The Cursewright's Vow

Chapter 4: The Princess's Suitor, Part 5

 This wasn't an invitation to his rooms, and apprehensive or not Carala was too curious to refuse. They had slipped into Talinara's darkened streets, avoiding lit corners and cheerfully blazing windows much as Denisius and Varallo Thray would do two weeks later, arriving at the shadowy bulk of the Maathinhold within half an hour. Nervously Carala scanned its brooding outline, hoping Tacen didn't intend to slip through one of the many crumbling holes in the outer wall to visit the decayed central courtyard. 

She found it difficult not to believe the various tales that claimed that ruin was haunted, not when she knew that hundreds of the Sidereal Reach's scholars had been burned alive there, all to the sounds of the anguished screams of the Doyenne as she had been forced to watch. Those screams had had no sense to them, as her tongue had already been sliced out at the Emperor's command. Such facts weren't in the history texts, but Carala knew them nonetheless. Silenio never tired of telling the story, not least because he had been the one to cut out the Doyenne's tongue. The only comfort Carala had in such a gruesome tale was that all of them had deserved it; all of them had known of the plot to kill her father.

But to her surprise Tacen passed by several cracks in the outer wall large enough for a man to slip through and led her instead to the grand doors of the Curate's Tower, skating his fingers over them lightly before approaching the humbler watchman's door to their side. To her astonishment he tugged from his pocket a heavy iron key.

"Where in the gods' names did you get that?" she whispered.

"Never mind, dear princess. I have better connections than you might guess." He winked at her then, and gave her a playful swat on her backside as he urged her into the open doorway.

But she was suddenly and deeply fearful, and it had nothing to do with the idea of the ghosts of burnt scholars or the demon cohort that had supposedly founded this place. A key to the Maathinhold meant Tacen knew someone with Imperial connections, or someone bold enough to steal from an Imperial connection. She wondered just what the real business of his caravan company was, and wished she had paid more attention to Varallo Thray when he argued with her father over which businesses might be fronts for the criminal guilds. Though she couldn't remember Swiftfoot ever being mentioned, that didn't mean the Chancellor -- or her father -- didn't suspect them. There were many such debates to which she wasn't privy, and, as she now cursed herself, she hadn't paid much heed to the ones she had witnessed.

Nevertheless, she was a princess of the Imperial House of Deyn, and she was not helpless. A jeweled dagger was sheathed at her waist beneath her cloak. Not once had she ever been naive enough to roam Talinara by night unarmed. Perhaps more importantly, she knew every corner of the Curate's Tower, and the rest of the Maathinold ruins nearly as well. Unless Tacen's secret connections went even deeper than the presence of that key suggestedr, there was simply no way he could pursue her through the Tower if she felt the need to escape. And if this whole affair had been nothing but some sort of plot, she owed it to her father to see if she could learn more about it.

And if it wasn't a plot . . . .

She didn't let her imagination follow that line of thought any further. Already she was blushing too hotly.

Tacen took her by the hand as he led her through the piles of noble refuse that filled the Tower, guiding her to the Magistrate's Stair that threaded along the outer wall to one of the central chambers a little over halfway up the Tower's height. She allowed him the illusion that she didn't know where they were going, partly because she found his clumsy attempt at courtliness rather charming, and partly because she was wary enough to want him to believe her to be more at sea than she really was. But when he led her to the stairway's end and forced open the stubborn door at the last landing, he -- maybe unintentionally -- baited her into showing off a little.