The Assassin and the Underworld (Throne of Glass 0.4)(13)

She almost groaned.

“How close were you, exactly?” He focused on the house, though she noticed that he’d fisted his hands.

Just tell him the truth, idiot!

“Nothing happened with Ilias. It was just a bit of flirtation, but … nothing happened,” she said again.

“Well,” he said after a moment, “nothing happened with Lysandra. And nothing is going to. Ever.”

“And why, exactly, do you think I care?” It was her turn to keep her eyes fixed on the house.

He nudged her with his shoulder. “Since we’re friends now, I assumed you’d want to know.”

She was grateful that her hood concealed most of her burning-hot face. “I think I preferred it when you wanted to kill me.”

“Sometimes I think so, too. Certainly made my life more interesting. I wonder, though—if I’m helping you, does it mean I get to be your Second when you run the Assassin’s Guild? Or does it just mean that I can boast that the famed Celaena Sardothien finally finds me worthy?”

She jabbed him with an elbow. “It means you should shut up and pay attention.” They grinned at each other, and then they waited. Around sunset—which felt especially early that day, given the heavy cloud cover—the bodyguard emerged. Doneval was nowhere in sight, and the bodyguard motioned to the guards, speaking quietly to them before he strode down the street. “Off on an errand?” Celaena pondered. Sam inclined his head after the bodyguard, a suggestion that they follow. “Good idea.”

Celaena’s stiff limbs ached in protest as she slowly, carefully inched away from the gargoyle. She kept her eyes on the nearby guards, not once looking away as she grabbed the roof ledge and hauled herself up it, Sam following suit.

She wished she had the boots the master tinkerer was adjusting for her, but they wouldn’t arrive until tomorrow. Her black leather boots, while supple and supportive, felt a bit traitorous on the rain-slick gutter of the roof. Still, she and Sam kept low and fast as they dashed along the roof edge, tracking the hulking man in the street below. Luckily, he turned down a back alley, and the next house was close enough that she could nimbly leap onto the adjacent roof. Her boots slid, but her gloved fingers grappled onto the green stone shingles. Sam landed flawlessly beside her, and, to her surprise, she didn’t bite his head off when he grabbed the back of her cloak to help her stand.

The bodyguard continued along the alley, and they trailed on the rooftops, shadows against the growing dark. At last, he came to a broader street where the gaps between houses were too big to jump, and Celaena and Sam shimmied down a drainpipe. Their boots were soft as they hit the ground. They picked up a casual pace behind their quarry, arms linked, just two citizens of the capital on their way to somewhere, eager to get out of the rain.

It was easy to spot him in the crowd, even as they reached the main avenue of the city. People jumped out of his way, actually. Melisande’s street festival in honor of the Harvest Moon was in full swing, and people flocked to it despite the rain. Celaena and Sam followed the bodyguard for a few more blocks, down a few more alleys. The bodyguard turned to look behind him only once, but he found them leaning casually against an alley wall, merely two cloaked figures taking shelter from the rain.

With all the waste brought in by the Melisande convoy, and the smaller street festivals that had already occurred, the streets and sewers were nearly overflowing with garbage. As they stalked the bodyguard, Celaena heard people talking about how the city wardens had dammed up parts of the sewers to let them fill with rainwater. Tomorrow night they were going to unleash them, causing a torrent in the sewers wild enough to sweep all the clinging trash into the Avery River. They’d done it before, apparently—if the sewers weren’t flushed out every now and then, the filth would grow stagnant and reek even more. Still, Celaena planned to be high, high above the streets by the time they unleashed those dams. There was sure to be some in-street flooding before it subsided, and she had no desire to walk through any of it.

The bodyguard eventually went into a tavern on the cusp of the crumbling slums, and they waited for him across the street. Through the cracked windows, they could see him sitting at the bar, drinking mug after mug of ale. Celaena began to wish fervently that she could be at the street festival instead.

“Well, if he has a weakness for alcohol, then perhaps that could be our way around him,” Sam observed. She nodded, but didn’t say anything. Sam looked toward the glass castle, its towers wreathed in mist. “I wonder if Bardingale and the others are having any luck convincing the king to fund their road,” he said. “I wonder why she would even want it built, since she seems so eager to make sure the slave trade stays out of Melisande for as long as possible.”

“If anything, it means she has absolute faith that we won’t fail,” Celaena said. When she didn’t say anything else, Sam fell silent. An hour passed, and the bodyguard spoke to no one, paid the entire tab with a piece of silver, and headed back to Doneval’s house. Despite the ale he’d consumed, his steps were steady, and by the time Sam and Celaena reached the house, she was almost bored to tears—not to mention shivering with cold and unsure if her numbed toes had fallen off inside her boots.

They watched from a nearby street corner as the bodyguard went up the front steps. He held a position of respect, then, if he wasn’t made to enter through the back. But even with the bits of information they’d gathered that day, when they made the twenty-minute trek across the city to the Keep, Celaena couldn’t help feeling rather useless and miserable. Even Sam was quiet as they reached their home, and merely told her that he’d see her in a few hours.