The hidalgo stared down the hallway of the royal palace. At the far end he saw people dashing back and forth down the connecting corridor, alternately grim-faced and panicking. Servants, soldiers, and ladies in elaborate dresses. Lorenzo touched his medallion and reflected for a moment on what a strange week he was having. And then he ran.
One of Lady Sade’s maids had taken Qhora away for some sort of private discussion about their meeting with the queen. He had almost insisted on going with her, but she assured him that she would be fine, and he had trusted her. His quiet time alone lasted a little over ten minutes before the gunfire began and he raced out into the hall.
He charged down hallway after hallway, shouldering through the crowds, apologizing to each person he collided with. His hand clutched the spot on his belt where his sword should have been. Now it was sitting in a guard station down at the bottom of the Royal Road.
Every hallway and doorway and stairway looked the same to him, equally new and equally unhelpful. People were pouring in and out every which way, offering him no hint as to where the danger was. He grabbed a young man carrying a pitcher of water and asked, “What’s happening? What were those shots?”
“I don’t know!” The porter trembled. “Something about assassins in the palace. Assassins with guns! Lady Sade is dead, and some old woman, and I don’t know!”
“Where are they? Where is Lady Sade?”
“The Morning Garden. Back that way, turn right, end of the hall, in the courtyard on your left. I think.” The porter pointed down the hall, then backed away a few nervous steps, and darted off in the opposite direction.
Lorenzo ran. He found the Morning Garden with a crowd of soldiers standing in the warm light on the grass around a profusion of bodies on the ground. He rushed around the corner and ran straight into a man in a white uniform, his face obscured by a white veil. The guard shoved him with the side of his rifle. “Stay back.”
The hidalgo peered over the man’s shoulder and saw Lady Sade sprawled against the wall, her chest painted red, her eyes open and vacant. On the ground by her foot was another woman with two medics working furiously on a wound in her belly. To the left were four other women, all pinned on the ground beneath the other guards, and in the corner a huddle of children were being detained at gunpoint.
One of the women on the ground wore a feathered cloak.
“Qhora!” He lurched into the soldier again. “Please, let me pass! Let her go!”
“No one beyond this point,” the guard said. “They’re all traitors and assassins. They will be imprisoned and tried for treason against the queen.”
“What?” Lorenzo stared at the scene again, trying to guess how any of this had happened in the last ten minutes.
“It’s her, it was all her!” cried a woman in a blue dress. “The foreign one! You should have heard her at dinner. Every word out of her mouth was rebellion and revolution and war against the crown. She’s a blood-thirsty savage!”
Qhora rolled over and kicked her.
The woman in blue wailed. “You see! She’s a violent savage!”
Two guards converged on Qhora.
Lorenzo examined the garden, noting the positions of the eleven guards, and which ones were holding their weapons, and which ones were looking away from him. It felt like a destreza lesson from his youth. Angles and lines of attack, circles of movement. Simple geometry.
I can do this. Rifles are simple things. Long straight weapons that only shoot in long straight lines. Fixed points of origin. Limited fields of fire. Simple geometry. He swallowed. No. I can’t fight eleven armed men.
The two guards reached for Qhora. “Get her up. Let’s get her somewhere secure.”
Lorenzo’s first instinct was to surge into the garden and tear the men apart with his bare hands. His second instinct was to leave, which he did. He waited long enough to see which way they were taking Qhora and then he ran back the way he had come and began working his way around to the right to intercept them. For two panicked minutes, he hurried through unfamiliar hallways with no way of knowing whether he was actually getting closer to them when he turned a corner and almost plowed into the two guards escorting Qhora down the passageway.
“Enzo!” she called out.
Lorenzo glanced down at the rifle between him and the first guard. He didn’t know much about rifles and he knew that combat was a poor time and place to start learning new things. But there was one part of the rifle he recognized. He wrenched the long bayonet off the barrel of the rifle, twisted the gun across the guard’s body, and plunged the blade through the trigger guard to jam the weapon and impale the soldier’s hand. The man gasped and stumbled against the wall, out of the way.
His gaze flashed over Qhora’s startled face to the second guard who was raising his rifle to his shoulder. Lorenzo slipped sideways, grabbed the rifle, and twisted it back against the man to break most of the fingers of his right hand. Unable to think of anything else to do, Lorenzo again slipped the bayonet off the rifle and jammed it through the trigger guard, impaling the man’s hand to his weapon.
He turned to find Qhora yanking the first man’s bayonet out of his hand. “Come on,” she said. “They’re going to kill the queen and her family. We need to find the old woman with the cat.”
Lorenzo blinked. “What cat?”