make the hair on the back of her neck stand on end. This was different. This was a stare which penetrated a jolly crowd, and cut through the people who passed back and forth across its line of sight.
“Anyway, so, don’t pay your taxes!” She shouted to the crowd before disappearing into it.
She had already paid three silver for a bed upstairs. The feeling in her belly gave her reason to pull her cloak around her shoulders and the hood up over her head, and slip away amid the general chaos of the conversation.
This was fine by her. Slipping away after her speeches had become her modus operandi. She did not want to become the focus of the rebellion. She wanted the movement to swell up around her and take on a life of its own, form a wave of change which would sweep the king away forever.
Archon had tried to violate her. He had destroyed her family. She could not hate anything or anyone as much as she hated him. And she would never rest until her people were free of his alleged rule.
She felt someone behind her as she ascended the stairs. As soon as she was in her room, she would bolt the door securely and be safe. The trip there was the most dangerous part. If she was caught on the stairs. Nobody would notice her screaming amid the general carousing of the pub.
“Where are you going?”
The words came from a stranger who appeared at the top of the stairs ahead of her. Iris felt the presence behind her turn and bugger off fairly quickly. Whatever minor predator had decided to follow her up from the bar gave way to the bigger one at the head of the stairs.
She could not see much of the figure. It was dark up there. Someone had put the lights out deliberately, she thought. Her instincts and basic common sense told her this was bad news. She turned around to go back down to the pub, but a hand reached out from the cloak, and took hold of her, dragging her into her room faster than she could scream.
She struggled and fought, but the stranger was far stronger than her, and as it turned out, infinitely taller. He had been hunched over the entire time, apparently hiding his height.
The moment they were in the room and he had used the bolts which were supposed to keep her safe to trap her inside, he threw the cloak from his shoulders with a dramatic swirl.
“YOU!”
The word burst out of Iris with all the power of a curse. For some bizarre reason she could not understand, she was almost relieved to see that it was not a random robber.
It was the monster. Archon. The alien king himself had followed her to the remote tavern in the wilderness and apparently sat and listened to everything she had said over the last hour.
She blushed, embarrassed though she had no reason to be. Every word out of her mouth had been the truth. Still, it was a little awkward to be caught in the act of rebellion.
He could have done anything. He could have set the building alight with her and everyone else inside. But instead he’d chosen to sit among the people, listen to her, and then capture her up in her room where nobody would hear her scream.
There was some strange mercy in his actions, or perhaps he was waiting to exact a cruel private revenge. Those blue glittering eyes did not give away any of his secrets as they drank her in with dark rimmed satisfaction.
“They said I wouldn’t be able to find you,” he said conversationally. "That your trail was too random, that you were too small and insignificant to be worth my time.”
“So why did you bother?”
“You have been telling tales about me,” the king smirked. “And you stabbed me.”
“You were trying to fuck me,” she hissed. “You deserved to be stabbed. You’re nothing more than a filthy murderer. I am going to make sure that everybody knows it, even if I have to tell each and every person on this planet individually.”
“If only there were some means to communicate in a wider way, some sort of net of communication which every human could access via a shining stone,” the king mused, a dimple on his cheek indicating some kind of reckless mischief Iris did not understand, and was not interested in understanding.
In spite of her brave words and stance, Iris