The Tower of the King's Daughter by Chaz Brenchley

Author:Chaz Brenchley [Brenchley, Chaz]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 0441010806
Published: 2012-02-11T14:21:16+00:00

SIX

Where She Must

THERE WERE LESSONS in humiliation, lessons and lessons; Julianne thought she might never now be free of learning this.

THE NIGHT HAD been all breathless adventure at first, deliberately so: wings over time to make a child of her once more, those days and nights she’d slipped off with unsuitable friends to scout the rooftops of Marasson, later the cellars and sewers. So long as she focused on that and played the irresponsible girl again, she could do this and enjoy it, almost. So long as she kept a fierce grip on herself, her trembling fingers, her torn and treacherous mind…

Taking almost nothing with them—the flask ofjerethand a blanket each, knives and food and water, silver and gold and little else; Elisande told her that all her clothes would be useless, so why carry the weight? They could go dirty till they found something clean—they had dressed to confuse, to look like boys from any distance, and slipped out of the hut by the window at the back. There was no guard at their door, Julianne had insisted on that. With friends to the east and friends to the west, she’d said, with men watching to the north and the south and the village deserted, she needed no further protection; she would not be treated like a prisoner, she’d said, to be guarded night and day. Besides, she was entitled to some privacy, she’d said, rustling her skirts in a way intended— and successfully so—to make her auditors blush.

So, no man at the door. But there would be men none the less in the streets, or rather the single street and the few alleys that made this hamlet; they were likely compromising their agreement by watching the door from a distance, men at every corner.

Out of the window they’d gone, then, she and Elisande; a quick scramble over the sill and a drop to ground and then a low-bending shuffle, almost a crawl sometimes as they’d used their hands to find their way through stones and scrub till they came to the dry river bed.

More scrub and thorns on the steep bank down; Elisande had tried to run through them, slipped and fell and rolled to the bottom with a muted squawk. Julianne, ever practical, had sat down and slid like a child, lying flat to let the bushes pass above her and laughing breathlessly, silently in the moon-made shadows.

Laughter that had died quickly, with a touch and a motion of Elisande’s hand, a whisper no louder than a breeze: “There are men in the gully. Be still.”

Still she’d been, a moment of chill terror before she’d remembered who and what she was: no child but daughter of the King’s Shadow, and what was there, who was there here that she should fear? To be discovered and detained would be a concern certainly, an inconvenience, a problem; with her father’s life at risk—ifshe could trust the djinni, and she must—it was a problem she would strive to avoid. But not from fear, no…

She’d turned her face to Elisande, shaped words on a gentle breath of air.

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