Fortunately, sneaking down a stone hallway didn’t require much skill. Karata quietly opened any doors in their path, leaving them open enough that Raoden didn’t even have to move them to slip through.
The dark hallway joined with another, this one lined with doors—the quarters of the lesser officers, as well as those guards allowed room to raise a family. Karata picked a door. Inside was the single room allotted to a married guard’s family; starlight illuminated a bed by one wall and a dresser beside the other.
Raoden fidgeted anxiously, wondering if all this had been so Karata could procure herself a sleeping guard’s weapons. If so, she was insane. Of course, sneaking into a paranoid king’s palace wasn’t exactly a sign of mental stability.
As Karata moved into the room, Raoden realized that she couldn’t have come to steal the guard’s accouterments—he wasn’t there. The bed was empty, its sheets wrinkled with a slept-in look. Karata stooped beside something that Raoden hadn’t noticed at first: a mattress on the floor, occupied by a small lump that could only have been a sleeping child, its features and sex lost to Raoden in the darkness. Karata knelt beside the child for a quiet moment.
Then she was done, motioning Raoden out of the room and closing the door behind her. Raoden raised his eyebrows questioningly, and Karata nodded. They were ready to go.
The escape was accomplished in the reverse order of the incursion. Raoden went first, sliding through the still open doors, and Karata followed, pulling them closed behind her. In all, Raoden was relieved at how easily the night was going—or, at least, he was relieved right up to the moment when he slipped through the door to that final hallway outside Iadon’s chamber.
A man stood on the other side of the door, his hand frozen in the act of reaching for the doorknob. He regarded them with a startled expression.
Karata pushed past Raoden. She wrapped her arm around the man’s neck, clamping his mouth closed in a smooth motion, then grabbed his wrist as he reached for the sword at his side. The man, however, was larger and stronger than Karata’s weakened Elantrian form, and he broke her grip, blocking her leg with his own as she tried to trip him.
“Stop!” Raoden snapped quietly, his hand held before him menacingly.
Both of their eyes flickered at him in annoyance, but then they stopped struggling as they saw what he was doing.
Raoden’s finger moved through the air, an illuminated line appearing behind it. Raoden continued to write, curving and tracing until he had finished a single character. Aon Sheo, the symbol for death.
“If you move,” Raoden said quietly, “you will die.”
The guard’s eyes widened in horror. The Aon sat glowing above his chest, casting harsh light on the otherwise caliginous room, throwing shadows across the walls. The character flashed as they always did, then disappeared. However, the light had been enough to illuminate Raoden’s black-spotted Elantrian face.
“You know what we are.”
“Merciful Domi …” the man whispered.
“That Aon will remain for the next hour,” Raoden lied. “It will hang where I drew it, unseen, waiting for you to so much as quiver. If you do, it will destroy you. Do you understand?”
The man didn’t move, sweat beading on his terrified face.
Raoden reached down and undid the man’s sword belt, then tied the weapon around his own waist.
“Come,” Raoden said to Karata.
The woman still squatted next to the wall where the guard had pushed her, regarding Raoden with an indecipherable look.
“Come,” Raoden repeated, a bit more urgently.
Karata nodded, regaining her composure. She pulled open the king’s door, and the two of them vanished the way they had come.
“He didn’t recognize me,” Karata said to herself, her voice amused yet sorrowful.
“Who?” Raoden asked. The two of them squatted in the doorway of a shop near the middle of Kae, resting for a moment before continuing their trek back to Elantris.
“That guard. He was my husband, during another life.”
“Your husband?”
Karata nodded. “We lived together for twelve years, and now he’s forgotten me.”
Raoden did some quick connecting of events. “That means the room we entered …”
“That was my daughter,” Karata said. “I doubt anyone ever told her what happened to me. I just … wanted her to know.”
“You left her a note?”
“A note and a keepsake,” Karata explained with a sad voice, though no tears could fall from her Elantrian eyes. “My necklace. I managed to sneak it past the priests a year ago. I wanted her to have it—I always intended to give it to her. They took me so quickly…. I never said goodbye.”
“I know,” Raoden said putting his arm around the woman comfortingly. “I know.”
“It takes them all from us. It takes everything, and leaves us with nothing.” Her voice was laced with vehemence.
“As Domi wills.”
“How can you say that?” she demanded harshly. “How can you invoke His name after all that He has done to us?”
“I don’t know,” Raoden confessed, feeling inadequate. “I just know we need to keep going, as everyone does. At least you got to see her again.”
“Yes,” Karata said. “Thank you. You have done me a great service this night, my prince.”
Raoden froze.
“Yes, I know you. I lived in the palace for years, with my husband, protecting your father and your family. I watched you from your childhood, Prince Raoden.”
“You knew all this time?”
“Not the entire time,” Karata said. “But for enough of it. Once I figured it out, I couldn’t decide whether to hate you for being related to Iadon, or to be satisfied that justice took you as well.”
“And your decision?”
“Doesn’t matter,” Karata said, wiping her dry eyes by reflex. “You fulfilled your bargain admirably. My people will leave you alone.”
“That’s not enough, Karata,” Raoden said, standing up.
“You would demand more beyond our bargain?”
“I demand nothing, Karata,” Raoden said, offering his hand to help her to her feet. “But you know who I am, and you can guess what I am trying to do.”
“You’re like Aanden,” Karata said. “You think to lord over Elantris as your father rules the rest of this cursed land.”
“People certainly are quick to judge me today,” Raoden said with a wry smile. “No, Karata, I don’t want to ‘lord over’ Elantris. But I do want to help it. I see a city full of people feeling sorry for themselves, a people resigned to seeing themselves as the rest of the world sees them. Elantris doesn’t have to be the pit that it is.”
“How can you change that?” Karata demanded. “As long as food is scarce, the people will fight and destroy to sate their hunger.”
“Then we’ll just have to fill them,” Raoden said.
Karata snorted.
Raoden reached inside a pocket he had formed in his ragged clothing. “Do you recognize this, Karata?” he asked, showing her a small cloth pouch. It was empty, but he kept it as a reminder of his purpose.
Karata’s eyes blazed with desire. “It held food.”
“What kind?”
“It’s one of the pouches of corn that is part of the sacrifice that comes with a new Elantrian,” Karata said.
“Not just corn, Karata,” Raoden said holding up a finger. “Seed corn. Part of the ceremony requires that a grain offering be plantable.”
“Seed corn?” Karata whispered.