Chapter 10: Gilded Lies
The slop of the trail gave way to a sucking, viscous mud that pulled at their boots with each step. The city wall, glimpsed through the trees, vanished and reappeared like a grey illusion. They’d been walking for hours in the washed-clean morning, a brittle silence hanging over them. The storm had scrubbed the sky to a hard, pale blue, but the ground held onto every ounce of water.
Leo saw it first. His little hand shot out, finger pointing at the distant, sun-touched stone.
“Look! It’s gold!”
A spike of cold dread went through Seraphina before she even processed it. Her eyes tracked his pointing finger. High on the wall, near the main gate, long swathes of cloth hung, gleaming dully in the harsh light. They were the color of old, stained teeth.
Callum’s grin was immediate, a reflex. “Where? I don’t see any—oh. That.” The grin stayed, but his eyes went flat and hard, the way they had in the fighting pits of the compound. “Right. The Imperial decorating committee. They’ve got terrible taste.”
Vincent stopped walking. His whole body went rigid. He didn’t stiffen poetically; he just. Stopped. Like he’d walked into a pane of glass. “Don’t let them look,” he said, his voice low and strained.
It was too late. Kya was squinting. “They’re hanging from the gold,” she said, confusion smoothing into dawning horror. “There’s… things hanging under it.”
They weren’t banners.
They were long, saffron-yellow cloths, the Imperial color, draped over the heavy crossbeams of permanent scaffolds built into the wall’s architecture. From each beam, three ropes dangled. Two were empty, twisting lazily in the mild breeze. The third from the left held a shape. Dark. Shrunken. A bundle of rags that had once been a man. The wind caught it and it turned, slowly, a macabre weathervane.
The gold was just a backdrop. A stage curtain for the dead.
Seraphina’s hands moved before her mind did. One on Leo’s shoulder, pulling him back against her legs. The other over Mia’s eyes. “Don’t,” she whispered, but the word was for herself as much as the children. Don’t see. Don’t remember. Don’t think about how many empty ropes waited.
Kya made a small, choked sound in the back of her throat. She understood.
“Ah, the city’s just showing off,” Callum said, his voice absurdly loud and cheerful. He stepped smoothly, placing his broad back directly between the children and the wall, blocking the view. He crouched down to Leo’s level. “You know why they put those flashy curtains up? It’s ’cause they’re embarrassed. This whole city has a gut problem. Ate too much honey, see. Famous for it. Centuries ago.”
Leo, confused, looked up at Callum’s face instead of the horror behind him. “Too much honey?”
“Mountains of the stuff. Rivers. A beekeeper’s rebellion. Long story.” Callum’s eyes were locked on Leo’s, pouring every ounce of rakish charm into the boy’s wide-eyed stare. “The point is, the whole place got so sticky, so fundamentally cloying, that they had to cover up anything functional with something fancy. Gates, scaffolds, the mayor’s ugly nose—drape a bit of silk over it. Calls attention away from the mess. It’s all vanity.”
He was talking nonsense. Glorious, distracting nonsense. Vincent, meanwhile, had broken his stillness. He moved in close behind Seraphina. Not touching her at first. His presence was a wall at her back. Then his hand came up, palm flat and firm against the base of her spine, just above the damp wool of his own cloak she still wore. It was a directive, not a caress. A guide point.
“Walk,” he muttered, his voice tight. “Now. Follow the ditch line. Keep your eyes on Callum’s back.”
The touch burned through the layers of cloth. It was utterly pragmatic, and it short-circuited her panic. She had an order. A point of contact. A path. She nudged Leo forward, her hand still over Mia’s eyes, and Kya, pale and silent, fell in beside her like a sleepwalker.
They moved off the main path, skirting the edge of a runoff ditch that smelled of decay and old moss. The grand, guarded Ivory Gate—with its gleaming, actual gold leaf—was to the north. They were aiming for the lower, southeastern curve of the wall, where the land smelled fouler and the stones were slick with algae.
Callum kept up the narration, walking backwards now, his gestures broad. “—so the architects, in a fit of guilt-powered delusion, declared that all civic ugliness must be gilded. Hence… that.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder toward the distant, dreadful gold. “A centuries-old cover-up for a collective stomach ache. History is weird, kid.”
