COMMAND THE TIDES - Wren Handman Page 0,30
it’s my house,” she said. She touched her head and felt a bump near the nape of her neck, and remembered that she had hit it sharply there. How much of what she was feeling was exhaustion, and how much the blow? She was having trouble focusing on the child.
“Gray Men be wanting miss. Come come. Come come,” he insisted when she didn’t immediately move.
“Yes. Of course.” She would have to explain the fire, and no doubt Antoine had explained how he had found her, bound and dazed in the backcourt. She was too tired to think of a plausible lie. A robbery gone wrong? Perhaps she would just pretend total ignorance. Looking lost would hardly be a problem, and dressed as she was, yet clearly the homeowner, they would no doubt already believe her odd.
She followed the child to a nearby carriage, where the driver flicked him a gold nobble and leapt down to let her in. She had the briefest thought that it was an odd thing, Gray Men in a carriage…and she paused with one foot on the step and one hand wrapped around the doorframe, trying to see into the darkened interior.
Something round and hard hit her sharply in the small of the back, and she crashed headlong into someone’s lap. She sensed more than saw the door slam closed behind her, and felt the carriage begin to move. Instinctively she rammed her elbow down as hard as she could, and heard a grunt as she connected with what she thought was his shin, but the feel of cold metal on the back of her neck drove her to stillness.
“Enough of that,” a man’s voice said in heavily accented Sanitas. From the position of his voice it was clear there were two men with her in the dark interior, one whom she was lying on, and one who had what she assumed was a knife pressed to the back of her neck.
“Congratulations, you successfully subdued the unarmed woman,” she snapped. She knew she was turning to anger to hide her fear, but it felt good. To have an emotion she didn’t have to hide from, one that chased away the cobwebs in her mind and sent shivers of fire through her skin.
He didn’t answer her barb. The man she had elbowed pushed her up and shoved her sideways so she was on the carriage bench, and the one with the knife guided her carefully into a sitting position. She considered fighting them tooth and nail, just to let loose the beast in her chest, but there were two of them, and the point of the knife never strayed far from her chest. She wasn’t sure if they would kill her, but the chance was very real, and biding her time was wiser, if not as satisfying. She supposed she could ask what they wanted, but she knew the answer to that, so what would be the point? They seemed to feel the same, because neither man said a word as the carriage moved through the empty streets.
Every time a streetlamp came close she got a glimpse of her captors in the murky light through the curtains, and as they moved away their figures would drift back into obscurity. She wasn’t sure what help it would be, but she did her best to memorize the glimpses of their faces. An eye here, a nose there, all put together in her mind to make a picture of the men. One had the fair hair and skin common in northern Sephria, and he was the man who had spoken in the accent, so that made sense. The other seemed darker, either tanned or naturally, and his hair was either brown or black—Miranovo, then, or perhaps from Marabour far to the north, though their borders had been closed for a long time. He didn’t speak, so she couldn’t tell by his voice.
The one with the knife seemed, oddly, the higher station of the two; his clothes caught the light in flashes of gold and silver, whereas when she had fallen against the other man, her cheek had definitely been pressed against simple homespun. A nobleman and his servant, perhaps? Sephria and Miranov hadn’t been at war for at least forty years, but their peace always seemed tenuous, with one or the other raging about trade tariffs being too high or immigration being too lax. For any Sephrians to arrive here in force would surely cause diplomatic scandal if they were