“No!” she sobbed as the dog slid to the ground.
“Sire? Are you all right?” the guard asked with concern as he helped Cratyn up. Tiler had savaged his arm, but he had managed to fend off the worst of the attack.
“You killed my dog!” Adrina accused, unaware of the tears coursing down her face. “I want him punished, Cretin! He killed my dog!”
“Your damned dog was trying to kill me!” Cratyn gasped, still shaking from fear and shock. “I’m more inclined to knight him.”
Adrina brushed away her tears and gently kissed Tiler’s limp head before climbing to her feet.
“You’ll pay for this,” she warned, then she turned and walked out of the tent with all the regal bearing her breeding and ancestry allowed.
When she reached her own tent she dismissed her ladies-in-waiting impatiently and called for Tam. When her maid found her, she was tearing at the laces of her bodice impatiently, sobbing inconsolably.
“Here, let me do that,” Tam offered, as she saw Adrina struggling. The princess knocked the offered hand away.
“No! I can do it myself! I want you to go and see Tristan. We’re getting out of here.”
The young woman studied her closely. “Out of here? How?”
“I haven’t the faintest idea. But we’re leaving and I don’t care what it does to the alliance, to the war, or to my father. I’ve had enough!”
“We’re a thousand leagues from home in the middle of a battlefield on the border of an enemy nation,” Tamylan pointed out. “Where are you planning to go, your Highness?”
Adrina glared at her in annoyance then sagged onto her bed. It was a large four-poster that had taken a full team of oxen to bring it to the front. One of the trappings of her station designed to inconvenience Cratyn.
“I don’t know,” she sniffed, wiping her eyes. “Oh, Tam, they killed Tiler!”
The slave opened her arms and she sobbed against Tamylan’s shoulder hopelessly. Grief was a new emotion for Adrina. She had never before lost a living soul she had loved.
“There, there, I know it hurts, but it will pass in time,” Tam advised.
Adrina wiped her eyes and sat up determinedly. “I can’t do this any more, Tamylan. I don’t care if there’s a crown at the end of it. I cannot bear these people. It’s like a prison.”
“I understand, your Highness, but think it through before you act too hastily. This might be a prison, but it’s a sight more comfortable than the one awaiting you on the other side of the border, or worse, if you were caught by the Kariens trying to run away.”
Adrina looked up at the slave who had been by her side for as long as she could remember. “You always did say more than was proper for a slave.”
“That’s because I’ve always been your friend first, Adrina.”
Adrina smiled wanly. “Even though you were my slave?”
“Slavery is a state of mind, your Highness,” she shrugged. “You’re a princess, yet you’ve less freedom than I have. I never minded being a slave. It just meant that I knew where I stood.”
After Tamylan left, Adrina lay on the bed and thought on what the slave had said. She was right. Even being a princess didn’t stop you from being used by other people for their own ends, or save you from being hurt. If anything, it made you more vulnerable. Well, enough was enough. She would find a way out of this and she would never, as long as she lived, ever allow a man to hurt her again.
And by the gods, she vowed, she would make Cratyn pay.
Part 2
BATTLE LINES
Chapter 21
Loclon may have been responsible for letting Medalon’s most notorious criminal escape, but his expertise with a blade was widely acknowledged. Commandant Arkin assigned him to the cadets. His days were spent in the Arena teaching future Defenders the finer points of swordplay.
Following his initial annoyance at not being assigned to active duty, he found he enjoyed the job. He had regained his fitness quickly. The cadets were in awe of both his skill and his fearsome scars, and the rumour that he had killed a man in the Arena enhanced his reputation considerably.
The work gave Loclon a rare feeling of omnipotence. While they were in his charge, he had the power of life and death over these young men, and he wielded it liberally. Demerits were earnt easily in his classes and, almost without exception, the cadets treated him with gratifying obsequiousness to avoid incurring his wrath. Of course, there was the odd dissenter. Occasionally, a cadet would fancy himself a cut above the rest of his classmates. There was one such foolhardy soul in the Infirmary now. His temerity had cost him his right eye. Commandant Geendel, the officer in charge of the cadets, had demanded an explanation, of course, but the word of an officer was always taken over the word of a mere cadet.
Loclon smiled to himself as he rode through the Citadel toward his lodgings, thinking of the expressions on the cadets’ faces when he had appeared in the Arena this morning. No doubt they had all been hoping Geendel would relieve him of his duty. Well, they had learnt a valuable lesson today. In the Defenders, the officers would always close ranks around their own. Loclon had learnt that lesson the hard way, too.
On impulse, Loclon turned down Tavern Street, deciding he owed himself a drink to celebrate his victory over the cadets. He reined in outside the Blue Bull Tavern, handed his mount over to a waiting stableboy and walked inside, his boots echoing hollowly on the wooden verandah. Business was slow this early, but he spied a familiar figure hugging his ale near the fireplace. He ordered ale from the barkeep and crossed the room to join his friend.
“Gawn.”
The captain looked up. “Loclon. Finished for the day?”
Loclon nodded and took the seat opposite. Although Gawn had been a year or two ahead of Loclon when they were cadets, their friendship was a recent one. They had discovered they shared a loathing of Tarja Tenragan that few in the Defenders understood. Gawn had spent time on the southern border with Tarja and blamed him for just about everything that happened to him while he was there, starting with an arrow he took during a Hythrun raid, to the tavern keeper’s daughter he had impregnated and been forced to marry.
Loclon had met the girl once, a slovenly, lazy slut who spoke with a thick southern accent. To make matters worse, the child had been stillborn and Gawn was left with a wife he loathed, who would hold back his career just as surely as Tarja and R’shiel’s escape from the Grimfield would hold back Loclon’s.
“I heard there was some trouble with a cadet.”
Loclon shrugged. “Nothing I can’t handle. What are you doing here so early?”
“Parenor was called to a meeting with Commandant Arkin.” Captain Parenor was the Citadel’s Quartermaster. Gawn had been assigned as his adjutant on his return to the Citadel. It was an administrative position and a grave insult to a battle-experienced officer. “They are asking for even more supplies on the border.”
Nobody in the Citadel was exactly sure what was really happening on the northern border. Near half the Defenders in the Citadel had been sent north, supposedly to push back an attack by the Kariens. The reason the Kariens were attacking varied, according to which rumours one believed. Loclon believed the one that fitted with his own view of the world – that the Kariens were invading to avenge the death of their Envoy at Tarja’s hand. But it did not explain Tarja’s reinstatement to the Defenders, or the sudden alliance with the Warlord of Krakandar, or the First Sister’s change of heart. Even Gawn, who knew the southern border well, was at a loss to explain how near a thousand Hythrun Raiders could cross into Medalon without being noticed.