Oops, We're Fugitives

Time To Go

She splayed her hands just before she reached the ostentatiously large doors, sending them swinging as far as their hinges would go, causing them to land with a resounding bang against the corridor wall. This, she realised, was not good. Her head whipped from left to right, scanning the wood-panelled corridor wall as she – very carefully – closed the doors again. At the end of the corridor to her right, a guard patrolling a perpendicular corridor looked at her curiously, halting his rounds. Morgana waved to him, leaning casually against the doors. "I'm an overzealous door-opener, nothing to worry about!" she called cheerfully, struggling to grip an electrum and 3 daggers in one hand behind her back without looking incredibly suspicious. The guard put the back of his hand to his bowed head. "As you say, Lady Morgana," he replied, and continued on his rounds. She breathed a sigh of relief, nettled though she was by the title, and assumed a composed posture as she strolled in the opposite direction. She took 10 steps, then glanced over her shoulder – the guard had disappeared. She broke into a sprint.

The Magister is dead, said a despairing little voice in her head. What are we going to do? But Morgana wasn't really listening. There was another louder voice shouting don't think, run, and it was winning by a long shot.

After a few minutes and several agonising twists, turns, bumped servants, toppled piles of laundry and staircases that in her opinion were unnecessarily long, Morgana made it to the double doors that opened into the chambers she shared with her team. She made the unlocking gesture in the air that was her personal key to the rooms and burst in, nearly crashing into Idris m'Nison. Whatever he'd come here for, he'd picked the wrong moment. She slammed the doors behind her, wincing as they shut with an attention-drawing bang. "We!" she held up a hand. She could hold her own well enough in a 2-on-1 fight, but she was no match for stairs, the enemy of humanity. Bent double, she panted unashamedly.

"What?" Willen said. "What the hell is going on?"

"Magist... dead... framed... must leave!"

"You got more words out but didn't make any more sense," Willen said, folding his arms across his chest. Morgana waved desperately at the room in general, hoping that they would understand that they needed to grab their bags, send their personal possessions somewhere safe so the State wouldn't claim them as traitor's loot, and get out of the castle 10 minutes ago, even though it would make them look guilty despite not being guilty.

"Yeah... we didn't take telepathy courses, either," Willen said witheringly.

"I did," Reggie piped up. "But I failed it, so I can't help."

Morgana lifted her head, glared at Willen, took an enormous breath, and finally managed to speak. "The Magister has been poisoned, he died in my arms, a couple of guards who I'm pretty sure are related but claim they're not walked in on me, they, I'll admit, not unfairly thought I'd done it, also the reason they walked in at that moment was because someone in the Guard had detected a threat to the Magister's life and they'd come to stop it, I don't know how or why it took them so long, and then they were further convinced that it was me, actually us, because of that stupid senator – the really weird one at that ball we had to guard 3 weeks ago – Harcourt! Because of Harcourt's interest in us they think we're traitors, and uh... I sort of incapacitated them and ran after they informed me that they'd been given permission to kill the Magister's assassin on sight, and they think I'm the assassin, which means that we're all in danger of losing our heads, because, you know, all for one and one for all. Point being, we need to get out of this castle." She heaved in a lungful of air, let it sit there for a moment and enjoyed being oxygenated before she let it out again. The others stared at her. Even Willen was struck dumb. "Go on!" she shouted "Move! We can talk about it later!"