Chapter Three: Playing Damsel is Distressing
Aya kept her eyes wide and teary, as barbaric Prince Carnen dragged her out into the rain and pressed his dagger to her throat. Of course he was not brave enough to stand alone out here and face this blockade of overturned wagon and uniformed men armed with flint-lock rifles, but his poorly thought out plan of using his fiance to shield him was dangerous for both of them. The tarp over their heads would keep the gun powder dry, and Charlotte suspected wearily that Carnen had absolutely no idea just how accurate these new weapons smuggled in from Arakesh could be. “What a strange line of sticks,” he taunted, exactly as Aya had dreaded, “but I’ve seen they have terrible aim.” Not these new models, idiot. “So get out of my road, right this instant, or you’ll have the blood of your duke’s daughter on your hands.”
“Your highness, do remember that these men are your subjects,” Aya loudly rebuked him, and Carnen’s eyes narrowed, clearly caught off guard by her tone this first time she had dared speak. Aya ignored him for the moment though, keeping her eyes locked on the captain of the city watch in front of her, the leader of this ill-advised ambush. “You are Captain Banen, correct? Most esteemed officer of the city watch, only recently dismissed from your duties.”
“That is correct,” the man muttered, rifle still trained on Carnen’s head. “And you are Lady Charlotte? In truth?” He did not actually know Charlotte. He had glimpsed her running around the palace gardens a few times maybe when she was only knee high, and he had certainly never been introduced to Aya, whose traditional maid’s uniform of veil and bonnet had always neatly hid her features. “This brute has taken you captive?”
“Certainly not.” Aya laughed with just the right amount of nervous energy. “My father, your duke, has just agreed to my engagement to this most dashing son of our current sovereign. Prince Carnen is now taking me home to the castle where the official ceremony will be hosted, but you, good sir, have blockaded our only direct route there, and you truly must stand aside.”
“This brute and his raiders were seen marching on the duke’s estate, set to pillage the place no doubt. We feared the duke had been slain.”
“No, good sir, he is very much alive and well,” Aya assured him, “and he consented to my departure this night in company with our fair prince.”
“That so-called prince has clearly abducted you, madam.”
“You question my word?” she demanded in outrage, and the captain cringed, gun wavering.
“I… no, of course not, madam, but your words are being most clearly coerced in this moment.”
“In what fashion?”
“There is a knife at your throat!”
Aya batted it aside and Carnen let her, hand dropping limp to his side and eyes weighing into her in bemusement. “That was simply a test, good sir. When we saw your blockade I bet my dear fiance that it was patriots of this country and not bandits, men who would defend me most fiercely. His highness doubted that and said you would be scared into retreat, even if you believed me in danger, yet you have ever so admirably stood your ground, so I win the bet, and we can abandon all this quite dramatic theater. Yes?” She locked eyes with Carnen, and he sheathed his blade without a word. Rash blustering idiot that he was, at least he could take basic cues.
She turned back to the captain. “Now will you kindly haul aside your wagon, captain? And trust in my father’s wisdom, not work to sabotage his decisions?”
“You swear the duke is unharmed? And you go with this savage of your own free volition?”
“I swear it,” she enforced.
“Even in spite of your attire.” He looked pointedly to her bare feet and night-shift, and Aya clutched self-conscious hands to her chest.
“Are you oggling me, captain?”
“No. No, madam, of course not,” he stammered, turning bright red.
“What I was doing in this carriage with my soon-to-be husband is my own affair, and you will spread no word of it. Is that clear?”
“Yes, madam. I apologize. For everything. We will not delay you further.” He slung the rifle over his back and shouted to his men to dismantle their barricade. “We will carry on to meet with Duke Marseir, your grace, and send signal to our other guerrilla troops not to further inconvenience your convoy.” That was more a pointed threat for the barbarians than it was an assurance for Lady Charlotte. The black-armored brutes were already tensing.
“We should cut them all to pieces, my prince,” Carnen’s general growled in his ear. He had a dozen armored men on horseback flanking this carriage after all, but those gothic knights simply did not understand that if Banen’s dozen had fired their rifles, it would have gone straight through their armor at this range, and they would have died long before they were within cutting range of the group.
Carnen had at least read this ambush correctly in that respect. That’s why he had taken ‘Charlotte’ out here with him as leverage. Banen was such a veteran sniper though, that he would have shot the prince in the head and freed the Lady Charlotte long before that dagger drove home, as Aya had seen in an instant.
