Gideon


    The night passed poorly and without sleep.


    The cool early-morning air brushed Gideon’s arms as he donned the silver-ted Valiant Guard armor. It was a meticulous process, and it felt strange to be doing it once again. He’d thought The Viin’s Malevolent Guards would’ve thrown it off a cliff or melted it down for weapons. The metal nged as he bent at the waist to adjust his boots.


    He hated this uniform, hated all it stood for, but he hadn’t always. There had been a time when he was proud to bear the king’s crest, proud to be one of the few men permitted to serve His Majesty and the vision he held for Rennedawn.


    But now all the armor did was remind him of every terrible thing that had urred thest time he wore it. And chafe. Gods, how had he forgotten how ufortable this thing was?


    “How did the king expect you to do anything in this getup?” Keeley’s voice pulled Gideon’s attention, and he bit his gloved hand to keep from chuckling. “Don’tugh! I already feel ridiculous enough.”


    Gideon coughed into his fist, holding up a finger, thanking his lucky stars The Viin had Valiant Guard armor in storage from the ones he’d dispatched. “I’m notughing, just observing. Amid a pronouncedck of oxygen.”


    While the rest of the Malevolent Guards waited nearby, Gideon and Keeley were meant to take out the two Valianting down for their posts, then sneak in and relieve the two sitting outside the hidden tunnel. That was the easy part. The hard part was releasing the female guvre and somehow getting Fate’s creature out of the enclosure without the rest of the Valiant Guards being tipped off.


    A casual Friday.


    Keeley snorted as she stiffly started moving back toward camp. “For the record, you look even more ridiculous in this getup than usual, and yet I’ve had the strength to resist teasing you.”


    “The first day we met, you called me a tin can with arms.”


    Keeley looked genuinely confused by the statement. “That wasn’t teasing. That was a fact I was kind enough to ry to you.”


    Gideon didn’t have the will to argue with herck of sleep was doing him in, and so was the funny way she was walking. “Things riding up in there, Captain?”


    Metal met his shin at the end of her kick, and Gideon gripped his throbbing leg with a curse. “Gods. Sorry, I shouldn’t have referred to your undergarments. Please don’t report me to Becky.”


    “The fact that you could even think of such things when I look like a metal toolbox is absurd.”


    “Keeley, you could be wearing an oversize paper bag, and I would still have no trouble thinking of such things.”


    Toote now, you ignoramus.


    Keeley stared straight ahead, not reacting. Not even a twitch. This was a new low, being ignored. If anything, Gideon had always managed to be irritating, but perhaps even that finely honed skill was leaving him.


    As the camp where most of the Malevolent Guards remained came into view, Gideon stood still and let Keeley move ahead of him. He watched from atop the grassy hill, not hearing a word of what Keeley was saying to the rest of her staff but enraptured nheless as the captain dropped her satchel into Min’s waiting palm. The deference the others showed to her was clear in the way they all bowed their heads gently.


    Min and Andrea—two of Keeley’s shadows, it seemed—threw their arms around her, and the three of them remained together for a moment before Keeley pulled away. With a quick nod at Gideon, she began heading in the direction of the pce.


    Gideon stumbled after her onto the hidden path they’did out as the best ce to catch the next set of guards before they made it to the secret tunnel. He was supposed to be silent—if anyone heard theming, they were done for, and this whole borate n would have all been for naught.


    But Gideon was a Sage.


    So after approximately thirty minutes of holding out, his mouth opened and words spilled forth. “With the way youmand an audience, I could almost believe that your father was a king.”


    Keeley shot a hand to her lips as they walked and snapped at him, “My father, if that was even the man writing those letters to me, was a fraud. The letters were my keeper’s way of tricking me so I wouldn’t escape her house. For all I know, she paid someone else to write them, or even wrote them herself.”


    She’d told him of this an hour before, by the pond. That her dad was a chatan who had fathered Keeley with a mother who had never wanted children, then left her alone with the woman. But she’d received letters from her supposed father frequently, and hemitted to the lie they’d told Keeley from the time she was a little girl.


