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“Jemel,” he says, “will you be safe here?”
“Safe? I am with my brothers,” Jemel says, voice slow and emotionless.
“You’ve never left the Rose Palace and now you travel north. So soon.”
Jemel frowns. “I’m not a child. And it is too late for your concern.”
It is not unexpected. Some things cannot be mended, he supposes. “I just want to help,” Xan says. “I will help you any way that I can.”
“You are helping. You are going to fetch my dagger. And you will help Damon in the battle to come at Urynwud, but—” Jemel pauses as if he is fighting himself over something. “I want you to do something else for me.” He sounds so vulnerable as he says that. It makes Xan ache.
“Of course,” Xan says.
“You know you owe me,” Jemel says as if he didn’t hear what Xan just said.
“I said I would,” Xan returns, unable to keep a note of hardness from his voice. For all that he cares for Jemel, for all that his heart breaks to comfort him, he cannot allow himself to forget that Jemel is stubborn as an old donkey.
“Get the linden chest,” Jemel says. “The one that contained the letter from Embel. It has all my work on the translations and everything I know about Pershel. I need it.” He looks up at Xan’s face, silver eyes glittering. “Can I trust you with this?”
“I don’t know,” says Xan. “I can promise you I will complete this task. But whether you can trust me after what happened between us, I cannot know.”
“Perhaps,” Jemel says, very softly, “if you do this for me, I will be able to learn that I can trust you.”
Xan nods. He says nothing more, but he leaves The Happy Swineherd with a tiny spark of hope in his heart.
Xan knows, when he reaches the Rose Palace, that he does not have much time.
There are riots everywhere and he has to change his route several times to avoid barricades. When he reaches the gates to the grand courtyard, he finds them open. They had been opened for the people of Attar to attend the Ascension, and they remain open.
More people are in the grand courtyard, starting fires. Racing in and out carrying treasures from the palace. Xan walks past more rioters, cheering, smashing and stealing as he makes his way through the marble halls.
He steps over the bodies of several dead guards. When he is recognised as an Imperial General, one or two of the braver rioters try to attack him, but he fends them off easily, armed with a sword against untrained men with sticks and knives.
Where are the guards? The enforcers? They could easily get this place under control with even a small number of armed trained men.
But he rethinks that after he turns another corner and finds even more rioters. More than he thinks he could take even with his advantages. Perhaps he should have worn some kind of disguise. He has no choice. He turns and flees. He’ll have to take another route to his chambers.
As he rounds one corner, then another a door suddenly opens and a man beckons him inside. He darts in and finds himself in a small chamber. A great oak desk is piled with papers and before him stands a short man in a tightly fitted formal jacket. It takes Xan a moment to place him. Warung, Atticul’s Chancellor. From the way things are organised in the room he is making ready to flee.
“At last,” Warung says.
Xan leans back against the door. “I am not here for you,” Xan says in Artemian, assuming this man thinks him a guard who has come to escort him from the palace safely. “Where Emperor Atticul?” he pauses, then adds, “Is he safe?”
Warung looks despairing, but hides it swiftly. “Oh, Xan of Pluma, forgive me.” If Warung is surprised that Xan is speaking Artemian with him, he does not show it. He speaks fast, but Xan understands enough. “He is gone. With army. Hevel Forest..”
“And palace. No guards?”
“Guards go with army.” Warung gestures to the closed door and says more in Artemian that Xan takes for a list of punishments that will be inflicted on the rioters outside.
Xan nods. He keeps his face quite placid. “Then I go with Emperor. When army leaving?”
“March begun,” says Warung. “They left at dawn.”
Dawn. Atticul must be even more eager than anticipated to get to the Amber Forest. But it matters not. An army marching will move slower than he can. “I meet them on road.”
Warung says nothing as Xan leaves the room, taking a moment to remove his leather jerkin so he can slip anonymously through the halls of the temple, bared to the waist in the cold air. He knows he looks distinctly Plumian, but he does not look like a tool of the Azurian Empire.
It is short work then to blend in with the crowds and find his way to his fine rooms in the palace and collect the dagger. As he picks it up it seems strangely warm, as if it is humming slightly. It makes him think of Jemel. He said he might learn to trust him again.
