Royal Outlaw: (Royal Outlaw, Book 1) (31 page)

“Deputy Provost,” a very pale guardsman said tentatively. His eyes were wide and they were riveted to Mariel. “What if she really be the princess?”

Mathias scowled at the middle-aged man. “How long have you served as a soldier to the king, Guardsman Cowart?”

“Twenty-two years.”

“After twenty-two years, you should know better than to believe such filthy lies. Quickwit here shares the same given name as the princess and that’s all.”

The leader turned back to Mariel, but the guardsman named Cowart was not finished. “But, Sir . . .” Mathias glared. The man hesitated. He looked at Mariel and swallowed hard. “Sir, more’n eleven years past I be stationed in a town some days south o’ Remel, where the exiled princess and her daughter be livin’. One day a li’l skinny wretch o’ a girl covered in naught but rags and dirt and blood come up ta me. She done told me she be the princess and she need help cause some spidy-man be chasin’ her.”

Mariel’s head spun wickedly. She remembered being hungry and tired and hurting. She remembered fear. Terrifying, mind-numbing
fear
. She had been running from someone, from
something
. But she could not remember what it was.

“What is your point, Cowart? Street urchins try to play off being something better than they are all the time.”

“But this un, she be different. She didn’ look like no princess and I tol’ her that. But I didn’ know what had happened at Remel not more’n two weeks afore.”

“And you think the girl was the princess?” Mathias asked in disbelief.

Cowart blushed and looked at his feet. “I didn’. Not ‘til las’ spring when the story come out ‘bout the princess bein’ ‘live and all. And then I ‘member the li’l wretch. I never forgot her. She didn’ look like no princess, ‘cept her eyes.” The soldier looked up and stared straight into Mariel’s eyes, a haunted expression on his face. “The eyes, they be the darkes’ green. Niver seen eyes like that on anyone, ‘cept this here lassie.”   

  Mariel had needed to move constantly to keep her pursuer from catching her, she remembered that now. She had covered her tracks like Papa had taught her, and had wished she had paid more attention to his lessons. She was young and frightened and unable to survive in such a hostile environment after living a spoiled life. She had begged for help from every person she saw. No one had listened. Until she had found a Natrician soldier.

“I ain’t been nice ta her. I tol’ her I believed her and I took her back to the barracks. She start cryin’, she so happy. But we be mean. We laugh and bowed and tol’ her we give her a meal. But we don’, we gave her a . . .”

“A bone,” Mariel said, her horrified mind reliving a piece of the past that had so long been locked to her. Her hands shook, but she had forgotten where she was. In her eyes it was just her, Guardsman Cowart, and her lost memories.

The feel of the hilts of her knives in her hands brought back another flash of a memory.
She was scared as she sat on a horse in the courtyard. A man reached up and tried to grab her, but horrified, confused, and desperate she swung the knife in her hand and stabbed him. His warm blood spilled across the hilt and her small, cold hand.

“
No!”
Mariel screamed. She dropped the knives she held in her hands and they clattered to the floor of the tavern. The room spun dangerously as she forced her mind out of terrifying memories and grabbed onto the table to keep from falling. “I’m not the princess. I’m not!” She cried, almost hysterically.

The rest of the memories were just waiting to be unlocked, but she could not let them in. She could not face them. Not now. Not ever. Facing her mother’s murder and the events leading up to it was impossible. And remembering who hunted her?

Grey
robes. Brown recluse spiders. The stench of rotting flesh. Blood.

“No!” She tore herself away. She ripped at her hair and used the pain to distract her from the memories she could not bear to face.

“
Mariel!
” Cara’s concerned and fearful voice cut through the princess’s madness.

Mariel stopped pulling at her hair like a madwoman and looked up. Behind the gaping guards she saw Cara standing, still clutched in the arms of a soldier. She took several deep breaths and tried to calm her shaking body and mind.

