one fortified doorway and then another, leaving a pair of hulking guards by each, until it was just the two of them climbing down the stairs. The lower they went, the denser, colder, damper the air became.
I am descending into hell.
“Put me on house arrest and we’ll revisit this in the morning when everyone’s sober.” Tao thought of the dancer waiting for him in the luxurious bedchamber he’d hardly visited since arriving. “Confinement to quarters works for me.”
“You’re to be held in the dungeon three days, after which the king plans on killing you.”
Tao coughed out a derisive laugh. “Why three days? Why not just do it now?”
“He needs time for a trial with false witnesses and testimony.” Markam’s voice dropped. “Xim’s not stupid. He knows the reason for your arrest is weak. He’ll simply find a stronger one, with the help of torture and truth serums.”
True. Drugged, a man could be made to say most anything. “This is madness. Yes, I should have watched my tongue in front of my officers. I knew better. But treason? I gave Xim peace on a silver platter.” Asking nothing for himself but the chance to fade away into the fabric of the precious lands he’d defended. “In thanks I get a death sentence.” The aftertaste of betrayal was bitter indeed. “You can’t let him go through with this.”
“What can I do?”
Come on, Markam, think outside the box. Maybe there was a reason his friend had stayed behind with the Palace Guard and Tao had gone off to fight in the Hinterlands battlefields, where thinking unconventionally was a requirement for survival. “Help me escape.”
“You’ll end up living like an animal on the run, Tao.”
“So be it. I have the survival skills. I’ll go back to the Hinterlands. I’ll disappear.”
“And I’ll be hanged for my role in it, leaving the madman in charge of the asylum. I can’t, Tao.”
Bleakly, Tao walked down the stairs, trying to think his way out of a dead end. He’d rather take his chances in the wild lands than wait for a mock trial, but he couldn’t leave his best friend to be tortured and killed.
“Don’t worry,” Markam said. “By tomorrow, it will be as if you never existed.”
Tao jerked his head up. “I thought I had three days.”
The dungeon stank of rat feces and decay, the smell of hopelessness. Markam steered him into a cell and locked him in. Although it was arguably the best of the lot, inside the tang of urine was downright eye-watering. “Be patient, and you will see.”
Tao gripped the bars. “You try being patient from inside a dungeon cell.”
“Too many lives hang in the balance to tell you more. People I care about greatly. If things were to go wrong now, and you were hauled in for an interrogation, and you revealed…” Markam stopped himself. His angular face took on the appearance of stone, his eyes full of secrets.
“You want protection for your men.” By Uhrth, Markam must have been thinking outside the box for years while Tao was away, if he had a network to protect. “In that case, I want protection for my men, also. Their service to the kingdom has been beyond the call. Beyond any crime blamed on me in a charade of a trial.”
“Xim will need to placate them after getting rid of their general. There’s enough land to go around, and a fair share of women, lonely from too many years of losing men to war. Knowing the alternative, they’ll let Xim buy them out, I suspect.”
Tao knew this was the unfortunate truth of a large fighting force. The average soldier didn’t know him, the general, personally; they received their orders through the chain of command. His officers were the ones most at risk in this. Their loyalty and honor to him ran blood deep. Yet, if they moved to defend him, they’d be hanged for mutiny.
Weary, Tao gripped the bars. “I trust you’ll look after Aza.”
“Always,” he said, his tone somber, his gaze flickering with something that gave Tao pause. It was more than just childhood friendship talking; Markam had feelings for Aza that transcended a palace guard protecting his queen.
I have indeed been gone from home too long. If Aza shared Markam’s feelings, Tao prayed the pair knew enough not to take any chances and reveal it to Xim, and that a pointless dream of star-crossed love wasn’t the motivation behind Markam’s desire to undermine the king. But he bit back the urge to demand the truth. Any such knowledge could be wrested out of him and be used to hurt Aza.
Tao let his hands slide off the bars. “You’d better go.” There was nothing more to be said, nothing more to do. Everything he cared about existed outside these prison walls. He was locked in a dungeon, and by tomorrow, according to Markam, it would be as if he’d never existed. We shall see.
“Good luck, my friend,” Markam said. “To both of us, actually.”
Then his oldest friend walked out, slamming the thick door closed behind him. The thunder echoed off the dungeon walls, the sound of boots hitting stone quickly faded and Tao was left alone with a chest thick with disbelief and a mind racing through a dwindling arsenal of options.
THE SUNS HADN’T YET peeked above the horizon when Elsabeth gave up trying to sleep and climbed up to the eaves to feed the pigeons. Her mother had always been the one to care for the messenger birds whose journeys could take them as far as the Barrier Peaks. Elsabeth had, by necessity, handed the running of the clinic over to others, but the aviary was hers to keep, in memory of her mother.
The interior of the roost was a simmering, cooing mass of gray and rainbow-hued feathers, bobbing heads, clawed feet and pecking beaks. “Hello, my friends.”
Cuh-choo-coo, cuh-choo-coo—their melody greeted. She shook a tin can of dried beans, calling them to breakfast. As they ate their feed, she filled the water dishes and trough and added grit to the floor of the pen.
A loud fluttering of wings erupted at the landing outside. The flock scattered, noisily reacting, as a large blue male strutted inside, immediately committing himself to breakfast. “Prometheus! If you stay out all night carousing, you do it at the risk of being dinner for an alley kitt.”
The bird strutted by, wearing a slender tube tied to its leg. A message.
A jolt went though her, sweeping her grogginess away. Her eyes opened wide. For most of the night she’d tossed and turned, suffering bursts of disjointed dreams, or had lain awake, worrying about Beck’s treachery, Markam’s plans, Aza’s fears and Tao’s return. Now, this message promised action.
“What do you have for me, little one?” She carefully unfastened the rolled paper and unfurled it. It was blank, and green.
“The green flag,” she whispered. She’d been the one to think up the way Markam should alert her to an emergency so she would not be caught unawares. Red meant stay at home, and green—she crushed the paper in her hand—come to the palace as soon as feasible.
In her gut, she knew why: if Markam had summoned her, General Tao was in danger, if not already dead. She didn’t want to analyze why she desperately hoped it wasn’t the latter.
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE WEATHER HAD TURNED during the night, summer to autumn, the thick, humid heat of the past week replaced by the crackling air of harvest season. From the hooks behind the door she snatched a wool wrap and yanked it around her shoulders. She burst out her front door and ran around back to the medical clinic, where the current practitioner, Chun, slept with his family. The young physician, once mentored by her father, was trying to button a shirt with one hand as he answered her furious knocking at the door.
“Green flag,” she said. “Don’t know more. Tell Navi. Be at the Kurel canteen when Little Lume is straight up.” The young accountant, Navi, also worked at the palace. At high noon in the mess hall, no one would think anything