The Beauty of Darkness - Mary E. Pearson Page 0,133

ropes of hair.

Sights I didn’t expect to see.

“Wait!” I shouted, putting my hand out to stop the others.

Kaden stood on the other side of the splintered door, the ax still gripped in his hand. Sweat glistened on his brow, and his chest heaved with exertion. Jeb and Tavish stepped past him, and I told Gwyneth and Pauline they could be trusted. Jeb extended his hand. “Thank the gods that we found you. This way,” he said. “We don’t have much time.”

I dropped my fistful of dirt, thinking how close I’d come to crushing his windpipe. Jeb smiled. “You remembered.”

“Did you doubt me?”

“Never.”

Pauline ran toward Kaden, slamming her hands against his shoulders. “The baby!”

“He’s fine,” Kaden answered. “Berdi has him and fetched a wet nurse. I told her to go to the abbey to hide.”

“Hurry. This way,” Tavish ordered. He turned and led us down a passageway. I recognized where we were now—the citadelle armory—one of the outbuildings. It was small compared to the armory at Piers Camp, meant only to arm the citadelle guards. They must have been holding us in one of its storage rooms, but this only confirmed my suspicions—while the citadelle guards might be complicit in the traitors’ schemes, it didn’t mean soldiers in the ranks were. I heard a battery of shouts ahead. Jeb, who brought up the rear, noticed my slowing steps and said, “Don’t worry. They’re ours.”

Ours? I tried to make sense of it as I ran.

We poured through a door that emptied into the main supply room, and in the center of it were five men, partially dressed in various stages of pulling on uniforms. A half dozen more lay facedown, their hands shackled behind them, the tips of swords held to their necks by just as many plain-cloaked men. Sven ripped shirts into strips and called Jeb and Tavish to help him gag the shackled men.

“Are you all right?” Kaden asked, taking another look at me and reaching for my hand.

“I’m fine,” I said, pulling away. “The Watch Captain is in on it, and at least some of the citadelle guards are Vendan too. They speak flawless Morrighese. It seems the scholars were busy tutoring in languages too.”

Anger flashed in Kaden’s eyes. There was so much the Komizar had never told him, but that was the Komizar’s way, using many people like puppets, but never sharing too much information with a single one. The power had to remain all his. Kaden grabbed a strip of cloth. “Let’s wrap it a little more,” he said, lifting my bloody bandaged hand.

He saw me blanch with pain. “How bad is it?”

“I’ll live,” I said. “Malich not so much. He’s dead. The Komizar and his writhing nest of cavern worms have developed another interesting weapon—a crossbow that shoots multiple iron bolts at a time. Luckily only one of them got me.”

He gently wrapped the strip of fabric around my hand. “Hold your breath,” he said, before pulling the fabric tight. “A little pressure will help stop the bleeding.”

The pain jolted through me and then pulsed up my arm.

“I’ll get you a cloak,” he said. “You can’t walk out of here looking like that without drawing attention. And then there’s more I need to tell you.” He went over to a jumbled pile on a table, the discarded clothes of the half-dressed men, I presumed, and sorted through them.

Father Maguire came up behind me, startling me with his attire. A sword was belted at his side, almost hidden by his robes.

“You know how to use one of those?” I asked.

“I’m about to learn,” he answered, and then he told me he had finally found the information in the archives that I had asked for. “There were no relatives.”

I nodded. This was only further confirmation—another piece of the blurred picture that had come into focus in the darkness of the cell.

Gwyneth and Pauline had already stepped into the middle of the room, taking in the bustle of activity and becoming part of it—a plan in the making that I was beginning to grasp. At the far corner the room, I spotted Orrin pulling halberds from a rack and then Natiya carrying an armful of baldricks, all tooled with the Morrighese insignia. She handed them to the half-dressed soldiers and crossed the room to Gwyneth and Pauline, a chatter of noise and explanations I only half heard because in the opposite corner, something else caught my eye.

A warrior. Someone swinging a flanged mace to break the lock on another