Crownhaven and the road south. The night of the betrayal and the days after.
The city was still celebrating.
That was the first thing Lucian understood as Desmond pulled him out of the lane behind the residence and onto the next street. That nobody cared. Behind them his home was burning, the cathedral bells were ringing the alarm, and two streets further on people were dancing around a fountain and singing a song about a king who was as wise as an owl and as strong as a bear.
A man with a wineskin stumbled against them, laughed, apologised and went on laughing. A woman threw flowers from a balcony. A boy no older than Lucian sat on a wall and blew the same three notes on a wooden flute, over and over.
No one looked at them. A man in sooty armour, dragging a child in a nightshirt behind him by the hand, was nothing special on a night like this. They probably took him for a drunken father fetching his son out of a tavern.
They don’t know, Lucian thought. Nobody knows.
And then, colder: And tomorrow they’ll believe whatever they’re told.
Desmond did not stay on the main streets. He turned into lanes Lucian had never seen, narrow, stinking passages between houses whose upper storeys jutted out so far that the roofs almost touched. He walked fast, but he did not run. Running people drew attention. At one corner he tore a cloak from a washing line, coarse and grey and smelling of soap, and threw it over Lucian’s shoulders. His own surcoat with the raven he pulled off as he walked, rolled it up and tucked it under his arm.
He was still bleeding from the wound on his arm. Lucian saw the dark drops on the cobbles behind them.
“Desmond.” It was the first word he had spoken since they left the house. His voice sounded like a stranger’s. “You’re bleeding.”
“I know.”
“They can follow the trail.”
Desmond stopped. He looked at the ground, at the drops, then at Lucian. Something in his face changed, only very briefly.
“Well spotted.” Barely louder than a breath.
He tore a strip from his shirt, wound it tightly around his arm and pulled the knot tight with his teeth. Then they went on.
It was only much later that Lucian realised it had been the first time that night he had looked behind him.
They reached the river shortly before the fourth hour.
The Calder flowed right through Crownhaven, broad and sluggish and brown, and left the city in the south through the River Gate, a massive iron grille that was lowered at night so that no boats could pass in or out unseen. Lucian had seen it from the carriage when they arrived three days ago. It had looked like the maw of some enormous beast.
Now they stood beneath the quay wall, in the shadows, ankle-deep in cold mud, and Desmond watched the grille.
“The city gates are shut. All of them. I heard the horns. They’re looking for us.”
“Who?”
“Everyone who believes it when they’re told a traitor is fleeing.”
Up on the bridge above the River Gate, soldiers were marching. Lucian saw their torches, heard their voices. They were not masked men. They were city watchmen, in the king’s colours, purple and gold.
Desmond nodded towards the water. “The grille doesn’t quite reach the bottom. Down on the left side, where the current is strongest, there’s a gap. The smugglers have been using it for a hundred years, and for a hundred years the city watch has pretended not to know about it.”
“How do you know that?”
“Your father and I once sneaked out of the city at night when we were students.” Desmond spoke as calmly as if he were talking about the weather. “We wanted to go to a fair in a village downriver. Hollis caught us at the gate the next morning when we tried to get back in.”
Lucian looked at him. “Was that the story with the bucket?”
“No. That was a different one.” Desmond laid a hand on his shoulder. “Can you swim?”
“Yes.”
“Good. You won’t have to swim much. Hold on to me. Take a deep breath when I tell you, and don’t let go, no matter what happens. Do you understand?”
Lucian nodded. Then, because Desmond kept looking at him: “Yes.”
The water was so cold that it squeezed the air from his chest. It crept through his nightshirt, through the cloak, into his bones, and Lucian clenched his teeth so they would not chatter. Desmond swam with long, calm strokes, Lucian on his back, arms around his neck. They kept to the shadow of the quay wall, close to the bank, until the grille rose before them, black and dripping, the iron bars as thick as Lucian’s arm.
Above them the soldiers marched.
“Now,” Desmond whispered. “Deep breath.”
Lucian breathed in. Then they dived.
Under the water it was completely dark. The current seized them, tugged at them, tried to press them against the bars. Lucian felt Desmond pull himself along the grille, bar by bar, downwards, further and further down, until Lucian’s ears hurt and his lungs burned. He felt rough stone at his back, cold iron at his shoulder. He felt his cloak catch on something and Desmond wrench it free.
Then the tightness suddenly eased, and the current swept them away.
They surfaced twenty paces beyond the grille, outside the city. Lucian coughed and gasped and clung to Desmond’s neck. Above them the city wall grew smaller, and the torches of the soldiers on the bridge were no more than little yellow dots.
No one had seen them.
They left the river a mile further south, clambered up a bank and hid in a thicket until the sun rose. Lucian was shaking so badly that his teeth chattered, however hard he clenched them. Desmond pulled him close, laid the wet cloak over them both, and so they sat beneath the dripping branches while the sky in the east turned first grey, then pink, then gold.
It was a beautiful morning. Lucian hated it.
