“Quiet!” he snapped, face flushing as he eyed the gathering throng on the quayside. “It’ll be all I can do to get you clear of here without this lot stringing you from the nearest mast.”
I could hear them now, despite the thickness of the walls that surrounded us, a classic baying mob. The words “Hang the traitor!” and “Avenge the Hope!” seemed to be the most salient amongst their chants.
“‘It is only in the Alpiran Empire that the rule of law is truly respected,’” Fornella quoted in a faintly bitter voice. As ever her memory for my writing was aggravatingly accurate. “‘Justice being applied equally regardless of station. All, from the meanest, most beggared subject to the Emperor himself, can expect equal treatment before the law.’”
She paced back and forth, prowling the cell and wincing at the occasional upsurge in the mob’s fury. “What can you have done to arouse such ire, my lord?” she asked, her tone more than a trifle sarcastic. “Perhaps offended the Empress in some way?”
“You didn’t have to stay,” I pointed out.
She sighed and sat down next to me on the mean wooden bench, tracing a hand through her hair and issuing a groan of annoyance at the grey tresses coming away in her fingers. “Where else is there for me to go?”
I watched her hold the hair up to the light from the small window, thinking they resembled tarnished threads of copper and making a mental note to write the observation down later, should I be afforded the opportunity. “Is this what happens?” I asked. “When you are denied the blood of the Gifted?”
“To the best of my knowledge no other recipient of the Ally’s blessing has undergone this particular trial. Some have been killed of course, assassinated or fallen in war, such is the nature of Volarian politics. But, once blessed, none have tried to exist without feeding.”
She opened her hand and let the hair fall to the floor, pausing a moment to flex her fingers in the shaft of sunlight, a faint smile on her lips. “Strangely, I find I don’t miss it at all. Mortality, as it transpires, has its compensations.”
A clattering of locks and the tramp of boots told of a visitor. I rose to regard the tall figure coming to a halt on the other side of the bars, an imposing fellow with handsome if somewhat weathered features and close-cropped hair that now had more white in it than grey. “Hevren,” I said, taking note of his uniform and the star embossed onto the centre of his breastplate, the crest of a Cohort Commander. “Promoted at last, I see.”
