Sweetness Bled and Brindled Read online

  But it would mean letting Jewel know that what she was, in truth, was nothing but a thief who’d used him to get inside. He’d look at her with those big, hazel eyes that made her heart skip, the flecks of gold fading in disappointment. His lip would wobble like it did that time he’d come too late for a child who’d got on the wrong end of a knife fight even for his magic to save. He’d ask ’why?’ in that same broken tone he used when the whole world had betrayed him simply because it was not as gentle and good and kind as he wanted it to be.

  And he had far too much power to be broken by the world. Briar’d studied magic under a tutor enough, before, to know that. Jewel would never forgive himself for twisting that power in anger or pain, never smile again. Forget laughter. Briar had been there when he’d found Mattie, stuck in a poacher’s trap and half-near death. He’d been so distressed she’d offered to kill the squirrel cleanly instead of ignoring it. He’d looked at her with such horror then that she’d known.

  Jewel, youngest prince of Wellandy, could destroy the world. And yet he was sweet, and kind, and everything Briar knew the world couldn’t tolerate.

  “Briar?”

  She startled, and cursed herself in silence. “Sorry. What?”

  “I asked whether you could speed it up a little. We had word while you were out that the queen mother’s died.”

  “Right?” Briar wasn’t entirely sure how it was relevant to their time line. Jewel would be devastated by his grandmother’s death. If she could find a way to meet him earlier without wrecking the careful stretch she’d begun to build into her plans, to delay the inevitable when she’d have to deal with his broken heart…

  “We can get them all at once,” Spindle said, simply, pulling her back from her accursed, disobedient thoughts.

  Briar raised her eyebrows. “You want to bring the whole estate down?” She wasn’t surprised, not exactly. Spindle held too deep a loathing for aristocracy for her to be surprised. Still, this was a new plan, one she hadn’t foreseen and didn’t trust herself to grasp with so little to go on.

  “Yes. No more robberies. No more small strikes. Cut off the head of the snake. Blow it straight into the void.”

  As far as initial plans went, she’d heard worse. It had a clear goal. She’d just not heard worse plans from Spindle, who insisted they didn’t harm anyone who wasn’t aristocracy if they could help it and whose seed ideas usually had at least some sense of strategy. Briar shrugged. If he wanted to blow up a building, she’d help.

  Silent as she considered her options, she finally spoke. “I can get myself in without the prince. If they’re planning a funeral, they’re hardly going to be turning down help. It’ll take me a few days to figure out how to get a whole team inside, though.” And a few days to get Jewel out. She could always tell him she had nothing to do with the attack. It wasn’t like Spindle had the numbers to succeed, even with her magic to help him. It could be good. She’d be free of her debt and she could gather Jewel to her and ride off into the sunset or something.

  “He won’t expect me. I’ll have to wear a disguise in case something goes wrong.” Either would be annoying, but it wasn’t like they’d never happened before. Disguises were useful; plans couldn’t be static. “When do you need your men in?”

  “By the full moon,” Spindle said. “It should take at least that long for the vultures to flock together.”

  “Fine.” She’d take stock of where help was needed the most on her first day and get the crew entrance that way. “Don’t blame me if your robberies go awry while I’m off playing love-struck fool.” Briar waved a hand and strode off, ignoring the protests. “I’ll leave tomorrow. Have someone fetch Holly and a dress and send them my way.”

  Right now she was going to bathe in the stream.

  In the end, getting onto the estate proper was even easier than Briar felt it out to have been. Apparently they were short so many maids, they were all too glad to hire a strong young woman willing to work on the spot, no references needed.

  Briar had not grown more fond of dresses since the last time she’d worn one. The damned fabric kept getting trapped between her legs, but she did her work without complaint. The bonnet hiding her short hair itched and she missed her deep hood. Her gloves too, but a poor farmer’s girl wouldn’t have high quality kid gloves.

  The estate was filled with a frantic energy she didn’t recognise as the maids were directed to and fro to clean rooms, rearrange furniture and move paintings around, as well as an underlying fear that she did, knew exactly what lay at the heart of such fear. It made her uneasy. It was the quiet whispers and furtive movements that she recognised. The glances left and right before maids stepped into a room fully, the way all the servants stayed in trios if they possibly could.

  Oh, Jewel. She couldn’t ask about him. Not immediately and not directly. She knew better. And the fact that she couldn’t see him bothered her. He wasn’t in kitchens after a startled cook dropped a hot plate onto another’s hand. He didn’t come to help one of the girls in Briar’s group who’d been too weak to hold up her side of a painting and fallen off the ladder. She couldn’t even find him among the horses and the dogs.

  When she heard that one of the regular maids was ill, she was the first — the only one — to volunteer to bring the woman dinner. The near-complete silence sent a shiver down her spine, but if Jewel was anywhere, he’d be where he could do something useful. It was the only place left she could think of to look without trying to find his quarters.

  He wasn’t there. And the woman wasn’t ill at all, though Briar had no trouble seeing why they’d pretend it. Briar fed her the broth that the cooks had provided. She didn’t even need to probe the woman for information. It was cauterised all over her face and soaked into all the sheets.

