"Your breeches! I can't climb in skirts! Now!" She put enough of the power in her order that he obeyed her, blushing to the roots of his hair, and she pulled his breeches on, leaving him to look frantically for something to cover himself with.
Which is ridiculous; he's wearing more now than some of the male dancers wear on stage.
"Go!" she snapped at him, running for the stairs to the roof. "Tell Tyladen what I just told you!"
She didn't wait to see how he solved his embarrassing quandary; time was not on her side.
The King can't know about this; that means that this arrest is on a trumped-up charge at worst. That means I won't have to dodge every guard in the city, only the ones in blue-and-green livery.
They would probably bully their way inside, and might even get as far as her room before Tyladen called in enough help to throw them out again.
And I left my harps!
But T'fyrr was worth all the harps in the world. The Elves could make her a new pair of harps; all the universe could not make her a new T'fyrr.
She scampered across the roof in a bent-over crouch, in case someone was watching from one of the other rooftops. When she got to the edge, she scanned the area for a lookout.
There was one, but he wasn't very good; she spotted him before he saw her, and commotion down on the street caught his attention long enough for her to get over the side away from him and down onto one of the walkways. She paused just long enough to coil up her hair and knot it on top of her head_then, from a distance, she was just a gangly boy, not a woman at all.
She stood up and shoved her hands in her pockets, and strolled in a leisurely manner along the walkway until she got to the building across the street. No shouts followed her, and she did not sense any eyes on her for more than a disinterested few heartbeats.
She took care not to seem to be in any hurry; she even stopped once to look down with interest at the milling knot of guards at the side door of Freehold. One or two of them looked up, then ignored her.
Then she reached the haven of the next building and threw her leg over the side of the roof there, climbing up onto it, rather than going down to street level. Just as if she had been sent on an errand over to Freehold and was returning.
When she was reasonably certain that no one was watching her, she sprinted across to the other side of the roof. There was another walkway down the side of the building there, and this one went all the way to the ground if you knew how to release the catch on the last staircase.
All Freeholders, of course, did.
She careened down the metal staircase, knocking painfully into the handrails and slipping on the steps in her hurry. She tumbled down to the drop-steps, hit the catch, and let her weight take the steps down into the noisome alley below.
Then, at last, she was in the street, and it would take a better tracker than a noble's guard to find her.
I had not known it was possible to hurt so much. T'fyrr had always thought that when you were injured, you lost track of the lesser pains in the face of the greater. Evidently, I was mistaken, he thought, far back in the fog of pain and background fear. Odd how it was possible to think rationally in the midst of the most irrational circumstances. Probably that ironic little mental voice would go right on commenting up until the moment he died, since it seemed more likely that he would die of his many wounds rather than maddening hunger.
So T'fyrr cataloged every pain, every injury, working inch by inch over his abused flesh in his mind. He had to; it was the only way he could keep himself sane. As long as he had something to concentrate on in the face of darkness, fear and the absolute certainty that not only did he not know where he was, no one else did either, he could stay marginally sane.
Whoever had plucked him out of the sky at the height of his climb had known exactly what they were doing. They were ready for him the moment he tumbled, sick and disoriented, onto the floor of the room they had brought him to. He had not been able to raise so much as a single talon in his own defense.
Magic. They caught me in a magic net and dragged me down to their hiding place. And to think I was laughing in my heart at Nightingale's "irrational" fear. Magic could do nothing to me, of course. It has no power over the physical world. I wonder if I will get a chance to apologize to her?
Before he could move, four burly men had swarmed over him, trussing him up like a dinner-fowl. But they had more surprises in store for him.