THE LONELY KING.

The Tunnel Fire

Adex did not wait for orders to form. He turned from the gatehouse stair and ran, sword still drawn, straight for the servants' entrance that led down into the tunnels beneath the keep — the same tunnels where Merrick was supposed to be keeping the boy safely hidden from all of this.

The explosion had come from below. That much he knew. What he didn't know was whether anyone down there was still breathing.

He took the narrow stone steps two at a time, torchlight from the wall sconces flickering wildly as smoke began to curl up through the passage from somewhere deep below. The air thickened fast, hot and choking, and somewhere ahead he heard shouting — Merrick's voice, hoarse and desperate, calling a name that wasn't the boy's, because none of them had ever learned it.

"Boy! Where are you?"

Adex reached the bottom of the stairs and found the tunnel half-collapsed, chunks of old stone and broken timber scattered across the floor where the wall had blown inward. Merrick knelt in the wreckage, coughing hard against the smoke, dragging debris away from a smaller shape pinned beneath a fallen support beam.

"Merrick!" Adex was at his side in seconds, throwing his weight against the beam alongside the Chancellor. "Is he alive?"

"He's breathing. He's breathing, Your Grace, just help me—"

Together they heaved the beam aside. The boy coughed weakly, one arm curled protectively over his head, blood matting dark through his hair at the temple. Alive. Battered, but alive.

"Who did this?" Adex demanded, hauling the boy gently into his arms. "Who knew about this tunnel?"

"I don't know," Merrick said, voice raw. "I chose this route myself, not an hour ago. No one else should have known which passage we'd take."

That answer sat wrong in Adex's chest, cold and sharp. If no one else should have known, then someone had been watching them closely enough to guess it anyway — or someone close enough to hear Merrick give the order.

There was no time to chase that thought further. Above them, the sounds of battle were growing louder, closer, spilling from the breached gate into the streets surrounding the keep. Adex carried the boy himself back up through the smoke-filled stairwell, Merrick close behind, sword drawn now despite his robes, ready to fight for the first time in longer than either of them could remember.

They reached the inner keep's great hall to find it already half a war room. Servants had abandoned their usual duties to carry wounded soldiers in from the courtyard. Commander Ashgrove's lieutenants shouted orders across the chaos, rallying whatever men could still be spared from the collapsing eastern defense.

Adex laid the boy down on a bench near the hearth, and a healer was at his side within moments, pressing cloth to the wound at his temple.

"He'll live, Your Grace," the healer said after a quick examination. "The cut looks worse than it is. But he needs rest, and quiet, neither of which this castle can offer him tonight."

"Then we move him again," Adex said. "Somewhere no one would think to look. Not even our own people."

Merrick, still catching his breath, shook his head slowly. "Your Grace, if there's a spy close enough to know our tunnel route, moving him again inside these walls solves nothing. We need somewhere outside the castle entirely. Somewhere with no connection to the crown at all."

Adex thought of the answer before he wanted to. "Ashgrove's family holds a hunting lodge two hours north, past the river bend. No banners, no records tying it to the crown. If we send him there under guard, disguised as a merchant's household, no one watching this castle would think to look."

"That could work." Merrick hesitated. "But Your Grace — sending him means trusting Ashgrove with the truth of who he is."

"I trust Ashgrove with my life tonight," Adex said. "That will have to be enough."

He turned to find the Commander already crossing the hall toward them, blood-streaked and grim-faced from the fighting outside. "Your Grace, the gate is lost. We've pulled back to the second wall. It'll hold through the night, but Halveth's men aren't retreating — they're digging in like they mean to hold the outer districts permanently."

"Then it's worse than a raid," Adex said grimly. "It's an invasion."

"That's my read as well, Your Grace." Ashgrove's eyes moved briefly to the boy resting on the bench, question plain on his face, though he didn't ask it outright.

Adex made the decision in the space of a single breath. "Rell. I need to trust you with something bigger than tonight's battle."

By the time the boy was wrapped in borrowed traveling clothes and loaded into a plain merchant's cart under cover of the smoke-choked dark, dawn was less than two hours away. Ashgrove rode alongside the cart himself, four trusted men in unmarked armor flanking the sides, and Adex watched from the inner gate until the small convoy disappeared north along the river road.

"It's done," Merrick said quietly beside him. "He's as safe as we can make him tonight."

"Safe is a generous word for anything happening in this kingdom right now." Adex turned back toward the burning eastern districts, where smoke still climbed thick against the paling sky. "I need the full council awake within the hour. If Halveth has moved this openly, he's not hiding behind deniability anymore. He wants this seen."

"A public claim requires public proof," Merrick said slowly, thinking it through even as he spoke. "If he intends to reveal the boy's existence to justify all of this—"

"Then he needs the boy back," Adex finished. "Which means tonight's attack wasn't the whole plan. It was cover. While the city burned and every soldier we have fought at the gate, someone was meant to slip in during the chaos and take him."

Merrick's face drained of color for the second time that night. "Your Grace. The signalman. He said there were more men waiting in the eastern hills."

Adex was already moving before the sentence finished, shouting for a fresh horse, because if Halveth's true plan had been to use the siege as a distraction while a second team moved on the boy directly, then sending him north with only Ashgrove and four guards might not have been protection at all.

It might have been exactly what the enemy wanted.

He reached the stables at a dead run, calling for his horse to be saddled, when a rider came thundering back through the inner gate from the north road — one of Ashgrove's own men, horse lathered and half-collapsing beneath him, face white with a terror that told Adex everything before the man even opened his mouth to speak.

"Your Grace," the rider gasped, sliding from his saddle and nearly falling to his knees. "They were waiting for us on the river road. Commander Ashgrove is down. The boy is gone."