The Ride North

He rode for four days.

The first day was the hardest. The garrison would discover his absence at dawn and Geoffrey would send riders after him. Royal orders. Desertion. The penalties were clear. A knight who abandons his post in time of war is stripped of his spurs and hanged. Aldric understood this. He understood it the way he understood that winter follows autumn. A fact. Not a deterrent.

He left the main road after the first hour. The main road was watched. Patrols. Checkpoints. The King's men would look for him on the road because the road was where a man would go. Aldric went cross country. He followed game trails and dry riverbeds and the lines of hedgerows that divided the farmland south of Verdin. His horse was fast and it was strong but it was not fresh and he pushed it harder than he should have because every hour he lost was an hour she spent in the east wing.

He did not think about what he would do when he arrived. Thinking required a plan and he did not have one. He had a sword and an oath and the memory of her hand on his chest. Those were not strategic assets. They were not the tools of a rescue. They were the tools of a man who had nothing left but the thing he was told to be and the person who had told him to be it.

He thought about the oath instead. The words he had spoken when he was seventeen years old. Kneeling in a hall that smelled of incense and old stone. A lord he barely remembered holding a sword over his shoulders. The words were simple. I will serve. I will obey. I will protect. I will not falter. Standard words. Words every knight spoke. The difference was that Aldric had meant them in a way that other men did not. Other men spoke the words and then lived lives that bent around them. They served when it was convenient. They obeyed when it suited them. They protected when the danger was manageable. Aldric had never bent. He had never managed. He had simply done what the words said and the words had become the shape of his life and now the shape was broken because the person the words were sworn to was behind a locked door and he was on a horse in the middle of nowhere riding toward something he could not see.

The second night he slept in a copse of trees off the road. He did not light a fire. He ate cold bread from the rations he had taken and he drank from a stream and he lay on the ground and looked at the stars through the branches and he thought about the scars on his chest. Five lines. He pressed his fingers to them through his shirt. They were there. Solid. Permanent. The only thing the King could not take from him.

On the third day the terrain changed. The flat dry borderland gave way to the rolling hills of the interior. The roads were better here. Wider. Better traveled. He stayed off them but he could see them from the ridgelines and he could see the traffic on them. Carts and horses and people. The kingdom going about its business. Unaware that its princess was locked in a tower and the knight who served her was riding through the dark to save her.

He thought about the King on the third night. About the disgust on his face when he had seen the scars. About the sincerity. The King had meant what he said. He believed he was saving Aldric. He believed Elara was sick. A monster. And the King was not entirely wrong. She was sick. She was a monster. She had cut him and used him and made him stand outside doors and listen and she had done it all on purpose and she had enjoyed it. That was true. All of it was true.

But the King did not understand. He saw the scars and he saw cruelty. He did not see the devotion that made the cruelty possible. He did not see the room where the knife was not just a knife. Where it was a language. Where the blood was not just blood. Where it was the only honest thing either of them had ever said. The King saw the wound. He did not see the conversation.

On the fourth day he saw the capital.

It lay in the valley below him and the morning sun was on it and the white stone of the palace caught the light and it looked like something from a dream. Beautiful and terrible and waiting.

He did not enter the city through the main gate. He circled to the east and came in through the tanner's quarter where the smell was so bad that the guards at the gate held their breath and waved people through without close inspection. He wore a plain cloak over his armor and he kept his head down and his sword hidden and he passed through the gate as just another man in a city full of men.

He went to the Thorne townhouse first. He left his horse in an alley two streets away and approached on foot. The shutters were closed. The gate was locked. He knocked. Nothing. He knocked again. A window opened on the upper floor and Lady Thorne looked out and her face went through shock and fear and relief in the space of a second.

She opened the gate and pulled him inside and closed it behind him.

"Ser Aldric. You should not be here."

"Where is Lord Thorne."

"Gone. Hiding. The King's men came three days after the arrest. They searched the house. They took papers. Lord Thorne was not here. He is with contacts in the lower city. I have not seen him in a week."

