Changer of Days by Alma Alexander

then bit her lip as she realized what she had said. She reached out to lay an apologetic hand on Anghara’s arm. “I’m sorry…not today of all days…I shouldn’t have said that…But there has to be a way—you’re not asking for a guide into the mountains, surely taking you up on the battlements for a few minutes could hurt nobody.”
    Anghara’s eyes were sad. “Don’t get my hopes up, Senena. I have learned to hope for nothing, it is less painful.”
    This, it seemed, had been entirely the wrong thing to say. Senena’s eyes glittered, and she lifted her chin with a grim sort of determination. “I will see it done,” she vowed.
    Just as Senena had once sat listening to a conversation thought to be private between a king and his counsellor, this exchange in the guardroom in its turn was overheard by a pair of ears not meant to be privy to it. Even as Anghara was being escorted back to her cell and Senena left the guardroom to begin a determined attempt to accede to Anghara’s wish, a message was already making its way down the corridors of the keep, out across snow-piled courtyards, into the cold, empty white streets of the city, to a shabby hostelry just inside the city gates. The boy who carried it, a wiry waif of some eight years or so, looked around the inn’s common room with a swift glance, and crossed unerringly to where two young men sat in desultory silence by the fireside. He pulled at his forelock in an age-old gesture of respect, but what was in his eyes was closer to adoration as he lifted them to the face of the older of the two, a dark-haired youth with piercing blue eyes. The boy handed over a much-folded scrap of parchment, tugged his forelock again, and left without uttering a word. The youth opened the parchment, and sat staring at it in silence for a long while; then he rose to his feet, crumpling the message almost heedlessly as his hands closed into fists at his sides.
    “This is it,” said Kieran, and his voice was flat and cold, a steel blade leaving its sheath. “Sif is coming back within days, and we will not get another chance. We go in tomorrow.”
     
    Kieran’s men had caught up with the splinter group they had been chasing, but they hadn’t found Anghara; worse, the group contained none of the five men whom Sif had spoken about, the men who knew who Anghara was. Those whom he had caught could tell Kieran very little except to gloat over the fact he had run after the wrong bait and the prize he had been after was that much closer to the point of no return. Perhaps he could have taken a lucid decision if any of those men had had the barest inkling of what they had done. But instead they crowed over an achievement that was meaningless to them, except perhaps inasmuch as they had figured out who was chasing them and they had managed to comprehensively hoodwink someone with Kieran’s reputation. When one of Kieran’s men lost his patience and floored a grinning soldier with a violent blow, Kieran had not intervened, and neither had Rochen; after that, killing was but a step away. Kieran had long since gotten over his sensibilities where enemy lives were concerned, but these were revenge killings, done in cold blood. He was not proud of them, or of himself for standing back and abrogating the responsibility. The truth was, he had been furious, sick with anger and helplessness. That didn’t excuse what he had done, but at least it made it easier to cope with—it was as though naming his sin drew some of its sting.
    “I’m not giving up,” he had said, driven into a dangerous, almost fey mood. If Anghara was really immured in Miranei, his actions would be as insignificant as a mosquito trying to bite a knight through armor. He knew it. The knowledge was a poisoned arrow in his heart.
    By this time both Adamo and Charo were with him, and the brothers, who keenly remembered the Cascin to which a waif they’d known as Brynna Kelen had arrived so many years ago, seconded him