Fugitive

Fugitive

A Frost Novelette

Other books by Kate Avery Ellison

The Curse Girl

Once Upon a Beanstalk

Frost (The Frost Chronicles #1)

Thorns (The Frost Chronicles #2)

Weavers (The Frost Chronicles #3)

Bluewing (The Frost Chronicles #4)

Aeralis (The Frost Chronicles #5)

Fugitive

A Frost Novelette

Kate Avery Ellison

Copyright © 2013 Kate Avery Ellison

All Rights Reserved

Do not distribute or make copies of this book, electronically or otherwise, in part or in whole, without the written consent of the author.

For Natalie Cleary, a fan of the Frost.

AUTHOR’S NOTE:

This novelette tells Gabe’s side of the story in Frost, along with flashbacks to his life before, and contains spoilers through book #4 (
Bluewing
) of The Frost Chronicles. So I strongly advise you not to read it unless you’ve read at least
Frost
,
Thorns
,
Weavers
, and
Bluewing
!

(If you have read the entire series, including
Aeralis
, you can still enjoy this story just fine, but note that it fits nicely between
Bluewing
and
Aeralis
as far as the ending goes.)

THE ARREST

THE SOLDIERS BURST into the hall of my family’s estate, clutching guns to their chests as they surrounded me. My stomach dropped as I stared at their faces, lifeless as corpses, their eyes hidden by dark shades. The air around me was silent; the entire party held its breath. At my back, my sister made the faintest noise, a squeak like a mouse caught in a trap. I didn’t look at her. I couldn’t move as they stepped forward to take me.

“Gabriel,” my mother gasped, but her words could do nothing to stop them, nothing to save me. I was powerless. We all were. And I’d made a fatal mistake.

I’d trusted the wrong people.

THEN

“YOU’RE LOSING, little brother.”

I ignored Korr’s mocking tone and drew back the bow. I inhaled a lungful of the damp autumn air and took aim at the target, a paper pinned to one of the hedges at the end of the jewel-green lawn. The target fluttered limply in the breeze.

From the house, my sister called for me. “Gabe! Where are you?”

Startled, I released the arrow, and it went wide.

Korr laughed.

I lowered my arm and blew the hair from my eyes, stung by my failure. “Only a cad laughs when his opponent fails.”

“Then I’m a cad,” Korr said, amusement dancing in his eyes. “Now pay up.”

I scowled at him, but he was unrelenting. Reluctantly, I removed the ring from my finger, a heavy gold one set with a ruby, and handed it over. Korr snatched it from my palm and held it aloft.

“A king’s ring,” he said, smirking. “I shall wear it well, brother.”

“Half-brother,” I grumbled.

Korr lifted one eyebrow but didn’t comment. He slipped the ring onto his finger and spread his hand, admiring the effect. “I think it suits me.”

It did suit him. Korr was the more kingly-looking of the two of us. His thick, dark hair and sneering mouth drew admiring stares and smiles at whatever party or gala we attended, never mind that he would never wear the crown. Of course, neither of us would. The rise of the Aeralian Dictator Merris had ensured that. Now we were merely pets, kept in a gilded cage to be paraded out whenever the Dictator needed us.

I sighed and turned away to find my sister. Korr never hesitated to add insult to injury, but I wouldn’t let him bait me.

NOW

THE STONES OF the prison were like ice beneath my body. Fever blistered me. I could feel the heat around my neck and across my ears. I lay still, listening as a cough rattled to my left and chains clinked to my right. Somewhere far away, someone screamed, and my chest constricted as panic swallowed me.

An ache raged in my head. Someone was groaning and they wouldn’t be silent. I just wanted them to be silent. The sound was animalistic, like a dog with its paw caught in a trap.

“Shut up,” someone snapped from another cell, and I realized with a shock that I was the one groaning.

My cellmate didn’t move from where he was curled in the corner. His fingers were bound with cloth, and the tips of them were soaked in blood. He’d been taken away to be tortured a few days ago, and he hadn’t spoken since his return.

It wouldn’t be long before they came for me, too.

The walls spun, and then I thought I heard music, but it was all in my mind.

I was losing my mind.

The bars of my cell rattled as the guard unlocked the gate. He wrenched it open, and the hinges screeched. I wanted to cover my ears, but my hands wouldn’t move.

The guard hoisted me up with one hand. My legs crumpled beneath me. I moaned. I wanted to demand where he was taking me, where my family was, why I was imprisoned, but I couldn’t find the words. They clung to the walls of my throat like spiders.

The guard half-dragged me to an adjacent room. A single chair sat in the middle of a dirty floor. A single gas lamp hung naked from the ceiling. The guard flung me into the chair, and I coughed as my shoulders slapped against the wood and the air leaped from my lungs. Slowly, I raised my eyes to his, hoping to see mercy.

There was none.

Another man appeared from the darkest recesses of the room and chained my hands together. Shudders began at my ankles and ran up and down my limbs. I yanked at my wrists, but they were secured. He grabbed my neck and shoved me forward in the chair, bending me at the waist so my stomach slapped against my thighs. Something hard and cold pressed against my shoulder. A gun?

Pain exploded in my shoulder and back. I screamed. They released me and I fell back against the chair, panting, arching up against that burning hole. Had they shot me? I hadn’t heard the sound of a gunshot. Was this torture?

The guard leaned forward, and his foul breath heated my face.

“Time to go, prisoner. You’ve been sentenced,” he said.

