A/N: OK, here it is: the chapter with more plot, more fluff, and more beasties! I hope everyone likes it. It was a lot harder to write than the last one, and I'm still not sure I got all the necessary bits in.

Big thanks to everyone who has reviewed so far:) And a HUGE thank-you to whoever nominated this fic for the Circle of Heroes awards! I'm unbelievably flattered and chuffed :D

Daine's daughter -- but I can, if I haven't written the next chapter yet ... that's the problem with serialized fiction, I guess! (Don't worry, I am going to finish the story. Pretty soon, too.)

Tawnykit -- Thanks :). I'm so glad you thought the car flashback worked! I'm not claustrophobic myself, so I tried to work from the experiences of friends, plus my hubby's difficulties with aeroplanes. Ozorne is pretty evil, n'est-ce pas? I enjoy reading about Ozorne as a somewhat sympathetic figure, but I just can't seem to write him that way. I did try, but he just kept on being evil, so I went with it ;). All I'll say about the execution possibility is, don't worry too much ...

Dolphindreamer -- Thanks :). I had fun writing the dream sequence ... well, maybe not fun exactly. Dream sequences are like flashbacks for me, in that I can't seem to write anything of any length without including at least one! Great that you picked up on the "someday" thing. I tried and tried to think of what would finally make Daine say "yes," and then suddenly it hit me!

Alanna22039 -- Thanks:) This is nearly the end, actually ...

Palomino -- Thanks:) I will finish it. I promise. I hate it when people abandon a good fic halfway through!

mistywabbit -- Thank you so much:) I've fixed the error in chapter 9, and please, please tell me if you see any more! I think you're the first person to notice (or, at least, to mention noticing) that the GPS mobile is Numair's focus. Translating small, but key, details into the modern setting is tricky, but also funfun (no, I haven't thought of a way to bring in the darkings, alas).

Disclaimer: Characters and bits of plot belong to Tamora Pierce. Other bits of plot and details of this AU belong to me.


12: Rescue

The hour before dawn on Tuesday saw a variety of rather peculiar activities beginning in the vicinity of the Royal Palace.

On the kitchen loading dock, two young men in chefs' whites unloaded from a succession of delivery vehicles, in addition to the materials for a great many breakfasts, an impressive assortment of weapons (automatic rifles, murderous-looking knives, and businesslike nightsticks, all neatly packed in crates labelled "peaches" or "dates") and several small, suspiciously unlabelled parcels. The former were collected, a few at a time, by the unusual number of casual visitors to the kitchens that morning; the contents of the latter found their way into those dishes destined for the Palace Guard.

At the main gate, where the guard had been doubled following an escape attempt by one prisoner and an attack on His Majesty by another, four soldiers subdued the other four and tied them up beneath the staircase, and a third quartet, looking only slightly awkward in stolen uniforms, emerged from behind the statues to take their place.

In a small, bare cell somewhere under the palace, one of the above-mentioned prisoners, a dark-haired, very tall man whose clothing was very much the worse for wear, rolled from his left side to his right and woke up when he nearly fell off his too-short metal cot. He had a pounding headache, and the back of his head felt strangely damp. The hand that reached up to explore the situation (awkwardly: it was handcuffed to its partner) came away sticky with blood.

All around the high wrought-iron walls that surrounded the palace compound, people who had no obvious business gradually collected, none speaking to any of the others.

And in the grounds of the Royal Zoo, an extremely unauthorized person went quickly and quietly from cage to cage, picking all the locks.


Numair had been awake for some time—awake and fretting, as Daine might have put it—by the time the smartly dressed guardsman opened the door of his cell and thrust in a tray of food and a sheaf of papers closely covered with laser-printed text, several pages in English and several more in Arabic.

"What's this?" he inquired.

"Your confession," the guard returned gruffly. His face looked pale, even a little green, and he seemed to be speaking with some effort. "You're to memorize it. And breakfast." He began to pull the door shut behind him.

"Wait!" Numair shouted after him. But the only sound was of someone being sick in the corridor.

