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The clink of gold had me swearing and lunging forward to knock his hand away, but I was too late. Milady – a pinch-faced woman with raggedy furs and several missing teeth – had the coins already clutched in her gloved fist, and Milord – who had a thick blonde beard reaching down to his chest and was dressed even poorer than her – stepped between us, slapping a hand against his staff threateningly.
They both stared at me.
“Not a chance,” Milord spat when he recovered. “We dunna want the trouble that transporting a southerner could bring, do we, Milady?”
“Smuggling is smuggling. And we already paid,” Mat reminded them from beside me.
“So you have. And yet we’re the ones with the knowledge of how to getta over them peaks.”
My lover shrugged. “We have knowledge too. Of what you look like, and which of your activities might be of interest to certain…more law-abiding citizens.”
“Or I could just gut you where you stand, you little shit,” Milady snarled, swinging her bow forward and resting the viciously sharpened wooden tip of it to his throat.
I flinched. He didn’t.
“Mat,” I muttered, tugging on his arm. By Dios, they could keep the fucking money, as long as they didn’t hurt him.
“Bad for business, that,” Mathias said lightly to Milady, impossibly calm, and there was a tense moment where neither of them moved.
And then she laughed and rehooked her bow over her shoulder, clapping him on the back. “You’ve got stones, Mazekhstani,” she said and then jerked her head in the direction of the mountains to our left. “Well? We haven’t got all day, have we, Milord?”
“We dunna,” he agreed, “but we do have just enough time for us to enact our usual precautions.” He grinned, handing the staff to his companion before pulling two tatty cloths from the pack on his back.
“Canna have you knowing where the crossing is,” Milady explained. “Alsobad for business.”
“Then that’s a hell fucking no from us,” I spat, fear growing in me when Mathias did nothing but turn around to let the other man tie the blindfold around his head. I couldn’t even enjoy the sight of my boy like that, the grey cloth over his eyes drawing greater attention to the shape of his sweet lips and delectable jaw, because his unbounded recklessness froze me colder than the snow resting in our hair.
He didn’t care. He’d thrown himself thoughtlessly towards this foolish venture without giving a fuck if he lived or died, and while my northerner had always had an unhealthy relationship with his own safety, it hadn’t ever been likethis. I cursed Kolya some more, fiercely yet silently, and vowed I’d beat some sense back into my wildcat even if I had to do it literally.
“Well?” Milord asked, the second scrap of cloth hanging from his fingers. “You in or out, southerner?”
Mat held out his hand to offer me comfort, but I merely knocked my fingers against his rather than taking it, not wanting to provoke more northern intolerance when I was about to be rendered blind.
“Times a ticking, ain’t it, Milord?” Milady sang, although she was beginning to look irritated.
“It is, Milady.”
“Ren,” Mat said softly.
I huffed out a resigned sigh that fogged my breath in front of my face. I may not have had Mathias’ temerity, but if we were ending up with slit throats at the bottom of a mountain somewhere, we were doing it together. That was the least of what I owed him.
“Fine,” I said. “But if you dare let us fall off a cliff, we’re dragging the both of you down with us.”
I tensed as the scratchy fabric stretched taut across my eyes and was fastened behind my head, and again when my hood was thoughtfully pulled back up over it. I appreciated the warmth it offered, although I suspected they only did it to avoid looking at me and my apparently offensive southern complexion.
“Dunna about that,” Milord said to me, clearly amused. I could smell the rankness of his breath on my face and tried not to recoil from his closeness. “‘Nother gold coin says you won’t get the chance.”
*
Chapter Nineteen
I didn’t need my eyes to know the exact moment we were herded into a tunnel by Milord and Milady, as the howling, icy wind was abruptly replaced by the strong scent of earth and the telling echoes of a confined space. Neither was my sight necessary for the growing realisation that this tunnel was far from stable: the clods of soft dirt and other unidentifiable detritus I was frequently tripping over told their own tales, as did the eerie creaks of tonnes and tonnes of earth shifting and settling above our heads.
I was glad to not be traversing mountain slopes while blindfolded, but I wasn’t sure this was much better. One unfortunately timed rockfall and we’d be buried under the Tungsten Mountains in a tomb so deep that our skeletons would never be found, and wasn’t that a cheery fucking thought?
We stumbled along for what felt like hours, gauged by the soreness of my feet and the aching of my stomach rather than any proper time-keeping, as tucked away in this hidden vein of the continent there were no stars or sunlight to indicate whether the day had yet faded into night. The only light that made its way through the cloth wrapped across my eyes was the flickering of a torch held by one of our companions, who were happily chattering away to each other in that inane way of theirs, where they used a whole lot of words to say nothing much at all.
The only source of comfort in this strange, terrifying place was the prince at my side, who occasionally bumped against my arm or hip when Milady or Milord failed to keep us steered straight, or when he considered too many minutes had passed since he’d last pissed me off.
