need to rescue. There are more than we thought, I assume in part because the royals have companions, such as My own ladies.” She raised a brow at Agatha, where she’d been hanging back behind Kara.
She stepped forward, looking drawn and thin—well, she always had, but more so now—and I really wondered at the wisdom of her returning to Yekpehr. “They do, Your Highness,” she answered in her whispery voice. “These are loyal companions and servants who’ve attended them for many years. The companionship among them runs deep. If You wish to extract the royal captives without noticeable fuss, then I advise planning to rescue all of them. They will not betray one another.”
“But you escaped,” Kara said to her, partly in question. “Alone. Ah, not that I mean to accuse, but—”
The look she gave him was bitter enough to cut him off without a word from her. “Yes, Kara, I am a traitor to my former comrades. I seized an opportunity to escape, and in doing so I betrayed those I left behind. Don’t judge them by my failures, Kara. Not everyone is as faithless as I.”
Kara looked aghast at his misstep, and Agatha turned her face away to stare out the open gallery—a scene that might’ve been the bleak and empty landscape of Vurgmun, judging by her expression, rather than the riotous and verdant gardens of Calanthe. Oddly enough, it was Percy who stepped in to break the awkward silence.
“You’re not faithless, Agatha,” he said, with none of his usual drama or flamboyance. “Every one of us here has done terrible things to survive. You did what you had to.”
“We all have,” Brenda agreed.
“Yes.” I went to Agatha and put a hand on her shoulder, understanding now why she felt compelled to return to Yekpehr, no matter how painful it might be for her. “I’ve killed, and worse, so I might live—and I’m not proud of it. But with this mission, we have the chance to right some wrongs. Because you escaped, you had the knowledge to get Lia and Sondra out. Because you escaped, you can tell us how to get the rest of them out.”
She tipped her face up to me, the hollows of grief and guilt making shadows under her papery skin. “Thank you, Conrí,” she said softly. “And Percy, all of you.”
“All right,” I said. “How many people will we be rescuing?”
Lia grimaced. “Ninety-seven.”
Percy whistled long and low, while everyone else murmured unhappily. “The Last Resort can’t hold more than two dozen,” he noted with regret.
“So we need to get ninety-seven of them, plus six of us—me, Agatha, Brenda, Ambrose, Ibolya, and Kara—back to—”
“Seven,” Percy clarified. “I’m going.”
“All right,” I nodded, surprised, but not unhappy about it.
“Eight, counting Merle,” Ambrose supplied, when the raven croaked and flapped his wings.
“Nine, then,” I said, “counting Vesno, too. This problem is easily solved,” I said, “using tried-and-true techniques of the Slave King’s rebellion.” Sondra and Kara grinned back at me. “We need a ship to carry a hundred and five people back to Calanthe, but we only need to take nine of us there. We’ll sail the Last Resort to Yekpehr, then steal one of Anure’s fastest ships of appropriate size and speed to return.”
Lia gave me a real smile. “Brilliant.”
“What would be even better,” Brenda mused, twirling her finger over the smooth sand that imitated the harbor, making it swirl, “is if we could somehow get Anure to load those captives onto that ship himself.”
“Yesss…” Sondra paced to the towers Agatha had helped detail, studying the replicas of the rooms where the royal captives lived. I refrained from giving Lia a triumphant look that—see?—that part of the model was useful. “That is a diabolically clever plan. It would remove the most difficult and dangerous aspect of this rescue—getting to the royals and getting them out of their imprisonment. No way are we hustling a hundred people out from under the guards’ noses without them smelling a problem.”
“But if the guards themselves are moving the people…” I said, moving up beside her.
She gave me that flesh-eating grin of hers. “And they load them onto the ship for us…”
“Then we steal it and sail away,” Kara finished. “I like this plan.”
“If we can figure out how to get them to do it,” Brenda qualified.
I stared at Ambrose, who returned my gaze expectantly. “When we were stuck at the Slave Gate at Yekpehr, Ambrose appeared, looking like a lord of the citadel. Exact enough to convince the guards.”
“A combination