  She’d thought she’d recognised the way Jewel could flinch or freeze. She’d told herself she was imagining it, if only so she could let Jewel have that fantasy he seemed to need. Briar had burned the man who’d tried to hurt her a long time ago, as well as any person since who’d tried the same albeit with more control.

  Jewel would have to be presentable for affairs of state. This woman, though she clearly had enough rank to have her own small bedroom, had no such protection, and whoever had beaten, cut and burned her clearly didn’t care who saw.

  The woman was exhausted halfway through eating the bowl of soup. It was a miracle she’d stomach enough to eat that much. Briar put the food aside. She still didn’t know where to find Jewel, but now she knew where to start looking. It was enough.

  Hand on the doorknob, Briar turned around. She hadn’t cared too much about Spindle’s plan before. It was risky and badly thought-out. In her experience getting rid of rot at the top only resulted in different rot, often worse, but perhaps it was worth a try just this once. Some things did go too deep to let fester.

  Briar strode back over to the bed and watched the servant’s laboured breathing, glanced again at the bloody sheet and the mutilated face. If she were Jewel, she could do something selfless and kind. She might even have the power to restore the missing eye and thumb. She wasn’t Jewel and she had to find him fast. But fire and a collapsing building weren’t nice ways to go, no one would come for her when Spindle enacted his plan, and with those injuries no one would notice if Briar added a few more.

  She made sure it was quick.

  She took the tray with broth back to the kitchen, spent some time scrubbing floors and slipped out unnoticed to meet up with Cedar. It felt odd to make her way to the tree she left Fourscore-and-twenty at when she met up with Jewel from the other direction. It was open and exposed and it made her feel uncomfortable. She wasn’t used to not being the one who was waiting either. She hadn’t been prepared for how much seeing a human figure but not being close enough to determine who it was would set her heart racing. If it wasn’t her companion…

  It was, and her relief was palpable. She hurriedly filled Cedar in on the pertinent part of her day and told him to send some
people who could pass as gardeners and cooks over. If they could spare some people to be maids as well, it would help too. She was a little reluctant to share that one because she might be assigned to the same team as them or be expected to make small-talk that would make her efforts to find Jewel far more complicated, but if she was going to help Spindle bring the whole thing down she couldn’t do it without as many people as possible. He already didn’t have enough.

  “Are you all right?” Cedar asked. He’d come with Fourscore-and-twenty. Briar was a little startled to realise that she was stroking the horse for comfort. She wasn’t normally fidgety.

  “I’m fine. I missed this beauty.” She dug a sugar cube she’d swiped from the kitchen and held it out to the horse. Fourscore-and-twenty took it daintily. She’d have to find a way to take her horse with her too. She didn’t like having this little time to consider her options, but one took the opportunities thrown their way. She’d succeed or she would not.

  She looked at the other bandit, watching his eyebrows rise. “I’m fine, Cedar. I’d forgotten how tired cleaning makes you, that’s all.”

  “If you say so,” he said dubiously.

  “I need to get back before I’m missed.” She wasn’t going to be, but she needed to start snooping around the place to see if she could locate Jewel and the sooner she started, the sooner she could leave it all behind.

  Within a week, Spindle’s people had infiltrated the estate and they’d set up a plan. Briar’s only objection was that they kept trying to make her needlessly integral to its execution. They didn’t need a fire mage. They hadn’t even needed her to get inside, if she was entirely honest. She’d found it easy enough to avoid anyone she knew while at work. Even Holly had managed to pretend like she didn’t know anyone and Holly was one of their worst actors.

  Briar still hadn’t found Jewel, despite having spent her free time looking for him. She’d even sneaked off several times when she was supposed to be working and tried to create a few accidents that would set him running discretely.

  Nothing. He wasn’t in his chambers. She’d checked a few times after she’d found them. The bed looked as unslept-in as it had the first time she sneaked inside. She’d also found the estate apothecary or whatever it was. Jewel’s workspace. He was never there when she checked either, and it didn’t seem like anything got touched between her visits. It worried her. She clung to the assumption that if he were dead, or had run away entirely, the gossip and rumours would be just as filled with his name as the queen mother’s.

  There was silence.

  So Briar trudged on until she felt like there was only one place she hadn’t yet looked: the prison cells she knew had to be there. Why anyone would throw Jewel in a cell was beyond her, but it was a place to look.

  It’d taken her a while to find what seemed like the likely entrance, but she had no idea how she was going to get inside. She never saw it guarded with fewer than four people. Taking them on wasn’t the trouble. She’d used her magic against more people than that in the past and won. She could do it again. The trouble was that it would attract attention, and she wouldn’t be able to sneak away afterwards.

  Her best option, she’d eventually decided, was the crown prince. He seemed to be the one most people in the castle were afraid of. If anyone knew where Jewel had disappeared to, or had any reason to want the youngest prince missing, it was probably him. All she had to do was find a way to get him to tell her, and she had the worst of luck in encountering him.

