‘Why has your father not –’
‘Why didn’t he move heaven and earth to find me? Why didn’t he let it be trumpeted everywhere that humans had stolen his only child?’ I bit off the words. ‘He did not because he could not.’
‘Why?’ he whispered.
‘My father knew that if he said one thing about it to anyone, or if he stirred one finger outside our country, the Supreme Council would kill me. That was the price they made him pay for the war he waged on your people. Those were the terms. My capture defeated him. My imprisonment has made him keep the peace – and the silence. He cannot ask for anyone’s help. Not ever.’
The young man gave a heavy sigh. ‘Why do they want to kill you now after all this time?’
‘Some prophecy, I was told.’
‘What prophecy?’
‘I don’t know. Oh, please, Guard Bator, whatever you were told about me, this is the truth – the absolute truth,’ I cried. ‘Look into my eyes and tell me what you see.’
Our eyes met for a long moment. He gave a low groan and put his head in his hands. ‘In the Angels’ name, what have we done?’
‘You have done nothing,’ I said, recovering from that long glance which had goose-pimpled my skin. And the tremble started in me again, because whatever small respite this encounter had brought me, my fate had not changed. It was midnight, and in three and a half hours, I would be eighteen. And that would be the last morning I would ever see. The thought was so bitter that I could not stop a small cry escaping.
‘Princess, what is the matter?’
All of a sudden I was so angry that I wanted to scream, to hit him, to shake him till his teeth rattled in his head. Was he such a fool? Did he not understand? I managed to control myself enough to say, ‘In just a few hours I will be eighteen and I will die.’
‘No,’ he said, absolutely calm. ‘Not while I can do something about it.’
I looked at him, my heart pounding with a hope I dared not express. ‘Why?’
‘Why what?’
‘Why would you help me?’
He looked straight at me, his gaze steady as rock, his voice quiet and clear. ‘Because I love my country, Princess. I love it too much to want to stain it with innocent blood.’
And that’s when I knew without a doubt that magic is real, even in this place, and that it had come to my rescue at last.
Izolda
But fear dies hard. ‘I’ve been shut up here for ten years. Escape is impossible.’
‘I know where all the guards are,’ he said, smiling, and gestured to the dumb waiter. ‘We’ll have to leave the way I came. I’m afraid the space is a bit tight, but there’s no other way. And we have to leave now.’
I looked at him. He was so determined, so certain of himself, and it scared me. What if he was leading me into a trap? What if he was just giving me false hope?
He must have understood the expression in my eyes, because he said, ‘I swear by all that is holy to both you and me that I will get you to safety. But we do not have much time. Please, gather what you need and let us go.’
I nodded and hurriedly went to my drawers. ‘Where are we going?’ I asked. ‘I don’t know what to take.’
‘Take only the strictest necessaries, Princess.’ He flashed a little smile. ‘A change of clothes – a cloak, some boots, if you have them. The slippers you’re wearing won’t last two minutes out there.’
‘I don’t have any boots.’
‘Never mind.’ He smiled more broadly. ‘We’ll find you some in the scullery. Er, nothing too fine or fancy, Princess,’ he added as I lifted out a silk dress.
‘Oh.’ Feeling like a fool, I quickly put the dress aside and selected some underclothes, a clean shirt, a nightdress and a thick skirt. As I fetched my cloak I thought, How can he smile? Does he have no sense of the danger we face?
‘Here, take this,’ he said, giving me his blindfold. Seeing my confused expression, he explained. ‘Wear it like a mask around the bottom of your face so only your eyes are showing. Pull up the hood of your cloak, hold it tight around you, carry that bundle as though it were laundry. There you are – you could pass for one of the Magus’s servants at a quick glance.’
I did as I was told. Reckless he might be, but slow-thinking he was not. He proved that even more in the next few seconds. He crossed to my dressing table and picked up my hairbrush. ‘You permit, Princess?’ he said as he extracted three hairs from it.
I nodded dazedly.
Going to the diamond-paned window, he pulled off one boot and brought the steel-capped toe down hard on one of the glass panes. He had to do it twice before it smashed in a jagged pattern.
‘What are you doing?’
‘We don’t want them to think we escaped via the dumb waiter,’ he said. ‘We want them to think you escaped a different way.’
‘But that hole isn’t big enough to let a mouse through! And there’s a sheer drop below. They won’t be fooled for an instant.’
He smiled again. ‘Wait and see.’ He rummaged in his pocket and brought out a small dark-coloured shell. Placing it on the windowsill, he arranged the strands of my hair in a crisscross pattern above the shell, two vertical, one horizontal. The redness of the hair shone bright against the dark shell. He looked at me. ‘They keep telling us about the black ships.’
My scalp tingled. The hairs represented masts. The shell was the hull of a boat. It would look like a spell. ‘But they know I’m not really a witch. And even if I could use magic, it does not work here.’
‘You are of the blood of Night,’ he said with a shrug. ‘How can they be sure?’
He was right. It would at least give them pause. For the first time, I felt my own smile awakening in response to his.
As Kasper stepped into the dumb waiter and beckoned for me to follow, I took a last look over my shoulder at the room that had been my home for so long. Oh, there were no regrets. How could there be? Was I anxious? Yes. Afraid? Yes. But I was also hopeful. Exhilarated. And I even felt a strange kind of peace. For even if I were to die that night, I would not be alone. Not anymore. And so, with a lift of the heart and a catch in my throat, I turned back to Kasper and said, ‘What are we waiting for, then? Let’s go.’
The platform was, as he’d said, a tight fit, and we were unavoidably crammed up against each other, our limbs touching, our hearts beating close together. But I didn’t have time to think about it because the heavily laden platform plunged so swiftly that it was all I could do not to cry out. We landed almost instantly, with a bone-jarring jolt, and emerged into a stone cellar that suddenly brought back a half-forgotten smell to me – the smell of rock …
Cautious not to linger, we hurried through the cellar and into a cool pantry. No one was about. He stopped briefly to grab some items off the shelves, and we were about to hurry on when a large dog trotted in, obviously intent on raiding the pantry too. My heart skipped a beat, for dogs can smell even the slightest trace of feyin blood, and I have more than a trace from my father’s side, though my mother was human. Its hackles rose, it stared at us with wild yellow eyes and would have no doubt raised the alarm if Kasper hadn’t grabbed a ham hanging from the ceiling and thrown it across the room. The dog snatched the ham and raced off to devour it in peace.