The Rebel Assassin

Chapter 11: The Protectorate

It was horrible, even leaning on Wes for balance for about an hour after we left the border behind. Everyone kept shooting me furtive looks, as if I might collapse at any moment, and knowing they weren't far off the mark only made me more irritated about it. It was getting easier, but not because the sick weak feeling was going away, I thought — only because I was getting used to it.

Maybe this was the "balance" Caer liked to prattle about. The price of magic. Guardians were protected inside Solangia because of the consequences of killing us, but once we crossed out of the border, we were twice as vulnerable.

I hated it.

"I'm fine," I growled at Joshua as he looked over his shoulder as us.

"Who said I cared?" He asked coolly, but he looked as if he did. "I just want you to stop tripping over rocks and knocking them into me. I thought thieves were supposed to be graceful."

I kicked the largest rock I could reach into his ankles out of spite and he sped up to get out of range.

"Hey, stonehead, she's the Assassin," Wes called after him.

But I had been trained as a thief, I thought. That didn't change just because it turned out we'd been purposefully mislabeled, like jars in a pantry switched around by some kids as a joke. Thinking of myself as the Thief for ten years didn't change just because it turned out it hadn't been true.

Could I even call myself an assassin? Roman had made me part of his court, true, but my only experience with killing had been training for the sake of it, fighting in the match house, and the occasional brawl in the city — and none of those were the jobs of assassins. I'd never killed in cold blood. I'd been forced to kill Xalva, not that I regretted it now that I knew he'd been Nemia's mentor, and a horrible one at that.

It was easier to think about these inconsequential things than to think about how I felt, or how this un-Solangian ground felt beneath my feet, so I let myself get carried away by it.

Thief. Assassin. Thief. Both?

By the time we reached the city of the Protectorate close to midnight, our way lit by lanterns, my head was spinning and my body was practically numb. I didn't even mind when Dell, who had barely spoken a word to me in ages, took charge of getting me into our shared room at the inn.

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Technically, all the livable land that wound between the mountain peaks between Solangia and Emorial was the Protectorate, a state (barely a country) that was nominally independent and neutral but in practice barely distinct from Emorial. It had no army. Rather, it had prisoners.

In the city of the Protectorate — most of the state's population was gathered into one city, with only a few isolated farms scattered in the rest of its land — was a castle that doubled as a university, but no one outside the Protectorate went there willingly. Other countries sent certain individuals there. Young nobles rousing trouble but too politically important to kill might be unceremoniously dumped there, or second heirs the first heir wanted out of the way might be tucked away there.

And in return for the Protectorate providing this prison for all other country's uses, it was understood that the Protector would kill any of the prisoners if her state were to be attacked. And so it never was.

"And everyone's okay with this?" I'd asked Caer disbelievingly when he covered it during our brief lesson on surrounding countries (brief because I got bored with it quickly).

"Sure," he'd said. "It's convenient for everyone. Rulers of other countries get a prison no one's allowed to complain about their family or friends being imprisoned in, since nominally it's a university or vacation spot. And the Protectorate gets a neater alternative to keeping an army. No one will attack the Protectorate, because then the Protector would kill whatever prisoners of that country she has in her charge, and then that ruler would face the consequences for letting those people be killed."

I'd digested this for several minutes, because it seemed too ridiculous to be real. "That is so overly complicated. Why can't people just keep their prisoners in their own country and be done with it? I hate politics."

Of course, what had seemed like the unnecessary complications of nobles and rulers then made much more sense now.

Take the Black Knight, for example. Aeric wouldn't want to get rid of him, the same way he wouldn't want to get rid of me or Nemia — if Solangia was ever attacked, he'd want to be able to call up all of Solangia's Guardians to protect his kingdom. But he also didn't want to keep three Dark Guardians around his castle, making everyone nervous (himself included). The solution? Protectorate.

The only thing that didn't make sense was why he'd sent the Black Knight to the protectorate instead of me. After all, it was the Assassin prophesized to kill the king. Gordan had said, apparently repeating Jaden, that the Sage had felt better being able to keep a close eye on me, rather than never being sure if I was staying put in the Protectorate or crawling back to Solangia to kill Aeric. But I had another theory.

There was already a Knight in Solangia. The White Knight, Abram. What if the real reason, or at least another reason, Tobias preferred to send the Black Knight away was because he didn't want the two Knights getting close? I wondered what that would be like. Two sides of the same coin meeting. The Light and Dark Knights. It sounded powerful.

I thought about this until Dell forced me to get out of bed with the sheer force of her glare and started getting ready for the day.

"You're not part of the plan," I said to her as I tied my hair back, more of a question than a statement.

"No, I have my own job. I'm going to sneak around, look for clues about who he is."

I nodded. We knew it wouldn't be obvious who the Black Knight was, though he would have to be eighteen years old. The prisoners — well, "guests" — of the Protectorate didn't go around announcing their status, since the entire castle was the perfect target for assassins. A bunch of important people isolated from their home and their resources. And the Knight may not have even known what he was in the first place.

"Good luck with the embassy," Dell offered.

I nodded, and didn't mention that I actually had no plans to follow the strategy of the rest of our group involving the embassy. "So you're talking to me now?"

She pursed her lips. "I wasn't not talking to you."

"You've been angry at me ever since I left the Capital."

"Maybe. I had good reason. You abandoned us. I wasn't ready to forgive you, but I guess with Aiden splitting off... well, you were right to leave. We all should have seen it coming, and now he's a danger to the entire organization because we didn't."

"It's not like I knew," I said, though a voice in my head pointed out that I'd never trusted Aiden much. "I had other reasons for leaving. It's not your fault."

Dell didn't look much like she believed me, but she wasn't the type to take other people's word for anything. She'd believe me once she'd triple-checked her sources and come to the same conclusion. For now she slipped out of the inn to go do whatever spy things she could manage in this new city, and I went downstairs to meet the rest of the group and then promptly piss them all off by disappearing.

No offense to them, but it was pretty obvious Roman had ordered Joshua to get a grip on the Black Knight's loyalties before anyone else, and I couldn't let that happen. I had to find him first. For that matter, I didn't really want any of the rebels getting to him before me either — they'd try to indoctrinate him into their mindset as surely as Joshua would try to win him over to the Assassin's Court.

I wasn't just racing the princess's envoy anymore. I was racing everyone. And for the Black Knight's sake, I had to win.