Warrior (73 page)

“You think Tejay’s right, don’t you?”

“Yes. I think you underestimate your brother.”

She snatched her hands away and crossed her arms defensively. “You’re only saying that because he lets you hang around with him and his friends in Greenharbour.”

“And you have dinner with your brother on feast days,
occasionally
, at your mother’s table and usually end up arguing with him about really stupid little things until Princess Marla gets so irritated that she threatens to have you both thrown out of the palace.”

“Once,” Kalan corrected, and then she smiled sheepishly. “And I’ll have you know I was
winning
that argument.”

“My point is, Kal, I probably know him better than you do these days. Damin’s not as silly as he looks.”

“Well, there’s something to be grateful for.”

She glanced down into the foyer and noticed Orleon heading out the main doors of the palace with a torch in his hand. With a start, Kalan realised what it meant. Someone was arriving at the palace.

Given the hour and the news they’d just received about Damin’s pending arrival, there was little doubt in her mind about who the steward had gone out to meet.

“He’s here!”

Pushing Rorin aside, Kalan picked up her skirts and broke into a run, flying down the stairs in a way she hadn’t dared since she was ten years old with her brothers and cousins in hot pursuit. She cleared the last three steps in a single jump and skidded on the polished granite floor, before coming to a halt as she hit the doors. Dragging them open, she ran towards Orleon, who was standing on the broad landing, his torch held high against the gathering gloom.

To Kalan’s intense relief, Damin and the rest of the Raiders were riding across the plaza. She waited impatiently as they rode towards the palace. When they arrived, the troop milled about in front of the palace, waiting to be formally dismissed by Almodavar. To Kalan’s astonishment her step-brother, Adham Tirstone, rode at Damin’s side.

“I spoke to Tejay about the slaveways,” Rorin told her, coming to stand beside Kalan as the troop dismounted. “Isn’t that Xanda and Luciena?”

Kalan nodded as she realised with growing amazement that her cousin Xanda and Rorin’s cousin Luciena, along with their three children, were also part of the troop. Between her parents, Emilie rode her own mount, but Jarvan and Geris were doubled up with two of the Raiders riding in front of them.

Their slave, Aleesha, rode another mount just behind them. Kalan couldn’t imagine how their family managed to be riding with Damin, and although the children were clearly exhausted, the atmosphere among them seemed quite jovial.

Which meant all Wrayan’s attempts to contact Damin had been in vain
.

Picking him out of the crowd, hearing him laugh at a joke Adham must have made, Kalan knew with terrifying certainty that her brother had no inkling of what awaited him inside the palace.

“Damin!” she cried, yelling at the top of her voice to be heard over the sound of sixty-odd men and their horses preparing to dismount.

Her brother and stepbrother immediately turned towards her as the men around them fell silent. There was a note in Kalan’s cry, a plea of desperation, that couldn’t be ignored. Damin dismounted and pushed his way towards the steps as she ran down to meet him.

“Kalan?” he asked, obviously puzzled to find her awaiting his return so anxiously. “What’s wrong?”

“Mahkas found out about Leila and Starros.”

Every person in the courtyard heard her. Silence descended over the plaza, as if some mischievous god had suddenly robbed each man of the ability to speak. She looked at her brother expectantly. Now, when it really counted, Kalan prayed silently that he wouldn’t let her down.

He didn’t. It took less than a heartbeat for Damin to work out what Mahkas’s reaction must have been to such news. She watched her brother’s demeanour alter subtly, as if he intuitively understood what Tejay had predicted—that only the Prince of Krakandar could hope to confront her regent and have any chance of prevailing.

Kalan could have cried with relief.

“Where is Starros?” Damin asked Orleon in a voice Kalan had never heard her brother use before.

The old man barely even hesitated before answering. “In the cells behind the Raiders’ barracks, I believe, your highness.”

“Captain!”

Both Almodavar and Harlen responded to the authority in Damin’s tone, almost instinctively.

“Your highness?”