Numair sniffed cautiously at the pita, the banana, and the plastic bowl of dates on the tray and decided (despite being very hungry) to give it a miss, just in case. His head still ached fiercely, and he was beginning to feel dizzy and faintly sick. It's shock, he realized at last, with surprising detachment. I've had a blow to the head, and I'm going into shock. I've probably got concussion.

That settled, he turned his attention to his "confession."

Had the circumstances been less dire, the text might have reduced him to helpless laughter; it was over-the-top, bombastic, the sort of thing that a young Arram Draper would have found terribly dramatic and impressive, and it was impossible to imagine any reasonable adult taking such a confession seriously. With Ozorne, you never can overcome that first impression. He considered departing from the script and simply stating the "facts" of the case, until it occurred to him that this might actually improve Ozorne's credibility. That settles it: definitely concussion.

Two readings ought to do it, he decided, and sat back against the cinder-block wall to memorize his lines.


Numair and Daine are in his kitchen, washing up after a dinner party—the first they have hosted together—and it is very late. She has contrived to decline offered lifts back to her flat from the Coopers and Onua, protesting that it is unfair to leave Numair with the washing-up, and now they are alone in the house. (He wonders, but not thoroughly enough, at his—their—friends' unprecedented failure to stay and help clean up.)

She has had just enough wine—a glass or so—to make her cheeks glow pink. She smells very faintly of satsuma soap and chocolate. She has spent this chilly November evening surrounded by friends, talking and laughing and thinking about happy things. She is serenely cheerful and absolutely exquisite, and every so often she slides an arm about his waist for a moment or puts down her tea towel and reaches up for a brief kiss.

He grips the edge of the sink white-knuckled, not sure how much longer he can resist her. Which he has promised himself he will do, his conscience reminds him, until she is ready: he will not be just another man trying to get her into bed.

Daine yawns hugely. "Listen," she says, "it's so late, I don't want to put you to the trouble of running me home—d'you mind if I just kip on your sofa?"

They both know perfectly well that he would never let her sleep on his ancient, lumpy sofa, which in any case is half buried in stacks of books and papers.

"There's the spare bedroom upstairs," he says. "I'll make up the bed for you."

"Would you? Thanks ever so, love." She stands on tiptoe and kisses him again, quickly, then pats his shoulder. "Don't worry, I'll finish up down here."

He trudges upstairs and searches the linen cupboard for sheets; he can hear her pottering about in the kitchen, putting away plates and silver, singing to herself. He makes up the never-used spare-room bed with shaking hands. He does not want her to sleep across the hall; but neither does he want to hear the full ugliness of common-room gossip turned on her when she becomes, in their colleagues' eyes, his latest conquest. Wrapped in the double preoccupations of research and new love, he is blissfully unaware that tongues have been wagging on this subject for many months already. Since, in fact, long before there was really any cause.

The bed-making finished, he ducks into the bathroom to perform his bedtime ablutions, not wanting to encounter her there later.

"All set, love," he calls down.

"Thanks—I'll be right up," she calls back.

He goes into his own bedroom and shuts the door firmly. Undresses, yawns, crawls into bed—alone, as has been usual for him for the past two years, though never in his adult life before. Hears her sleepy voice bidding him goodnight from across the hall, and answers as casually as he can manage.

Sometime in the wee hours a small sound wakes him: the door of his bedroom quietly opening, and soft footsteps approaching. Blinking at her in the moonlight, he registers what she is wearing: a flannel shirt several sizes too large for her, one he vaguely remembers hanging on the coat-tree at her flat weeks ago and never seeing since. The shirttails hang to her knees. She is looking at him steadily, her expression unreadable.

Then she lifts the covers a few inches and climbs in.

He sits up, clutching blankets around his bare chest—as though it is a sight she has not seen dozens of times in the Uni pool. "Daine," he protests, weakly, "you shouldn't—I don't think—"

"You think too much," she says, smiling. And kisses him. Gently at first, her palms against his cheeks, then hungrily—greedily. Her arms go round him and his fingers tangle in her hair.

Almost before he realizes what is happening, she has shed the too-large shirt and they are skin to skin. Dark fingers brush the milky skin along her collarbones, and she shudders.

