Chapter 16: The Emperor's Wrath
The boot steps halted outside the infirmary door. A heavy fist struck the wood twice, not a request for entry but an announcement of it.
The door swung inward.
Four men of the Emperor’s personal guard filled the space, their black enameled armor drinking the weak light. Their leader, a man with a thin scar bisecting his eyebrow, scanned the room. His gaze passed over the unconscious Jared, dismissed the surgeon cowering by his tools, lingered on Freir’s elegant posture, and settled on Kellen, shirtless and bleeding before the Princess.
A slow, knowing smirk spread across the guard captain’s face. It was a vulgar expression, full of assumed comprehension.
“Your Highness,” the captain said, his tone dipping into false deference. “Your Grace. We heard there was some… excitement on the border. A fire. An incident. The Emperor desires a report.” His eyes slid back to Clara, taking in her torn sleeve, the smudges of soot on her neck, the wildness of her hair that had nothing to do with wind and everything to do with a man’s hands. “You look distressed, Princess.”
Freir moved before anyone else could, a fluid step that placed him slightly in front of the guard’s sightline to Clara. He offered a smile that was all polished diplomacy. “Captain Voris. How efficient. The smoke hasn’t even cleared. Yes, a terrible accident with a lamp in the granary tower. A tragedy. We were just ensuring the wounded were seen to.” He gestured casually toward Jared. “As you can see.”
Voris wasn’t looking at Jared. He was still staring at Clara, his smirk deepening. “An accident. In a tower you had no business being in, Princess.” He took a step into the room, his men fanning out behind him. “You seem to find yourself in unusual places tonight. First the battlements, now a burning tower. And here, in such a state.” His voice dropped to a suggestive murmur. “Almost like you’ve been romping.”
Kellen didn’t move. But Clara felt the change in the air around him, a drop in temperature. He remained between her and the guards, a wall of silent, wounded fury.
“Watch your mouth,” Jared’s voice was a ragged scrape from the bed. He had pushed himself up on one elbow, his face ash-gray, the fresh stitches in his side pulling taut. The surgeon made a frantic noise. “You’re speaking to your Princess.”
Voris chuckled, finally glancing at Jared. “I see who I’m speaking to, Captain. A guard who failed in his duty, letting his charge roam into danger. And a princess who clearly doesn’t need guarding to find trouble seeing as she ran away from home.” He looked back at Clara, leering. “Or perhaps she just enjoys the company of men in damaged states.”
It happened too fast for thought.
Jared moved with a pained roar, lunging off the bed. He ignored the tear of his wounds, the surgeon’s cry. His massive fist, driven by pure rage, connected with Voris’s jaw with a crack that echoed off the marble.
Chaosis a fragile, spinning thing.
Voris crumpled. A second guard drew his short sword. Freir snatched a glass bottle of antiseptic from a tray and shattered it against the man’s helmet. Sharp, pungent liquid sprayed. The man stumbled, blinded.
The third guard went for Kellen.
Kellen met him halfway. He grabbed the man’s sword wrist, yanked him forward, and drove his forehead into the bridge of the guard’s nose. Bone crunched. As the man reeled, Kellen stripped the sword from his grip and spun, placing himself squarely before Clara again.
The fourth guard hesitated, eyes wide.
The infirmary was now a cage of violence. The sterile order was gone. Overturned trays rang on the floor, scattering scalpels and probes. The smell of blood—fresh, bright blood from Voris’s mouth and the guard’s nose—overpowered the lavender and spirits.
Jared stood over Voris, breathing in harsh, wet gusts, his hand pressed to his seeping side. “You will,” he grunted, “keep your filth to yourself.”
Voris touched his bloody mouth, his eyes blazing with hate. He looked past Jared, past Kellen, to Clara. “You see?” he spat, red staining his teeth. “This is what you cause. Violence. Insurrection. You are a poison.”
“She is a princess,” Kellen said, his voice so cold it cut through the panting heat of the room. He held the stolen sword loosely, its point aimed at the floor, but his readiness was absolute. “And you are a dead man if you speak of her again. Accident or not.”
Freir had picked up a long, sharp probe from the floor. He held it like a dart, his beautiful face calm. “The question, gentlemen, seems to be what story leaves this room. Yours?” He nodded to Voris. “A tale of insult and assault against the Emperor’s guard? Or ours?” His eyes glinted. “A tragic account of loyal men injured in a fire, and overzealous guards who, in their confusion, attacked the wounded and insulted the Imperial bloodline.”
He let the implication hang. Voris’s men looked uncertain. Their captain was disgraced and bleeding on the floor. A duke, a foreign prince, and the Captain of the Guard—even wounded—were not men to be easily disappeared.
Voris pushed himself up, hatred etching his features. “The Emperor will hear every detail.”
“I’m sure he will,” Freir smiled. “Shall you go now? While your jaw is still so… eloquently swollen?”
The standoff crackled. Jared swayed, his strength leaking onto the marble. Kellen didn’t move an inch.
It was Clara who broke it.
She stepped out from behind Kellen.
She didn’t look at the guards. She walked to the supply table, picked up a roll of fresh linen bandage, and turned to Jared. Her hands were steady. She began wrapping his midsection, applying firm pressure over the weeping stitches. Her touch was clinical, her focus absolute.
