Prodigal - Book III

A Bridge to an Old Life

It's only when days stretch into a week, and then another, and then another, that Fae understands what Commander Beinsho meant when he offered his help.

He offered his control.

Posters with the faces of the three Cabal leaders line the streets, offering a hefty price, and for every Keesark soldier she spies there is a Halften one, mirroring, hovering alongside like a specter, a shadow in the dark. They are in her meetings, in her halls, everywhere but her quarters.

There at least, Beinsho has allowed her to maintain the illusion of control.

Parts of her had dreamed of something like this, had imagined it as a relief, the lightening of the heaviness hovering over her. Instead, she feels these Tower walls collapsing inward, over her prone form.

There is one other who feels this way, one other who seems to have been rolled back to a role thought to have been long abandoned. But Keno is never one to be caught off guard; he moved before Beinsho could, becoming only rustled air where he would have before been a solid presence. Her spymaster has taken up his old ways, and the hidden panel inside her quarter's walls has been put to use once more. He still keeps to his duties, just more quietly now.

"It's quite the show," he murmurs at her side one night, watching over her shoulder as a Halften squadron performs some exercises in the courtyard below.

A demonstration, Beinsho had said, all hard lines in the firelight, spine rigid, arms crossed, looking out on Fae's city. A siege disguised as a military parade. We'll take the main courseways, disguise the catapults as floats, and then hit all at once the main hideouts your little spymaster has found.

"It will be quite the show," she answers, because he knows what this is too.

"You'll have your knife at the sendoff?" he asks, and she hears his hand brush the side of her skirt, bringing her back to another time.

"If everything goes to plan you don't need this," he had said, tapping her bow. "Stick with this." And his hand had fallen, his fingers pressing at the blade on her thigh.

"You'll take my bow for me?" she asks, turning to look at him. "You still owe it a sonnet."

The ghost of a smile graces the spymaster's wide mouth, a hint of mischief and long forgotten mayhem.

"If Your Highness insists..."

"Commands."

"Commands," he sighs. "Oh well, it's probably best for one of us to look armed if things go sideways."

"Will things go sideways?" Fae murmurs.

They look at each other. Things always go sideways.

"Ben is a knife," Keno says. "Subtle, sudden, and unpredictable. Meg is a hammer. You know when she's angry."

"So what, she's going to pulverize the Halften army with a sledgehammer?"

Her spymaster makes a face. "I wouldn't put it past her. Watch out for the elbows."

He's trying to make her laugh so she smiles, though she can't quite seem to make it reach her eyes.

"With Ben I would be worried about a bait-and-switch, a false lead, or something," Keno says more seriously now. "Meg might use the element of surprise but she'll be straightforward. Blunt."

"Ben would see what Beinsho is doing in a heartbeat," he adds after a moment. "With Meg... there's a chance."

A chance, my, how much hope we have.

"And what then?" Fae wonders out loud, voicing the thing circling her thoughts for days now. "If fortune favors us, if Beinsho takes out the camps, if he beats back the Cabal..."

Then Fae is left sitting on a paper throne, holding court with fireflies as Beinsho marches back west, and all of Fae's subjects will know, all of Fae's subjects will see.

"Then we win," Keno says, disrupting her thoughts, "and we live to see another day."

She glances over at him to see him already watching her, his dark eyes glittering curiously, almost knowingly.

Fae looks away, out, beyond the soldiers to the dark city in the distance.

They are here, the two of them, up in the Tower, alive for another day. Helen is up here too, a relic of her old life, a bridge, perhaps, back to that life, if that is the way things go. 

And Caj... Caj is somewhere else.

Something else, a whisper in her mind says. She doesn't know what he wants, what he needs, what she should do to make things right. She thought he had just needed time, space, a second to breathe, but the longer she left him in there the tighter those walls became and she's so afraid—

I'm so afraid he's no longer in there.

A hand at her shoulder; Keno's, warm and dependably solid.

Who could have predicted that my most steadfast ally would be a thief? She wants to laugh and cry and settles for twisting her fingers in her dress again.

I am so alone.

"You're not alone," he says, because of course he does, because they always track on the same line of thought, the same pattern of thinking.

"No," she says, and she tries to smile as she glances over, "I have you."

His hand tenses at her shoulder even as the carefully crafted smile answers her own.

"Well, for now. You technically haven't paid me in several weeks and—"

She laughs.

"If I wanted to steal away," she says, quieting down, looking back outside. "Run off to Vatra, to Allayria and Hiran and everyone else, would you help me?"

She glances over at him, her spymaster who is suddenly so uncharacteristically grave.

"You already know my answer," he says. "But you'd never do it."

She raises a brow, and he smiles, a sad thing now, turning his dark, handsome head and nodding out, into the dark, past the practicing soldiers to the black thing lumbering into the courtyard, alone.

"You'd never leave him behind."

A/N: Hello from the bowels of computer-deathdom. I have devised an interim solution that allows me to post while my laptop is resurrected (not unlike our favorite cheese-chaser) so here we are! Here's last weekend's chapter, hoping to get you this upcoming weekend's soon if this all goes well.

Poll time: Where would you rather be? In Solveigard City or making your way to Isati and her lovely mother in Vatra?

Such choices...