“Keep it sheathed, general,” Carnen dismissed, waving his men back into line around his carriage. “We will do nothing to sabotage my fiance’s most excellent diplomacy soothing the tempers of our peasants.”
“They attacked the crown prince!”
“No, they gave threatening implication as they briefly delayed us. It is hardly the same severity of transgression. Now stand down.”
The general stomped off in a huff, and Carnen seized Aya around the waist, throwing her bodily back into the carriage seat. She was so shocked by the act that she instinctively swung at him. Carnen caught her fist, pressing up against her with a savage smile. “At ease, my lady, or should I say my little dragon. What happened to all that whimpering and tearful silence?”
“I am a proper lady, and thus I have had it up to here with the indignity!” she snapped, ripping back her hand. The docile routine of fully embodying Charlotte had earned her nothing but a near death experience in the crossfire of a narrowly averted gun fight, and she refused to endure anymore. “You will find with any maiden that our crying turns to crankiness when you soak a lady thoroughly and then almost get her shot, hauling her out into the mud and rain! And why in God’s name have you not offered me a cloak yet?”
“Well… because…” His eyes drifted up and down her soaking dress, and he admitted petulantly, “I like to look at you without it. Besides, by throwing you in here, I am only supporting your most clever story.” He unclipped his breastplate, and she scrambled back from him with a very Charlotte-like blush. Though Charlotte would not have had the rage in her eyes. “You told your men we were pursuing most indecent activity inside this carriage. You could not bear to wait for the marriage bed, clearly, and thus stripped right down to seduce me.” The rest of the armor had already come off, and there was his bare neck, in perfect stabbing range. “I find myself in a most obliging mood now, I must say, so I will bend to your begging my lady and--”
“Enough.” she ordered, and so commanding was her tone that Carnen did indeed draw back, arching an eyebrow. “You are acting as scum betraying your word to my father the very day you gave it.” He stiffened. “You will treat me as a proper wife and royal lady. That means you do not threaten me, and you do not touch me until we are legally wed. Is that understood?”
“You think you command me?”
“The law commands us all,” she proclaimed, “every commoner and lord alike. Did you not glimpse your almost death this evening, what would have happened to you had you truly harmed either me or my father, your duke?” His eyes darkened with resentment, but he could not dismiss her words. “We have thousands of guerrilla troops scattered out in the countryside exactly like Captain Banen and his men. Even should you stay holed up in Stalis castle with your father, those gates will not hold should the Arakesh land at our coast and take that city back with canon fire.” She leaned right up in his face, and this time Carnen was the one to draw back. “You require my most gracious compliance to keep hold of your father’s stolen seat. The whole point of a political alliance is that it is a formal agreement, with formal agreed upon rules. You will need a public wedding between us to have peace for your people. You cannot haul me out there screaming and crying, and you most certainly cannot kill me, or you will have further riots and word will spread, until this country reverts possession right back to the Serkos union.”
She ripped the cloak from his back and swaddled it tight around her in layers of cozy, concealing leopard fur. He stared at her in stunned unease for an instant, then just blinked and shook his head. “A little dragon you are indeed. I knew I was right to speak against this coerced marriage when first your father sent his insulting proposal to the throne.”
Aya’s eyes narrowed in surprise. With the way Carnen had been acting, she did not figure that he was the one who had been dragging his feet and delaying this sham of an alliance.
“Still, you are at least decent to look at, as I said, and I rather prefer this impudent tongue lashing to those quivering tears from before.” He was right back to threatening arrogance, eyes cutting into her like spears of cold blue ice. “After all, I know behind this desperate bravado there still lurks that shaking damsel my men hauled shrieking down the stairs of her posh and pretty rooms. I will not have just your terror though.” He sunk down on the bench across from her, arm draped over the cushions and mouth split in a leering smile. “You will welcome me happily into that marriage bed, dearest. You ban me from touching you, but I say that by the end of the week you will be begging for it.”
“Your every word is a panting plea for my permission,” she countered dryly, and his smile broadened.
“You truly are not as I expected, little Charlotte.” That was a major failure on Aya’s part. Still, she was an assassin, not an actress. Her mission was not just to fool Carnen, it was to kill him, and she would all too happily do so, the second Queen Clara was free.