“Raek, dismiss the men. Almodavar, you might like to come with me.”

The crowd of men and horses parted to let Damin and Almodavar through. Leaving Rorin to greet his cousin and her husband, Kalan hurried in her brother’s wake, anxious to fill him in on all that had happened since Mahkas discovered the affair. She was hard-pressed to keep up with him, however.

Damin lengthened his stride as if to accommodate his fury at the thought of his friend being confined like a common criminal, leaving Kalan more than a little concerned.

Even she was not sure what they would find.

The cells were guarded by half a dozen men who closed ranks across the entrance as the prince approached.

“Stand aside!” Almodavar barked impatiently.

The men didn’t budge.

Damin walked up to the sergeant, a seasoned Raider in his mid-thirties named Pakin Clayne, who’d trained with Damin any number of times when the prince was a boy. “I’m sorry, Prince Damin, but Lord Damaran left quite specific orders—”

“What are you going to do, Clayne?” he asked, stepping into reach of the man’s sword arm. “Kill me?”

“Please, your highness—”

“I will be Krakandar’s Warlord and the High Prince of Hythria for a whole lot longer that Mahkas Damaran is going to be regent of this province, Sergeant Clayne,” Damin reminded the man in a voice that frightened Kalan a little. “So you can either stand aside or you can run me through. Decide now. I’m in a hurry.”

Kalan was reasonably certain no man in Krakandar’s army would dare draw a weapon in anger against her prince, but for a moment she had a bad feeling Clayne was seriously contemplating the idea.

Although it couldn’t have been more than a few seconds, it seemed a frighteningly long time before the sergeant signalled his men to fall back. Once past that hurdle, however, she forgot about him. Lifting a torch from the wall bracket, she hurried along the corridor and down the stairs to the lower level with Damin and Almodavar, past the mostly empty cells until they reached the very end.

“Unlock it!” Damin demanded, pushing Clayne out of the way before he’d barely turned the key.

When she saw Starros—if indeed the battered, broken thing hanging from the chains was their childhood companion—Kalan gasped and covered her mouth with her hand, afraid she was going to lose the contents of her stomach.

The human wreckage that hung limp and lifeless from the ceiling chains looked barely alive. He wore only a pair of thin linen trousers in the freezing cell and every inch of his exposed skin seemed to be either bruised or bleeding.

“Cut him down!” Damin growled. There was a brittle, sharp edge to Damin’s words, as if each syllable was a cutting tool of its own.

The sergeant released the chains and lowered Starros to the floor. Almodavar caught him gently, cradling the young man in his arms, his expression so shocked, so shaken, he seemed incapable of speaking. Kalan held the torch high in her left hand and bent down to feel for a pulse behind Starros’s bloody, swollen ear. It was there, faint and surprisingly regular.

“Who did this?” Damin demanded of the sergeant.

“Lord Damaran, your highness,” Clayne replied, this time without hesitating. “With a chainmail gauntlet and an iron bar. He’s been at him for days.”

“Will he live?” This time Damin directed his question to Kalan.

“Maybe. If he gets help. But we need to get him out of here, Damin. Now.”

“My lady,” the sergeant began, distraught at the idea that he might have to stand between the Prince of Krakandar, his sorcerer sister, Krakandar’s most senior captain and a jail-break. “Please . . .

don’t place us in the position of having to stop you.”

She ignored his plea and stared up at Damin. In the flickering torchlight, he seemed much older than his twenty-four years. And angrier than she had ever seen him. Damin looked down at Almodavar, who was holding the unconscious young man in his arms, tears coursing freely down his cheeks.

“We’ll get him out of here,” he promised.

Almodavar looked up, seemingly oblivious of his tears. “Remove Starros from the palace and he will become outlaw.”

“Better outlaw than dead,” Damin pointed out, his rage still contained, but Kalan wasn’t sure for how much longer.

“You’re asking me to defy your uncle?”

