Bounty (37 page)

“The intensity may flicker between the full illusion of nonexistence and something merely faded,” the slave informed him. “Pure invisibility requires sustained power that flickers in and out of my tempered grasp. So stick to the shadows.” Stepping back, Evantralis stood dismissively idle and said no more, waiting for him to depart.

“I will return as swiftly as I can, and relieve you of sustaining the illusion,” Godren assured her.

“You need only return as swiftly as the wind drives you.”

Hesitating, Godren nodded. “Thank you,” he said sincerely, and then he took his leave, feeling like a ghost.

*

The chapel in Alabaster Square was a quaint fortress of devotedly-preserved beauty, a place that shone despite its age as if the gods themselves blessed the efforts of preservation. Only a minimal amount of traffic trickled through the square itself, and no one approached the church.

Across the way, Godren considered whether it was wise to just walk in. Should he try to find a more discreet way of entrance as an extra precaution? His invisibility was holding strong, but he still felt like he should be a glaringly obvious presence out in the open. Being nothing more than a consciousness walking around was difficult to get used to.

Finally, after procrastinating long enough to memorize the design of most of the chapel’s intricate architecture, Godren set off across the square to inspect the dwelling more closely. He would give it a quick once-over, and then resign himself to the best option.

He could not see anything through the windows except the occasional silhouette, smeared like figures from an oil painting through the tinted and stained glass. Around back he found his inspection cut short by a wall that encompassed some manner of courtyard, and he decided he would either have to simply use the front door or climb over the obstruction before him. The latter was more to his liking, and luckily in his element as well, so he boosted himself off of the closest windowsill and pulled himself over, dropping into the stone yard. A fountain stood in the center, but other than that the courtyard was plain and barren.

One of the chapel windows was cracked open, though, and a feminine figure sat primly by the sill on the inside.

She was here.

Approaching the window, Godren lowered himself onto the bench that sat beneath it, and moved as close to the wall as he could. The princess’s features were tempered by the subdued shadows of the interior, but he could see the wistfulness of her expression. Before addressing her, he took stock of the voices conversing in the room behind her.

“We cannot risk informing them of her arrival,” one man said, sounding like the king.

“They will always welcome their royals, sire, with or without a warning of arrival,” a quieter voice assured His Majesty. “Especially when the purpose is seeking refuge with them.”

Godren tried to peer past the princess and deeper into the room, but he could make out nothing except vague movement in the shadows. Well then, how best to go about addressing the princess without startling her?

“Your Highness,” he whispered as gently as he could, but tried to avoid sounding ghostly.

Cat glanced sharply at the emptiness beyond the window.

“Don’t be alarmed.”

“Ren?”

“Aye. You won’t be able to see me, but I’m here.”

“How?”

“Never mind. But I do wonder how you ex
pected
me to penetrate a church in broad daylight,” he murmured, sounding slightly more irritated than he meant to.

Catris opened her mouth, looking a little disoriented. “I…didn’t expect you to come,” she confessed defensively.

“Well I did. What are
you
doing here?”

Glancing over her shoulder, Catris leaned closer and lowered her voice. “My father is hiring a decoy and sending me to the convent in the mountains, until the threats that are hovering around can be concluded.”

Not an overall terrible idea. He just couldn’t envision Catris in a nunnery. “That’s a wise precaution. What did you summon me for?”

Catris awkwardly tried to collect her thoughts, still trying to adapt to his evidently unexpected appearance. She looked over her shoulder again. “Father, I’m going to take a turn around the courtyard,” she announced.

The background murmuring paused in consideration. “Stay reserved, Tris. Make sure you keep quiet.”

Rising with a complying nod, Catris disappeared from sight in a rustle of skirts. She slipped out between a frame of pillars and joined him in the courtyard, looking about uncertainly.

“Here,” he announced quietly, rising to come away from the window.

Awkwardly, the princess made an attempt to focus on him, and then gave up and looked down. “I summoned you because I had to see you,” she confessed. “I had to see you before I left.”

Godren closed his eyes, willing her to stop. He knew she couldn’t see him, so he let the dismay at her words show on his face. “You didn’t,” he told her matter-of-factly. “There is nothing for you to see – and I’m not talking about the state of invisibility I have assumed – and you could have spared me the grief of renewing that which torments me every time I see you.” His voice was laced with the subtle presences of pain and resentment as he did not quite his best to mask the struggle within him. A hint of blame surfaced, and a trace of weary bitterness weighed in his words.

“No, you don’t understand, Ren,” the princess told him right back, not allowing him his grief or point of view. “I have found myself entrusted with fateful entities that I cannot ignore in the gravity of other things you have revealed to me. They no longer carry the shallow weight of intriguing secrets, and I would ask you to humor me and allow me to justify why I would ask you to come.”

After a moment of feeling utterly corrected, Godren nodded, then remembered that she couldn’t see him. “Forgive me. Please proceed.”

Catris reached into a well-concealed pocket in her voluminous skirt and withdrew a scrap of parchment, handing it to him – or at least, offering it to the emptiness before her.

As Godren took it, it faded in reaction to the spell that encompassed him – but not completely, and his own form materialized ever so slightly. It was as if the spell was only designated to his specific proportions, and taking on another object forced him to ‘share’ the illusion and see it balance out between them.

Granted a visual, Catris took the opportunity to focus on him, to study him. He turned his attention to the parchment, however, and went still.

