The Born Queen - J. Gregory Keyes [147]
That led her to muse about the possibility of cooking something for the evening meal. She hadn’t cooked in twenty years, but once she had rather enjoyed the alchemy of it.
She got up and started going through the pantry and was imagining what she might make from pork confit, pickled radishes, spelt flour, dried cod, and prunes, when she heard voices. She ignored them at first but noticed eventually that the language didn’t have the cadence of Hanzish. It sounded more like the king’s tongue.
She abandoned her exploration of dried goods and made her way down a short corridor that brought her to the great hall, a lovely chamber that must have been partly natural, for it had stone teeth depending from the ceiling, as she had heard existed in caves.
But the chamber didn’t hold her attention at the moment.
The many dead men on the floor did.
And Robert, talking to a fellow in a black jerkin. Robert, who now waved at her and smiled.
“We were just wondering where you were,” he said.
In the gray of almost dawn, Neil gauged the distance and wasn’t happy with what he thought.
“Is this the only way?” he asked.
“The only other way is down,” Brinna said. “There are twenty guardsmen between us and freedom there, and even at the peak of your fighting ability, I doubt you could manage that much killing.”
He nodded absently. He was standing on the casement of the only window in Brinna’s suite, which faced another tower and another window. The second building was perhaps three kingsyards away, the window around a yard lower than the one on which he stood. He was being asked to jump from one to the other.
Other towers jutted up all around, a virtual forest of them.
“Where are we?” he asked. “This doesn’t look like anyplace I saw in the city.”
“This is Kaithbaurg-of-Shadows,” she said.
“You live in the city of the dead?”
“I get my visions from the dead,” she said, “so it is convenient. Besides, haliurunnae are considered to be more dead than alive. Many people feel polluted by our presence.”
“That’s terrible,” he said.
“Can you jump that far?” she asked, passing the issue back into wherever seldom spoken of things belonged.
“Why not just lower us down to the ground?”
“The rope isn’t that long,” she said. “I took it from the boat, thinking I might have need of it one day, but I was only able to manage so much without it being noticed in my things.”
“Well,” Neil said, “I’ll jump it, then.”
He tossed the hauberk and sword first, worried at the echoing sound of their impact, and then flexed his knees.
He knew he wouldn’t manage to land on his feet, and he didn’t. He hit the bottom of the window with his breastbone and caught his arms over the edge. His left arm cramped up in a ball, and the right went weak, but he managed to get one elbow up, then the other, so that he could squirm through.
Alis tossed him the rope, and he tied his end on a roof beam above the window.
He waited impatiently as Alis tied off their end, then showed Brinna how to hang on the rope by her hands and knees. Even though it was a downward slope, he could see the princess was having trouble. Although she didn’t make a sound, tears were running from her eyes by the time Neil received her on his end.
He was astonished at the lightness of her body as he drew her in, at the feel of her. For an instant their gazes locked, and he wanted to brush the water that had collected on her cheeks.
He set her down instead and followed her gaze as she looked at her hands. They were bleeding, and he suddenly understood that she almost hadn’t made it, that what he thought of as a minor physical effort was at the further limits of her ability. Living one’s life in a tower didn’t do much to toughen the body.
Courage, he reflected, was a relative thing.
Alis came across as quickly and surely as a spider while Neil armed and armored himself.
They had no choice but to untie their