Page 9 of The Crimson Throne
No thoughts means no emotion.
No emotion means I stay in control.
After far too long, the door opens again, and the guard comes back out—this time with Hal and Oskar in tow.
Oskar’s got his arm wrapped around Hal’s narrow shoulders, and I can see every one of Hal’s eleven years in his shaking countenance.
I purse my lips and throw a quick, low whistle. It sounds like idle noise to anyone else, but it’s one of the partridge calls, signaling all clear.
Everything’s fine. I promise.
For a moment, a light flickers in Hal’s eyes.
For a moment, I think maybe I can salvage this. Maybe he won’t hate me too.
But Hal gawps at me, then looks away quick, like meeting my gaze is a death sentence.
My stomach swoops, and I nearly lose the war I’ve been waging against dry heaving.
He didn’t look at me that way before. And now terror’s lodged in his eyes. Like Oskar, one year on my eighteen; he’s kept me at arm’s length for a while, and his suspicion is proved right after yesterday.
A scowl is carved into Oskar’s face. He glares at me with all the fear and mixed hatred he usually packages up for the sake of survival. You can’t be picky about who your allies are in Southwark.
Arguing with Oskar’s a concern for later. For this moment, both of ’em lookdry, and I manage a full breath.
Of nasty prison air.
A cough lodges in my throat, but I’m not done.
“Thank you, sir.” I turn to the guard and fall back into my fumbling, frantic persona, so desperate and relieved that I hurl my body at him, catching him in a grasping hug. “Oh, thank you kindly, sir. Our mama will be so happy. She’ll—”
The guard shoves me away with a disgusted sneer. “Back off. Get gone, the lot of you.”
Oskar usually catches on. We play on people; it’s what we do. But he doesn’t pick up my act, glaring at me hard, and Hal, his face half buried in Oskar’s shirt, looks out with big blue eyes that are watery, worried—scared. And that’s what guts me most, that Hal’s fixed to be someone else who avoids me back home.
If Oskar lets me go back home.
“Out.” The guard throws another hacking cough into his soiled rag and disappears back into the prison.
We shuffle toward the main door and dive quickly to freedom.
The bright blue sky and potent sunlight outside the Clink hit us like daggers, but all three of us have the good sense to stay quiet as we walk calmly through Winchester Palace. We weave around the various buildings cluttered up next to the Clink, and finally,finally,we topple into the street outside the palace grounds.
I want to keep going. Keep on walking and walking until I can’t smell London at all anymore, until I can get the stench of rot and agony and death out of my nose. I want to breathe, but I can’t so long as the buildings around us are just the same, the Southwark neighborhood crowded with whorehouses and seedy pubs, the streets gone to mud. We’re out of the Clink, out of the palace grounds, but I’ll never be out, will I?
Oskar and Hal start walking down the road, back toward the little room we share with half a dozen others. But the moment I turn to follow, Oskar whips on me.
Before he can speak, I gotta try.
“We got attacked,” I say. “You can’t expect me to just stand by while—”
Oskar’s glare is on fire. “We run. You know that. We don’t stick around to pummel our marks.” His voice is a hiss, so close to the Clink still, with people walking past us on the road. “You nearly killed a baron, Samson,” Oskar continues, upper lip curling over his teeth. “With Hal there too. You knew it was his first time out. You knew, and you still went off half-cocked and screwed us all.”
Hal fully shoves his face against Oskar’s side. With that turn away, the last of my resolve vanishes.
The baron’d been a patron of the brothel we live next to. None of the girls there liked him; he was cruel, the sort who left bruises.
The sort we took pleasure in tricking, then robbing blind.
