The Twisted Way (Champions of the Crystal Book 3)

Chapter 21.1

Half an hour later they were winding their way through some of the more obscure corridors in the huge warren that was Palace Royal, and Sabrina was still shaking her head. She'd always thought of Mukryilla as a straightforward person, and to discover this streak of deviousness was not entirely reassuring. Darice had been entertained by Sabrina's expression as she put on the uniform of a lieutenant in the Queen's Guard—the same uniform Darice herself wore, but with more modest rank tabs—and they tucked the strikingly lifelike dummy into Sabrina's bed. Using decoys was a time-honored military tradition here as well as on Earth, but Sabrina found it distressing to hide among the ranks of her own guards.

Still, it would probably work, at least for a while. In the severe uniform, with her hair pulled back into a tight French roll and no makeup on her face, she didn't look at all like the woman who had been on stage in front of the entire solar system and more earlier in the day. The Reissian assassins would have a good description of her, but they would be looking for the Regent, not for a mere lieutenant.

Sabrina supposed she should be glad that it was only a dummy taking her place, not a real person. She could imagine a loyal Praxatillian with a passing resemblance bravely volunteering, and she knew she could not have lived with it. Whether Mukryilla would have given her the opportunity to object was a whole other question, though, she knew. She had a feeling that Mukryilla and Darice—and probably Tassan and even Scotty—would ruthlessly deceive her at every turn if they felt it was necessary to her safety to do so.

She had a depressing feeling that this was a ruse King Baldaran and his predecessors would have scorned, but she wondered whether Rayland might have approved. She was not Miahn, however entangled with their culture she was; she must face the fact that she was more fragile and therefore could not afford to be quite as scrupulous. But she hated it.

Darice was pretending to treat it all as an amusing adventure, but Sabrina knew her bodyguard better than that. She couldn't figure out if Darice were secretly ashamed of this strategy and feigning confidence to hide it, or if she thought the situation hopeless and merely wanted to keep Sabrina's spirits up until the end. Or maybe this was just the fey behavior of the doomed.

You do not have the luxury of dying, Tirqwin had said, and she knew it was true—but then she didn't have the ultimate control over that, did she? I must just do my best to live, she thought. I'll go down fighting, if I have to go.

She remembered Haaron's training, meant to be a remote contingency since Mara's dangers were almost always from things Sabrina could not affect. Neither of them had ever envisioned that someday the target would be Sabrina. She wondered fleetingly if Mara had glimpsed this part of their future. Mara had spoken of a separation and a reunion amid terrible circumstances, but Sabrina thought with a shudder that the vision could be interpreted to apply to the regency and their reunion during the Battle for Dansestari. So she couldn't even hold on to that as her one bright hope.

It occurred to her, though, that Tirqwin didn't think she was going to die. If Mara had foreseen her death, Tirqwin would have known about it, and their last conversation would have been very different. So would Mara's good-bye, she realized with a lifting of her spirits. So her death wasn't inevitable.

Darice, perhaps sensing Sabrina's anxiety, kept up a steady stream of chat about various unimportant topics as if she were really addressing a colleague. If anyone were around at this hour, they must think they had seen a couple of off-duty guards. No one must know that the Regent was not in her own bed, so that no one would suspect she was in the conservatory suite. Sabrina made an effort to reply coherently and was rather distractedly amused to find that complaints about the food were evidently another thing the Praxatillian military had in common with Earth forces—at least American ones, she amended conscientiously.