Once Betrayed, Twice Shy

Stay close

FARAH

The word breach moves through me like cold water.

“How many?” I ask.

“Unknown. We’re still—”

“How long ago?”

“Twenty minutes, maybe less.” He’s already turning. “Lord Caspian needs to—”

“He’s in the dining hall.” I’m already moving. “Come.”

We go back the way I came, and I push the door open without knocking because some situations make courtesy irrelevant and this is clearly one of them. Marcus is still gone. Caspian is on his feet before I’ve fully crossed the threshold, reading something in my face or in the guard’s or in the quality of the air itself, the way he reads everything — before I’ve said a word.

“Eastern border,” I say. “They’re inside.”

He moves.

I have seen Caspian Vey command a room before. I have watched him exercise authority with the deliberate, measured economy of someone who has never needed to raise his voice to be obeyed. What I see now is different — not louder, not larger, but faster. The armour that is always slightly visible reassembles fully and instantly, and the man who was sitting at a breakfast table forty seconds ago asking me a question with something almost like vulnerability underneath it is simply gone, replaced by something considerably more efficient.

“Vasek.” He addresses the guard without looking at him. He’s already moving toward the door, toward the corridor, toward wherever his war room is in this palace. “How many entry points?”

“Confirmed two, my lord. Possibly more.”

“Origin?”

“Northeast quadrant. They’re moving south.”

“Toward what?”

A pause.

Caspian stops walking.

Turns to look at Vasek with an expression that does not allow for pauses.

“They appear to be moving toward the palace grounds,” Vasek says, and now I understand the expression on his face when he found me in the corridor, why it was the other kind of concern. This isn’t a border skirmish. This is something with a direction. A destination.

Caspian’s jaw does the thing. “How far out?”

“Forty minutes on foot. Less if they’re running.”

“They’re running,” Caspian says, as though this is obvious. As though whoever planned this would not have come this far without accounting for every minute. He’s walking again, faster, and I find myself moving with him because no one has told me to go anywhere else and my feet have apparently made their own decision.

“Farah.”

“I’m coming,” I say, before he can decide otherwise.

He looks at me sideways.

“You have training—”

“With Daria, who I assume you’re about to pull into whatever this is anyway.” I hold his gaze. “I’m not going to the library to wait.”

Something moves across his face. Brief and complicated and ultimately set aside for a more convenient moment that we don’t currently have.

“Stay close,” he says.