Sanctuary - Lynn Abbey [213]
Cauvin scarcely breathed while Leorin dressed. He heard her lift the latch. Then she was gone.
Chapter Eighteen
Cauvin searched for his cast-off clothes. Leorin had scrambled the clutter, and finding them was more of a challenge than he’d expected. He meant to follow his betraying bride, but he would have failed from the start if the Stick and Leorin hadn’t struck up a shouting match while she was still on the stairs. Though the barkeep didn’t win the argument, he slowed Leorin down. Cauvin was on the window ledge—black cloak flapping, breeches unbelted, boots in hand, and the Ilbarsi knife hanging by a single thong—when Leorin stormed onto the street.
She took a torch from the bucket, lit it from the lantern hanging over the Unicorn’s entrance, then strode east, the shortest way out of the Maze. Cauvin pulled on his boots and dropped to the ground. He didn’t dare carry a torch, even if he’d had the time to grab one. Instead, tightening his belt along the way, Cauvin barely kept up with his bride.
The Hand hadn’t felt a need for stealth when they searched for corruption and impurity, so stalking wasn’t an art that they’d bothered to teach their marauding orphans. Cauvin worried about the noise he made while walking the shadows. Twice within sight of the Unicorn, he tripped over the gods alone knew what, but Leorin never hesitated, never took a glance behind. He kept her in sight.
Leorin turned left on Shadow Street, striding past dives that made the Vulgar Unicorn look respectable. Her golden hair caught the attention of a pair of derelicts just past Slippery Street. One of them lumbered up like a baited bear at Anen’s springtime carnival. Before he could question his own instincts, Cauvin was running to Leorin’s aid, the Ilbarsi knife bare in his hand.
He needn’t have worried. Leorin knew the bear was behind her. When he got close—but not too close—she spun around, showing off a shiny knife of her own. The bear wasn’t drunk enough to impale himself on a lethal length of steel. He called her a “froggin’ witch” and retreated. His unsteady path brought him within a few arm’s lengths of Cauvin, who could have taught him the price of corruption, if he’d wanted to.
But Cauvin’s wants were limited to keeping pace with Leorin. He thought she might be headed for the bazaar and didn’t look forward to tracking her through a quarter where outsiders sometimes disappeared after dark. Fortunately, Leorin turned right, toward the palace gate, not left, toward the bazaar, when Shadow Street butted into Governor’s Walk.
Cauvin faced different problems on the Walk, where the guard kept the peace from two towers, one on either side of the palace gate. The guards were no more blind to Leorin’s golden beauty than the derelicts had been. They offered to protect her from any froggin’ Wrigglie skulking in the shadows behind her and weren’t likely to be cowed by a knife in her small, woman’s hand. Not that Leorin needed a knife to bend them around her fingers. While Cauvin flattened against the palace walls, she laughed and swayed and persuaded a stout fellow—an officer, to judge by his short cloak and shiny scabbard—to be her personal escort, carrying her torch past the other guards.
Cauvin couldn’t keep up from the shadows. He decided to risk walking down the center of Governor’s Walk as though Wrigglies had every right to be there. He’d have been in trouble if Leorin and her officer had entered the palace. The great, iron-banded doors closed at sunset, and a man had to be someone to get through the narrow watch gate. A woman had only to be beautiful, and Leorin was Imperially beautiful.
He thought there was a good chance she was headed for the palace. froggin’ sure, the palace was the quarter of Sanctuary that the Hand knew best. And, froggin’ sure, if that silk-wrapped Ilsigi he’d seen earlier wasn’t the Whip, then he was the Whip’s twin.
The officer stopped in front of the watch gate. His arm found its way around Leorin’s waist. He wanted to take her inside, but she eluded him. Reclaiming her torch,