Морган Райс - A Dirge for Princes

If she had been at full strength, she might have taken on the soldiers by herself, moving among them, running and killing. As it was, she could barely muster the energy to thrust down at them alongside the sailors. Those pushed past Kate, as if trying to shield her from the fighting. Kate just wanted them to focus on getting the ship away from the docks.

Slowly, the ship did start to move. The sailors used oars and long poles to push it clear, and Kate felt the shift of the deck under their efforts. A solider leapt at the ship and fell short, falling between the boat and the docks.

Below, Kate saw the forest cat still snarling and killing, hemmed in by soldiers. Kate suspected that her sister wouldn’t want her companion abandoned, and in any case, the forest cat had saved them. She couldn’t just leave it.

“You need to get aboard,” she yelled, then realized the stupidity of expecting it to understand that. Instead, she summoned up the little power she had left, wrapping the need to get aboard with an image of the boat leaving, and threw it at the creature.

It turned its head, sniffed the air once, and bounded for the boat. Kate saw its muscles bunch, and then it leapt. Its claws dug into the wood of the ship as it pulled itself up the side, and then it settled on the railing pushing its head against Kate’s hand and purring.

Kate stumbled back, feeling the solidity of a mast at her back. She all but slid down it to the deck, sitting there because she no longer had the strength to stand. But that didn’t matter anymore. They were already well away from the docks, only a few scattered shots marking the presence of their attackers there.

They’d done it. They were safe, and Sophia was alive.

At least for now.

Sebastian woke to pain. Total, complete pain. It seemed to surround him, throbbing through him, absorbing every fraction of his being. He could feel the pulsing agony in his skull where he’d struck it as he fell, but there was another repetitive pain, bruising his ribs as someone tried to kick him awake.

He looked up and saw Rupert looking down at him from possibly the only angle where his brother didn’t look like some golden ideal of a prince. His expression certainly didn’t match that ideal, looking as though, had it been anyone else, he would have cheerfully cut their throat. Sebastian groaned in pain, feeling like his ribs might have broken under the impact.

“Wake up, you useless idiot!” Rupert snapped. Sebastian could hear the anger there, and the frustration.

“I’m awake,” Sebastian said. Even he could hear that the words were anything but clear. More pain flooded through him, along with a kind of foggy confusion that felt as though he’d been hit over the head with a hammer. No, not with a hammer; with the whole world. “What happened?”

“You got thrown from a boat by a girl, that’s what happened,” Rupert said.

Sebastian felt the roughness of his brother’s grip as he hauled him back to his feet. When Rupert let go, Sebastian staggered and almost fell again, but managed to catch himself in time. None of the soldiers around him moved to help, but then, they were Rupert’s men, and probably had little love for Sebastian after his escape from them.

“Now it’s your turn to tell me what happened,” Rupert said. “I went through this village from end to end, and they finally told me that was the boat your beloved was taking.” He made it sound like a curse word. “Since you were thrown off it by a girl with the same look to her – ”

“Her sister, Kate,” Sebastian said, remembering the speed with which Kate had propelled him from the cabin, the anger there as she had thrown him. She’d wanted to kill him. She’d thought that he’d…

He remembered then, and the image of it was enough to make him stop, standing there in blank unresponsiveness, even as Rupert decided it would be a good idea to slap him. The pain of that felt like just one more iota added to a mountain of it. Even the bruises from where Kate had thrown him felt like nothing compared to the raw pit of grief that threatened to open up and claim him at any moment.

“I said, what happened to the girl who fooled you into being her fiancé?” Rupert demanded. “Was she there? Did she escape with the rest of them?”

“She’s dead!” Sebastian snapped without thinking. “Is that what you want to hear, Rupert? Sophia is dead!”

It was as if he were looking down at her again, seeing her pale and lifeless on the cabin floor, blood pooled around her, the wound in her chest filled by a dagger so slender and sharp that it might as well have been a needle. He could remember how still Sophia had been, no hint of movement to mark her breathing, no brush of air against his ear when he’d checked.

He’d even pulled the dagger out, in the stupid, instinctual hope that it would make things better, even though he knew that wounds were not so easily undone. All it had done was widen the pool of blood, cover his hands in it, and convince Kate that he’d murdered her sister. It was a miracle, put like that, that she’d only thrown him from the boat, not cut him to pieces.

“At least you did one thing right in killing her,” Rupert said. “It might even help Mother to forgive you for running off like this. You have to remember that you’re just the spare brother, Sebastian. The dutiful one. You can’t afford to upset Mother like that.”

Sebastian felt disgust in that moment. Disgust that his brother would think he could ever hurt Sophia. Disgust that he saw the world like that at all. Disgust, frankly, that he was even related to someone who could see the world as just his plaything, where everyone else was on some lower level, there to fit into whatever roles he assigned.

“I didn’t kill Sophia,” Sebastian said. “How could you think I could ever do something like that?”

Rupert looked at him in obvious surprise, before his expression shifted to one of disappointment.

“And there I was thinking that you’d finally grown a backbone,” he said. “That you’d decided to actually be the dutiful prince you pretend to be and get rid of the whore. I should have known that you would still be completely useless.”

Sebastian lunged at his brother then. He smashed into Rupert, sending the pair of them tumbling to the wooden slats of the docks. Sebastian came up on top, grabbing at his brother, swinging a punch down.

“Don’t you talk about Sophia like that! Isn’t it enough for you that she’s gone?”

Rupert bucked and twisted underneath him, coming up on top for a moment and throwing a punch of his own. The tumbling momentum of the fight kept going, and Sebastian felt the edge of the dock against his back a moment before he and Rupert plunged into the water.

It closed over them as they fought, their hands locked on one another’s throats almost through instinct. Sebastian didn’t care. He had nothing left to live for, not when Sophia was gone. Maybe if he ended up as cold and dead as her, there was a chance that they might be reunited in whatever lay beyond death’s mask. He could feel Rupert kicking at him, but Sebastian barely even acknowledged the tiny extra hint of pain.

He felt hands grabbing at him then, hauling him out of the water. He should have known that Rupert’s men would intervene to save their prince. They pulled Sebastian and Rupert from the water by their arms and their clothes, hauling them up onto dry land and all but holding them up as the cold water seeped through them.

“Let go of me,” Rupert demanded. “No, hold him.”

Sebastian felt the hands tighten on his arms, holding him in place. His brother hit him then, hard in the stomach, so that Sebastian would have doubled up if the soldiers hadn’t been holding him. He saw the moment when his brother drew a knife, this one curved and razor edged: a hunter’s knife; a skinning knife.