“Who is more important, Almodavar?” Damin responded in a low voice meant only for the captain. “Krakandar’s regent or your own son?”

The old captain looked down at the boy he had never once acknowledged as his child and nodded slowly. “Where can we take him?”

“Your highness, if you attempt to remove the prisoner . . .,” the sergeant began again, clearly torn between his duty and his desire.

“You chose which side you were on when you stood aside, Sergeant,” Damin pointed out, glancing over his shoulder at the men gathered in the hall outside the cell. “Don’t go changing your mind on me now.”

“But Almodavar’s right. Where
can
we take him, Damin?” Kalan asked. “The city is sealed. And there’s nowhere inside the walls of Krakandar where Starros is safe.”

“Take him to Wrayan.”

Almodavar looked shocked. “You’d hand your best friend over to the Thieves’ Guild?”

Significantly, Kalan thought, even now Almodavar still hadn’t actually acknowledged that Starros was his son.

“I’d hand my best friend over to the care of the one man in Krakandar who might have some hope of keeping him hidden.” Damin smiled, briefly, humourlessly. “Don’t worry, Almodavar. I’m sure he won’t turn into a thief for spending a few days in a Guild safe house.”

Almodavar nodded reluctantly and then looked up at the sergeant. “Clayne has a point, though, Damin. Your uncle is still regent here. Any man who aids you in removing Starros from the palace risks death.”

“As does any man who stands in my way,” Damin replied.

There was a moment of tense silence as Damin forced every man present to decide whose side he was on.

Kalan didn’t let out her breath until the sergeant snapped his fingers and ordered one of the troopers to fetch a stretcher to carry Starros.

Obviously relieved that he wouldn’t have to fight his way out of the cells with an escaping prisoner, Damin turned to Kalan and drew her away from the men so that he could speak to her out of their hearing. “I want you to go with him, Kal. Tell Wrayan—”

“It’s all right, Damin. I know what to tell him.”

He glanced across at the men. One of them hurried in with the stretcher Clayne had sent him for and laid it on the floor. Several of the other men gathered round and gently lifted Starros onto the canvas. “I can’t help feeling this is my fault.”

“Why? You didn’t do anything.”

He nodded grimly. “That’s exactly my point, Kal.”

She didn’t like the sound of that. “What are you going to do now?”

“Have words with Mahkas,” he replied, in what Kalan considered to be the understatement of the decade.

“He hurt Leila, too. Not as bad as this, but—”

“It’s all right. I’ll see she’s taken care of.”

“And she thinks Starros is dead. Mahkas made me tell her he was. It’s been a nightmare, Damin.

It’s as if he’s lost his mind. He won’t let Aunt Bylinda in to see her. Leila’s half-starved and sick with grief, and—”

“It’s all right, Kalan,” he assured her, putting his hand on her shoulder. “I’ll straighten everything out. I know I said I’d wait until Mother wrote to him to clear this idiocy up, but it’s too late for that now.

I’ll speak to Mahkas. I’ll make certain he knows there’s no future for me and Leila, and maybe then we can start working out a way for everyone to get what they want.”

“Just don’t do anything foolish, Damin.”

He smiled, but it was forced and there was no hint of humour in his eyes. “You know me.”

“Which is precisely
why
I feel the need to tell you not to do anything foolish, Damin.”

“Trust me,” he said, but he was watching them manhandle Starros onto the stretcher, rather than giving her warning the attention Kalan felt it deserved.

“You always claimed you hated people who said that.”

“Not as much as I hate people who hurt my friends,” he replied.

Four troopers took an end each of the two poles threaded through the canvas loops and carefully lifted Starros off the floor. Carrying another torch, Clayne took the lead and Almodavar fell in behind them. With the other two troopers leading the way, they headed out into the hall.

“Be careful,” she warned, standing on her toes to kiss her brother’s cheek. She wasn’t sure why she felt the need to make such a gesture. It just seemed the right thing to do. “Mahkas is still regent here, Damin. You have no real power other than your name.”