She brought herself back to the situation at hand. She was in a tavern. Eleven of the Provost’s Guard led by the Deputy Provost, Sir Mathias Goodwin, had come to arrest her. Two of the men were unconscious, but two more held Hallie and Cara captive. She needed to escape, but more importantly, she needed to keep her friends safe.

Mariel met Cara’s large brown-eyed gaze head on, and she hoped she conveyed every ounce of desperation and need for action that she felt. Cara got the message. Her eyes fluttered closed and she dropped into a faint.

The guardsman holding the copper-headed girl grunted in surprise when he was suddenly supporting all her weight. He dropped his knife and grabbed her with his now free hand to keep them both from crashing to the ground.

As quickly as she had dropped, Cara straightened. She grabbed her captor by the wrist and drove her fingernails into the soft spot between the tendons and bones. She wrenched the man’s arm back and threw her weight to one side. The guardsman was thrown off balance with his wrist still painfully held by the girl. Just as Mariel and James had taught her, Cara threw the man over her hip.

Before anyone recovered enough to react, Cara grabbed a bottle of rum off the table next to her and smashed it over the head of the unsuspecting guardsman holding Hallie. The man dropped like a rock, freeing the vocal girl.

“Run!” Mariel yelled.

The two noble girls did not need to be told twice. Together they spun and raced out the door. Taking advantage of the distraction of Cara’s and Hallie’s escape, Mariel hopped up onto the table that stood between her and the guards. She jumped from the table and grabbed one of the low hanging beams. Using the momentum from her leap, she swung her body toward the group of guards and released the beam.

Her bare feet made contact with two of the guards’ faces and she dove into a diving roll. Regaining her feet, she ran and jumped. She smacked her stronger right hand onto the counter and used it to propel herself up onto the wooden counter. Jumping off, she ran through the kitchen. Behind her she heard Sir Mathias barking orders.

The back door banged open, startling a handful of lazy soldiers who had been instructed to guard that exit. Mariel blew by them and ran down the street in the opposite direction of the Citadel and the temple she had instructed her friends to flee to. She knew the guards would not give up the fight so easily, they would pursue their quarry. But she hoped that by leading them deeper into the city she would give Cara and Hallie a fair chance of escape.

Escape for her though was doubtful. The loosely tied corset and the skirts did not help her odds. Her bare feet smacked the cracked cobblestones and rutted dirt of the various streets and alleys she raced down. She was in far better shape than she had been three weeks before, but her strength and stamina were no match for fit guardsmen. She hoped that the adrenaline pounding through her veins would be enough to keep her out of reach of the angry men.

Trying to shake off her hunters, she led them through two other taverns, but they were only slowed a little. Kitchen staff and customers alike cried out in alarm and cursed her as she ran passed them.

Her left arm throbbed from swinging on the beam, but she still scrambled up a trellis and leapt onto a dilapidated wooden porch connected to the second story of a sad looking house. She had been betting that the porch would not hold the weight of the guardsmen, but the wood was not as rotten as she had first thought.

The family who owned the room connected to the porch screamed and shouted complaints from their straw pallets as she ran through their home. Bursting out of the door and onto a creaky set of stairs, Mariel did not look back as she flew down the stairs and out the front door.

More people prowled the streets in these lower districts than in the tavern where the whole mess had begun. Shaking with fatigue and breathless, Mariel tried to hide herself in a group of beggars. But the fancy blue dress she wore stood out among the rags, despite the grime that covered it.

Sir Mathias and two of his guards had managed to keep up the chase on her. They ran straight toward the group of beggars who scattered. Mariel tried to bolt again, but her tired legs gave out and she fell.

Unwilling to give up, she drew her ankle knives and braced herself for an attack. Before she could stand or the guardsmen could draw their weapons, Sir Mathias swung his fist at her. She dove out of the way to keep him from hitting her head. She did not move fast enough to escape harm. The punch struck her on her injured left arm.

