Blackmailing His Bride (Court of Paravel)

And an important piece of information. They kept asking me why I was sneaking around Linz Manor.

Linz Manor, the gray house at the top of a craggy hill. The road up there was barricaded with barbed wire and guarded by more soldiers. My face aching and feeling like I was going to pass out, I crept through the bushes until I reached a cliff face. It was steep, but I thought I could make it up by scrambling from rock to rock.

My hands and knees became torn and blood from my nose ran down my face. The climb became harder and harder and I was so dizzy that I was certain I was going to pass out and fall to my death. As I paused to catch my breath, a collared dove regarded me from her nest. I had some bread in my pocket and I threw crumbs onto the rock near her. For several moments she just stared at them while I breathed as quietly as I could. Dainty and cautious, she got up, and I saw three tiny, bald little babies waving their heads and squawking for food.

As I watched her feed the chicks, I forgot about the pain in my face. I didn’t think about what the soldiers would do to me if they found me. I was so close to the Prince and he hadn’t seen a friend in eight years. There was no way I was giving up now.

As I pulled my body up the final few feet of cliff, Linz Manor lay before me. It wasn’t fenced off like a prison and guarded by towers with riflemen, but it was boarded up. The only way in seemed to be through the main entrance, where there were soldiers. Then I found a grate that seemed to lead to a sewer. It was damp and pitch-black inside, and just high enough for me to crouch-walk through the stagnant water. I didn’t know where I was going and if I was going to get hopelessly lost and die.

After a few minutes, I emerged into what looked like cellar, lit only by a grate high up near the ceiling. My heart pounded wildly. I was inside. There was dust everywhere, as if no one had been in this room for a very long time. I found a narrow staircase that spiraled up and up, and I heard voices in the distance that sounded like soldiers. Each of the doors I cautiously tried were locked, until I reached the attic. That was as dusty and cobwebby as the cellar and I crept along the beams, I heard a voice. A boy’s voice.

Two boys’ voices, in fact. I lay and listened to them for a long time through a grate in the ceiling of their room. They were playing some sort of game.

“Remus, you let me win just now.”

Remus! Wasn’t the Prince’s friend called Remus, the boy who was nearly killed protecting the Prince when General Lungren slaughtered the King and Queen? Without another thought, I yanked open the grate and stuck my head into the room.

I’ll never forget the look on Prince Anson and Remus’ faces when I appeared above their heads. “Your Highness,” I whispered to the boy with dark hair and solemn eyes. “I’ve come to rescue you.”

And with this grand announcement, I overbalanced and fell right on top of them.

We talked in whispers, and I told them who I was around the tissues the Prince gave me for my bleeding nose. I wanted to help them to escape. Remus thought that was the best plan, too, and the two of them could reach France or Austria and seek asylum.

Prince Anson’s thin face turned stony. “If I leave, then it will be other people who’ll be punished. Chairman Varga will tell everyone that I’m as selfish and devious as my father. I’ll stay here, and wait.”

“For what?” I asked. I didn’t know then that Prince Anson was thinking far, far ahead, to a future only he could see.

“Jakob, will you do something for me?” the Prince asked.

He craved to know how his closest allies were faring and how they were being treated by Varga. Where they were and what they were doing. Who might be still be loyal to him, even after everything that had happened. “I have no right to ask this of you. I’m sorry.”

I shook my head. “You are the only person in this country who has the right to ask anything of me. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

I hated to leave them. They were thin and obviously unhappy, but at least they weren’t being beaten and starved. Back in Ivera, I kept my ears open and my eyes sharp. When I returned to the Prince, I was able to inform him of Devrim Levanter’s continued imprisonment and the living conditions of all the First Families. They were treated badly by Chairman Varga, but they had a better life than Levanter or the Prince. Every time I scaled that cliff up to Linz House, there was the gray dove, watching me from her perch on a rock or a branch, her quiet presence giving me the strength to carry on.