Flight Through the Night
The travel from private palace study — at the royal desk to the Wild Boar — wayside inn hideout consumed the next hour. Headlights cut cold through the gathering dusk.
The latch fell home.
Caden stood at the window while Victor Whitmore’s torch bobbed under the palace gateway. The hoofbeats faded into the wet city dark, and the night folded shut over them. The marriage treaty lay open on the desk, the ink still wet at the signature line. Caden looked at it for one breath and then turned away.
Jasper was already in the doorway, a leather satchel over one shoulder, his face cut from the same hard stone as the palace walls. He had heard everything through the antechamber.
“Bring Nadia, Jace, and Selene through the coal tunnel,” Caden said. “No lights on the river side. Tell Chaffey we need the grey courier carriage.”
“Every gate on the river will be watched.”
“Then we’ll be under it.” Caden pressed the carved rose beside the hearth. A panel swung open on a smell of iron and cold mice. “When you hear me knock twice, follow.”
He went first because that was what a king did when he was not worth the blood yet spilled. The old servants’ passage was narrow, the walls rough stone slick with condensation. He counted steps to keep his mind from the boy waiting somewhere above. Forty-one to the wine cellar. Eleven more to the coal chute.
At the top of the chute ladder he heard Jasper’s boot, then the careful hush of a woman’s skirts, then the small arrested breath of a child who had been told many times to be quiet. Jace came down the ladder first. His hands were small on the rungs, and he was careful—the way a child is careful when he has learned that noise brings consequences. Caden caught him by the waist and set him down on the stone. The boy’s face was pale, but his mouth was set in a line that looked nothing like Nadia and everything like Caden’s own father.
Nadia descended next. She wore a grey traveling cloak, no jewelry, and her face was composed. She had not asked a single question, and that was the part that hurt worst. She had learned to trust him with nothing to trust.
Selene came last, a canvas surgeon’s kit pressed to her chest. Her eyes were too bright, but her hands were steady. She had never held a weapon in her life. She held the kit the way another woman might hold a prayer book.
They went under the stables and came out in Chaffey’s forge. The smith had banked his fire, and a carriage waited in the yard with its wheels wrapped in rags. Elias, the old courier, sat on the box and said nothing. He was paid to say nothing.
The plain black coach had no crest. The curtains were drawn. Once they passed the north toll, the guard looked at Elias’s coat and waved them through without lifting his lantern. Caden sat with his back to the driver, a pistol across his knees, watching the city wall dissolve into heath, then woods, then a moon like a scratched silver coin.
After a long while, Nadia said, “He knew about Jace.”
“And now every road out of the city is a judgment on me,” Caden said. “Victor wants the treaty signed. He wants the Whitmore name on the throne. A dead heir is worth more to him than a living king who owes him.” He looked at Jace, asleep against Nadia’s shoulder. “He will burn the world to reach the boy. So I will move the boy ahead of the fire.”
“To where?”
“A wayside inn the royal couriers use. North of the main road, off the post lanes. It has a dry cellar and a way out.” He paused. “I know that place better than I know this carriage, and I know this carriage well enough to sleep in it.”
Selene did not smile. She shifted her bag on her lap and kept watching the road behind them through the slit in the curtain.
They reached the Wild Boar before moonrise.
The inn had been built on an old drovers’ road: two storeys of black timber, a sagging roofline, a sign that creamed in the wind—a boar with tusks painted the color of rust. Caden had used it three times as prince and once as king. It was kept stocked by the crown’s couriers: hard bread, salted bacon, pickles, candles, powder in waxed tin. No servants. In a pinch, one man could hold it for a day.
Jasper moved through the rooms with his carbine low, checking the shutters and the back door. Caden knelt in the root cellar and pressed the oak shelf beneath the stone wall. There was a click. The shelf swung inward on iron pins, revealing a black shaft no wider than a man’s shoulders. The courier’s tunnel ran eighty yards to a dry ditch behind the well. He slid the panel shut and did not speak of it.
They ate bread and cold mutton in the kitchen. Jace fell asleep with his cheek on the table, and Nadia carried him up to a rope bed that smelled of hay and mice. Selene went with her, lantern in hand. Caden sat downstairs with a pistol across his knees and listened to the wind pick up.
At midnight, the safe house tracking alert triggered.
The bell was small—no larger than a thrush—hung beneath the porch beam and wired to a hair-thin strand of black horsehair across the gate. It rang once, clean and near. Not wind. Not animal.
Caden was on his feet before the note died.
Footsteps stopped outside.
He crossed to the window in three strides and looked through the crack where the shutter had rotted. Seven men in the yard, dark coats, no torches. They spread like fingers reaching for a throat. One stepped onto the porch. Another put his shoulder against the kitchen door.
Jasper came down the stairs, carbine in hand. “I put her and the boy below. Selene’s with them.”
“The root cellar?”
“Trapdoor behind the barrels. They’re pulling it open now.”
The kitchen door jumped in its frame—a ram, or a heavy shoulder. Caden fired through the upper panel. The wood screamed. He fired again, and the man on the porch staggered back.
Jasper moved behind the pantry, covering the back stairs. “Go,” he said. “I’ll hold the stairwell.”
Caden shouldered through the cellar door and dropped to his knees at the trap. He heard Nadia below, her voice tight. “Caden—the far wall—the door—he found it—” Then a laugh, low and familiar.
Caden went down the ladder two rungs at a time.
The root cellar smelled of earth and old apples. Nadia stood with her back to the false panel, Selene pressed beside her, Jace hidden between them. He was seven years old, and he was not crying. His hand was clamped around his mother’s fingers, and his chin was up.
Victor Whitmore stood at the far end by the icehouse door. He held a lantern in one hand and a pistol in the other. He had come in from the outside while his men made noise at the front. He had not been fooled by the main road. He had known the root cellar had another door.
“Your Majesty,” Victor said, almost gently. “You should have signed the treaty when I offered.” He raised the pistol. The barrel tracked past Nadia, past Selene, and settled on Jace. “A dead heir is worth more than a signed one.”
The shot came.
Caden hit the floor and kept moving, one hand dragging Jace by the back of his coat, his own body between the boy and the barrel. The ball grazed his left forearm—a line of white fire that cut through muscle and turned the edge of his sight black. Blood sprayed the packed earth in a dark fan. He did not fall. He could not fall.
Jasper came down the last three rungs of the ladder and kicked the lantern out of Victor’s hand in the same motion. Glass burst. Coal oil sprayed the shelves and the dirt and Victor’s sleeve, and the flame raced up it—a sheet of gold that ate the dark. Victor shouted and slapped at his cuff, dropping the lantern. Thick black smoke boiled to the ceiling, rolling across the room in a blind wave.
“Go,” Caden said, shoving Nadia. “Selene—the pin by the shelf, left and low. Jace, take your mother’s hand and don’t look back.”
Selene’s fingers found the iron pin. The false panel swung open on a breath of cold air. She scrambled inside, pulling Jace after her. Nadia followed. Caden pushed himself in last as Jasper kicked a rack of stores against the gap. The tunnel’s mouth swallowed them into blackness.
They crawled. Elbows and knees on packed earth, the scrape of stone, Jace’s small open mouth drawing air too fast. Cold wind touched Caden’s face. The tunnel ended at a dry ditch fringed with ferns, and he dragged himself out and reached back for Jace.
Smoke curled up from the tunnel mouth behind them, thick and oily, lit by a distant orange flicker.
Victor’s voice followed them through the smoke. “Run, little prince. There is no corner of the realm my father does not own.”