Inherit the Flame

Chapter Twenty-Four

No one could ever accuse Dame Honding of treating her prisoners to cheap accommodations. The guards saw them settled in the upper floor of the Hotel Cinder, a quaint building of grey stone in the shadow of the city’s second largest firemount. The smoothness of the carved walls spoke of quiet pride in the city’s selium miners, who moved selium from the belly of the firemounts at just the right pace to keep quakes from rumbling their footing. The Cinder was a monument to those miners: crafted fully of stone, not a single wooden support beam to absorb an errant shake, and so very close to the firemount itself.

Ripka would have spent more time admiring the place, if it weren’t her prison.

“She cannot keep us cooped up here,” Ripka said, as she paced the narrow lane between the door and the room’s small, singular window.

“But she is.” Honey sat on the edge of the bed, her sturdy legs not quite long enough to touch the floor, so she swung her feet in small, rhythmic arcs. Ripka gave her a solid side-eye, genuinely not able to tell if the woman were being sarcastic or not.

A polite scratch at the door interrupted Ripka’s train of thought. She scowled at the thick plank of wood, knowing it was locked, and forced herself to sound somewhat amiable. It wasn’t the guards’ fault she was locked up here.

“Come in.”

A key clanked in the lock, and the door slid open to reveal a rather contrite-looking Tibal and Enard, a black-clad guard their constant shadow.

“You have half a mark,” the guard said, then ushered the men within and shut the door behind them.

Enard moved forward immediately, barely checking himself from gathering Ripka up in his arms. Tibal lingered behind him, a surly shadow, arms crossed as he scowled around the room as if he could find fault in the furniture for all the misfortune that had yet befallen him. Despite his body language, it was Tibal who spoke first.

“As, despite my best wishes, you have successfully drawn me into your mess of a scheme, you had better tell me the details.”

His posture, she realized, was not wary acceptance of his fate. Though Tibal had his arms locked down around him, he had a slight forward lean, a subtle gleam in his eye. He might pretend annoyance, but Tibal was intrigued by whatever Ripka had dragged him into. Despite the weariness of a long night, Ripka felt a little lighter. This was the first time she’d seen a spark of the old Tibal re-emerge since Detan had left them behind at the Remnant.

“The part regarding the Valatheans you know well.” He grunted, a disgusted agreement. “The rest I have uncovered mostly recently.”

She launched into her early suspicions that Thratia would use similar methods to those she had used in Aransa to such great effect, and her first investigations into the cafes, and what she found there. The forum seemed to spark some interest in Tibal, his brows raising high in appreciation, but she didn’t bother lingering long on that feature of local politics.

Keeping her voice carefully controlled, she explained the events of the night. Their run-in with Dranik at the Ashfall Lounge, and his subsequent confession to her that his movement for freedom was not as pure as he had thought.

With every word laid down, Ripka only had eyes for Tibal’s response. She felt Enard stiffen near her, but his reaction was a known quantity. It was Tibal who had proven unreliable in recent months, and Tibal’s help they needed now. Ripka was clever, Enard calm in a crisis, and Honey a willing accomplice, but Tibal had bent his recent years to the very type of subterfuge they must attempt to flush out and befuddle Thratia’s vile network.

By the time she was done telling the tale, Tibal was still as a boulder, every hard line of muscle stiff beneath his dusty, grease-stained clothes. While Hond Steading’s future had not previously roused him to any emotion at all, being confronted with the very human reality of it – of people disappearing, and Thratia’s network at hand – had clearly unsettled him. Tibal wouldn’t fight for a city, any city. But he would fight for a city’s people, and that was the distinction he’d drawn sharp as an obsidian blade.

“I see,” Tibal said, and managed to lay into those two simple words the full scope of his intention. He saw, and he would help, and he would not stop until he’d fixed what he saw was broken.

“We must get away from our jailers to do any good at all,” Enard said.

She flashed him a small smile and squeezed his arm. “Escaping jails is something we have recent experience in. But you’re right, and the sooner the better. If I miss my meeting with Dranik tomorrow I fear he’ll go to ground, and that will be a hard trust to rebuild, if we can even find him.”

“That sister of his,” Enard said, “is she in it, too?”

“Hard to tell. She’s an exuberant woman, and often disgusted with her brother’s melancholy nature. She brushes off his obsession with things political, but…”

“She knows,” Honey said, soft as always. “Women like that know everything that goes on in their house.”

“What time are you due to meet him?” Tibal asked.

“Nightfall, at a place very near the lounge I spoke of.”

Tibal puffed his cheeks up and blew air out in a great gust. “Not a lot of time to get us out of here. Six guards on two stories of building, and we haven’t been here nearly long enough to know their habits.”

“And these two need rest.” Enard glanced pointedly at Honey, whose head was lolling to one side, though her eyes were open. Ripka had to admit that the very thought of making any escape now, when her muscles were still screaming from her earlier flight from the watchers, made her feet feel like anchors.

“Daybreak, then,” Ripka said. “No doubt our guardians will rouse us early for a meal. We’ll take account of things then, and wing a plan if we must.”

Tibal asked, “Are you prepared to follow my lead, if it comes to that?”

A week ago, she wouldn’t have trusted him to lead her anywhere but a bottle. But he had a spark back, one she hadn’t seen since he and Detan had joined their heads together to figure out the best way to get Nouli out of the Remnant.

“You’re the expert,” she said.

He grinned like a rockcat who’d caught a viper for his supper, and tipped his singed, floppy grey hat to her. In all his surly rebuke of Detan’s abandonment, he hadn’t stopped wearing the hat they’d fought over as long as she’d known them both.

A heavy pounding on the door startled them all – well, all except Tibal. While she and Enard and Honey flinched from the sound, Tibal just smirked, eyeing the door with quiet contempt. He was in his element, and the very sight of his confidence buoyed Ripka’s worn-down spirits.

“Time’s up.” The guard who’d let the men in opened the door and stood glowering at them all, a false bluster that may have fooled a child, but told the four in the room only one thing: the guard was tired, and anxious, and resented her post. Ripka turned her head to hide an instinctive smile.

Hond Steading had no idea the force it harbored. She hoped, deeply, that if its people knew then they might be grateful.