“They’ll search the roads.” Desmond was talking more to himself than to Lucian. “The road east first. To Ravenhold. That’s where everyone would expect us to go.”
“Aren’t we going home?”
Desmond was silent a moment too long.
“Ravenhold isn’t your home any more, Lucian. Not any more. If we go there, they’ll find us within a day.”
Lucian thought of the castle. Of the grey walls and the crooked towers, of the apple tree in the garden that he had fallen from. Of the old man with the goats. Of his room, where the wooden soldiers he had been given on his eighth name day still stood on the windowsill.
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He said nothing. He had no more words for it.
“We go south,” Desmond went on. “And then east, the long way round. And at some point, when nobody’s looking for us any more …”
“Will they stop?”
“Only if they believe there’s nothing left to look for.”
Lucian did not understand. Then he understood.
“They have to believe we’re dead.”
Desmond looked at him for a long time. Then he nodded.
It took them two days to reach the gorge.
Two days in which they walked across fields, crept through woods, hid in barns and stole bread from windowsills. Lucian had never stolen anything in his life. On the first day it felt wrong. On the second it felt like nothing at all.
On the second day they also saw their pursuers for the first time.
There were six riders who came over the crest of a hill, perhaps half a mile away. Not city watchmen. They wore dark clothes without crests, and one of them had a dog on a long leash. Lucian and Desmond lay flat in the tall grass at the edge of a field and watched the riders stop on the road, watched the dog circle, sniffing, and then pull in their direction.
“The dog’s got our scent,” Lucian whispered.
“Yes.” Desmond did not sound worried. He sounded as if he had expected exactly that. “Good.”
“Good?”
“We need witnesses, Lucian.” The captain rolled onto his back and looked up at the sky. “For what comes next, we need witnesses.”
Varrow Gorge lay half a day’s march south of Crownhaven, where the Calder had dug itself deep into the rock. An old stone bridge spanned it, narrow and without a railing, and beneath it, so far down that you grew dizzy looking, the river foamed between black rocks.
They crouched in the shelter of the trees at the edge of the gorge. “Your father and I once had to do an exercise here. As students. Abseiling from the bridge, with rope and hooks. Whoever fell got a month of stable duty.”
“Did anyone fall?”
“Me.” A twitch at the corners of his mouth. “I got caught on a rock ledge under the bridge. A small cave, right under the third arch, invisible from above. Your father laughed at me for two hours before he let a rope down.”
He said it quite calmly. But Lucian saw him clench his hands into fists as he spoke.
Then Desmond explained the plan to him.
He explained it twice. The third time he made Lucian repeat it, word for word, the way he did in training when Lucian was learning a new movement. Lucian repeated it. His voice did not tremble. He did not know why not. Perhaps because there was nothing left inside him that could tremble.
At the end he did ask one more question. “And if it doesn’t work?”
Desmond laid his hand on his head, exactly the way his father had done on the stairs.
“It’ll work. Because it has to.”
They waited until they heard the dog barking.
Then they stepped out of the trees and walked onto the bridge. Not fast. Not secretly. They walked so that they had to be seen: a tall man in sooty armour, the surcoat with the raven pulled on again, and a black-haired boy in a torn grey cloak.
Behind them the first rider burst out of the woods.
“There!” someone roared. “On the bridge!”
Lucian heard hooves on stone. He heard the dog yapping and straining at the leash. He heard the sharp metallic click of a crossbow being spanned.
“Walk.” Desmond’s hand pressed against his back. “Not too fast.”
They walked. The bridge was narrower than it had looked from a distance. Beneath them the Calder roared so loudly that Lucian could no longer hear his own heart. The wind tugged at his cloak.
In the middle of the bridge, right above the third arch, Desmond stopped.
At the far end of the bridge two more riders appeared. They had cut off the way. Of course they had. Desmond had said they would.
From both sides they came onto the bridge now, slowly, weapons drawn, like hunters who had cornered a wounded animal.
“Hand over the boy, Captain,” one of them called. A big man with a scar across his nose and a voice Lucian knew. He had heard it on the night of the fire, through an open window. The letters into the study. “Hand him over and you can go. Nobody’s interested in you.”
Desmond drew his sword.
“Come and get him.”
The man with the scar laughed. Then he nodded to the crossbowman.
Lucian did not see the bolt coming. He only heard the snap of the string and a dull sound, and then Desmond staggered, clutched at his shoulder and stumbled backwards, to the edge of the bridge where there was no railing.
“Desmond!”
Lucian did not have to pretend to scream. The scream came all by itself, from the same place in his chest from which no sound had come that night on the stairs.
He threw himself forward and seized Desmond’s arm.
And Desmond let himself fall.
They plunged over the edge together, Lucian and the captain, a tangle of grey cloak and surcoat and arms and legs, and the last thing Lucian saw of the bridge was the face of the man with the scar, stepping to the edge and looking down.
Then there was only the wind.
The fall did not last long.
