Fiona flung the little mop into the sink, where it sank with a splash. “How close?”
“Very,” Holt said. “We have no time to talk.”
Sebastian took his bag from Holt. “No time to change?”
Holt was already through the door. “Time enough to saddle the horses and ride,” he said over his shoulder.
Fiona wiped her pruny hands on her wrecked trousers and followed him. “How do they know who we are?”
Holt dumped his bag and hers on the wet ground outside the stable and began saddling Mittens. “The whole story will have to wait,” he said. “I know only that they are inquiring after Fiona Cooper by name, and they have your description. They have spread out through the city and are being extremely thorough in their examination of every foreign woman in Haizea. It seems disruption of the Jaixante is taken quite seriously.”
“Let me do that,” Fiona said, fumbling with the horse’s tack, but Holt took the leather straps from her firmly and gave her a little push out of his way.
“You still don’t know what you’re doing,” Sebastian said to her, saddling his own horse. “This is faster. Put your boots on. Holt, are you sure we can’t just hide?”
“They have already arrested two women with Miss Cooper’s coloring, one far too young to be their quarry. My impression is that her capture is of such great importance that they are unwilling to take chances on letting her slip away. We need to put Haizea behind us, as quickly as possible.” Holt handed Mittens’ reins to Fiona and turned his attention to his own horse.
Fiona secured her bag and mounted, then had to turn awkwardly and dig for her rain cape. Riding had started to come more easily to her, but Sebastian was right, she couldn’t do this on her own.
She turned Mittens in a circle, fidgeting. Sebastian and Holt worked in grim silence, and Fiona waited, one eye on the street, watching for those fluttering robes. Finally, the men mounted, and without a word the three rode out of the stable yard and down the street at a fast trot.
The sun was setting, somewhere past the lowering black clouds, and street lights were flickering into life all along the street. Their orange-tinged light turned the raindrops gold as they hissed past the lamp glass and made white-and-black Mittens look a ghastly yellow. Fiona hunched into her rain cape and tried not to imagine Jaixante guards coming up behind them. The ones she’d scared off with the mysterious tokens hadn’t known her name, so there had been two groups, one sent off down the banks of the river on a fool’s quest that had turned out not to be so foolish, at least in terms of finding them. But the other group…the only way they could have known her name was if someone had put Fiona Cooper’s absence from the Irantzen Temple that morning with the mysterious intruders of the previous night.
She hunched further, this time trying to avoid her feelings of guilt. What must Hien have thought when she turned up missing? Had she been the one to conclude that Fiona Cooper was involved in the break-in? Fiona had become an excellent liar over the years, concealing her secret, but she’d never felt this guilty about any of her lies. And there was no way to make amends or explain.
“We can’t travel through the night,” she said to Holt, who rode just behind her.
“No, but we cannot risk finding a place to stay within the city,” Holt said. “Our only hope is that we outpace our pursuers. A farm, with outbuildings, is what we need.”
A man holding his coat over his head rushed past Fiona going the other direction. She glanced back after him, but the street was still; no sign of pursuit. The inn was already out of sight. “I think the rain is helping.”
“It had better be, because I won’t risk going faster on these slick stones,” Sebastian said.
It felt like they were crawling at that pace, creeping along an inch at a time. The darkness was complete. The sun had set, the storm clouds filled the sky, and the orange lamps made puddles of light on the cobbled streets that shone wetly below the horses’ feet. Soon they had the street to themselves. The darkened storefronts were hollow, gaping eyes and mouths, not the brightly lit plate glass windows of a Tremontanan city, but smaller spaces, some of them shuttered against the night, none of them revealing what could be bought inside. Fiona remembered the lively activity they’d seen when entering Haizea and was struck by the stark difference. The rain was letting up, but she couldn’t hear anything beyond the sound of raindrops hitting the ground. Like the Jaixante, it reminded her of a city of the dead.
Ahead, dark shapes emerged from a side street and ran toward them, shouting commands in Veriboldan. “What—” Sebastian said, but Fiona didn’t need to understand to know what they wanted.
“We have to run,” she said.
Holt turned his horse and kicked it into a faster gait. “This way.”
