised that he wasn’t the only one who cared about Safita and the knowledge that there were people who had known her for longer than he had, that there were still enormous parts of her life that he had no idea about, hit him like a visceral punch.

“She convinced me to come back here,” he replied abruptly, looking out of the tiny window to avoid having to face Nell. No matter how much her secrets might be hurting her brother they were her secrets and he wasn’t about to spill them. “That’s what I was talking about when I said she’d condemned me to something worse than death… I ran away and she brought me back.”

“Why did you run away?”

“I didn’t want to be king Favia; I’d spent so long following all of the rules that when they tried to marry me off I snapped and ran away. Of course,” his voice filled with bitterness, “I was prepared to accept that it was my duty until one of my father’s advisors told me that I shouldn’t have to put up with this, especially if I was going to become king later on in my life. ‘Not everyone is fortunate enough to wield power,’ he’d said, ‘and you shouldn’t let yourself be forced into anything you don’t want to do,’ and I, stupid boy that I was, listened to him. After all if my father trusted him, why shouldn’t I?”