    That her father was the king and she was being hidden away for her own protection.


    “I still don’t understand why she did such a thing,” he said now.


    Keeley seemed focused on the bushes in front of them, where they’d set up a lookout for the king’s guards, but paused her assessment to give him a sardonic lift of her brow. “I should think you of all people would understand a person of authority using your ignorance against you. The king knew whose son you were for the entirety of your employ. My guardian wanted me to be a good little girl, so she told me every possible lie, and when I misbehaved—”


    She stopped talking, and Gideon’s blood ran cold as they both got into position hidden among the bushes. “When you misbehaved what?” he whispered.


    She touched the burned-off piece of hair at the end of her braid. “She’d hold me down, sometimes even using rope, and she’d cut my hair.”


    Don’t let them cut my hair. Please.


    The thought of a young girl with golden locks being held to the floor made his stomach twist hard in anger. Would she have screamed? Did she wait and hope someone woulde for her, or did she fight back?


    Before he could ask more, one of the Valiant Guards crested the hill, followed closely by the second. In the next moment, Keeley gasped as an arrow whooshed through the air and buried itself in the first one’s eye, a second spearing through the remaining one’s forehead.


    Keeley straightened and slowly turned to look at Gideon, who was holding the crossbow against his shoulder. At her raised eyebrow, he lowered it and winced sheepishly. “I apologize. Did you want to do that part?”


    Keeley fiddled with the end of her braid—a nervous tic that made Gideon’s chest burn. Indigestion. Hopefully.


    “No, that’s all right, sir knight. Happy to have you pull your weight.” She patted his shoulder, moving around him and tucking her thick locks into the back of her armor and the rest into her helmet, which she then donned, obscuring her face. “Ready?”


    “Let’s go free a mother-to-be.” Gideon pped his hands together, securing his own helmet, now unable to see anything but Keeley’s honey-colored eyes. It was afort to know that even if her mouth wasn’t, her eyes were bright and smiling.


    The ease between them didn’tst, though, as Gideon straightened into the same stance he’d done every day for as long as his recent memory allowed. Keeley followed suit, the instruction he’d given her the night before working to near perfection with little practice.


    It had taken Gideon months to get the march right and to stopughing at how ridiculous it felt to raise one’s knees up with every step like a deranged swan. Keeley didn’t look ridiculous, though. She looked regal and poised.


    An incredible aplishment in Gideon’s eyes.


    When they reached the hidden tunnel, Gideon did the customary knock, hoping to all the gods that this side of the tunnels’ secret knocking pattern was known by so few that they wouldn’t have thought to alter it.


    The stone wall slid open, pulling branches of hidden ivy leaves with it. Behind it stood a dark hall and two guards who were—as Gideon had predicted—piss drunk.


    “Rordon. Luther.” Gideon nodded, attempting to alter his voice, though he wasn’t certain they had the presence of mind to recognize it anyway. “We’vee to relieve you.” An empty bottle of brandy was still rolling back and forth on the ground as both guards exchanged a nce before scrambling out of the tunnels and presumably back to the barracks to sleep off the worst of it.


    “Drunk? They were drunk on the job? Did you know this was going to happen?” Keeley grabbed his arm and tugged him along. The tunnel door swung shut behind them when Gideon pulled on the torch lever against the far wall.


    “Those two are always drinking on the job. I’ve yet to see them take anything seriously. It’s why they were given a post at this tunnel,” Gideon exined, pulling two torches free, holding one and handing the other to Keeley.


    She took it with a sputter of disbelief that he found charming. “Why were they given a post at all if they’re so irresponsible?”


    “They’re the king’s cousins.”


    Keeley held the torch with both hands and rolled her eyes, a marker for her displeasure. “Oh, of course. Mediocre men receiving positions of power they haven’t earned because of their birthrights. How against the grain.”


