The Decoy Princess (51 page)

Tension pulled Kavenlow tight. “Chull bait!” he muttered. “You couldn’t wait, could you,” he said, his face red behind his salt-and-pepper beard. “You think you can come here and charm my apprentice from me? She spat in your face, didn’t she?”

Jeck crouched, and grunting in effort, he slung Garrett over his shoulder. “She said she would take me as her instructor,” he said, puffing as he rose to a stand and put his hat back on.

Kavenlow gripped my arm in sudden fear. “Tess!”

Face warm, I frowned at Captain Jeck. “I said nothing of the kind,” I replied hotly, walking almost sideways as I followed Jeck down the hall as he carried Prince Garrett. “I said I’d let him teach me how to heal with my hands while serving as ambassador. I’m using Captain Jeck, and he knows it.”

Jeck chuckled, and Kavenlow went white. “Tess, no,” he said urgently as he paced beside me. “That decides it. You aren’t going. He’ll wring what he can from you, then use it to take Costenopolie. That is, if he doesn’t outright kill you!”

“He won’t kill me. He wants me to be his apprentice,” I said, not caring that Jeck was listening. “And he can’t watch me all the time. When will another opportunity to walk freely in King Edmund’s halls come again? Let me go, Kavenlow. I’ll be all right.”

“No,” Kavenlow said, sounding as if he had bit the word off, it was so sharp.

“But I want to go,” I insisted. “Kavenlow, let me go!”

Under the weight of Garrett, Jeck laughed breathlessly.

“What the devil are you laughing about?” Kavenlow asked, his eyes angry.

Jeck shifted Garrett to a more comfortable position and started down the hall. “
Let me go. Let me
go
,” he said in a high falsetto. “That’s all she has been saying since I met her.” He eyed Kavenlow from under his hat. “Let her go. Or don’t you trust your own work?”

Hunched and muttering obscenities, Kavenlow strode down the hallway between us, the guards trailing behind. “I have a week before Garrett goes back,” Kavenlow said. “You are not leaving with Captain Jeck, Tess.”

I said nothing, smug in the knowledge that Contessa would listen to me before him. I was going. I would learn how to heal with my hands if nothing else. The other thing—the killing—I wasn’t so sure about.

Duncan’s raggedy silhouette appeared at the distant end of the hallway. Hands moving expressively, he talked with a sentry until the soldier gestured toward us. Duncan followed his gaze, an eager stance coming over him. “Tess?” he called from the top of the hall, “Do you want to go get your horses? We have a few hours before your sister’s coronation.”

I looked from Kavenlow to Jeck, feeling the weight of an apple in my pocket. I wasn’t Costenopolie’s princess—I was Kavenlow’s apprentice—and I had a present to collect. “Yes,” I called out as I slipped from them both and went to walk the streets with Duncan, free for what was probably the first time in my life. “I’m coming.”