They bolted down a side street, skidding on the paving stones, Holt now leading the way. Fiona clung to Mittens’ reins and prayed she wouldn’t fall off, that Mittens wouldn’t trip and break a leg, that they would lose their pursuit in the winding, narrow streets. They crossed another wide thoroughfare, this one crowded with people despite the weather, and Holt turned to parallel it, but was forced to turn again, and again. Fiona was utterly lost. All she knew was that they were gradually moving east, away from the Kepa River and the city center. Did Holt know where they were going? He couldn’t possibly.
She wiped rainwater out of her face and followed Holt around another turn, then gasped as a dark-clothed Jaixante guard stepped out practically under Holt’s hooves. The horse reared up, startled, and Holt flung himself forward to keep his seat. The guard held a pistol on Holt. “Down,” he said.
Holt’s horse jigged nervously. “Down,” the guard repeated. “All down.”
Fiona looked at Sebastian, whose face was set and tense in the orange light. “Do as he says, Fiona.”
The guard’s attention flicked to her as she dismounted, then to the street behind him as he realized his partner hadn’t followed him. In that moment, Sebastian lunged forward, the pistol came around to point at him, and Holt leaped from his horse to bear the man to the ground.
The pistol went off with a loud bang, and then Sebastian had joined Holt in the scuffle. Someone kicked the pistol away; it skittered across the paving stones toward Fiona, and she picked it up carefully. She knew nothing of gun Devices and even less of their Veriboldan counterparts, which was what the weapon was, but she held it with her finger carefully away from the trigger and said, “Let him up.”
Holt had the man pinioned, and he looked up in surprise at Fiona. More movement in the darkness turned into another guard running into the street, pistol at the ready. Quickly Fiona brought her pistol to bear on the man and rested her finger lightly on the trigger. “Drop it,” she said in Veriboldan. The man, his pistol swinging wildly from target to target, finally dropped his weapon. “Kick it to me.” He kicked it so it rattled across the stones toward her.
Sebastian came to her side and picked it up. “What now?” she murmured to Sebastian. “We don’t have any way to tie them.”
Someone screamed behind them. Fiona jerked in surprise, but kept her attention on the guard. “Someone’s noticed us,” Sebastian said. “We have to move.”
“Lie down on the street with your hands where I can see them,” Fiona said. “Holt, let that one go.” She kept the pistol pointed at the prone guard while Holt released his captive and kicked his knee so he fell heavily to the ground. The screaming continued, joined by several voices shouting. Fiona cursed and mounted her horse, thrusting the pistol into her waistband. Holt kicked his horse again, and the three of them took off down the street. Behind them, the guards’ whistles joined the din.
They rode far too fast down the narrow street. The street lamps were further apart now, and some of their lights were broken. The street narrowed again. The ceramic-tiled houses were gone, replaced by haphazardly constructed shanties of wood and concrete blocks. Light leaked from behind doors that didn’t fit properly, falling on heaps of refuse, some of which moved. The air felt oppressively heavy, like a wet woolen blanket weighing Fiona down. Dusktown. The guards might not be their biggest problem anymore.
Silent figures watched them from every corner, but made no move to approach them. Fiona carefully didn’t meet anyone’s eyes. She hoped they didn’t look like targets. Holt was a big, sinister figure, and Sebastian wasn’t small, and she…well, Holt and Sebastian didn’t look like targets, and she was armed, if it came to a fight.
Ahead, someone moved into the street and stopped, facing them. Holt drew his horse up. “Stand aside,” Fiona said.
“Just want a coin or two for a hungry man and his family.” The man didn’t have his hand out.
Fiona sensed other figures moving in on both sides. She drew the pistol and pointed it at him, startling him into taking a few steps backward. “Back away,” she said.
The man glanced to his right, then put two fingers to his lips and whistled. The other figures melted away into the shadows. Fiona realized her hand was shaking and stilled it. The man nodded at her as if they’d just been having a polite conversation and stepped back to one side.
“The pistols are only going to take us so far.” Sebastian’s low voice carried clearly through the rain.
“We should move faster,” Fiona said, and Holt picked up the pace.
She rode with one hand on the reins and the other holding the pistol, her shoulders stiff with tension every time something moved in the shadows. Distantly, she heard the guards’ whistles, calling to their friends, probably capturing some poor Tremontanan woman with red hair who’d spend an uncomfortable night in a cell, not the kind the Irantzen Temple offered.
