It was dark when they came to get her.
When Jane had entered the encampment, she had been taken straight to a tent near the middle, roughly untied, shoved in through the flap, and left alone.
The interior of the tent contained nothing but the packed-earth floor, stained canvas walls stretched over a framework of thin wooden poles, and a single larger timber pole in the center, holding the entire sorry affair upright.
There was no one else in the tent, but that didn't mean that she was left unguarded. She could hear men moving around just outside; even see them silhouetted against the filthy canvas. There seemed to be one positioned at each corner of the squarish construction, so escape was not an option.
Of course, escape was not an option regardless. If she had been determined to escape Cuthbert's edict, all she would have had to do was go straight to Dragon when she'd left the castle that morning. A few moments to explain the situation to him, and they could have fled the kingdom together to seek their fortunes elsewhere – assuming she could have talked him out of waging his own war on the castle and roasting Cuthbert alive.
But that was neither here nor there, as it wouldn't have solved the problem of leaving her loved ones in imminent danger. Jane had been unable to think of a satisfactory way to accomplish this since leaving her audience with Cuthbert (of course, she was so deeply distraught that she failed to take into consideration the fact that she probably wasn't thinking straight.) No, the only solution that had seemed feasible in terms of protecting her friends and family had been to do as Cuthbert had ordered and sacrifice herself. She had chosen her path, and would not deviate from it now. Even if one of the guards outside had thrown open the tent flap and shouted at her to run for it, she would not have done so.
There were others to think about beside herself, after all. So many others whose lives hung in the balance.
No, escape was not an option.
She walked slowly, almost trancelike, to the middle of the tent, and folded herself onto the hard-packed floor. Leaning her back against the central pole she pulled her knees up to her chest, dropped her head forward onto them, wrapped her arms around her legs, and closed her eyes.
She stayed like that for most of the day.
Waiting. And remembering.
OOOOO
Her memories of growing up, of the people and places she loved, kept her company all that long, long day. She remembered gathering chestnuts with her mother in the autumn, running on a carpet of red and yellow fallen leaves. She remembered Lavinia as a little girl, not the sad-eyed teenager she had become; remembered her flitting about the castle with a tiny pair of wings strapped to her back, filling the courtyards and corridors with her laughter, hosting tea parties beside the fountain on summer days.
She remembered helping Rake in his garden, gathering ingredients for a grateful Pepper. She remembered sitting on the castle ramparts and stargazing with Jester on warm evenings while he sang and strummed softly; not really listening to the words, just letting the music wash over her like balm after a hard day's practice.
She remembered helping her father with his ledgers and lists, keeping Smithy company as he worked in the forge, feeding Pig choice scraps from the kitchen. She remembered eating supper by lantern-light at the garden table with her friends; the easy camaraderie that had flowed between them.
She remembered the queen the way she had been before her husband's early death had shattered her heart; a paragon of graceful womanhood with her gentle manner and serene smile. She remembered King Caradoc himself who had been, more than anything else, a true family man; perfectly enchanted by his wife and children. She remembered stern, disciplined Sir Theodore, her silver-templed mentor, and loud, portly Sir Ivon, master of inventions that never worked.
She remembered Dragon. She remembered screwing her courage to the sticking place on the day she'd set out to meet him for the very first time, convinced that she was about to confront a mortal enemy; never dreaming that she would be making the friend of a lifetime. She remembered his peculiar and fanciful fetish for cows. She remembered Dragon calling encouragement to her in the practice yard as he lazed the mornings away on the castle's sun-warmed walls. His large, solid presence beside her as they passed long afternoons poring over the runes in his cave. She remembered laughing at the humorous, and often rude, nicknames he invented for the various "shortlives" that populated the castle and surrounding area. The wind in her hair and the wild, weightless exhilaration of flying with him – a feeling that never dulled with time or repetition.
And, somewhat to her surprise, more than any of the others, she remembered Gunther.
Gunther sparring with her in the practice yard, smirking at his victories or scowling at defeat, but always, no matter what, pushing pushing pushing her to be stronger, faster, smarter, better.
Gunther stalking away from the garden supper table into the darkling of a summer night, offended by some offhand remark by Smithy or Jester. The mental armor he had constructed as a child to protect him from such perceived slights and rejections had appeared formidable – but in reality it had been thin, and the insecurity it shielded so terribly deep.