  The queen mother’s funeral came closer. Snooty, arrogant people began to arrive and the rooms Briar and the palace staff had so painstakingly cleaned were occupied and messed up. The atmosphere shifted away from desperate, frantic cleaning to cautious anticipation. The noise increased exponentially with bored socialites in dire need of entertainment.

  Briar only restrained herself from burning the group who decided that they had to sing loudly directly outside the servants’ quarters on the one night she’d allowed herself a full rest because it would look suspicious, and some of the visitors undoubtedly knew enough magic to find her if she used it recklessly. She did convince a small gaggle of maids to help her catch frogs to put in their rooms, however.

  The screams were a delight.

  Finding her quarry, the crown prince, bothering one of the maids a few days later was… not. One of the maids in the cleaning group she’d been assigned on that day had forgotten to bring an extra bucket of water and Briar had offered to fetch it, using the time alone to fit in what little exploration she could. When she made it back with the full pail, she found the crown prince looming over what was it, Daisy or something, as the girl cowered against the wall. He had one hand pressed against it; the other was still, surprisingly, relaxed at his side. Anyone else who should have been in the room had made themselves scarce.

  In the moment it took Briar to put down the pail of water she’d brought — there was no reason to soak poor Daisy along with the arsehole — she decided that the best way to get his attention was to stride over and not say a thing until she was wrenching him away from the blonde girl and bodily putting herself between them.

  Daisy, unsurprisingly, fled the moment she could, leaving Briar to stare down the crown prince. He flicked a glance at her hand gripping his wrist and she let it go. Pushed herself against the newly vacated wall for good measure and looked up at the prince through her eyelashes, hoping very fervently that she could still act helpless and scared, like she’d only just realised exactly what she’d done and desperately regretted her life’s choices.

  She watched his face shift from outrage to a confident, self-satisfied smile. If she could have punched him, she would have, but she feared that would push him too far too quickly for the opportunity she’d stumbled into. Which would involve him not being so angry he’d try to murder her outright. If he lost his temper enough to have her hauled off, she would finally have a chance to explore the dungeons.

  So she whimpered when he leaned in close enough for her to smell the sweetness — so like Jewel’s — on his breath, even if she would rather have gagged. She would almost have preferred a drunkard. She sniffled when his voice sounded right beside his ear, for all she knew his crotch was right there and entirely unprotected. “You dare interfere with the affairs of your betters?” he asked, pleasantly enough, and moved back to give her space.

  Briar didn’t want space.

  So she did what she knew men like him hated. She looked up, defiant and proud, and said, prim and proper as she could with her southern accent, “Anyone who thinks scaring children is a worthy use of their time is lower than a worm.”

  When he raised a hand to strike her, she looked him straight in the eye and challenged him to do it.

  It wasn’t the hardest blow she’d ever felt and she had a feeling he’d held back on purpose, but still. It was an effort to simply look back, uncowed, instead of breaking his nose with her forehead like he deserved.

  She spat in his face. Missed the nose, which was a pity, but hit the cheek. And oh did that turn the crown prince a shade of red and purple that would have made her laugh had he not punched her in the stomach and grabbed her by the hair when she’d doubled up.

  He pressed her against the wall so close she didn’t know how his arm was comfortable yanking her hair down and her head up until she might have feared he’d slit her throat if he wasn’t pressed so closely to her that his free hand couldn’t reach a blade. Her fingers tingled with the desire to light his clothes on fire. Or his hair. He was probably prouder of that than his expensive silks. And it would keep burning with less effort.

  “You dare?” he hissed, though she knew how tall she was and how much it cost him to pull her down to where he could feel bigger than she was. Briar didn’t answer beyond staring him down. If he was beneath a worm, he was beneath expending words on.

  And it irritated him so beautifully it was entirely worth getting thrown into the bedpost. Briar pivoted and twisted away before she could sl
am into it. It irritated her that the man didn’t crash into the thing himself, but she’d get him once he’d given her what she wanted.

  She darted out of his reach once or twice, letting him stumble against the furniture. She shrieked and called for help — not that she needed it even if it would actually come — and pretended she was a poor, helpless maid, only able to escape him through sheer luck. It was easier than she’d expected. Perhaps his clothes would matter more to him after all; he clearly wasn’t in as good a shape as she was and he certainly didn’t have the skill to match her for all that he was an abusive bastard. She had no doubt he’d hold his own, for a while, in a proper fight, but she had to wonder how long it’d been since he’d had to use physical strength rather than reputation and rank to beat someone.

  “Hold still, you bitch!” the crown prince growled as she ducked around a high-backed chair to avoid his grasp. Briar had, quite reasonably, no intention of holding still — or being quiet — until a couple of guards appeared in the doorway.

  It took, altogether, longer than Briar had wanted.

  “Seize her!” the crown prince growled.

  By that time, her throat was hurting from calling for help and the room was a decided mess. Somewhere in the scuffle one of them had knocked over the water pail. It was probably not her because her skirts were dry enough, but it had made the marble floor even slipperier. She’d had a few close calls when she’d fallen, the advantage of practice ruined by the frantic scramble back up, and the realisation that the crown prince was decidedly out of practice and shape on top of angry more than that he was a buffoon who’d never been in a real fight before.