Something scuttled across the street in front of them, and she jerked the pistol around to point at Holt’s back, then swiftly brought it away, cursing silently. This was no worse than the slums of a Tremontanan city, but the strange buildings, and the smells, and the dim lighting, made it feel alien, worse than the Jaixante and its windowless fairy spires.
Then there were fewer buildings, and no lamp posts, and they’d left the city behind them. The cobbled streets had turned into a dirt road that was almost indistinguishable from the long grass that grew on either side of it. Sebastian and Holt were barely visible in the gloom, and even Mittens looked pale, a patchy ghost. “We have to keep moving,” Fiona said.
“Carefully,” Sebastian said, and headed off along the road, this time at a walk.
After a few minutes, the rain stopped, but dark clouds still covered the sky, blocking out the moon and stars. Fiona pushed back the hood of her rain cape to breathe in the wet, chilly air. Her foot no longer hurt as badly, her various aches from running were subsiding, but she was wet despite the cape and her filthy clothes chafed her. She held her tongue. Complaining about minor inconveniences seemed stupid, given that they were still running for their lives. If you could call it running when they were groping along the road, trying not to stumble.
They rode for what felt like hours, Fiona all the time straining to hear the sounds of pursuit. But it really did seem they’d left the guards behind. She refused to feel relief. Time enough for that when they were safely back in Tremontane. Her head jerked, and she realized she’d nearly fallen asleep on Mittens’ back. “Should we look for shelter?” she said.
“I think I’ve found something,” Sebastian said. She saw a dark shape that might be his arm pointing off to the right. In that direction, a handful of hunched buildings huddled for mutual protection, and a few lanterns gleamed like earthbound stars. “That’s a farm.”
“We cannot ask them for shelter,” said Holt, “without risking exposure later. We should not assume those guards will give up their pursuit entirely.”
“I was thinking we’d just borrow one of their storage buildings.” Sebastian turned his horse in the direction of the farm. “Change clothes, sleep a few hours, and move on.”
Holt made them stop some fifty yards from the closest building. Sebastian and Fiona waited while he crept up to it and slinked around its weathered sides, dark with rain. “So if he wasn’t always a manservant, why did your parents hire him as one?” Fiona whispered. They weren’t anywhere close to where anyone could hear them, but the chill in the air and the darkness in the sky made her feel inclined to quiet.
“He did a service for my father,” Sebastian said in the same low voice. “Something not entirely legal, I gather. On a whim, my father hired him as a footman—heaven only knows why he thought that was a good idea. My mother likes them to be a matched set. So when she complained about him ruining her aesthetic, he assigned Holt to me. Something about taking on whatever my exclusive, expensive school might throw my way, as if assassins and thieves might infiltrate it. It was a good choice, but probably not for the reasons my father believed.”
Holt had disappeared beyond the building, which was windowless and had the same steeply-sloped roof every other farm building Fiona had seen possessed. “What, you never had his help sneaking out at night?”
“No, but I honed my own skills sneaking out past him, or trying to. Though he did teach me to pick locks. I’m not very good. He never showed me how to pick pockets, which I thought would have been much more useful—there, he’s coming back.”
Holt was remarkably silent for such a tall man, and made almost no silhouette against the darkness. “It is a storage shed,” he said, “and there is room, barely, for all six of us.”
“Thank heaven. I’m about dead on my feet,” Sebastian said.
They led the horses around to the front of the shed, which had a single large door that creaked open to reveal a warm, cavernous interior. Shed was probably the wrong word for it, though “barn” didn’t quite fit either; it was a single large room with no loft, packed with pallets on which rested burlap sacks stacked twenty high. It smelled dusty, and floury, and Holt patted one of the sacks and said, “Wheat.”
Sebastian found an empty burlap sack and began rubbing his horse down. “I wish we had food for them,” he said. “Or food for us. All this wheat, and it does none of us any good.”
Mittens nuzzled Fiona’s arm as she followed Sebastian’s example. “I know,” she murmured to the horse, “in the morning we’ll find you something. I want to change into something less filthy,” she announced to the room.
“There’s space beyond the pallets where you can have some privacy,” Sebastian said, “and I think we can sleep on the sacks.”
Never had any bed looked so welcoming. Fiona took her bag into a corner and rapidly put on her own clothes, kicking the dirty temple clothes into a corner. Then she changed her mind and folded them neatly into her bag. They might come in handy, though she couldn’t imagine how.