“You’re tearing your sutures, Captain,” she said, her voice clear in the shattered quiet. “You’ll need to stay put. Unless these men would like to explain why they prevented the Duke and the Prince from saving his life, and then provoked him into bleeding out on an infirmary floor.”
She tied the bandage off, her fingers deft. Then she lifted her gaze, not to Voris, but to the uncertain guards behind him. Her expression was the one she had practiced in her tower window for years: remote, imperious, utterly bored by their existence.
“Well?” she asked. “Are you here to assist, or are you here to compose more creative fiction about my evening? My father awaits. And he does so hate to be kept waiting by the help.”
The shift was seismic. The Princess was no longer a disheveled girl in a scandalous situation. She was command and cold expectation. She had reframed the battlefield.
Voris saw it. The defeat in his eyes was more visceral than the pain in his jaw.
Kellen watched her, the sword still in his hand. The woman who had kissed him with desperate hunger was gone, replaced by the carved portrait of royalty. But he had felt the crack in the marble. He had seen the knife in the dark. He knew it was the same person.
“You heard Her Highness,” Kellen said, his tone final. “You may go now.” He dropped the stolen sword. It clattered on the stone, a period to the violence.
As the guards shuffled to obey, hauling a furious Voris to his feet, Clara smoothed her ruined tunic. She could feel Kellen’s eyes on her, a physical weight.
Freir fell into step beside her as they moved into the corridor, ensuring the guards left. He kept his voice a whisper only she could hear.
“That,” he murmured, “was magnificently cold. Remind me never to get on your bad side.”
Clara didn’t smile. She kept her eyes forward, on the back of the guard in front of her, on the walk to the gate. The ghost of Kellen’s kiss was a brand on her lips. The memory of the dagger going into the assassin in the tower was a cold stone in her gut.
She had survived the fire, the kiss, the brawl.
Now she had to survive the emperor’s persistence in bringing her home.
Now she had to survive the emperor’s persistence in bringing her home. That persistence walked ahead of her, a stumbling, hateful shape supported by his men. The procession through the stone corridors was a silent, tense funeral march for a different outcome. Torchlight flickered over black armor, over Kellen’s bare, blood-streaked back, over Freir’s watchful eyes.
“A little to the left, I think,” Freir murmured, his voice conversational as he walked beside Voris. “When you tell your story. Emphasize the part where you called the Imperial Princess a common tramp. It lends such credibility.”
Voris spat a glob of blood and saliva onto the pristine floor. “You won’t be smirking for long.”
“Probably not,” Freir agreed cheerfully. “Smirking gives one wrinkles. But I’ll be breathing, which is my current priority.”
They reached the stronghold’s main gate, a monstrous construction of iron-bound oak. The night air that swept in was a cold slap, smelling of damp stone and distant pine. Beyond the arch, the world was a bowl of blackness, the Emperor’s lands an invisible pressure. The guards tasked with the winches looked from their wounded comrades to the Duke’s icy glare, and got to work.
The chains groaned. The gate lifted slowly, revealing a slice of starless sky.
Kellen moved to stand just before Clara, a subtle barrier between her and the opening. He still hadn’t put a shirt on. The wound on his back was a dark, rough line in the torchlight, a testament she had cleaned with her own hands.
Voris shuffled to the threshold, turning one last time. His swollen jaw made his words thick and dripping with venom. “This isn’t over. He will send more. He will burn this place to its foundations to get her back.”
“You tell him,” Kellen said, his voice carrying flat and clear in the courtyard. “Tell the Emperor his mercenaries failed. Tell him his guard was not enough.” He paused, letting the totality of the failure sink in. “Tell him you could not extract the Princess from her protection.”
It was a direct, daring challenge, packaged as a simple report. Voris’s eyes burned with the understanding that he was being made a messenger of his own humiliation. He vanished into the dark, his men melting away after him.
The winches ground again, and the gate sank with a final, thunderous crash. The sound was a full stop. For a heartbeat, there was only the shared, exhausted silence of the courtyard.
Jared let out a long, pained breath, sagging against the wall. “He’s not wrong, though. They’ll come back. With more.”
“Obviously,” Freir said, brushing invisible dust from his sleeve. He leaned against the cold stone, the lightness gone from his face, replaced by pragmatic calculation. “This little border fort was a decent hideaway for a day. It’s compost now.” He pushed off the wall, looking at Kellen, then Clara. “We can’t stay here. We have to move further into my country. Tonight.”
Kellen finally turned to look at Clara. In the guttering torchlight, his expression was unreadable, the man who had kissed her buried beneath layers of necessity. “Can you ride tonight?”
The question was practical, stripping away everything that had happened in the infirmary. It was the right question.
Clara met his gaze, the ghost of his mouth on hers a secret warmth in the cool air. She thought of her tower room, of the stale silence, of the gilded cage waiting to reclaim her. She looked past him, at the sealed gate, at the night that held both danger and an impossible kind of freedom.
“Yes,” she said. The word felt like the first true one she’d ever spoken.
“Good,” Freir said, already moving, his boots ringing on the stone. “Because we have about four hours until that vomitous little captain convinces someone with real authority to turn this place into a sieve. Jared, try not to bleed on my saddle.”