The Hostage Prince by Jane Yolen Page B

that way had always been his intention. And it was true. Well at least it had been true before the assassins had arrived. And now it was true again. The rest—well, it was bluff. He knew it. The girl might know it, too. But since she was of the underclass, he was certain she would never say any such thought aloud. “So, are you ready to stop arguing and—”
    â€œWho killed
them
?” Snail asked, interrupting again. “And why?” She looked up at him with a kind of childlike puzzlement, as if this were a maze she could not think her way through.
    â€œWhy should I care?”
    â€œBecause someone is quite the dab hand with quiet butchery,” she said. “And we don’t know which side he’s on.”
    Aspen wanted to ignore her. She was only a midwife’s apprentice, after all. But his hand holding the candle obviously felt differently, because it suddenly began trembling, sending bouncing shadows across the stone walls.
    He realized that now they had a brand-new worry.
Who—indeed—had killed the assassins? And why
? The girl had put her finger on the open wound and had not flinched. On the other hand, he had closed his eyes and tried to ignore it.
    This
, he thought,
is possibly a worse worry than the others combined
.
    â€œLet us get out of here and into the light,” he said.
Surely I have been traipsing around in these dungeons long enough for dawn to be near.
“Everything looks better there.” It was something his father used to say.
    And maybe
—he hoped—
it is true
. After all, nothing could look any worse. Of that he was now sure.

SNAIL’S FIGHT
    I
nto the light.
That suddenly sounded like the best idea in the world.
    Following the prince—because that was what her class was trained to do since birth—Snail thought about what she’d just witnessed. As the prince had checked out the two dead boggarts, she’d stared at them over his shoulder.
    Their throats had been cut with something large and inelegant.
    Something like the ogre’s butcher knives, the ones he’d worn in the belt around his waist.
    But when she and the prince had passed by the dead ogre, he was still lying on his stomach, which concealed the knives. And he was as still as the two creatures at the door. So she knew he couldn’t have been faking. Ogres were not subtle creatures.
    There’s someone else in this game,
she thought.
Someone who doesn’t care about killing, which argues for a toff. Someone who is fast, thorough, and inelegant, which argues for a Border Lord. Someone who kills without using magic.
She bit her lower lip.
Which leaves only another creature, or an apprentice.
She sighed.
Apprentices don’t kill.
    She thought a minute, then amended that:
Unless they are apprentice assassins
. Not that she’d ever met any apprentice assassins. Or met anyone who’d met any.
    It was a puzzle.
    Puzzles made her head spin.
    A midwife’s apprentice was taught how to anticipate problems in the birth chamber, not solve problems left by killers.
Anticipate, alleviate, and then await—the midwife’s creed
. What an assassin’s creed was, she didn’t want to know.
Cut, kill, hack, and hew, slice your prey through and through? And then slip silently away?
    She forced herself to watch the prince’s back and keep up with him step for step across the interrogation cell. By concentrating on that, she got her head to stop spinning at last, but it didn’t solve the puzzle.
    She
hated
puzzles.
    While she climbed the secret stairs behind the prince, she stuffed her right hand into her apron pocket and wrapped her fingers around the handle of the knife she’d taken from the ogre’s back. Elegant, with a carved handle, and an exceedingly sharp point that she hadn’t dared touch, the knife was the only thing that made her feel even a little bit safe.
    So why hadn’t the prince taken it? Or asked for