‘My heart belongs to the wind,’
he read.
‘I was told I would learn to cut it out and bury it in the street if I didn’t want it destroyed. Perhaps I am a rebel, or maybe it is merely that my heart belongs to a rebel. Or, there is the possibility that it is simply too late. But I cannot find it in me to cut it out – with a sour twist of irony, I realize I don’t have the heart to.

‘But for safekeeping, I pour my soul out onto the wind. The pieces of my heart are scattered everywhere now, and only if someone finds them all and puts them together can they truly then break it. For how can you break something that is already kept in pieces?

‘This piece belongs to the rebel in my life – though, bless her blissfully ignorant heart, she may never know. I will not write her name, for the wind knows it. But I will say this: it would be wise to end this here, to do her proud and be a rebel in my own way – a rebel against my feelings. So I’m signing my feelings over to the wind, that the wind would tear out my heart as I open myself to it, and carry it far, far away, where these sacred things can live wild and free – or, if fallen into someone’s fateful hands, may they live sheltered and protected.

Godren stared at the memo, the entry to his diary that he had unleashed to the will of the elements from atop the Ruins’ walls. How could she have this? A sensation unlike any other came over him then. Something greater than intrigue, but graver than awe – a humbleness, a wariness, and the strangest angle of unwelcome hope he had ever experienced, that he didn’t dare even consider.

Gods…

“Where did you get this?” he asked.

The princess shook her head. “It was just a scrap on the wind. Could have been anyone’s, or any thing.”

“But…?”

“It’s your handwriting. It looks just like the missive you sent through my window. Same style, blood and all.”

Godren looked back at her, duly affected, but what was her point? “It is mine,” he confirmed. “But what of it, your Highness?”

“It carries enough of its own implications,” Catris said, but it was dismissively. “But it’s been inconsequently in my possession for quite some time, and it wasn’t until my father designed my leave just days past that the real phenomenon voiced itself. I went out in the grove to anchor the feel of it into my head, and… As if the trees could sense that I would soon be gone, they shed their life and fell dormant. And caught throughout the branches, I found these.” Reaching back into her pocket, she produced a sheaf of additional scraps, and, with a mix of dismay and awe, Godren took them and shuffled through them. Countless snippets from his criminal life flashed before his eyes, pieces that should have been strewn far and wide, destroyed by weather, or at the very least picked up by dozens of deviating strangers. Yet here they were, all in her possession.

“I cannot begin to guess what I am supposed to make of it,” Catris said as he looked them over in disbelief. “But I put great stock in the magic of that grove. It seems the least I can do is acknowledge that you have demonstrated an incredible will to serve me; recognize that you have expressed a humble and restrained desire to pursue me; and investigate the depth of those things with my own judgment.”

Forgetting about the scraps in his hands, Godren looked up in alarm. “My lady,” he protested.

“You will not continue to run away from the respects that I owe you, Ren. I’m through with you having some noble conflict that interferes with
you
showing the respect of accepting your dues, and I’m not asking for your permission to appraise you.”

Unable to refuse the princess her firm wish, Godren stood there helplessly.

“I want to know the extent of your feelings for me.”

Appalled, Godren tried shaking his head. “My lady…” She couldn’t ask that. Princess or not, no human should have the right to demand he pour out his secret feelings to them.

“I’ve seen it in writing, so I have the right to address it,” the princess said. “And you have expressed enough regrets for issues such as the inability to be together to make it a topic that would rest much easier rectified than ignored.”

“My feelings are irrelevant,” Godren said. “Because, my lady, we
can’t
be together. Regrets expressed in that area are of no consequence whatsoever, not when any man across the nation would kill to be with you.”

“But the man who would
not
kill is then a rare man indeed.”

Godren stopped dead. What, in the gods’ names, did she mean to imply by that? “You don’t know what I’ve done,” he told her gravely.

“I know
good
things you’ve done. Do those not count? Will you measure yourself only by the bad, Ren?” the princess challenged, gently exasperated. “No, I don’t know what you’ve done. But I know who you are; I know you are Godren of Wingbridge, one of the city’s most wanted, and I know what you
haven’t
done.”

As he stared at her, spine prickling at her implications, Catris offered him one final piece of parchment. It was folded neatly down the middle, and Godren braced himself for the significant content and peeled it open. What he found, written in his blood with all the sincerity a hand could relay, was the meaningful statement:

I didn’t do it.

All the weight of the unjust accusations, and the unheard protests of innocence, suddenly rushed up from the depths of Godren’s being and choked him, sparked by the essence of wretched memory that had spawned this first entry back when it all started. Something caught in his chest, piercing his breath, and a pain deep and long wrote itself on his face.

Catris watched his reaction, seeing the emotions as they surged to the surface. A twilight of pity and fortitude curtained the window of her eyes.

Godren held his breath, and closed his eyes, enduring the reminder of all that had gone wrong, waiting for it to pass.

“I cannot prove anything with that,” Catris said after giving him a moment. “But I summoned you to test the ambition of greater forces in the fates intertwining us, and the fact that you received my contact, on top of the rest of this, is enough to convince me that you need to get out of where you’ve been cornered, Godren. Greater things still have a place for you. Still have faith in you. If you did not do the things that are marking you as a lost cause, that are marking you for condemnation, then you had better be fighting them with every breath in your body. If you are loyal to me, then I will accept nothing less from you. Not when you could be serving me in far greater and more personal ways than you have even already.”