He was giving Vincent time. Time to navigate.
Vincent’s hand stayed on Seraphina’s back, a constant pressure. His head was on a swivel, eyes scanning the tree line, the ditch, the distant activity on the wall walks. “The River Gate is just ahead. It’s lower. The guardhouse is set back. They’ll be watching the water level, not the people.”
“What if they recognize you?” Seraphina asked, her voice low.
“They won’t. The Duke’s son doesn’t come through the River Gate. He sends other people to do it for him.” There was no bitterness in it. It was a simple fact. “Keep the hood up. Your hair is noticeable.”
They rounded a final copse of sickly willow trees, and the gate rose before them. It was less a gate and more a reinforced archway, half-submerged in the sluggish, overgrown channel of what had once been a defensive moat. The water here was black, dotted with scum and floating refuse. Two guards in rust-spotted half-plate stood under the arch, looking bored and miserable. The smell was visceral—a mix of stagnant water, rotting fish, and the tang of cheap metal from a nearby tinker’s yard.
One of the guards hawked and spat into the muck. The other was picking at a loose thread on his glove.
Vincent’s hand left her back. He strode forward, his posture shifting from that of a noble to a man who carried messages for nobles. He looked tired, irritated, and slightly above it all.
“Duke’s business,” Vincent announced, his voice carrying a bored arrogance that was completely foreign to Seraphina’s ears. He didn’t break stride, flipping a small, dull pewter token toward the spitting guard. The man fumbled it.
“What’s all this, then?” the guard grunted, eyeing their bedraggled group.
“Refugees from the Riven floodplain. Got caught in the squall last night. The Duke’s charity case.” Vincent infused the words with a mild disdain, as if the very act of explaining was beneath him. He nodded at Callum. “My man here is escorting them to the almshouse. My job is to tell the Steward the almshouse is about to get fuller. An riveting duty.”
Callum gave the guards a weary, comradely nod, the long-suffering hired muscle. He had Mia on his shoulders again, and she played her part, burying her face in his hair.
The guard who’d caught the token squinted at it, then at Vincent. He saw the good, if travel-stained, boots. The sharp, unyielding posture. The absolute lack of concern for the guard’s opinion. It sold the story better than any document.
“Almshouse is full,” the guard said, handing the token back.
“Not my problem,” Vincent said, taking the token without looking. “Just my message. Move.”
It was the sheer, unassailable confidence that did it. The guards exchanged a glance, shrugged, and waved them through with an air of profound indifference.
And just like that, they were inside.
The noise hit first. A constant, low-grade roar—voices, cart wheels, the clang of a blacksmith, the shriek of a dissatisfied child, a drunk singing off-key. The air, previously damp and clean, thickened into a soup of smoke, cooking fats, sewage, and humanity.
They were in the Warrens. The city’s lowest belly. Buildings leaned so close they nearly kissed overhead, stealing the sky. The cobbles were slick with things Seraphina didn’t want to identify. Lines of worn laundry hung between windows like defeated flags.
For a moment, they all just stood there, huddled in the arch’s shadow, absorbing the sensory assault. The children were wide-eyed, overwhelmed. The hanging shape on the wall was forgotten, replaced by this immediate, pressing chaos.
Callum let out a long, slow breath, the performance dropping from his shoulders. “Well,” he said. “Welcome to the golden city.”
Vincent was already scanning the alleys, his face a mask of tight concentration. “This way. Quickly. We’re too exposed here.”
He led them into a narrower side lane, away from the main flow of traffic. The relative quiet was worse. It felt watchful. Shadows moved behind cracked shutters. A rheumy-eyed old woman watched them from a doorstep, her expression unreadable.
“The gambling house,” Vincent said, not turning. “The Queen of Spades. It’s a rat’s nest, but the owner owes my family a considerable debt of silence. We can get a room in the back. Not safe, but safer than the street.”
“Gambling house?” Seraphina repeated, pulling Leo closer as a pair of rough-looking men squeezed past them, smelling of onions and ale.
“Best kind of place to hide,” Callum murmured, falling in step beside her. “Everyone’s looking at their own cards, or their own empty purse. No one sees you.”