"What happened. To her. What did the King do."

Lady Thorne's face tightened. She was old and she was tired and she was frightened and she held it all behind the dignity that had kept her upright for sixty years.

"He confined her to her chambers. She was allowed one servant. Food was brought twice a day. She was not permitted to leave. She was not permitted visitors. This went on for two weeks."

"And then."

"And then he moved her. Three days ago. He moved her from the east wing to the old tower. The tower at the north corner of the palace. It has been empty for years. It is not a chamber. It is a cell."

"Why did he move her."

"Because he found out about Renard."

Aldric felt the cold start in his stomach. "Found out what."

"That Renard was feeding her information. That he was visiting her. Not just visiting. The King found out about the nature of the visits. Someone told him. A servant maybe. Or Renard himself was discovered. I do not know. But the King found out and he was furious and he moved her to the tower."

"The tower. Is she guarded."

"Two men at the door. Two more at the base of the stairs. The tower has one entrance. One staircase. One room at the top."

"What has he done to her."

Lady Thorne looked at him and her eyes were wet and she did not speak for a moment and the silence was worse than any answer.

"I do not know," she said. "I have not seen her. No one has. The servants who bring food say she does not eat. They say the food comes back untouched. They say she does not speak."

Aldric stood in the hallway of the Thorne townhouse and the cold in his stomach had spread to his chest and his arms and his hands and he felt the scars on his body throbbing. All five of them. Pulsing with his heartbeat as though they were connected to her directly. As though each cut she had made was a thread that ran between them and the threads were vibrating and the vibration said hurry hurry hurry.

"I need to get into the tower," he said.

"Ser Aldric. The tower is the most guarded place in the palace. You cannot walk in."

"I did not say walk in. I said get in."

Lady Thorne looked at him. She looked at his face and his hands and the cloak over his armor and the sword beneath it.

"Lord Thorne has a man inside the palace. A servant. He works in the kitchens. His name is Wren. He can be found in the kitchens after the evening meal. If anyone can get you into the tower it is him."

"Where does he enter."

"The servant passages. There are passages that run through the walls of the old parts of the palace. The tower is old. It was built before the east wing. The passages connect to it. Wren knows them."

"Tell me how to find him."

She told him. The layout. The timing. The passages. Everything Lord Thorne had shared with her before he had gone to ground. She gave him all of it and when she was done she took his hand and held it.

"She is not the same woman you left Ser Aldric. Whatever he has done to her. Whatever she has become. She is not the same."

"I know."

"You do not. You left a woman who was in control. Who held the knife. You may find a woman who has had the knife taken from her. And that may be worse. Because a woman who has lost control of the one thing she controlled may not be a woman you recognize."

"I will recognize her."

Lady Thorne squeezed his hand. "Go with care. The King watches everything now. He is not the man he was three weeks ago. He is frightened. A frightened king is the most dangerous thing in the world."

He left the townhouse and moved through the city toward the palace. The evening was coming. The light was going. The streets were thinning. He moved through the shadows and the alleys and he approached the palace from the east. The servant entrance. The kitchen door. The place where Wren could be found.

He found the passage that Lady Thorne had described. A narrow door in the palace wall that was used for deliveries. Unlocked. Unattended at this hour. He slipped through and moved through the service corridors and found the kitchens and found Wren.

Wren was small and thin and quick. He had the eyes of a man who had spent his life being invisible and had learned to like it. He looked at Aldric and saw a knight in armor with a sword and desperation on his face and he did not ask questions.

"The tower," Wren said. "I can get you there. But not through the main door. Through the passages."

"The passages."

"Behind the walls. They are narrow. Dark. Some of them have not been used in years. You will need to leave your armor."

"My sword."

"The sword I can hide. The armor I cannot."

Aldric looked at Wren and he thought about going into the tower without armor and without a plan and without anything except a sword and the scars on his body and he thought about what Elara would say. She would say this is foolish. She would say you are going to get yourself killed. She would say you should have stayed at the front.

She would also say come back.

"Show me," he said.