When, finally, his mind registers what his body already knows, he tears his mouth from hers and gasps, "Are you sure about this? Because if not—"

"I'm sure," she says. She is gasping, too. "I've never been so sure of anything."

"I love you," he whispers, holding her gaze.

"I know," she replies. "That's why."

She must know the mechanics—one cannot be nineteen years old and breathing, in a university town, and not know—but he has all the experience, she only instinct. Still, it is clear to him at once that she has no intention of letting him take charge. It doesn't matter, in any case: no prior experience could have prepared him for this, for the all-consuming blend of love, desire, and desperate, overwhelming need that she both provokes and satiates.

Did he expect her to be meek or coquettish? Of course not—her practicality and her fierce determination are part of what he loves in her. She is as strong, as eager, as hungry as he. There is a moment when her body in his arms feels (against all previous evidence) impossibly fragile. He hesitates, afraid of hurting her; her voice and her hands urge him on.

For once they both are speechless—though by no means silent.

The next morning they both sleep through their scheduled lectures. When Numair rings his department head to apologize for his unexplained absence, his halting excuses are met with puzzlement: a colleague has already prepared and taken his lectures for the day, forewarned by an e-mail message "from your RA" about an off-campus meeting.

When he confronts Daine with this evidence of prior intent, she smirks at him. She is dressed in clean clothes and is cleaning her teeth, in his bathroom, with her own toothbrush. While he watches her, one eyebrow raised, she spits toothpaste into the sink, rinses it, rinses her mouth. "Of course I planned it," she says at last. "A girl can only wait so long." Then, suddenly, she blushes and drops her eyes. "You don't … you don't mind, do you?"

He takes her gently by the shoulders, and she lifts her face to his.

"What I mind," he says, his voice an amorous growl, "is these mixed signals of yours." He runs his hands from her shoulders down her arms; her eyes close, and he feels her shiver. "You've cancelled all my lectures for me, and yet" (a soft kiss on her throat, below one ear) "you've gone and put on all these clothes."

It is a few days after this that he first asks her to marry him. "Someday," she says, with an impish grin. "Provided you behave yourself."

A month later, she gives up to Evin her place in the flat she shares with Miri and moves herself and her modest worldly goods into Numair's house. By the end of that week, it seems to him as though she has always been there.


Daine had realized early on that her cell was thoroughly soundproofed. It must have been for this reason that when her would-be rescuers arrived, she had no warning of their coming—heard no screaming or shouting or fleeing footsteps—until the moment when she awoke to the sound of something large and heavy crashing against the door.

While impregnable to an unarmed human being, that barrier posed little challenge to a large and determined rhinoceros. After only three charges, the door hung crazily from its upper hinges, and a smallish Indian elephant nudged it casually aside and reached in to investigate Daine with its trunk. Next the lion she had spoken with on her tour of the zoo thrust his way into the cell; sitting down at her feet, he began to wash her face with his large, rough tongue.

Shaking, she leaned down to bury her face in the musky-smelling cushion of his mane.

"I know you've come to rescue me," she said at last, raising her head to address the oddly assorted crowd straining to see her from out in the corridor—including the lion's mate, two Indian elephants, the rhino, a worried-looking pygmy hippopotamus, three chimpanzees, a kangaroo, an orang-utan, a zebra, a group of spider monkeys, a Bengal tiger, a variety of antelopes, a pair of grizzly bears, and a young female gorilla. She held up her hands to show them her shackled wrists. "Thank you—I'm so very grateful. Only—I can't leave—I can't get out of these chains."

There was a shifting in the crowd, and from the back of the group a tiny monkey—a male pygmy marmoset, she saw—leaped delicately along the backs of the larger beasts to land at last on the cot beside Daine and her lion. He jingled strangely with each leap. When finally he was still, and close enough to see, she realized why: in his tiny front paws he held a ring of keys.

"Oh, you clever little thing," Daine breathed, awestruck: even if they were the wrong keys, which seemed more than likely, it was an impressive effort.

The marmoset sat up, chittering, and offered her the keys; she took them awkwardly in her right hand and, hoisting her feet back up to the cot, began the difficult process of trying to unlock her ankles.

