The back of the cave was shrouded in shadow. She stood at the entrance letting her eyes adjust and a thousand thoughts moved within her. Perhaps a whole system of caves, which she could navigate one and then the next, crawling through the tight little entrances and worming her way in utter darkness until she stepped back into the sun in some distant place, lost and tired and free. Perhaps a tunnel carved by whoever had carved the walkway down, trenching in this earth to create a second escape. Perhaps that path along the face of the cliff was the second escape itself and those long-dead had used some other passage she had yet to find.
She'd filed her way from iron bondage, climbed a wall of brick and stone, slept in a forest that ate the living, killed those who pursued her. Those things flashing before her eyes as she blinked and the shadows slowly dissolved. Perhaps this was just one more step to take before she could return to that field with the army at her back and some banner flying in the air and the smell of horses and men and the warm earth and the call of horns on the wind.
She stepped forward to find that redemption and he was sitting in the back of the cave. He had a slender short short out and across his knees. His leather cloak wet and pooled around him. He'd pushed the hood back from short-cropped blond hair and he had no beard and he looked like a child but he was here. She did not know him but she knew a thousand like him and she started to step back out of the cave.
“Don't,” he said. “Koetter is at the top. It's over.”
She stopped and stood looking at him. She'd worked with assassins before and she knew what this man was from his eyes alone and had she seen them torn from his body she still would have known. There was another way and he'd seen her working her way down and taken it. Maybe in some manner she hadn't noticed he'd forced her here, herding her like a dog herding sheep, but silent and from the shadows. All to give himself this edge, this advantage in this place where there was nothing she could do.
“Sit down,” he said.
“How did you know?”
“Sit down.” He did not change the way he said it but something changed in the way he held the sword and she sat carefully on a rock at the front of the cave. He watched her the whole time. He did not appear to be tense but she knew how fast he would be on his feet and she would not see him or the sword until it had gone into her and come out again and she was standing wide-eyed with her heart in two pieces and still trying to beat beneath skin and bone.
“Did they tell you?” she asked.
He smiled softly and it was a horrible thing. “Those two fools in the town? No. There are a thousand of them looking for you and they are all the same.”
“Then how did you find me?”
The smile broadened a bit. “There's only one of me.”
She looked at him. “You don't have to do this.”
“Of course I do. I'm being paid incredibly for this.”
“I have money.”
“You have nothing. You're a dead queen.”
“I will have money.”
“I'd be a fool also to take a deal like that. The hope of a promise or actual gold.” He tipped his head to the side and there was something feline and dangerous in it. “What do you think I am?”
“I know what you are.”
“Then why offer me that?”
Because there is nothing else to try, she thought. It felt all around her like the world was growing smaller and compressing and some great force outside bearing down and crushing it all in slowly and with unstoppable power. The confines of the air itself clutching about her chest. She blinked and it was not this cave anymore but the pit and the iron shackles and the bones in the mildew and dirt and then she blinked and it was the cave and she could not see out of the corners of her eyes.
“How are we going to do this?”
“Listen,” she said. Her voice did not sound like her own. “He's not a king. He stole what he has. You don't have to follow him.”
He did not move his head but he laughed and it was a dead sound and sharp and no humor in it.
“You think I care about kings?” he said. “I don't give a damn about kings. What king hasn't stolen what he has? You're all the same and the world is the same and it always has been and always will be. You and your damned honor and it's all just a front for power and money. Nothing more. Kings live and die and when they die other kings replace them until they too die. I don't care which king it is who pays me. All I care is that the king of the moment is the one with the money and he pays and when someone comes and severs his head from his shoulders and dips it in tar and puts it on a stake over the front gate, only then will I go find out who he is and how much money he has.”
She tried to speak and could not. He was nearly lost to shadow. She wanted to close her eyes and the air was so thin and she didn't close them because she knew she'd see the pit and hear those chains clanking against the wall and she held them open as this unsteady ground moved below her. Some shifting of the earth's core deep within it, the broken pillars of the world.
There was one thing left and she knew it as surely as she'd known anything. Standing unsteadily to her feet. He did not move or she didn't think he did. But she knew only one way to make this darkness recede. Gasping now and sweat pouring down her face. She closed her eyes for just a moment and saw those bones in that grasping darkness and then she screamed, a bitter and shrieking sound tearing at her throat, something primal and furious and all that she had in her, and she ran at him with the knife raised in front of her and looking for that flashing sword.
She had been right about one thing: She did not see him move. There was only the faintest sound of the cloak and a grinding of stone and then his fist caught her hard in the temple one time. All that dark was replaced for just the barest moment with a flashing light, and then it was dark again and she was falling and spiraling through it and she could still hear herself screaming as the world broke.
She woke at last and everything was pain and she closed her eyes again and lay still. Feeling the rope around her wrists, tying her hands. The stone beneath her. The cold sound of the water dripping on the face of the rainswept cliff. When at last she opened her eyes she was lying where she'd fallen on the floor of the cave. The world sideways. His boots in front of her on the cave floor, him sitting where he'd been as if nothing at all had happened.
“This will be what you make it,” he said.
In her mind she could feel a sort of humming sound, deep and vibrating in her skull. It was not a noise but something more. As if perhaps her skull itself were moving, like a bell that had been struck. The pain flaring all down the side of her jaw where he'd hit her. She closed her eyes and opened them again and that's when she knew it wasn't from being hit. It was something else within her that was stirring and she did not know what and she wanted to scream in a way that ripped apart her insides but she could not.
He was still speaking. “If you want to play this game, we'll play it. If you want to be silent while I take you back to the city, it will go a lot better. But don't put any of it on me. It's all on you and it has been this whole time.”
She was not closing her eyes now but she felt like she was. She could see the swirling black and in her stomach there was that feeling of falling, of headlong downward flight. A lack of control. The whole world rushing around her and past and perhaps some world other for it never ended. The darkness moving and alive, a thing of fire and wings. First there and then gone and then somewhere else and always present. Writhing and tearing at the air.
Another voice. “I don't think she's awake.”