Page 88 of Untempered
The fool of a guard tried to get to his feet, but he just fell.
I drew a bracing breath. I’d never executed a man. Not in cold blood. Those children I didn’t count as executions. They were a mistake. A hideous, life-changing mistake.
I hadn’t drawn my sword since that day. I hadn’t trained. No one noticed to ask why.
I didn’t know why.
It felt heavy in my hands.
“Help me get him into the garden,” she said, and there was something far too normal about her voice as she made that demand.
I sheathed my sword again, relieved at the respite. My hands hooked into the depressions beneath his arms. He screamed when she took his legs, and I wished her knee to his face had done more than make him eat a few teeth. A dead weight’d be harder to haul, but if this was a stealth mission, we were failing at it.
The door to the side garden wasn’t too far, though, and as soon as we were on the ground, she dropped his legs. He was babbling pleas, and I was feeling sicker.
“Thomas’ field hospital might be worth considering,” I offered.
“He wouldn’t be there long enough,” she said with a quick shake of her head. “Men like him have long memories.” She cast her eyes around and leveled a finger at the seawall. “There.” He was struggling to sit up and she knelt, one hand going around the back of his neck, the other in his collar, fisted hard.
His struggles ended before I could do more than grab one of his hands and stop him from clawing at the collar she used to choke him.
“Obviously,” she said, still choking him, “we need to avoid being spotted. If you hear the Watch, we head to the nearest shadows, andyoustay as still as you can.”
The world was upside down. In a hall nearby, someone hurried past holding a torch. They never paused, though, to come our way. He jerked and went still.
Her hand relaxed on his collar, and she straightened, stumbling a little on the hem of her skirt. I went to catch her, but she flinched back. Before I could figure that out, she said, “Get his feet.”
“Youget his feet.” His shoulders would be heavier.
She shrugged, quilting up her skirts as I’d seen Isolde do earlier, a few economical movements that didn’t stop them from getting muddy but would protect them from more damage than they’d suffered and free her up.
I took him under the shoulders this time. His head lolled. I was right about him being heavier as a deadweight. Her cheeks puffed out as she took him by the ankles, but there were no screams.
I couldn’t see where we were going. My prediction was right—he was both heavier and quieter like this—but I hadn’t accounted for my own nausea. The last of the sun’s light guided her, and I trusted her to know these gardens well enough to steer me.
“Past those lamb tongues,” she said. “The silvery-leaved plants. The lamb tongues, there? Goleft,” she said eventually, huffing with impatience. I went left around a bundle of plants that looked light green, not silver, into the soft bed of the garden. “A little more left. That’s good.”
Part of me wanted to ask if it was right. But I didn’t joke with her. That wasn’t what our relationship was like. I certainly didn’t joke with her while I carried the body of a man I suspected was still breathing. If he was, he wouldn’t be soon.
He hadn’t been sick. How many guards did she have who weren’t sick?
She put him down in the lee of a large bush and slipped away. If I hadn’t been staring at her, there’s no way I could’ve tracked her movements. She didn’t vanish the way Isolde could, hiding in plain sight, but she melted into the shadows like a native predator.
Which she was.
I heard booted feet along the walkway above us and stayed where she’d left me, my heart drumming as I waited for the cry of discovery.
The steps had moved past me when she reappeared at my side, though, somehow condensing out of the darkness. Her fingers were stained with ink as they settled over the man’s throat, her eyes on the walkway above us, her expression entirely blank.
In the darkness, I couldn’t see what she was doing. I didn’t know if she was tracking his pulse, limiting the blood reaching his brain, or preparing to strangle him if he made a noise. The rise and fall of his chest was shallow, but still present.
My heart rate didn’t settle as those boots moved further away. But at some point, she stood and murmured, “Up the stairs and to the east, just a few steps, there’s a lookout spot.”
Where we’d hurl him, unconscious and barely breathing, off the wall? Or would we murder him first? I took his shoulders again, the dead weight dragging, and again walked backward through the garden.
The stones were damp and slippery, but the sea wall wasn’t high. That it existed at all spoke more to vanity than necessity. I couldn’t imagine anyone attempting to navigate the aggressive swell and rocky outcrops to scale the cliffs to take the keep, wall or no. The course to the La’Angi bay was signposted by magework; it was so hazardous that the route safe for ships was carved into the stone in the seabed by old magics long forgotten—deep enough to let them pass safely, but only if they were cautious. Even Luca’s shortsighted plans would never include incursion by sea.
The guardsman’s head bobbed up and down, and the pressure on the bones in his neck made my stomach writhe. There was something honest about a sword to the gut.