Before long Daine was panting and cursing and half-crying with the effort; her arms ached, and she was becoming convinced that the correct key was not to be found. Then she felt a hand on her shoulder and looked up, startled, into the dark eyes of the gorilla.

The gorilla held out her other hand and Daine wordlessly dropped the keys into her palm. After all, why not? She had seen big apes do some amazing things, after all; why not this? It'd be a lot less strange than most of what's happened to me this week.

So she was less surprised than she might have been when, a few minutes' worth of trial and error later, she heard a soft metallic snick and felt her left hand, then her right, come free. Without thinking, she flung her arms around her saviour and hugged tight, crying, "You clever, clever girl! You're the cleverest, bravest gorilla there ever was!"

After a moment, the gorilla wrapped long, strong arms about Daine's shoulders and, very gently, squeezed.


"Who let all the zoo animals out?" Kaddar demanded. His allies inside the palace were reporting odd happenings—an influx of meerkats in the kitchens, steaming piles of dung in random corridors—and it was beginning to make him rather nervous. There were, as he was now discovering, distinct disadvantages to striking while the iron was hot—not the least of which was a strong possibility of third-degree burns.

There was a general round of shrugs and denials.

"Whoever it was was bloody brilliant," said Alanna, grinning. "They'll go straight for Daine, and confuse the hell out of everyone in the place at the same time. We couldn't have planned a better diversion if we'd worked on it for months. Much as I wish I had planned it," she added.

"You believe this is a positive development, then." Kaddar still sounded dubious.

"Bloody brilliant," Alanna repeated. "Trust me."

"Right, then," said Kaddar, squaring his shoulders and taking the safety off his weapon. "Pass the signal. Here we go."


Ozorne came alone to Numair's cell, splendidly attired and white to the lips with poorly suppressed fury, muttering under his breath. He did not speak to Numair, but unlocked the chains connecting leg-irons to cot and propelled his captive out into the corridor with an iron grip on his left biceps. Every so often the younger man caught a phrase or two from the sotto voce flow: my idiot nephew's pathetic attempt at rebellion; accursed incompetence; do they not understand what they owe to me?; should have … when the opportunity presented itself … He was not certain whether to be frightened or amused.

Once out of his cell, Numair made an important discovery: though the tiny rectangular room looked exactly like the one in which he had lost consciousness the night before (or had it been early this morning?), it was in a quite different part of the building, one that resembled a high-security research complex in its gleaming sterility. Searingly bright halogen pot-lights assaulted his eyes; he squinted, and focused on the floor in front of his shackled, shuffling feet.

There was a smell that did not fit these sterile surroundings. A few metres away from the cell door, Numair recognized it as the guard who had brought him his breakfast—the guard and his stomach contents, side by side on the otherwise pristine floor. His stomach heaved, and he swallowed hard.

Ozorne made a sound of disgust and shoved him forward, past this unpleasant spectacle, rather faster than Numair was currently capable of moving. "If you want me to run," he said mildly, "you'll have to give me full use of my legs."

The reply was a shove that knocked his head and upper body against the opposite wall.

After that they met nothing and no one, and Numair realized at last where he was: Ozorne's private laboratory complex, the one no one could enter without his thumbprint. He tried to consider what this meant, but found that he somehow couldn't think very well.

Their eventual destination was a thumbprint-locked chamber that resembled the "interview rooms" Numair had occasionally seen on television dramas featuring hard-bitten police detectives: formica-topped table, hard chairs, tape-recorder, large mirrored window that was obviously one-way glass. It was a little less pristine than the endless corridors, looking, in fact, as though perhaps it had more than once been used for the purpose for which it seemed to be intended. A large television camera was trained on the table and chairs.

Ozorne shoved his captive into a chair. Leaning down so that they were nose to nose, he hissed, "Remember this: Nothing you can do will save you, but you can still save her. Speak the words you were given—nothing more and nothing less. That is the agreement. If you break that agreement …"

Numair nodded—gently, so as not to knock his aching head against any of the many tables and chairs and cameras. He wished fervently that everything would stop spinning.

Say the words. It will all be all right if I just say the words.


