Part IX
She stood naked, looking at herself in a large piece of glass that some wizardress had enchanted for her. The magic had turned it from clear to some sort of silvery color, and it now reflected an image of whatever was in front of it as clearly as if you were looking at the original. The wizardress had a name for these enchanted sheets of glass, and had made a king’s fortune from making them. In fact, they were becoming so popular, that every alchemist in the city was busy trying to reproduce the effect scientifically. In any event, she couldn’t remember the name now. This one however, would look very nice in her chambers. She would have to make sure she found a way to get it there in one piece.
She turned around to face the bed where the youngest prince of Blueshaven was lying. He had been far too easy to seduce. She had always known he had a weakness for women. In fact, most of the city did. Maybe it was because of those experiences that he had turned out to be an exceptional lover. So good in fact, that she gave herself over to him and let him pleasure her fully before she killed him. And now, while the first banquet of spring still raved on, with its patrons eating and drinking and dancing merrily, Prince Ilfon lay dead in his room.
She had kept him secluded for most of the night. Ever since a little spell she wove had made her look irresistible to him. The spell didn’t last long; she had very limited power in her magic. In fact the only spells she could pull off successfully were considered mere cantrips by real wizards and wizardresses, but combined with some of the other tricks she kept up her sleeve (as well as anything pointy she had up there at the time), they made her very deadly indeed. But the spell had lasted long enough for her to get him alone, where she could put her real talents to work.
The fool had insisted on holding her afterward, which only made her bloodier when she stabbed him. She had stayed here longer than she wanted to because of having to wash up, but now that she was, she could get dressed and return to the festivities. It was important now that she was seen as much as possible to give herself an alibi. Plenty of questions would soon be asked of the feasters, but she wasn’t worried. Roomfuls of people would see her soon, and enough of them will have had their memories too dulled by strong drink to remember she had even left. No, the authorities shouldn’t be a problem.
She checked herself out in the glass one last time, making sure she was free of blood, and walked over to her pile of clothes on the floor. She had barely laid a finger on the first piece though when a sharp pound was heard at the door. This was followed by a couple of gruff voices.
“Prince Ilfon? Prince? The King has requested your presence downstairs right away, sir.”
The prince’s killer muttered an extended curse under her breath and scooped up the entire pile of belongings at her feet. With all the silent quickness she could muster, she swept across the room to the window, and tossed the bundle out of it. Some of the heavier items, such as her dagger, fell straight down, but the clothing fluttered in the evening breeze, some of it landing very far from the base of the tower below her. She sighed with a little relief as everything fell into the lake surrounding the tower, and didn’t get caught on any of the narrow ledges underlining the windows that ran all the way up and down its sides.
“Is everything all right in there, my prince?” the voices outside the door continued.
The woman took a deep breath. She thought for just a second about killing the men, but she dismissed the notion since she didn’t know how many of them were there. She couldn’t risk one getting away with a description of her while she was slitting some poor officer’s throat. She stepped one foot carefully out of the window onto the ledge, which turned out to be not even wide enough to place her whole foot on. She gasped nervously as she felt her bare toes curl over the edge into nothingness. Very slowly, she squared it off and shifted her weight onto it, then ducked her head through the opening.
There seemed to be some confusion among the men outside as to what they should do next. They had orders from the King, certainly, but bursting uninvited into a prince’s bedchambers could introduce certain unpleasant consequences into one’s life. If you were lucky, such consequences only affected your military posture, and not your physical one. A short debate had everyone in concurrence that they feared the King more, however, and the doorknob across the room began to turn.
She didn’t see it of course, but she wasn’t wasting any time nonetheless. She shimmied her slender form up the stone wall of the tower, and gasped sharply and nearly lost her balance when she felt the cold stone on her back. She had slipped her other foot outside, and was beginning to shuffle across the ledge away from the window when she heard the doorway to the corridor creak open.
If any of the men had looked toward the window upon entering the room, they may have seen a brief glimpse of flesh as the woman escaped. As it was, though, they all nervously peered at the bed first, hoping the prince would not be doubly displeased, as this was awfully likely if they were interrupting some activity there.
The killer was in trouble. She knew she didn’t have long until the men found the prince dead, and she also knew they would certainly look out onto the ledge as part of a search when they did. She slinked along the ledge for several yards before she realized the tower circumference was far too great for her to make it out of view in time. When the inevitable shouts rose from behind her, she chose her course of action. She dropped one leg off the edge as she stooped, grabbed the ledge, and lithely turned as she lowered herself over the side. She hung from the ledge now by tips of fingers, hoping feverishly that the dim candlelight from the prince’s room would not be enough for anyone to make out the contrast of them against the dark stone.
For several minutes, she hung there, and more than once the light spilling from the window winked out in an event she was sure was caused by a head and shoulders protruding from it instead, but nothing gave her any indication she had been seen. ‘That’s right,’ she thought to herself. ‘Nothing to see here. Just your everyday occurrence of a naked woman hanging from a tower ledge.’
When the commotion had finally died away, so did the distraction from wondering what it was she was going to do about her little predicament. The ledge was too narrow to climb back onto, and a quick glance to either side revealed little else between her and death. Her only chance appeared to be a window one story down, and a few feet to her right. With nothing else to lose, she began swinging her body sideways, trying to build up some momentum. Her fingers began to ache terribly, and when she could hold on no longer, she swung her body hard to the right and let go.
She fell for what seemed like forever, watching brick after brick float upward in front of her so much slower than they should. Her body tingled with the flow of adrenaline, and the air all around her lovingly caressed her form. She wanted to close her eyes and lean back, and fall into the embrace that was offered her.
An alarm went off in her head, and she snapped out of it just in time to see the window open in front of her. She instinctively hooked her arms inside it, grimacing when her fall was brought to a jolting halt as the corner of the ledge dug deeply into her armpits. She did her best to ignore the pain as she scrambled quickly through the window and tumbled prone onto the floor inside.
Thankfully, the room was empty. It looked to be the bedchambers of another member of the royal family, with the same type of canopy bed and furnishings the prince had in his. The linens were frillier, and in softer colors than upstairs, however, leading the woman sprawled next to the window to believe that one of the King’s daughters resided here. Despite being in a world of pain and utterly exhausted, she smiled. Fortune had just smiled ear to ear on her, indeed.
Twenty minutes later, she was downstairs in the drawing room with a glass of spiced wine in her hand, faking a laugh at a nobleman’s tale about him watching his farmhand give a horse an enema that went horribly wrong. She wore a stunning green silk dress that matched her eyes, complete with all the accessories befit of someone in a high enough social standing to attend a royal banquet. The dress itself was a little too big to fit her properly, but she walked with enough swagger that she would have challenged anyone at all to know the difference.