She remembered his face twisting in anger and shame on the myriad occasions that she had bested him in some childhood contest his father had witnessed; remembered him shoveling Pepper's food down like he hadn't eaten in weeks when he'd turned fifteen and hit a major growth spurt; remembered concealing herself to watch him practice with his longbow and understanding as she did so (though she wouldn't have admitted it even on pain of torture) that this was an area in which he was truly and genuinely gifted; a skill at which she would never, ever best him.
She remembered coming across him in rare, unguarded moments; finding him asleep on clean hay in the stables, or daydreaming in the sun; whittling some little trinket out of wood or bone in a shady corner of the courtyard on a hot afternoon, and once, memorably, even partaking of one of Princess Lavinia's tea parties.
She remembered him yanking her back from the edge of a precipice when she was twelve, saving her life; remembered him increasingly distancing himself from his father's questionable morals and unsavory ways as his teenaged years progressed, until it was clear to everyone in the court, as well as to Magnus himself, that Gunther had finally and irrevocably chosen his own path in life. That he was no longer, nor would ever be again, his father's pawn.
She remembered the night he'd moved into the castle; he'd arrived unexpectedly, after dark and in the middle of a downpour, drenched to the skin, jaw clenched to keep his teeth from chattering, no possessions but the clothes on his back. Seventeen he'd been then, with his sopping hair straggling into his steel-colored eyes, and the entire left side of his face a massive, vicious, spreading bruise.
Pepper and Jane, Smithy and Jester and Rake, all of whom had been sitting around the scrubbed-wood preparation table nursing mugs of hot cider had stared in astonishment, but the expression on his face, as thunderous as the weather, had invited neither questions nor comments. He had virtually collapsed into an empty chair, folded his arms on the tabletop, and dropped his head onto them.
He hadn't moved at all when Pepper had hesitantly offered him a mug of cider; hadn't moved at all, in fact, for the next two hours or so. It was only as everyone was going to bed and Smithy gave him a rather vigorous shake that they had discovered his father (well, everyone had always assumed it had been his father; Gunther had never said a word on the subject one way or the other) had actually hit him hard enough to give him a concussion.
Some parting gift.
The depth of Jane's fear that night, as she'd sat awake beside his pale and unmoving form, had shocked her. The depth of her anger toward Magnus had shocked her more.
In the end Gunther had recovered, none the worse for wear in any lasting sense; but he had never spoken of his father again, and never again slept away from the castle except for the times he'd been specifically sent hence on some errand or other. Jane for her part had single-mindedly buried the uncomfortable feelings that had arisen in her on that tense and eventful night, and aside from the rather closer quarters they now shared, life had gone on in much the same way as it ever had for the two knights-in-training.
She remembered Gunther's knighting ritual. Knighting the two squires, first Gunther and then, about a month later, Jane herself, had been one of King Caradoc's final acts before the incident that took his life.
Gunther had been required to keep a vigil in the chapel the night before the ceremony, kneeling alone on the cold stone floor from dusk until dawn in quiet contemplation of "the sacred and lifelong trust into which he was about to enter." Jane had padded quietly down from her room at about ten o'clock and spent the next several hours, until at least two in the morning, standing her own quiet vigil over him. She had never been sure exactly what had motivated her; the closest she had come to putting it into words was that she had trained along with Gunther almost from the very beginning, and even in this, the most isolated and introspective part of the knighting ritual, it just didn't feel right to leave him entirely friendless and alone.
She had stayed at the back of the chapel, cloaked in the sepulchral silence and shadows of the ancient building, and had not thought that Gunther had even noticed her presence. The next day, though, at the meal in his honor (a meal which Magnus had had the audacity to attend, trying to play the part of the beaming father for all that the two men had spoken not a single word to one another, so far as Jane had seen) he had leaned down in passing and murmured in her ear, "thank you for last night. It was more endurable knowing I was not alone."
No more had been said on the matter. But a month later, when it was Jane's turn to prise herself up off the chapel floor in the watery light of the dawn, stiff and chilled to the bone from an entire night of kneeling in place, she turned toward the door just in time to see it quietly slipping shut.
She hadn't kept her vigil alone, either.
This, and a thousand memories more, paraded through her mind as the sun first ascended toward its zenith, then began its slow downward trek toward the western horizon. And out of all the faces to visit her mind on that long, lonely day, the one that appeared most often by far had dark hair and troubled grey eyes.
Almost like a shadow, a wraith, Gunther kept her company as she waited to die.
It was dark when they came to get her.