I motioned her to take Paulo’s ankles. Without a word, she did so, and we jostled him up three long nights of steps and through a maze of passages until we came to the rotunda and the spiral stair. The lamps were turned down, and I warned Roxanne to remain silent. I didn’t need to tell Paulo. He’d passed out the instant we moved him. The climb up the curved stair was awkward, but we reached my apartments without meeting anyone.
Once Paulo was on the bed and I had turned up the lamps, I set to work trying to clean him up a bit, pleased that we had made it so far without detection. My satisfaction was short-lived.
A sharp metal point pricked the skin over the heart vein in my neck. “You will take me back to Montevial immediately or to the nearest Leiran military post. Maybe I won’t have you hanged if you do it.”
It took me exactly two heartbeats to have her on the carpet with her hands twisted behind her and Paulo’s spare knife pointed at her eye. “If you ever do that again, I’ll cut out your eyes. It makes a very interesting popping sound when it’s done right.” Clearly you couldn’t mince words with a Leiran princess.
The knife that she’d snatched out of a bowl of fruit went back in its sheath and into my boot. Then I hauled up the princess and shoved her into a cushioned chair, untangled a sheet from the jumble of bedclothes, and dropped the sheet in her lap. “I need this torn into strips.”
She spat at me and threw the sheet on the floor.
I picked up the sheet and dropped it back in her lap. “Rip it up, or I’ll tie you up with it and hang you from the ceiling. We don’t have much time until the alarm goes out, and I’ve got to take care of him before anything, even before saving your royal skin. He will not die.”
She must finally have believed me, for she started tearing the sheet, grumbling to herself and shooting murderous glances at me as she did so.
I tied long strips tight about Paulo’s ribs, then cleaned and bandaged his hands. His worst injuries were those I couldn’t see; his heart was racing, his skin cold, his breathing fast and shallow, his belly purple and hard. I propped his feet up higher than his head and covered him, but I knew nothing else to do for him.
“Who are you? How do you know those things you said to me? No one knew of the tarts, not even my nurse.”
“Be quiet. I need to listen.” As always, soft noises filled the Blue Tower: unidentified creaks and shuffling that I always imagined were the sounds of its growing, wind sighing up the stair and under the doors, rain spattering in our slot window, distant doors closing. At any moment the alarm would be raised, and the place would come alive. I just wasn’t sure what I was going to do when it happened.
I tied off a bandage on Paulo’s left leg; with bandages around his chest, his head, his leg, and his hands, he looked like a stuffed doll. Just as Roxanne threw me another wad of narrow strips, a small lamp, sitting on our eating table, brightened on its own. I had left that one lamp turned down as I worked, so I would know when the normal change of the light occurred.
I untangled one of the new strips and soaked it in a cup of wine. No time to dawdle.
The princess’s mouth fell open when I pulled Paulo’s knife out of my boot and pressed the hilt into her hand.
“If anyone tries to touch him - or you - kill them. If he wakes, give him this cloth to suck on. Nothing else. His name is Paulo.” I threw the wine-soaked cloth on the table and shoved the bowl of fruit toward her. “You can have whatever you want of this. It’s not poison or anything. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
“How do you know I won’t kill him myself and run away?”
Though I didn’t touch her, I made sure she was looking at my face before answering. “I once cut the skin off a man and tied him to a stake in the desert for a week. He crossed me far less than if you even think of hurting Paulo. And you have no idea where to run.”
“Where are you going?”
“To kill a man if he doesn’t do what I want.”
She didn’t even blink. “Don’t you need this, then?” She waved the knife at me.
I shook my head. “A knife is too simple for him.”
“Is he the one responsible for all this?” She pointed to Paulo and to me, her gaze traveling up and down, taking in a full view of the blood and muck spread all over me.
“This is only one part of what he’s done.”
She lifted her chin. “I don’t believe you cut a man’s skin off.”
“You had best believe it.” I didn’t do such things any more, but then, it didn’t seem to matter what I really intended. Dieste the Destroyer, the Fourth Lord of Zhev’Na, was still with me.
I slipped into the passage and closed the door softly behind me.
I needed to get this business over with quickly, so I could find Paulo some help. It would have been far better if I could have hidden him somewhere other than our bedchamber, but I didn’t know anyplace else with water and blankets and a bed. His hold on life was precarious. That left me few options. No time for anything subtle.
The plan that came to me needed only a few preparations. Fortunately, the time was right, and the help I needed most would be waiting for me just outside the Blue Tower. I crept through the passage and down the stair to the ground floor without seeing anyone. Just as I reached the rotunda, doors slammed down below, and men started yelling. Footsteps pounded on the stairs up from the dungeon.
I crammed myself into a niche underneath the stair. Two maintainers burst through the door from the lower levels, passed within a rat’s tail of my nose, and raced up the spiral stair. I popped out again and watched their feet. To my relief they bypassed the second floor, heading for the Guardian’s apartments on the floor above, no doubt. I thought myself out into the commard, and hurried around the corner into a narrow lane. Vroon, Ob, and Zanore were waiting for me, as they did every morning.
Once I told them what I needed them to do, I hurried back into the Blue Tower and waited at the bottom of the stair, just long enough for another one of the Guardian’s thugs, a red-haired fellow with wiry tufts sprouting from his nose, ears, and lips, to trot up from the dungeon. He caught a glimpse of me and shouted the alarm. “The Impostor!”
I bolted for the staircase, mapping out the warren of the tower rooms in my head. The hairy maintainer lumbered up the steps behind me.
Vroon had promised to be quick. Half an hour should be all I needed.
More shouts rang out from both the third level and below. I sprinted up the stair to the fourth-level landing and into the deserted rooms, making sure the red-haired maintainer and the three others who had joined him saw where I went. I led them up and down and in and out, shoving furniture in their paths, throwing pots to lead them into blind corners, then dodging past them and into another passage. Before very long, ten maintainers were after me - the entire posting in the Blue Tower. I tripped the red-haired fellow, and he slammed his head into a marble column. Nine pursuers.
After a pass through every nook and niche on the fourth level, I raced up to the fifth, and then the next, leading them away from Paulo and Roxanne. Trying to use up time.
Afraid I’d be trapped there, I didn’t stay long at the uppermost level. Rather, as soon as I had led most of the party around a blind corner, I doubled back to the stair, dropped over the rail and past three twists of the stair, grabbing the rail and vaulting over it again onto the marble treads, just below the two maintainers posted to block my descent. Rather than running away as they would expect, I engaged them and toppled them both down the long stair. Seven in pursuit. The maintainers weren’t chosen for intelligence.