They walked for what felt like miles through the labyrinth. The grandeur Kya might have imagined—spires, libraries, fountains—was nowhere. This was a world of chipped brick, boarded windows, and the constant drip of damp. Seraphina saw a child younger than Mia scavenging in a midden heap. She saw a man with a feverish cough slumped in a doorway. It was the compound, but louder, denser, and with the illusion of freedom.
Finally, Vincent stopped before a narrow, three-story building. A faded sign, depicting a flaking woman holding a blurry black shape, creaked overhead. No windows on the ground floor, just a heavy, iron-studded door. The smell of cheap tallow candles and sour beer seeped from the gaps.
Vincent knocked—a specific pattern: two quick, three slow.
A slit in the door slid open. An eye, bloodshot and surrounded by wrinkles, peered out. It scanned Vincent, paused on Callum, flickered over Seraphina and the children with vague disinterest.
The slit snapped shut. Bolts scraped.
The door opened just wide enough to let them sidle through into a dark, airless corridor. The man with the bloodshot eye was short, wiry, and missing two fingers on his left hand. He looked at Vincent and gave a single, grim nod.
“Back room. Two nights. No more,” he grunted, his voice like gravel in a can. “Food extra. Questions not included.”
“Understood,” Vincent said.
The room was exactly what the man promised. A single space at the back of the building, with a pile of musty straw in one corner for bedding, a slop bucket in another, and a small, filthy grate that pretended to be a fireplace. The walls were bare stone, sweating with condensation. But the door had a heavy bolt on the inside.
The moment the bolt thudded home, the performance fully ended. The false courage, the brittle focus, it all leaked away, leaving raw exhaustion. The children stood in the center of the room, shell-shocked and silent.
Seraphina leaned back against the cold wall, closing her eyes. She could still feel the ghostly pressure of Vincent’s hand on her spine. She could hear the echo of Callum’s ridiculous, life-saving story about honey.
They were in. They were hidden. For now.
Vincent methodically checked the grate, the single shelf, the stability of the door. Callum sank down onto the straw with a groan, pulling Mia into his lap. Kya and Leo drifted to Seraphina, pressing against her sides, seeking anchor in the unfamiliar, stifling dark.
The roar of the Warrens was a dull thrum through the stone. Somewhere above them, a man roared in triumph or agony—it was impossible to tell which. A dice game, a fight, a moment of passion. All of it meaningless noise.
In this silence, heavy with unsaid things, the image of the turning body against the gold cloth returned to Seraphina unbidden. It didn’t frighten her this time. It just sat there, a fact. A statement. This was the world. This was the city. Gilded scaffolds and stinking alleyways. And they were now trapped between them, their fragile future ticking away with the cost of a room rented by a debt of silence.
Callum caught her eye across the dim space. He didn’t smile. He just gave one slow, weary blink. A soldier’s acknowledgment. We’re alive. That’s the current win.
Vincent finished his inspection and stood in the middle of the room, looking suddenly out of place, his sharp lines and clean edges jarring against the grime. He looked at the children, then at Seraphina, his expression unreadable.
“We’ll need to move again before dawn tomorrow,” he said, his voice back to its normal, low timbre. “This is a pause. Nothing more.”
It was a warning. A reminder. But as he spoke, his gaze lingered on the cloak still wrapped around her shoulders, now a worn, grey thing in the poor light. A fact, just like the scaffold. But a different kind.
Seraphina just dropped to her knees and wrapped her arms around Kya and Leo, hugging them tight to her. They were in shock over the sight of the city, so different to the gilded image they had in mind. Even Sera, who remembered nothing but her past cage, was trying not to crumble.
The silence in the room was a thick, dusty thing, broken only by the ragged sound of Leo trying not to cry. Sera held him, her face pressed into his dirty hair, feeling the tremors run through his small frame. She was trembling too, a fine vibration deep in her bones that had nothing to do with the cold stone at her back. Across the room, Callum stared at the bolted door as if he could see through it, his jaw working silently.
Vincent moved first, a blade of purpose in the stagnant air. He shrugged off his pack with a grunt, the straps loud in the quiet. “We need to eat. We need water that isn’t from a ditch.” His voice was all business, scraping away the emotional residue. “I’ll go.”