She tossed the little sack in one hand, feeling the ceramic tokens shift, then put it and the scroll case into her bag. Speaking of things she didn’t know what they were for. It worried her somewhat, carrying around this thing that had been hidden so carefully away and had such an effect on people. Even the young thief had been afraid of it. And the guard had drawn some kind of conclusion about her before running away—
She cursed, loudly, then kicked her bag in frustration. “What? What’s wrong?” Sebastian exclaimed.
“That guard is going to tell them we have these tokens.”
“So?”
“So they’re never going to stop chasing us.”
Sebastian came around the corner, buttoning his shirt. “Or they’ll leave us alone because they’re afraid of what it might mean that we have them.”
Fiona let out a short laugh. “They’re going to be mightily confused, in any case. They know only that we were in the foreign trade office and that we have the tokens. But Gizane had them hidden in her desk, which, by the way, I don’t remember closing. What do you think the odds are that the tokens were supposed to be there? I bet Gizane stole them first. So they’re going to start asking a lot of questions.”
“None of which have anything to do with us.”
“If we’re lucky, they’ll turn their attention on Gizane.”
“Probably. But I think you’re right that they won’t stop chasing us, just in case.” He gestured to the sacks. “Sit there.”
“Why?”
“I want to look at your foot. It should be washed and bound up properly.”
Fiona sat and extended her foot to him. He took it gently in one hand and used his little light Device to examine it. “It’s not a deep cut, but I’m sure it’s painful. Holt, do we have water?”
“I drew some from the well in the farmyard,” Holt said. He had a bucket in one hand and a length of cloth in the other. “If you’ll allow me, sir?”
Sebastian gave way to Holt, who swabbed her foot gently enough that she didn’t do more than wince at his touch. He dried her foot and wrapped it tightly in the clean cloth, tying it off around her ankle. “That should do for now,” he said. “We can thank heaven you did not require stitches.”
“Thank you, Holt.”
“It was my pleasure, Miss Cooper. Now, I suggest we all try to sleep. We will have to leave here before first light.” He disappeared with the bucket. Fiona stood and put her weight on the injured foot. It throbbed, but felt less painful.
Sebastian leaned against one of the tall pallets of wheat sacks. “Still glad you came along?”
He was a dim shape in the darkness, but she could see him smile. “Surprisingly, yes,” she said, and his smile broadened.
“Dare I hope it’s the company you enjoy?” he went on.
“Sebastian—”
“Don’t say anything else.” She felt the touch of his hand where it gripped hers briefly, then released her. “We’re friends first, Fiona. Remember that. Just—I’m not going to stop hoping for more.” Lightly, he caressed her cheek, and then he was gone, leaving her gaping and her heart racing.
She closed her eyes and leaned against the stack. The musty, dry smell of wheat filled her nostrils, and she rested her forehead against the rough burlap and sighed. Roderick had been like this at the beginning—persistent, gentle, inexorable. And every bit as wrong as Sebastian was, though for different reasons.
She tossed her bag atop some of the lower piles of sacks and climbed up after it. The piles were solid and heavy and made for a good, if lumpy, bed. She heard Sebastian and Holt settling themselves nearby and thought about suggesting they set a watch, but the moment she lay down she felt all her muscles relaxing despite the hardness of the makeshift bed and realized she was too tired to worry overmuch about the slim possibility that someone might come out there during the night.
Wearily, she went through her evening routine, terrifyingly conscious of how flammable wheat dust was. She hoped she wasn’t tired enough to sleep too deeply, or Sebastian would find out first-hand how frightening her magic was.
She tucked her bag under her head, then had to shift it because something inside was digging into the base of her neck. Her journal. She hadn’t had access to it since they reached the temple, and now was a completely inappropriate time to use it, but she found herself wishing she could write down some of what troubled her now.
Dear Diary, she thought, we’re being chased by men who believe we’ve stolen something terrifying, this pallet of wheat sacks is hard and lumpy, and someone’s romantically interested in me for the first time in nearly ten years. I realize I wanted a change, but I didn’t know this was it. And to be honest, I’m not sure I’d ask for something different if I had the chance.
She fell asleep mid-thought, wishing she’d kissed Sebastian back.