CHAPTER SIX

“I am Lady Emmeline Constance Ysalt D’Angelica, Marchioness of Sowerd and Lady of the Order of the Sash!” Angelica shouted out, hoping that someone would hear her. Hoping that her full name would demand attention if nothing else did. “I am being taken to be killed against my will!”

The guard dragging her didn’t look concerned by it, which said to Angelica that there was no real chance of anyone hearing her. No one who would help, at least. In a place with as many cruelties as the palace, the servants were long used to ignoring cries for help, to being blind and deaf unless their betters told them not to be.

“I will not let you do this,” Angelica said, trying to dig in her heels and hold her ground. The guard simply pulled her along anyway, the size difference too great. She struck out at him instead, and connected hard enough that her hand stung with it. For a moment the guard’s grip relaxed, and Angelica turned to run.

The guard was on her in moments, grabbing at her and striking her so that Angelica’s head rang with it.

“You can’t… you can’t strike me,” she said. “People will know. You want to make this look like an accident!”

He slapped her again, and Angelica had the feeling that he did it simply because he could.

“After you’ve fallen from a building, no one will notice a bruise,” he said. He snatched her up then, carrying her over his shoulder as easily as if she were a wayward child. Angelica had never felt as helpless as she did in that moment.

“Scream again,” he warned, “and I’ll hit you again.”

Angelica didn’t, if only because it didn’t seem likely to make any difference. She hadn’t seen anyone on the way here, either because everyone was still busy with the wedding that hadn’t happened or because the Dowager had carefully kept them out of the way in preparation for this. Angelica wouldn’t put that past her. The old woman planned as patiently and as cruelly as a cat waiting outside a mouse hole.

“You don’t have to do this,” Angelica said.

The guard replied with just a shrug that jostled her in her place on his shoulder. They went up through the palace, along winding staircases that narrowed more the further up they went. At one point, the guard had to set Angelica down just to get through, but he kept a cruel hold on her hair, dragging her along with a sharpness that made Angelica cry out in pain.

“You could just let me go,” Angelica said. “No one would know.”

The guard snorted at that. “No one would notice when you just popped back up at court, or in your family’s home? The Dowager’s spies wouldn’t know you were alive?”

“I could leave,” Angelica tried. The truth was that she would probably have to leave if she was going to live. The Dowager wouldn’t stop at just this attempt on her life. “My family has interests so far across the sea that there’s hardly ever news. I could disappear.”

The guard didn’t seem any more impressed by that idea than the last. “And when some spy mentions you? No, I reckon I’ll do my duty.”

“I could give you money,” Angelica said. They were getting higher now. So high that, looking out of the slender windows, she could see the city arranged like some child’s toy below. Maybe that was how the Dowager saw it: as a toy to be arranged for her amusement.

It meant that they must be almost at the roof, too.

“Don’t you want money?” Angelica demanded. “A man like you can’t earn much. I could give you enough wealth that you’d be a rich man.”

“Can’t give me anything if you’re dead,” the guard pointed out. “And I can’t spend it if I am.”

There was a small door ahead, iron bound, with a simple latch. Angelica thought that the route to her death should have more drama to it, somehow. Even so, just the sight of it made her fear rise again, making her pull back even while the guard dragged her forward.

If Angelica had possessed a dagger, she would have used it while he unlatched the door and opened it to let the cold air beyond rip at them. If she’d had so much as a sharp eating knife, she would have at least tried to cut his throat with it, but she didn’t. In her wedding dress, she didn’t. The most she had were a couple of powders designed to refresh her makeup, a sedative snuff that was supposed to be there for the threat of nerves, and… that was it. That was all she had. Everything else was below somewhere, tucked away against the conclusion of her wedding.

“Please,” she begged, and there didn’t have to be much acting to it to look helpless, “if money won’t do it, then what about decency? I’m just a young woman, caught up in a game I didn’t want. Please help me.”

The guard pulled her out onto the roof. It was flat, with crenulations that had nothing to do with real defense. The wind whipped at Angelica’s hair.

“Do you expect me to believe any of that?” the guard asked. “That you’re just some innocent little thing? You know the stories they tell about you around the palace, milady?”

Angelica knew most of them. She made a point of knowing what people said about her so that she could have revenge for the slight later.

“They say that you’re vain and you’re cruel. That you’ve ruined people just for speaking to you in the wrong tone, and arranged for rivals to be shipped off with a mark of indenture tattooed on them where it wasn’t before. You think you deserve mercy?”

“Those are lies,” Angelica said. “They’re – ”

“I don’t much care either way.” He pulled her over toward the parapet. “The Dowager has given me my orders.”

