“Wait—” my attacker gasps out. “Sylvie, please.”
I recognize the voice. No, it can’t be.
I take a step back and look at the man doubled up before me. His head is bald, and he’s wearing the chainmail of the Royal Guard over a ruffled black shirt and black breeches. Enezian clothing, not the Selaran underclothes of the Guard. The man looks up at me, his eyes pleading.
It’s Larus. He’s shaved his head and his beard to avoid recognition, but I know his face better than almost anyone. I know his voice.
He’s still trying to get me out of here. Why?
“I’m not coming with you,” I say to him. “I made my choice.” I’m not letting him bring me back to Adria. I won’t join them, and I won’t be their prisoner.
I slip backwards into the shadows, but there’s movement at the end of the alley in the direction Larus was taking me.
“Larus?” someone calls. It isn’t Adria, but they’re Nithyrian, judging from the accent. “Did you find her?”
I darken the shadow I’m in as the woman turns towards Larus. There are three others with her, all of them in Selaran clothes and armor.
I look at Larus on the ground.Please, I say to him silently, but he can’t see me in the magical darkness I’ve created.Just let me go.
“Shadows,” he manages to choke out, catching his breath finally from my blow. “She’s here in the shadows.”
I take off into a run, knocking over crates as I go, trying to slow their pursuit. I leap over a crack in the road opened by an earth-born—possibly Larus—and grab onto a window box to prevent being brought off my feet by a sudden gust from a wind-born.
But it’s the fire-born that stops me. I reach a pile of rubble at the end of the alley, and I’m just starting to climb it when they ignite it in flame.
Fuck.
I climb as fast as I can manage, but I’m still sore and exhausted from last night’s fighting, and my legs give out quickly. The flames lick at my heels as I scramble for a roof, and I’m nearly there, nearly away from these people, my own people, nearly back to safety, when the rubble shifts beneath me, leaving me hanging onto the eaves by my bare hands.
I try as hard as I can to pull myself up, to swing my legs to the building so I can push against it for leverage, but I’m just too tired, just too weak.
“Let me get her,” says Larus from the alley beneath me as a bolt of flame explodes inches from my hands. “We need her alive.”
“If you get her, can you keep hold of her this time?” says the fire-born woman who spoke earlier. She’s a friend of Adria’s, I realize. Lady Marina of one of the minor Nithyrian Houses, or she was until she was stripped of her title after the last war.
Larus ignores her. “Let go, Sylvie. I promise you, I’ll keep you safe. I’m on your side.”
I’m on your side.It’s what he told me weeks ago when I told him what Seth and Adria were doing, when I told him what I’d realized about Ronan. And yet there he had stood in the throne room, telling Adria and me that he had betrayed us both, that everything he’d done was to save us both.
And maybe Adria had done something to him to compel his loyalty, but he’d given it to her all the same. He had a choice, and he didn’t choose me.
He can’t be on my side. Not if he’s on Adria’s.
But I can’t defeat him here, not when I’m unarmed and outmatched. I don’t want to go with them, but I don’t see what choice I have. Maybe if I cooperate, I can turn the situation in my favor.
I drop from the eaves into Larus’s waiting arms.
“Knock her out, and let’s go,” says Marina. “They’re raising the booms. If we don’t get on the water soon, we’ll be stuck within these walls.”
“Don’t—” I say to Larus, but he shakes his head.
“I’m sorry,” he whispers as he holds the handkerchief to my face once more.
I hold my breath and thrash my arms against him, but it’s no use. Before long, I have no choice but to inhale, and the world goes dark in a haze of minty poison and the wine on Larus’s breath.
I wake on horseback hours later. My hands are bound in front of me, and I’ve been draped sideways over the saddle and tied to it.The ground beneath me is not a city street but a dusty dirt path with deep ruts.
We’re not in Faros anymore.