THEN

I COULDN’T HELP but stare at the way my ring winked and flashed on Korr’s hand at dinner that evening. Looking at it made me sick. I turned my head and caught the stare of Beregrin, one of my uncle’s nobles and a member of the old Senate. He looked away when he realized I’d noticed his gaze. He lifted his wine glass to his lips and gulped the liquid, and then he pushed back his chair and rose from the table.

My mother stood near the door. She was like Korr—glossy dark hair, luminous eyes, and a mouth that could smirk as quickly as it could smile. She toyed with one of the fingers of her glove as she spoke to a noblewoman, and I knew that meant she was uneasy about something. Concern simmered in my stomach. I pushed away my plate of uneaten food. I had no appetite tonight, and this time it had nothing to do with our meager rations granted from the Dictator.

My sister smiled at me from the end of the table. She was wearing pink, my least-favorite color on her. It made her skin look sallow and her eyes muddy, but she thought that particular dress made her look older, grown up. I wondered why she wanted to be older. So she could become another pawn in the hands of the Dictator like the rest of us were? So she could be married off to someone?

Everyone in the room was a relic from an older time, a dead time. We still dressed up and played at throwing parties, exchanging small talk, and riding horses through the grounds, but none of us had any power anymore, or any money, really, except what we were allowed to withdraw from the banks by the supposedly benevolent decree of Merris, the former-officer-turned-Dictator.

Of course, we weren’t supposed to call him Merris or the Dictator. We were supposed to call him “His Excellency.”

I sighed.

“Gabriel,” a voice said to my left, and I heard a rustle of silk. I turned.

Lakin.

Her luminous eyes captured mine and held them. My heart beat fast in my chest. My hands curled at my sides.

She looked beautiful tonight. Her long black hair shone in the gaslight. Pearls dripped from her ears, her neck. Her dress was the color of wine, and it hugged her body in a way that said she knew how pretty she was, and she intended to use that fact to her advantage.

Something dark and angry twisted inside me. Lakin had been my betrothed. She would have been my wife. But now...now things were different. I was no longer a royal. I was no longer wealthy or powerful. And Lakin was no longer wearing her engagement ring.

She sank into the seat beside me and touched my hand with her own. I moved mine, and she diverted her gaze but didn’t try to touch me again. “We need to talk.”

“Talk, then.”

“Not here.” She looked up and smiled at a passing nobleman, then lowered her voice. “In the greenhouse, perhaps?”

It had been our meeting place before, when we’d been all beating hearts and tender kisses. Before my uncle’s death. Before the rise of the Dictator, Merris, when he stole the kingdom from my cousin, the heir to the throne, and imprisoned him. Before my family had become virtual prisoners in our own lands, watched like dogs and trotted out on parade days as a show of goodwill.

I didn’t want to say yes, but for some reason, I did.

“All right,” I said.

“Meet me when the clock strikes ten.” She rose and drifted away, toward a cluster of women with painted smiles and fluttering eyes. They looked at me and their smiles deepened, as if they were honey and I was a bee.

I looked away and reached for my wine glass. Some women still found me a worthy catch, just not the right one.

Korr stood and moved toward me. I didn’t move as he planted himself in the chair Lakin had vacated.

“Boring party, isn’t it?”

I didn’t want to speak to him.

“Come now,” Korr drawled. “You aren’t still angry about losing to me in that archery contest?” He fingered the ring on his hand and smirked.

“It’s just a ring,” I said, hoping he would believe my careless tone and drop the matter.

Korr smiled as if he didn’t believe him.

“But I hear rumors that you’ve been seen at the palace,” I added.

Korr’s smile vanished.

“It’s my childhood home. I miss it.”

“We spent most of our time at this estate,” I said. “The palace was the seat of the political, mainly. That’s all it ever meant to me. I’ll wager it’s more than sentiment that draws you there now.”

Korr’s eyes narrowed to a squint, and his fingers stilled against the ring. “Are you trying to accuse me of something, brother?”

I gazed at him and didn’t reply.

He made a sound of disgust and threw down his napkin. I watched as he stalked away, and I sighed. I rose from the table and went in search of my sister.

A voice spoke to me from the doorway as I passed into the foyer of the house. “Prince Gabriel. I’d hoped to see you alone.”

I stopped as a man stepped from the shadows beside one of my mother’s tapestries depicting the history of Aeralis. I recognized him—Beregrin, one of the noblemen, a former cabinet member of my father’s. Now he was as displaced as the rest of us in this new military regime. He’d been watching me earlier.

“What is it?” I asked, feeling weary. Too many people had already baited me tonight. Did this man want to reminisce about the old days, or complain about the new? I had the strength for neither conversation at the moment.

Beregrin stepped closer. “We need to talk.”

“It’s a night for talk, apparently,” I muttered.

Beregrin raised his eyebrows.

“Never mind,” I said. “What is it?”

“Not here,” he said. “Later. Tomorrow, in the Plaza of Horses?”

“I’ll be there,” I said. Curiosity and foreboding stirred in my chest.

Beregrin moved past me and was gone.

“Making friends?” Korr asked from the doorway. “I’ll wager not.”

I turned to face him, wondering what he’d heard. But his expression was merely curious, not triumphant. “Well, then why don’t you go make some, and leave me alone?”

“Oh,” Korr said, stepping into the foyer. “I have plenty of friends. You’re the one whose social life is lacking.”

“I’d rather have no friends at all than the kind you seem to be acquiring.”

“Yet another accusation,” Korr said. He dropped the simpering tone and pinned me with a direct stare. “What are you trying to say, Gabriel?”

My face flushed. He’d been seen at the palace, which was now inhabited by the Dictator and his men. “I think you have some explaining to do.”