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But when the next words were Lady Martinez’s quiet assent, I felt relieved, and then shame at that relief. I shut my eyes too, seeking solace in the aching burn of my fingers and arms that would be nothing,nothing,compared to what the servant now faced, unless the two remarkably resourceful women could plot their way around that too.
“I tell you,” Lord Martinez said, casually conversational as though he hadn’t just sentenced someone to a painful and disproportionate punishment over a fucking unmade bed. At least if Abril was the one remaking it, no one else would know how the sheets were still warm to the touch. “King Welzes has a remarkably progressive mind, for a foreigner. If he does half of what he’s promised, Quareh will berevolutionised.”
I bit down on all the scathing retorts I wanted to offer to that, unused to having to stay silent. Even as a prisoner inla Cortina,I’d rarely held my tongue, as Ren would readily attest to.
“Oh, dear?”
“You wouldn’t understand it if I told you,” Martinez responded haughtily. “Economics go over women’s heads, which now that I think about it, is probably why he wants to introduce such policies.” He laughed, long, loud, and ugly, and I used the cover of the noise to begin to climb down the wall, wincing at each rustle of fabric and scuff of my boots against stone.
Ren cracked an eye and followed me, moving at a fraction of my pace. When he adjusted his left arm to take his weight, he flinched and buried his face into his other shoulder, clearly muffling a scream.
Blyat.
I briefly wondered if climbingupand silencing the priggish lord would be the better way to go, but when I heard a chatter of male voices from inside the house, I knew our instinct to hide had been the better idea. Of course Martinez hadn’t returned home alone, and who knew where his men’s loyalties would fall, even with their master dead or incapacitated?
Neither Ren nor I were fighters. Perhaps this whole thing would have been easier if we had been. If we’d had Jiron’s skills for survival, or my brother’s imposing presence. But we were who we were: two lean, not particularly athletic men, whose talents primarily lay in bickering with each other.
And being seen here meant sentencing Lady Martinez and Abril to worse than a flogging, along with any other members of the household deemed to have been implicated regardless of actual guilt.
My heart twisted. I was sick of leaving people in the dirt everywhere we went.
As the nobleman above us continued to espouse Welzes’ plans for Quareh, being vague enough that I couldn’t work out exactly what they entailed but gleeful enough that there was no possibility it was anything good, I slid further down the wall until I could safely drop to the grass, holding up my arms to help my prince. Ren fell the final couple of feet onto me with a muted cry, driving the wind from my lungs and any remaining colour from his face.
“We have to get to that healer,” I whispered urgently in his ear, but he clutched my arm to keep himself upright and began to stagger away from the house.
“No,mi cielo. We can’t risk staying here any longer. We’ll find another.”
Torn by an impossible choice and rendered in uncertainty, I let him drag me into the shadows of the gardens and to the wilderness beyond.
*
Chapter Fourteen
The air grew even colder as we veered northwards, and we spent the last of our money on furs and food for the days Mat couldn’t catch any. It was late on the fourth day from the Martinezes’ estate when I paused, squinting at the stream we’d just forded and then the trees around us, which at some point had transformed from oaks and beeches into pine trees without our noticing.
“Welcome home,” I said softly.
It took Mathias a moment to catch my meaning. “We’ve...crossed the border? We’re in Temar?”
“I believe so.”
“I thought it would be more obvious.”
I gave a rueful smile. “The Mazekhstani border is marked by conflict and blood-drenched land. But we’ve had no real quarrel with Temar for decades, and while there are checkpoints on the roads, we’re deep enough in the woods to have passed by them unnoticed. You can’t bring an army or trade caravans through here, and that’s all either country cares about.”
“Home,” Mathias repeated, and then screwed up his face. “If we have indeed passed the border, then I think I just left mine.”
That made me falter, my breath catching. “Do you mean…?”
He leaned in and kissed me as we stood on the precipice between our countries, or as close as my memory of cartography allowed for.
Was this it? This measly stretch of leaf-strewn dirt, indistinguishable from any other, was what had tried so hard to wrench us apart? Being born on opposite sides of a border…thisis what demanded we be enemies instead of friends? Instead of lovers?
I made to pull Mat closer but my shoulder gave another pulse of pain and I gasped against his mouth. My northerner’s face folded into that concerned unease he’d been wearing so often lately, and while I was used to him looking sullen – and delighted in being the one to coax out a smile – this particular anguished look was not one I favoured.
As a result of his insistent demands, we’d passed through a few settlements in search of a healer since fleeing the estate. While we’d found a couple of helpful locals possessing basic herbal knowledge willing to assist, all they could offer were sympathetic looks, foul-smelling poultices, and leaves to take the edge off my pain. Those payoffs hadn’t been worth the risk of capture, but the stubborn brat refused to give up on finding someone with the Touch. Thankfully, this far from Máros either word of the bounty hadn’t yet reached my people, or we otherwise hadn’t been recognised.
“I misspoke, before,” Mathias said fiercely, cupping my face with his gloved hands. “Quareh is not my home. You are.”
