Tasia shrieked when someone grabbed her wrist, then realized it was Joslyn. The guard hauled Tasia to her feet and shoved her forward through a gap in the crowd. Joslyn cleared a path for the two of them, her short sword hacking left and right like a machete cutting through jungle overgrowth. The fat fruit merchant crashed into Tasia a moment later, but thanks to Joslyn’s swift twist on Tasia’s dress, the Princess disentangled herself from the merchant before he fell to the ground, knocking over two more men like bowling pins as he went.
Joslyn pushed Tasia ahead of her, the hilt of her dagger pressing into the small of Tasia’s back while the short sword continued to leap from side to side. The blade bobbed up and down so quickly that it almost looked to Tasia as if it moved of its own accord.
The Princess focused her attention on reaching the door, the Speckled Dog’s only entrance and exit. If she could open that door and escape up the narrow stairs to the street above them, this nightmare could still prove a short-lived mishap. She reached out, stretching towards the door’s rope handle.
A man’s face suddenly appeared an inch from hers. The mouth split into an angry gash, revealing a row of broken, yellow-and-brown teeth.
“Thief!” he shouted, and flecks of whiskey-tainted spittle sprinkled onto Tasia’s cheeks like light raindrops.
He grabbed the neck of Tasia’s dress, and without thinking, she lifted one riding boot and stomped down hard on his foot. The man cried out in pain and surprise, stumbling backwards and tripping on the two men behind him.
It looked as if all those hours training on the beach with Joslyn had paid off, after all.
Tasia grasped the door handle and flung it open.
She turned to tell Joslyn that she’d succeeded in opening the door, but the guard already seemed to know it had been opened. Joslyn wrapped an arm around Tasia’s waist and, with one final kick into the chest of a man brandishing a grease-coated steak knife, scooped the Princess off her feet and charged up the stairway.
Joslyn didn’t stop or set the Princess down when they reached the street. Still holding the Princess against her like an overlarge child, she sprinted up the street a full block, ducking into an unlit alleyway a minute later.
Only then did she set Tasia onto her feet.
“Are you hurt?” Joslyn asked, panting.
Tasia, who was still drunk but sobering quickly, hadn’t actually had the time to consider if she was hurt or not. She looked down at her body with surprise, as if only just remembering she had one. She didn’t seem to be in pain, but she patted herself down in a rapid inspection anyway, yanking her hand back from her midsection when it encountered the wet, sticky warmth of blood.
Had she been cut after all?
She rubbed her finger and thumb together, looking up at Joslyn with startled eyes. “There’s blood on me,” she said. Then the Princess saw the gash in the apa-apa tunic Joslyn wore, and realized the blood was not her own. “Joslyn! You’re bleeding.”
The guard looked down. “Yes. It’s not deep.”
“We must dress your wound,” Tasia said, lifting Joslyn’s apa-apa tunic and the linen shirt below.
The guard was right; the cut was long but not deep — a shallow, dark red swath contrasting against Joslyn’s bronze skin. It clearly wasn’t the first such injury she’d had; her entire flank was crisscrossed with white scars, along with a particularly thick scar that ran almost vertically down her side, like a seam.
Joslyn hastily pushed her tunic back down. “I’m fine,” she said, voice gruff. “We need to get back to the palace.”
“Yes,” Tasia said, still thinking about the map of scars she’d seen on her guard’s skin. “Alright.”
She let Joslyn lead the way. Guard tugged Princess forward by the wrist at a rapid clip as they traversed from alley to alley, staying off the main streets as much as possible. Gullies of sewage, dilapidated homes, and shuttered shops passed in a blur. The narrow alleys they traveled had no lamps, and the sun had fallen hours ago, giving them only the dimmest of light to navigate by. Had Tasia been leading the way, especially given her drunken state, she surely would’ve gotten lost within the first five minutes. That, or tripped over some unseen obstacle and fallen face-first into the sewage water. But Joslyn, who as far as Tasia knew hadn’t even lived in Port Lorsin until she was assigned to be the bodyguard of the Princess, hurried through the dark city with the same easy assuredness as a mountain goat would navigate a cliff face.
Or the assuredness an apa-apa would navigate a sand dune.
“I’m sorry your tunic got ripped,” Tasia slurred from behind the guard. Her feet moved on their own accord, as if Joslyn had somehow automated them. Nevertheless, she stumbled every few yards, sometimes because the guard was pulling her along too quickly, sometimes because she’d tripped on some piece of refuse. But the guard quickly righted Tasia each time before she could fall.
“It’s not a tunic,” Joslyn said without turning around. “It’s called a brizat, which makes it more cloak than tunic.”
“Briz… at,” Tasia repeated, trying to imitate Joslyn’s accent. “Wouldn’t it be hot to wear so much apa-apa wool in the des — ”
“Your Highness, with all due respect, I would prefer that we keep our talking to a minimum until we are safely within the palace walls.”
“Tasia,” the Princess mumbled. “I’m just Tasia.”
She’d really made a mess of things this time, hadn’t she? All she’d wanted was to be someone else for a while, to forget about her father and the council and the Empire and the War in the East and the assassination attempt and Mylla’s imminent abandonment. It wasn’t so wrong to want to escape all that, was it? Anyone else in her situation…
She could almost hear Mylla laughing in her ear. “You’re the Princess of the Four Realms,” she’d say. “Soon to be the most powerful woman in the Empire. Why are you complaining?”
“Because I don’t want to be anyone special,” Tasia muttered under her breath. “I want to be Tazy, the apa-apa merchant, who travels to the Adessian Islands and meets with the Silk King and has adventures.”
Joslyn glanced over her shoulder. “Did you say something?”
“No,” Tasia said.
The toe of Tasia’s boot slipped on something wet, and she toppled forward, crashing into Joslyn’s back. The guard twisted quickly, catching her and setting her upright again.
“Are you alright?” Joslyn asked. She winced just a little as she spoke. Just a small wince. But Tasia noticed these things in her guard now.
“I am,” Tasia said. “But what about you? How is your wound?” She reached for the hem of the brizat, but Joslyn pulled away. Tasia saw that the blood stain seemed to be spreading.
“There’s nothing I can do about it until we get back to the palace, Princess.”
“Tasia. Please just call me Tasia.”
Joslyn nodded and, with a gentle pull on Tasia’s wrist, she resumed her trek towards the palace.
19
“Please don’t report what happened tonight to Cole or to my father,” Tasia said when they at last made it back to her chambers.