Desmond had said it would not last long. He had said the rock ledge lay only three men’s lengths below the bridge, that you only had to turn to the left just before you plunged past it, that he would hold on to Lucian. He had explained it twice. Lucian had repeated it three times.
All the same he screamed until his body struck stone and Desmond’s arm closed around his chest like a band of iron.
They lay on a narrow ledge, barely wider than a table, beneath the overhanging arch of the bridge. Behind them a low, dark crack opened in the rock. Below them the river raged. Follow the newest chapters on NovelPing.
Desmond rolled over and pulled Lucian with him into the crack, all the way to the back, where the light did not reach. Then he did the last thing that was part of the plan.
He threw his surcoat out. The black, torn surcoat with the silver raven on it, soaked in his own blood. And then the grey cloak Lucian had been wearing, together with one of his shoes.
Lucian watched the two bundles of cloth flutter down into the depths, watched them disappear into the white foam of the Calder, surface, disappear again and finally be carried away downstream.
Above them, on the bridge, voices could be heard.
“See anything?”
“Only water. The current down there would tear an ox apart.”
“There! Something’s floating. The surcoat. And … is that a cloak?”
A long pause. Then the voice of the man with the scar, calm and satisfied.
“Send two men downstream. Have them fish the things out. The duke will want to see proof.”
“And the bodies?”
“The Calder gives back nothing it has once taken. Every child knows that.” Footsteps moving away. “The captain and the heir drowned. That’s what the report will say.”
Hooves on stone. A last yap from the dog. Then only the roar of the river.
Lucian lay in the darkness of the crack in the rock, pressed against Desmond, and felt the captain’s blood seep warm through his shirt.
“Desmond?”
“Hm.”
“Are you hurt? Really hurt?”
“The bolt grazed me.” Desmond was breathing heavily. “Not quite the way I’d planned. But it grazed.”
Lucian felt in the darkness for his shoulder, found the wet cloth, the torn leather. He remembered how he had pressed his hands on his mother’s wound, and for a moment he could not breathe.
“Lucian.” Desmond’s hand found his. “It’s only a scratch. Do you hear? I’m not dying. Not here, not from a scratch, and not before I’ve told you the story about the bucket.”
Lucian laughed. It was a terrible, broken sound, half laugh, half sob, and it hurt in his chest. But it was the first time since that night that any sound at all had come out of him that he did not have to hold in.
Desmond held him while he cried. He said nothing. He only held him, in the dark, under the bridge, while above them the world believed they were dead.
Thornby. Five days later.
The town crier stood on a barrel in the middle of the market square and read from a roll of parchment, so loudly that he could be heard at the smithy at the other end of the village.
Lucian stood at the very back of the crowd, the hood of a new brown cloak pulled low over his face. Desmond had traded a silver button from his armour for it that morning. Beside him stood Desmond, stooped, with a bandage under his shirt and a shabby hat on his head, looking like any other tired day labourer on the road south.
“… and be it known to all subjects of His Majesty Alaric the Third,” read the crier, “that on the night of the royal name day the treason of Aldwyn Ravenmoor, formerly Duke of Ravenmoor, was uncovered. In his chambers were found letters to Kaldrun, King of the Dwarves, in which the traitor forged an alliance against the crown and promised the dwarves land in the east of Arvendal.”
A murmur went through the crowd.
“In the attempt to arrest him, the traitor resisted and met his death, as did his wife Evelyn. His captain and his son and heir fled and drowned in their flight in the waters of the Calder.”
Lucian stood very still.
“The lands and titles of the House of Ravenmoor fall to the crown. His Majesty in his mercy has resolved to entrust them to the faithful Duke Gerald Winterhall, whose vigilance has preserved the realm from great harm.”
The crier rolled up the parchment.
“Long live the king!”
“Long live the king,” the crowd murmured back. Not all of them. Not even most. Lucian saw an old woman beside him shake her head. He saw a farmer spit on the ground, and a young mother wipe her eyes with the back of her hand. He heard someone whisper: “Ravenmoor? A traitor? Never.” And someone else, louder: “Always said so. Too good to be true.”
He watched the crier climb down from the barrel, brush the dust from his breeches and walk over to the tavern as if he had just announced the price of flour.
Traitor.
The word clung to him like mud.
My father listened to the goat man. He listened to the dwarves. He stood up when everyone else stayed seated. And now he’s a traitor because a man with a face of wax wants it that way.
Desmond’s hand came to rest on his shoulder. Heavy and warm.
“Come. We’ve still got a long way ahead of us.”
Lucian did not move. He stared at the empty barrel the crier had stood on.
“Desmond.”
“Hm.”
“I’m dead.”
Desmond was silent for a moment. Then he knelt in front of him, in the middle of the dirty market square of Thornby, among the chickens and the carts and the people who were already talking about the weather again, and looked up under his hood.
“Yes. Lucian Ravenmoor is dead. He drowned in the Calder, and the Calder gives back nothing it has once taken.”
Lucian nodded slowly.
“But that doesn’t mean,” Desmond went on, so quietly that only Lucian could hear, “that no one is left.”