Rune King

He could feel something drying on his shoulder, a substance just sticky and unpleasant enough to worry about its origins. He shouldn't have stood for the insult. They should have been terrorizing these people, taking their things and burning their homes.

Proving to them, and to the Gods, how overwhelming their superiority was. But instead they endured this humiliation at the hands of men whose hands had likely never held a sword, who had never been in a serious fight. Men and women who knew nothing about what it was like to risk your life for something.

He held back the urge to turn and spit on the ground to show them exactly what it was that he thought of them. He had to control himself. The walls surrounding the inner city were a welcome sight, if for no other reason than that the entire place wasn't completely absurd.

They were thick stone, and as he crossed beneath, he saw that they were wide enough for four men to walk side-by-side without fear of falling off. There was no way that they could have gotten through.

On the other side of the stone wall were a pair of wooden doors, and the leader, his white-and-red feathered cap making him look at once handsome and foppish to Gunnar, stepped down off his horse with the help of the young man who rode beside, and rapped his steel-gloved hands against the door.

A sliding click, and the door opened to reveal a grubby-looking little man who gestured them inside. The entire line of them were taken inside of a small room caged in with metal bars, and only when they had been locked inside were their ropes loosed.

The iron bracelets, on the other hand, continued to tie them all within a few feet of the walls, so they couldn't hope to break out by force.

There were a hundred questions running through Gunnar's head, but one question, the most important, he already knew the answer to.

They needed to get out of here, and they needed to do it soon. How they would do it, he didn't know. Who would be with him, he wasn't sure. Some might have refused simply because he wasn't in charge any more.

But if he knew one thing, it was that if they hoped to escape with their heads, it had to be soon.

Twenty-Eight

Five minutes. Deirdre didn't count to the second, but the constable couldn't have been far because within five minutes the girl's mother had returned with a uniformed man, too old for soldiering but with the body of a man who'd been in that life.

"She was right here, she threatened me and my daughter! She had a knife, and—oh, you should have seen her. She was soaked in blood, from her head down to her toes!"

Deirdre looked herself up and down. There was more blood than she'd imagined, but nothing like 'soaked,' and she hadn't threatened anyone. Whatever the woman had experience, it wasn't what Deirdre had done, but there was no question who she was talking about.

"Now, Millie, calm down and tell me what you know."

The woman wasn't calming down. She kept repeating herself, over and over. Blood-soaked, had a knife, threatened her and the girl. As if he would finally understand if she just used different words.

Deirdre couldn't keep watching around the corner as the constable started scratching his head. She was in danger here, that much was clear. How had things gotten off to such a bad start?

The question of whether or not she could even reveal herself if she wanted to pulled to the forefront. Now someone said she was a dangerous mad-woman who was brandishing a knife at a young girl. She'd have to dispel that notion before she even started to explain the very real danger she found herself in, and it wasn't clear that she would get the opportunity.

She had to get out of this place, get herself cleaned up somehow. A change of clothes, perhaps, though it seemed unlikely. And she had just come in the way she was headed. East and south. If she went back the way she'd come, she risked as much as going straight through, only she was going the wrong way entirely.

The gamble was whether or not she could make it in the delivery alleys between buildings all the way out of town, or if she would have to brave one of the wider streets proper. And if she could get lucky enough to avoid anyone seeing her.

Time seemed excruciatingly slow as she tried to walk. The ground was packed hard, here, and the earth was cool, but she ignored the cold that had worked its way into her feet. There wasn't any time for that. The alleyway jagged right, and she followed it.

It didn't just dead-end, and she was thankful for that, but to her disappointment it terminated in a street, and even as her view opened up as she approached, there didn't seem to be an alley entrance on the other side. Either she would have to go back the way she'd come, and risk the constable, or she had to hope that nothing would find her before she could get out.

She kept herself crouched low, like she'd seen Gunnar do. It was day-time, but she might be able to risk it. If she was lucky, that is. Closer, closer. She'd be able to come around the side of the next building, and then see what was coming up.

A quick peek, and then checking the other directions. The road stretched a few hundred paces before petering out into grassland. Not ideal, but she could make it. She counted the doors on each side, tried to calculate the risk that someone might come out while she walked by. But the risk didn't matter any more when she

heard a woman's voice behind her.

"You there."

It didn't sound violent, which was a surprise, but Deirdre turned so quick that she lost her footing and fell on her butt. The woman behind her looked good. Well-dressed and manicured. Like a proper lady, really. "I—I just want to go home. I'm just passing through, please, I don't mean no trouble."

The woman's face bunched up in confusion, and then her face brightened with understanding.

"Come with me, let's get you inside." Deirdre didn't move. "Come on, I'm a friend. You can trust me."

The way the lady winked at her made Deirdre's skin crawl. She clearly wasn't understanding something, and the lady did little to explain, but when she started to move, waving a gloved hand for Deirdre to follow, she decided she had little choice. That, or face the constable and hope he'd listen to her story.