The Bounty Hunter

Chapter Thirty Eight

Chapter Thirty Eight

The three of them stood just inside Ravina’s front door as she examined them critically. Maeven’s teeth were chattering and she had gone as pale as a corpse, causing Safita to throw glances which alternated between frustrated and worried at her every few minutes. Hergun, for his part, was utterly calm - at least Safita assumed he was because he had put his helmet on and she couldn’t see his face. “You really don’t need to have that on yet,” Ravina sighed.

“Oh well,” he replied, his voice sounding strangely ethereal as it echoed around his head, “it saves carrying it.” Safita scoffed and crossed her arms as Ravina glared at her. “Now you all know what you’re doing I assume? No need to look at me like that Safita, I’m just making sure.”

“Can we go yet?” she merely responded. “I want to get this over with.”

Ravina glared at her again and said, “You two are using false names from the moment we leave this house… How about Lusia and Andalia?” The two girls nodded their agreement and Ravina sighed, massaging her forehead as she tried to sort her plan out in her mind. “Right, Hergun you know you two are leaving through the back. Try not to be seen if at all possible; I don’t really want to have to answer my neighbours’ questions about why I had a palace guard leaving my house in the middle of the night when I get back.”

“Course,” he replied before clunking away through the house and towards the back exit.

“I don’t know how he’s going to navigate the wall,” she muttered before opening the front door. “Let’s go then.”

The walk up through the city took them nearly all night and the sun was beginning to rise as they reached the uppermost levels of Coraina. From up where they stood they could see its light spread gently out over the city and the land surrounding it, tingeing the sky with a rosy pink which replaced the red that stretched across the horizon and burning that pink away, transmuting it into a pale blue as the birds which flitted from tree to tree began to sing. It seemed, Ravina thought to herself, like too beautiful a morning for what was going to happen. As they strolled through the city people began to spill out from their doors, yawning and stretching as they headed about their business and curtains were pulled up from black windows; here on the higher levels there were far fewer shops, if any at all, and the people that filled the streets were all dressed as the servants of their masters and mistresses, bustling from place to place as they prepared the houses for the day. In large glass windows set high into the stone you could catch glimpses of maids’ skirts fluttering to and fro as they dressed their mistresses and heated baths while below, never stopping, the two of them drew nearer and nearer to the palace.

As they did so the crowds began to thin out again and soon there were only a couple of women drifting through the streets; up here, above the everyday bustle of the ordinary inhabitants, it seemed like the city had been emptied by a plague and the very air seemed heavier, as if the buildings were holding their breath and waiting to see what the two tiny wanderers would do.

Before they reached the palace they veered off, heading towards a small shadowy alcove in the wall which was round the corner from the gate and hidden from the eyes of the guards. Ravina, quickly dropping the basket of bread which she was carrying, stepped up, placing one foot on the alcove and staring up at the wall. “It looks larger from up here than it did before,” she breathed as her fingers felt for something to hold onto.

“Now’s really not the time to back out,” came the reply from behind her as her other foot was guided to a pair of narrow shoulders and she crouched over the head beneath her. Ravina leant with both hands against the wall as her base stood up slowly, lifting her higher and higher into the air and she walked them up the stone, heading towards the battlements on top. When both women were standing up straight she was just able to reach the roof of the house beside the wall and pull herself up onto that, spreading her weight out over her hands and her feet and crawling awkwardly up the tiles. “Now remember,” she said as knelt over the gutter, “listen for the sound of the gates opening and something about the bread being late before you appear.”