“The hell you will.” Callum didn’t even look at him. He shifted Mia from his lap and stood, his joints popping. “You’re the recognizable one, remember? The Duke’s son who never comes through the River Gate. I’m just hired muscle. I blend in with the filth down here.” He gestured at his own mud-caked clothes.
“Your face is on broadsheets in the upper districts, Cal,” Vincent shot back, finally looking at him. “The ‘wayward prince.’ The reward is substantial.”
“And your face is in the ledger of every important steward and guard captain in this city. Mine’s just a sketch on cheap paper. I’ll go.” Callum’s tone left no room for argument. It was the voice of the Second Prince, not the storyteller. He knelt to rifle through his own pack, pulling out a stained, threadbare overshirt and yanking it on over his own. It transformed him instantly into just another wiry laborer.
Vincent watched him, conflict tightening the skin around his eyes. He hated ceding control. It was an anatomical aversion. “Take the side alleys. The butcher on Tin Bell Lane throws his off-cuts out back after sundown. It’s not good, but it’s protein. A loaf from the baker on the corner, the burnt one. He sells it cheap.”
“See?” A ghost of Callum’s grin returned, bleak and sharp. “You’re better here. Calculating. Being crunchy.” He glanced at Sera and the children, his expression softening for a fraction of a second. “Bolt the door behind me. Don’t open it for anyone who doesn’t scratch three times, then twice.”
He didn’t wait for a response. He slipped out, and the solid thunk of the bolt driving home behind him felt like a coffin lid sealing. The room seemed to shrink, the walls pressing closer. Vincent exhaled, a long, slow release of breath he seemed to have been holding for hours. He turned his methodical energy to the filthy grate, assembling bits of ragged charcoal and a handful of straw from the bedding.
“We’ll get a little heat,” he murmured, more to himself than anyone. “Sterilize the water.”
Kya spoke, her voice a fragile thread in the dimness. “The golden city is mean.”
Sera looked at her daughter, at the crushed disappointment in her eyes. The stories she’d spun for them in the dark of the loft, the safe, pretty lies about a place with spires, felt like a crime now. “It’s just a place, Kya,” she said, her own voice rough. “Places aren’t mean or kind. They just are. It’s the people in them.”
“The people are mean, then.” Kya pulled her knees to her chest, resting her chin on them. She looked at Vincent. “You live here?”
“I live in a different part of it.” Vincent didn’t look up from his careful work with the flint. A spark caught, flared. “It has libraries. Quiet gardens. This,” he gestured vaguely at the weeping walls, “is the part we use but don’t see. Like the basement of a house where the furnace runs.”
“Why don’t you fix it?” Leo asked, sniffling.
The question was so innocent, so utterly logical, it stopped Vincent cold. The flint hovered in his hand. He looked at the boy, then at the grime embedded in the floorstones. “It’s not a broken hinge, Leo,” he said, his voice unusually gentle. “It’s a system. Fixing it would mean breaking the whole machine. And people who like the machine get very angry when you try.”
He blew on the tiny flame, nurturing it. The light grew, painting his focused, austere face in warm relief. Sera watched him. The practical man, the planner, explaining the cruel mechanics of the world to a six-year-old. The man whose hand on her back had been a line tethering her to reality.
The fire took, a small, desperate clutch of warmth. Vincent filled a battered tin cup from his waterskin and set it near the flames. “This will take a while,” he said. He settled back against the wall opposite Sera, his long legs stretched out. The casual grace of him was at odds with the squalor. He closed his eyes.
Minutes bled by, marked by the distant, muffled roar of the gambling hall. Raucous laughter, a sudden shout, the clatter of coins. It was a world away, just on the other side of the door. Mia crawled over to Sera, burying herself under the drape of Vincent’s cloak alongside her brother. Her small hand found Sera’s and held on.
“Tell the badger story again,” Leo mumbled, his eyes heavy.
“Not now, bug,” Sera whispered, stroking his hair. She kept her eyes on Vincent. On the steady, slow rise and fall of his chest. He wasn’t asleep. She could tell by the tension in his forearms, resting on his knees.
“He shouldn’t have gone out alone,” Vincent said suddenly, his eyes still closed.
“You would have done the same.”
