Chapter Six: Of Course She Wants to Be Rescued!
1384 Words
Riley
I didn’t sleep.
I couldn’t stop thinking of my helpless little sister being sent to marry a blood-sucker like Vance. It was a death sentence! I understood that my father’s hands were tied by pack politics, but I still couldn’t fathom how he could send his only daughter to die.
Father had never cared about Kaida. He blamed her for Mother’s death, but how could you blame a baby for being born? He ought to blame himself. There was only ten months between my birth and Kaida’s. I didn’t know all the details; father refused to talk about it, but common sense said that having two babies back-to-back was hard in a woman’s body. He didn’t give her time to recover after I was born.
I lay on my back staring at the ceiling of my chamber until the grey light of dawn crept under the door, and then I got up, pulled on my boots, and went to find Donal.
He was in the stables, as I knew he would be. Donal loved horses more than he loved people. Maybe that’s why he’d never had a sweetheart. He claimed the smell of horses calmed him. I’d never understood that, personally.
The horse barn smelled like horseshit.
It was early enough that the stable hands hadn’t yet started their morning rounds. The horses shifted restlessly in their stalls, their breath making small clouds in the cool morning air. Weak grey light filtered through the gaps in the wooden planks, striping the hay strewn floor in pale bars. Somewhere in the rafters, a pigeon was making its soft, mindless noise.
I found Donal in the tack room, rubbing oil into a saddle with long methodical strokes. Rows of bridles and halters hung on the walls around him, and the air smelled of leather and linseed oil. He barely looked up as I barged in.
“I need your help,” I said.
He didn’t look up from the saddle. “What have you done now?”
“It’s not what I’ve done,” I said, dropping onto an upturned bucket. “It’s what Father’s done.”
That made him look up.
“Father has signed a pact with the Devil. He’s marrying Kaida off to that vampire!” Donal was still while I talked, the way he always got when something serious was happening. He was a big, broad shouldered man, with a square honest face and dark eyes that missed very little, despite the sleepy, unhurried way he had of looking at the world. I paced the small room as I talked, stepping over a coiled rope, nearly knocking a bridle from its hook. When I finished, he set down the saddle cloth and was quiet for a long moment.
“Vance,” he said finally.
“Vance,” I confirmed.
He let out a long slow breath through his nose, the way a horse does when it’s unsettled. Appropriate, given the company he preferred to keep.
“Riley—”
“Don’t,” I said. “Don’t tell me there’s nothing to be done.”
Donal picked up the saddle cloth again and resumed rubbing. It was something he did when he was thinking — kept his hands busy while his brain worked. I grabbed a loose piece of straw from the floor and twisted it between my fingers, because I needed something to do with my hands too.
“I wasn’t going to say that,” he said mildly.
I blinked. “You weren’t?”
“No.” He glanced up at me with those dark, steady eyes. “I was going to say that whatever you’re planning, it’s probably going to get us both killed.”
“But you’ll help me anyway?”
He sighed the sigh of a man who had long ago accepted his fate. “When have I ever not?”
I felt the knot in my chest loosen just slightly. That was the thing about Donal. He never made you feel foolish for caring too much.
“We have three days,” I said, leaning forward on the bucket. “Father is sending her to Vance’s keep on the new moon. She’ll travel by carriage with a guard escort.”
“How many guards?”
“I don’t know yet.”
Donal gave me a long look. “What exactly is your plan, Riley?”
“We intercept the carriage,” I said. “We grab Kaida, and we run.”
“Run where?”
I opened my mouth. Closed it again. Outside, one of the horses kicked at its stall door, impatient for its morning feed. I knew how it felt.
Donal nodded slowly, as though this confirmed everything he had ever suspected about me. “So your plan is to intercept an armed guard escort, snatch your sister out from under your father’s nose, antagonize a vampire lord, and then—” he waved the saddle cloth vaguely, “—improvise.”
“When you say it like that it sounds bad,” I muttered.
“Riley.” He set down the cloth and looked at me directly. “It is bad.”
“But you’ll still help me.”
He picked the cloth back up. “Obviously.”
“Right,” Donal said, with the air of a man rolling up his sleeves before a particularly unpleasant task. “If we’re going to do this, we’re going to do it properly. No charging in blind.”
“Agreed,” I said, though charging in blind had been more or less my entire strategy until thirty seconds ago.
“First, we need to know the route. Which road will the escort take to Vance’s keep?”
“The old merchant road, most likely. It’s the only one wide enough for a carriage.”
Donal nodded. “The old merchant road runs through Greymore Forest, about a day and a half’s ride from here. If we’re going to intercept them, that’s where we do it. Plenty of cover.”
“We create a distraction. Draw some of the guards away from the carriage, create enough confusion to get Kaida out and onto horseback.”
I sat up straighter, the straw still twisted tight around my fingers. “Donal, that’s actually brilliant.”
He gave me a flat look. “Don’t sound so surprised.”
“Does Kaida know you’re coming?” Donal asked.
“No.”
“Does she know about any of this?”
“No.”
He raised an eyebrow. “So we’re rescuing a woman who hasn’t asked to be rescued.”
“She’s being sold to a vampire, Donal! Of course she wants to be rescued!”
“I know that.” He held up a hand. “I’m just pointing out that your sister is not exactly the type to sit quietly and wait for someone to save her.”
He had a point. Kaida was the least helpless person I knew, despite what everyone else in the pack seemed to think. “She’ll thank me later,” I said, with more confidence than I felt.
Donal gave me the look. The one that said he’d known me his entire life and wasn’t fooled for a single second. Then he stood and brushed his hands on his trousers. His father, the Gamma, would have had a strategy mapped out by now, every detail accounted for. Donal wasn’t his father yet, but sometimes it showed.
“We can’t leave until after the escort departs,” he said. “If we disappear before Kaida does, your father will know something is wrong.”
Donal was always right. That’s what made him my perfect co-conspirator. “So what do we do until then?”
“You,” he said, pointing at me, “are going to go and quietly find two or three men we can trust with our lives. No hotheads, no gossips. Can you do that?”
I straightened. “Of course I can.”
Donal’s expression suggested he was not entirely convinced. “Go. I’ll handle the supplies and the horses. We leave the moment her carriage rolls out of the gate.”
I nodded and turned to go.
“Riley.”
I looked back.
“Quietly,” he repeated.
- Writer