"You're sure you know how to use that thing?" Alanna whispered to Zaimid. Armed with elderly Kalashnikovs, they were prowling the corridors of the servants' wing, assigned to round up anyone they found there and stash them somewhere safe for the duration. Though most of the rest of the palace was filled with fighting, fleeing, or hastily concealed folk, so far they had seen no one in this wing at all. Alanna strongly suspected that Kaddar had sent them here to keep them out of the fighting.

Zaimid's dark eyes gleamed with mischief. "All young men must do three years' military service when they reach eighteen," he whispered back. Alanna nodded. That explained more than it didn't: she'd thought Kaddar, for example, rather old to be a graduate student. "It is the only way His Majesty can maintain an army at all," Zaimid went on, "and for that reason it is a good policy. But it is also a very stupid one, because it means that even a confirmed pacifist like me is thoroughly prepared to take up arms against him."

Now Alanna shook her head, marvelling that such a short-sighted, corrupt and (she thought) just plain stupid ruler had managed to stay in power so long. Then she and Zaimid heard footsteps ahead of them and froze, hugging the walls, rifle barrels trained on the turning in the corridor.

When the newcomer rounded the corner, however, both lowered their weapons: there seemed no possibility that this person could offer them any threat.

"Oh, it's you, is it?" Alanna said. "Tired of spying for His Majesty, are you? Come to turn yourself in?"

It was Varice Kingsford, looking unkempt, miserable and terrified. "Everyone's gone mad," she whimpered. "There are men with guns running about, and wild animals loose all over the palace, and …" she swayed on her feet, and Zaimid darted forward to catch her as she slumped to the floor.

Alanna sighed. "Just what we needed," she said resignedly. "Sleeping Beauty."


At eight o'clock in the morning, local time, radios and television sets all over the country, many of them strategically placed within the Royal Palace, crackled unpleasantly, and people stopped what they were doing when they heard their king begin to speak. Over the next ten minutes the story was picked up (with hastily composed subtitles) by media outlets all over the world, alerted by the same news crews who had so successfully covered the bizarre terrorist incident of the previous day.

"Our small nation remains saddened and outraged by the violent events that took place in our capital yesterday," King Ozorne said gravely. "However, we announce with great satisfaction, and with deep gratitude to our brave and loyal law-enforcement personnel, that we have discovered and apprehended the man who, for his own evil purposes, planned and orchestrated this despicable attack on a defenceless city …"

The villain of the piece, when at length the camera panned to reveal him, looked like nothing so much as a tourist with a possibly fatal hangover. His once-white shirt was grimy, its collar stained with blood; his long black hair was lank, and a vivid bruise bloomed on his temple. He sat with his manacled hands before him on a table, staring into the camera with eyes that appeared unable to focus. Nevertheless, he took his cue and slowly, haltingly, began to speak.

All over the palace, gathered around previously unnoticed TV monitors, people watched and listened: members (old and brand-new) of Prince Kaddar's impromptu army; prisoners under guard in the main banqueting hall; a red-headed British doctor and her oddly assorted patients; and, perhaps most importantly, a pale, grubby, wild-haired young woman with a pygmy marmoset perched on her shoulder—a woman mounted on a female Indian elephant.

The bilingual confession of Arram Draper, alias Numair Salmalín, as penned by Ozorne Tasikhe and word-processed by one of his army of clerks, ought to have taken some fifteen minutes to deliver. Five minutes into the English version, however, the prisoner swayed in his seat; a trickle of blood ran down his upper lip, then flowed, then gushed; his voice trailed off, and he toppled out of view.

The girl on the elephant went white under her bruises. "Right," she announced, in a voice of implacable fury. "Enough hanging about. I don't care who this Azan Fikret is or what he's planning—we're going down there now and get my husband—my mate—back. Walk on, Khaja."

The elephant walked. A pair of lions, a second elephant, a rhino, a pygmy hippo, three chimpanzees, two orang-utans, a zebra, a group of spider monkeys, three spotted hyenas, a Bengal tiger, several antelopes, a pair of grizzly bears, two grey kangaroos, and a gorilla followed in her wake.