“I have the authority to command a squadron. He has a charming smile and a fast dagger. It’s not the same asset profile in a crisis.”
A faint, tired laugh escaped her. It sounded strange in her own ears. “Asset profile?”
Vincent opened his eyes. They looked black in the low light, fixed on her. “It’s how I think. In valuations. In risks and resources.” He paused. His gaze dropped to the cloak. “Some assets are… incalculable. They break the model.”
The air between them charged, thick with the things they weren’t saying. The shared, unspoken dread of Callum out there in the Warrens. The memory of the scaffold. The impossible tangle of gratitude and fear and something else prickling under her skin. She was too tired to name it, too raw to trust it.
“He’ll be alright,” she said, willing it to be true.
“He has to be.” Vincent’s words were simple, absolute. A foundation. “The plan doesn’t work without him.”
But it wasn’t the plan he was talking about. She knew it. He looked away, breaking the connection, his attention snapping to the door as if he could hear something in the chaotic din beyond. The moment shattered, leaving the familiar, weary vigilance in its place.
They lapsed back into silence, waiting in the guttering light. The burnt-charcoal smell of their tiny fire mixed with the room’s odor of mold and old sweat. Sera felt the children’s breathing deepen into sleep against her, a heavy, trusting weight. Her own eyelids grew leaden.
The three scratches came, faint but deliberate. Then two more.
Vincent was at the door in an instant, hand on the hilt of his dagger. “Callum?”
“Open up. My hands are full of someone’s terrible dinner.” The voice was his, laced with familiar, strained cheer.
Vincent drew the bolt. Callum shouldered in, a bundled cloth in his arms. He kicked the door shut himself and Vincent re-bolted it. The prince’s face was flushed, a fresh scrape on his cheekbone. He dumped his bounty on the floor: a hard, blackened loaf, a greasy paper bundle leaking dubious gravy, and a small, waxy wedge of yellow cheese.
“The baker was agreeable. The butcher required… persuasion.” Callum wiped his knuckles briefly on his trousers, not meeting Vincent’s pointed stare. He nodded at the scrap on his face. “The alley disagreed with my navigation. It’s fine.”
He looked at Sera, saw the children sleeping in her lap. His demeanor shifted, the aggressive energy bleeding away into pure exhaustion. He sank down beside the food, tearing the loaf into ragged chunks with his hands. “Eat what you can. It’s not much.”
Vincent didn’t move from the door. “Were you followed?”
“I don’t think so.” Callum took a bite of the rock-hard bread, chewing mechanically. “But the patrols are thicker than sewage. They’re looking for someone. Could be us. Could be anyone.” He swallowed. “We can’t stay two nights. Dawn is pushing it.”
The fragile sense of respite they’d built evaporated. The room was just a cell again. Sera accepted a chunk of bread and the cheese from Callum. It was sharp and oily, but it was food. She ate, feeling the men’s eyes on her, watching her swallow as if her survival was a tactical objective they’d just secured.
Callum passed a piece of meat to Vincent, who finally left his post to take it. They ate in silence, the two of them a unit of focused energy, rebuilding their strength for the next move. The unspoken thing—the scaffold, the touch, the incalculable asset—hummed between all three of them, a third current in the dark.
When the last crumb was gone, Callum gestured to the straw. “Sleep. I’ll take first watch again. I’m wound.”
Vincent didn’t argue. He just moved to the far side of the straw pile, lying down with his back to the wall, his dagger unsheathed and resting on his stomach. Sera carefully extricated herself from the children, laying them side by side and covering them with the cloak. She lay down near them, her body a tense barrier between them and the door.
Callum sat with his back to the bolted wood, staring at the dying embers of their tiny fire. The scrape on his cheek gleamed in the faint glow.
“The honey city,” he whispered, so low she almost didn’t hear it. “What a joke.”
Outside, a man screamed in pain or ecstasy, the sound swallowed instantly by the roaring crowd. The dice game went on. The machine, as Vincent called it, continued to turn. They were inside it now, a grit in the gears, waiting for either destruction or the chance to jam the works entirely.
Sleep, when it finally came for Sera, was a black and soundless trap. No dreams of falling. Just a pure, heavy nothing, more terrifying in its way because it meant, for a few hours, she had to stop holding on.