Stars popped in Mariel’s head and danced merrily with bright flashing colors to the music of her screams. She struggled to hold on to consciousness even as her arms were painfully wrenched behind her and bound in cords. The battle was lost both to the guards and the pain as blackness consumed her.

* * *

Mariel groaned. Her arms were completely numb, which she supposed was an improvement to being unbearably painful. Heavy manacles rubbed against her wrists that were stretched above her head. She sat against a rough stone wall with her ankles also shackled and an iron ring around her neck.

It was freezing cold and she shivered violently. The chill should not permeate her body so thoroughly with the gown and petticoats to warm her, but then she noticed a lightness of weight. Her dress and petticoats had been stripped from her, not to mention all of her weapons—although that was to be expected. From what she could tell by feeling, she wore nothing except her loincloth, a thin chemise, and the dreaded corset. She could barely breath, her corset was so tight, which was not how Cara had laced it for her earlier. The guards must have stripped her naked to make sure that they found all of her weapons, which meant her lock picks were gone too. Not that those mattered when she could not move her arms. 

Other than her arms, her entire body hurt, especially her jaw and nose which had been struck during the fight. She was stiff and sore from overtaxing her body and then whatever torment she had endured unconscious until this point. She opened her eyes to get her bearings, but saw nothing except for utter darkness. The stench was unbearable and she breathed through her mouth to avoid retching. The dark, dank prison cell smelled of human excrement, vomit, rotten straw, death, and fear.

Mariel tried to move, only to have the iron chafe painfully against her wrists and ankles and nearly choke her. She had been arrested multiple times, but she had never been shackled so thoroughly before. These types of restraints were supposed to be used only for the most dangerous of criminals. She was a thief and a spy with treasonous backgrounds, but the measures that were being taken to keep her locked up were the workings of a man who wanted revenge for her degradation of his pride.    

She cried out in frustration and fear to the prison cell. In response to her scream, she heard a flutter of movement outside of her cell and muffled voices. But what chilled her to the core, was the voice that spoke out of the darkness of the cell. “You’re awake! Are you alright?”

“Cara,” Mariel moaned the name and let her head slide against the wall. “You and Hallie were supposed to escape.”

Now she heard the crying that she had not noticed before. “I . . . ran . . . too slowly!” Hallie blubbered. “I’m to-oo . . .
fat
!”  The sound of her crying echoed against the small cell. “Cara could’ve got-gotten away b-b-but she stopped t-t-to try to h-help me.”

“The soldiers were supposed to chase me, not you.”

“That man, Sir Mathias,” Cara said, sounding scared, but strangely calm. “He ordered some of his men to come after us. They caught us and brought us to this prison.” Here her voice began to break. “They stripped us down to our underclothes! But we weren’t carrying any weapons so they stopped.”

“Unlike you!” Hallie wailed. Anger had overtaken her anguish. “They brought you in unconscious and stripped your clothes clean off without respect at all for modesty. And they refused to let us get dressed again. The things they suggested . . .”

“I’m sorry,” Mariel whispered, feeling completely wretched. “I got you into this mess, and now I can’t get you out of it! I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.”

“You don’t have a plan for escape?” Cara’s voice sounded very small, and Mariel realized she had been so calm before because she had thought her friend would have a way to escape.

She did not know many spells, but even if she did, there was no access to any earthly thing or precious stone in this windowless prison cell.

“I’m an outlaw, not a god.”

“But haven’t you escaped prison before?”

Mariel sighed. “Yes, but they never chained me up like this and I usually managed to keep my lock picks from being found by guards.”

“So having lock picks would help?” Cara asked, her voice brightening.

Trying hard to be patient, Mariel reminded her friend that the guards had stripped her naked, meaning they had taken everything that might have assisted in an escape attempt, including her tools for picking locks.

“But they didn’t strip
us
naked,” Cara insisted. “They took our gowns, but they left us in our chemises and corsets.”