“And what will she do when you’ve fulfilled them?” Angelica demanded. “Do you think she’ll let you live? If the Assembly were to find out that she murdered a noblewoman, she’d be deposed.”

The big man shrugged. “I’ve killed for her before.”

He said it as though it was nothing, and Angelica knew then that she was going to die. Whatever she said, whatever she tried, this man was going to murder her. By the look of it, he was going to enjoy it as well.

He pushed Angelica back toward the edge, and she knew it would just be moments before she fell. Inexplicably, she found herself thinking about Sebastian, and the thoughts weren’t the hate-filled ones they should have been, given the way he’d abandoned her. Angelica couldn’t understand why that would be the case, when he was nothing but the man she’d targeted as a husband to further her position, a man she’d been prepared to lure into bed with a sleeping powder…

An idea came to her. It was a desperate one, but right then, everything was desperate.

“I could offer you something more valuable than money,” Angelica said. “Something better.”

The guard laughed, but even so, he paused. “What?”

Angelica reached down to her belt, drawing out the small snuff box of sedative, lifting it as if it were the most precious thing in the world. The guard let her, staring almost entranced as he tried to work out what it was. Very delicately, Angelica opened the box.

“What is it?” the guard demanded. “It looks like – ”

Angelica blew sharply, sending a scattering of powder into his face as he gasped. She cut left as he grabbed for her, hoping to dodge past while he was still dealing with the powder in his eyes. One meaty hand clamped on her arm, and the two of them pressed back toward the edge of the palace’s roof.

Angelica didn’t know what effect the sedative would have. It had worked quickly whenever she’d used it, but it was normally a thing of small doses and minor effects. How much would such a large dose do to a man that size, and would she have enough time before it happened? Already, Angelica could feel the edge of the roof against her back, the sky visible as the big man pushed at her.

“I’ll kill you!” the guard bellowed, and the best Angelica could say about it was that his words came out slightly slurred. Was his grip weakening? Was the pressure pushing her back any less?

She was tilted back so much now that she could see the ground below her, and a scattering of servants and nobles. Another second, and she would be falling, to crash to the cobbles of the courtyard and smash as surely as a dropped goblet.

In that second, Angelica felt the guard’s grip weaken. Not much, but enough for her to twist and slip by him, putting him with his back to the empty sky.

“You should have taken the money,” she said, and charged forward, shoving with all her might. The guard teetered on the edge for a second, then toppled back, his arms flailing at the air.

Not just the air. One managed to catch at her, and Angelica found herself jerked forward, to the edge and over it. She screamed, grabbing for anything she could find. Her fingers found a piece of stonework, lost their grip, and then found it again while the guard continued to tumble below her. Angelica looked down just long enough to follow his fall to the ground. She felt a brief moment of satisfaction as he hit, quickly replaced by the terror that came from hanging from the side of the castle.

Angelica scrabbled for handholds, trying to find something more to hold onto. Her feet hung in thin air for a moment, then managed to find purchase on the rough sides of a stone-wrought heraldic shield. Angelica noted with faint amusement that it was the royal crest, but also couldn’t help feeling relief at the fact it was there. Without it, she would undoubtedly now be as dead as the Dowager wished her to be.

The climb back up onto the roof seemed to take forever, Angelica’s muscles burning with the unexpected effort. Below, she could hear screams now, as people started to gather around the fallen guard. No doubt, some of them would be looking up, seeing her as she made it back onto the roof, toppling over and lying there, breathing hard.

“Get up,” she told herself. “You’re dead if you stay here. Get up.”

She forced herself to her feet, trying to think. The Dowager had tried to kill her. The obvious thing to do was run, because who could stand up to the Dowager? She needed to find a way out of the palace, perhaps make it to the docks and set off for her family’s lands overseas. That or sneak out through one of the city’s smaller routes, avoiding any watchers that had been set and making it out into the country. Her family was powerful, with the kind of friends who could raise questions in the Assembly of Nobles over this, who would —

“They’ll do what the Dowager tells them,” Angelica told herself. If they acted at all, it would be so slowly that she would undoubtedly be murdered in the meantime. The best she could hope for was to run and keep running, never being safe, never being at the heart of things again. It was an unacceptable solution to it all.

Which brought her back to her earlier question: who could stand up to the Dowager?

Angelica dusted herself off carefully, rearranging her hair as neatly as possible as she nodded to herself. This plan was… dangerous, yes. Unpleasant, almost certainly. But it was the best chance that she had.

While the people below shouted, she set off at a run back through the palace.