“I’ll keep that in mind,” she murmured.
He released her roughly and spun on his heel before moving through the trees as if he were made from the darkness itself.
Tempest rubbed the back of her neck. The Jester was a problem, but so was his wolfish protector. She’d have to tread carefully with that one. While Pyre played games and twisted words, Brine was honest and blunt. She didn’t doubt him for one second when he said he’d kill her.
Another wave of pain stabbed her temple. Tempest winced as colorful spots began to dance over her vision. It wouldn’t be long now until the migraine slammed into her, full force. “Dumb wolf,” she muttered. It was highly unlikely that she’d get any sleep now between the pain and the nausea.
Tempest trudged toward the city gates, rearranging her cloak and pulling her hood up to once more protect her ears from the cold. Then, she steeled herself for the long trek back to the capital city, to her bed.
Five
Tempest
“Stupid, strutting alpha males and their tempers,” Tempest found herself reciting, over and over again like some kind of mantra. Her mood had grown decidedly worse by the time she finally reached the outer walls of Dotae—which was saying something, since her bad mood back in Pyre’s cave had been considerable.
Reaching the city walls had been uneventful, other than having to battle against the incredibly cold night air and the pounding in her skull. She’d decided against entering through the main city gates—women traipsing about in the night received a certain reputation. While she wasn’t exactly a proper lady, she still needed to keep her reputation somewhat intact. So, she’d skulked to the southeastern part of the city. The slums. The city wall there was crumbling and had been clearly overlooked for some time. In fact, she knew that the patrol tended to avoid this area, so it was never well guarded. She’d bet her best dagger this was how Pyre got his drugs into the city.
Using the loose and broken bricks, Tempest nimbly ascended the wall. A giddiness swept over her as she climbed higher and higher, almost whooping in satisfaction when she reached the top of the thirty-foot wall. Her dress and cloak whipped around her in the winter wind. She’d like to see any of her fellow Hounds accomplish such a task while wearing a gown.
The wall curved and smoothed out in the distance on either side of her. While she longed to walk around the perimeter of her city for a while, that was hardly inconspicuous, and she preferred to go about her business unseen.
She took a deep breath of freezing air that bit her lungs, wondering why she hadn’t just gone straight through the city gates. Wanting to avoid the guards was a poor excuse—and largely a lie that she could not fool herself with. Ultimately, she knew, deep down, why she did not want to return to the Hound barracks. After everything she discovered over the past few weeks, Tempest felt less and less like a member of their ranks, and she could hardly stand to look at any of them.
Keeping secrets from her uncles pained her. She’d never lied to them. Every time she lied, it felt like she lost another piece of herself. Her entire life, all she’d wanted was a family and to fit in. Her uncles had created that for her. Now, it felt like it was on the edge of collapse.
Your so-called family might be murderers.
She shied away from that thought. Tempest didn’t want to think—or want to believe—that this was the case, especially given how they’d cared for her. And what of Madrid? He’d never been one for speaking many words to anyone, much less to Tempest. She’d always assumed that was because he was the head of the Hounds and had far too much to do. He had no time to concern himself with the likes of a scraggly orphan girl who’d been too wild to be cared for within King Destin’s court.
But it was becoming glaringly clear that Madrid actually paid more attention to her than she’d initially thought. Now, she couldn’t help but wonder if that was because he suspected her of wrongdoing.
Like betraying your king and country.
Tempest jumped from the wall to the nearest building and traveled for another fifteen minutes across shanties and roofs. She paused and peered down from the edge of a rowdy tavern. Drunks laughed beneath her while others crept quietly through the shadowy streets. Though night was fully in bloom, the time of day never seemed to matter in the slums. The people here never quite went to sleep.
A whimper caught her attention. She scanned the street and spotted a nightwalker being accosted by a man who was two times her size. Tempest rose onto the balls of her feet, preparing to intervene, when the woman slapped the man across the face and stomped on his foot for good measure. The man held his hands up and back away.
“Get sober,” the nightwalker hissed. “Or never see me again!”
The disturbance settled, and Tempest glanced at the small gang of children who had darted from the tavern below, crusty bread in their grubby little hands.
Tempest chuckled. She was quite certain, even from up here, that she recognized a couple of the children from the orphanage she often helped out at. The question was, had they stolen the bread, or had it been given? Probably the former. Little miscreants. An angry man ran into the street and shook his fist at the fleeing children. “If I catch you again, you won’t like it!”
Stolen it was.
The children of this orphanage had always had a knack for thievery. Tempest had learned some of her best tricks from them; she owed them a great debt for bestowing on her their secrets. With a small smile, she cast her gaze to the southwest and the northeast: the merchant quadrant and the working-class quadrant. They were completely silent. Most of the residents would be in bed, likely exhausted from a hard day of work.
The final quadrant in the northwest was the most affluent part of the city, within which the palace and the seaport were situated. It, too, appeared to be dead asleep, but Tempest knew it was all a façade. The members of the upper class were secretly as rowdy as the slums, only they kept their business indoors. There were parties and violent revels and sordid affairs happening within every third or fourth grand building. The revelries wouldn’t end until the sun rose, when the hedonistic upper class fell into bed only to repeat the same reckless behavior again the following night.
Dotae was huge. How many people did it hold? On the ground, it was hard to grasp the scale of the population of the capital city. Up on the roofs, however, Tempest had a bird’s eye view of Dotae. She knew to triple the number of people in the slums compared to the merchant sector, and even that was a conservative estimate. All in all, Tempest imagined there were close to a million people living within Dotae’s walls.
An intimidating city. There wasn’t a city half as big, not for leagues and leagues.
While she enjoyed the city, even loved it, she wasn’t a true resident of Dotae. In her heart, she was a forest girl. Daughter of a healer. Lover of all that was pure. It was all she had left that had been unsullied. By King Destin. By the Hounds. By the Jester himself.
Tempest was not entirely sure how to even reach the little clearing in the forest where her mother’s cottage had been. It was but a faint memory, and it pained her that, with every day that passed, it grew a little fainter still. Her heart stung just as painfully as the bitter night air did her face. She was losing hold of the one clear, coherent part of her past that made her who she was. Forgetting her mother would erase the last piece of the forest girl from her soul.