    “That sounded sarcastic.”


    He was surprised she didn’t set him on fire. “It was!”


    As they walked, Gideon guided her carefully down corridors well out of use, yelping when a cobweb caught on his arm.


    Keeley sighed. “It is a wonder that the kingdom agrees only men should be allowed among the Valiant Guard when they can barely defend against the threat of a spider.”


    “I didn’t think it was a spider,” Gideon argued. “I thought it was a centipede.”


    “What is the difference? In either case, you’re afraid of bugs.”


    “I’m afraid of anything with more than twenty legs.” Gideon shuddered and narrowly avoided another spiderweb. “And I don’t think the kingdom agrees; I think it’s just how it’s always been. You’d be surprised how easy it is for some to ignore the problems of the world if they aren’t impacted by them.”


    Keeley frowned, and her armor clinked an unpleasant sound off one of the stone walls. “That’s wrong.”


    “You think there are no ignorant people in the world?” Gideon asked skeptically.


    “For the first twelve years of my life, all I knew was ignorance, but I mean it’s wrong to be defeated by it. The only way for things to change is to not settle for what is and instead find a way to care.”


    Gideon rubbed at his chin and frowned. “How does one manage that?”


    Keeley pulled off her helmet for a moment and shed him a small smile that gave him a simr feeling to when she’d kicked him in the shin. “You give them a very good reason to and hope they think it’s a good reason, too.”


    She pulled the helmet back on and continued without him, and he struggled to keep up as they turned into the next corridor. She’d studied his map well. Gideon was beginning to wonder if he was slowing her down.


    “I feel redundant,” he grumbled.


    “I was going to say ‘superfluous,’ but all the same, I suppose.” She grinned, and that just-kicked feeling now felt like a cannonball to the gut.


    “So, you have no idea who was writing those letters to you when you were locked away? They never came to visit you?” Gideon asked, attempting to make sense of her story before they reached the guvre.


    Keeley shook her head, shoving a cobweb out of the way with her free hand. “No. It was only ever me and my, uh, ‘mother.’ The letters were all I ever had of him.”


    “I won’t give her any credit, but you turned out rather well despite it.”


    “Was that apliment?” she asked, eyes narrowed.


    “I’m afraid it was.”


    “See that it doesn’t happen again.” The words were snide, but there was clearughter in her voice.


    Gideon did a little jog until he was next to her again. “So, it’s truly just coincidence that whoever was writing those letters to you ims to be a king? No ties to the office traitor?”


    She was steady and sincere when she answered him. “No. Whoever the traitor is has nothing whatsoever to do with me. Although…”


    “Although?” Gideon supplied.


    “Although I suppose whoever my mother was working with to fool me could be seeking their revenge at losing their post. When I escaped to Massacre Manor as a girl, The Viin took pity on me and gave me a job. No need for more letters. Haven’t spoken to my mother since.”


    “He hired a twelve-year-old to be a Malevolent Guard?” Gideon was outraged.


    Sheughed, and it was a joyous, husky sound. “No, of course not. He had me sorting files until I turned seventeen. I joined the ranks not long after that.”


    Impressive. She was impressive, and that was a dratted problem. “Right, well. This is a lead, at least. When we’re done here, we’ll take this to The Viin and see if we can do some backward tracing.”


    There was an uneasy set to Keeley’s shoulders, but before Gideon could ask her what had put it there, a loud screech echoed through the longest corridor on their left. A screech of distress. A screech of agony.


    “The guvre,” Keeley said, lifting her mouthpiece to reveal a grimace.


    “Let’s go!” Gideon yelled, taking off down the hall.


    “She’s in pain,” Keeley said, running right alongside him. He noticed her clutching a hand to her chest, as if there was a thread from one woman to another that tugged them all when one was in pain.


    Gideon pushed his legs harder and grimaced.


    “Let’s hope to the gods it’s notbor pains, or this rescue just became far riskier than when we began.”