The Rebel Assassin

Chapter 7: Cheating

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I nudged Pitch a little faster and pulled up next to Joshua at the head of the group. It had been a few days since we left the boat and the Mitrove, and we had mostly focused on speed since then, with limited opportunities for talking.

"Should we hear back at the next place we stop?" I asked.

"You're the one who helped Dell organize this, shouldn't you know?"

I shrugged. "I like bossing people around, not being in charge. I make sure not to be too invested in things so no one can expect to rely on me."

"I hope that's a joke," Dell muttered on my other side as Joshua rolled his eyes. "But you already have your answer, anyway."

We looked up as she pointed. In the distance, a large black bird was descending on the town we were heading towards. It was the last stop before the mountain base town where we would pick up supplies and start up the mountain trail.

Even Pitch seems to perk up a little. "Race me?" I asked Wes, bouncing up and down a little. Finally, news. Hopefully the good kind.

"Nah, I don't wanna — yeah, bye!" He kicked his horse into a gallop in the middle of the sentence, leaving me a few paces behind and yelling wordlessly as we raced toward the town.

The bland landscape we had been riding through for the past day blurred into streaks as we ran down the narrow road, hooves pounding up dust and wind yanking handfuls of my hair out of its braid. We raced from the road onto the town's main street side by side, laughing.

The rest of them caught up with us after we had already tied up the horses and sunken into the shade.

"Immature," Joshua pronounced, looking down at us lying on the scraggly grass.

"I agree," I said. "Wes, that was a very immature way to start a race."

"You're just bitter 'cause you lost."

"We tied, even after you cheated!"

Dell ignored us and kept riding. "The bird is trained to wait at the inn's stable. Come on."

I jumped up to follow, buzzing from the race and nervousness, and we found the small inn — if it could be called that, with just two rooms available — in the center of the town. The half-decrepit stables were filled with slats of sunlight and housed only a donkey and the newly arrived bird.

"Looks like your plan worked," Joshua said, untying a pouch from the bird's leg. "Yet again, I find myself astonished."

"One day it'll stop being a surprise," I told him.

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Vain paced the small Coramine cell, panicked. His badge was a fake. He didn't understand — except he was starting to.

They had ridden into the town, stabled their horses where they would stay until they returned to Coramine on the return trip. Then he and Nick went to purchase supplies, but the storeowner jacked up his prices seeing the quality of their uniforms. He could have argued the prices down, but what was the point when they had been given the badges to save time? He pulled out the badge and coolly told the owner they would pay the prices on the labels, or he would be in contempt of Her Royal Highness.

The storeowner looked at the badge, pronounced it an unconvincing fake, and threw them out.

The town guards Vain showed the badge to next in outrage didn't find it any more convincing. "Who checked your documents?" The captain demanded. The tone of his voice said that any guard who accepted that badge was going to be in a significant amount of trouble.

"The guard at the gate," Vain said impatiently, barely holding onto his anger. He was the one who would bear the consequences if the mission was held up for too long. He sat and stewed in anger as they sent someone to fetch the guard from the gate.

Anger was replaced with dread when that person returned and quietly informed the captain that both gate guards were found unconscious, bound in rope and piled near the gate.

Seconds later, the town guards had seized each of member of Vain's company and forced them into Coramine's jail.

And now, pacing his cell, Vain thought about the friendly woman at the gate. At first he had been worried for her, thought the rebels she mentioned when they arrived had come by just after they entered the town and beat up the gate guards. He had felt guilty for not taking just a little longer to enter the town, for not being there to fight off the rebels!

But now... now he thought about the moment after she checked the badge, when she was barely holding onto everything at once as she grabbed things from her pockets. He had been laughing. He hadn't been watching closely. He hadn't suspected anything.

"Can I see the badge?" He asked the town guard on the other side of the bars. His voice had lost its self-riotiousness.

"What for?" She asked gruffly, clearly impatient with such boring guard duty. "You're staying here until our message gets to Maenar and they send someone up here to confirm your identity." Still, perhaps out of pity, she picked up the wallet from the table holding the things they had taken from them and opened it, facing him.

Vain stared at it, then wrapped a hand around a bar and rested his forehead against it. His head ached. "I need a favor," he said quietly. "It's important."

Because the badge she showed him, the one the town guards had taken from him, wasn't a royal badge with the princess's seal.

It was a thoroughly unconvincing fake.