Rogue, Prisoner, Princess. Morgan Rice

Empire soldiers to find.”

      “That’s because you’re an idiot, Nico. Even if they noticed one more body among the rest, who’s to say they’d care? And then we’d have the trouble of bringing him down somewhere they’d see him. No. We should ransom him.”

      Thanos sat in the cave where the rebels had holed up for the moment, listening to them argue about his fate. His hands were tied in front of him, but at least they’d done their best to patch and bandage his wounds, leaving him in front of a small fire so he wouldn’t freeze while they decided whether to kill him in cold blood or not.

      The rebels sat at other fires, huddling around them, discussing what they could do to keep the island from falling to the Empire. They spoke quietly, so that Thanos couldn’t overhear the details, but he already knew the gist of it: they were losing, and losing badly. They were in the caves because there was nowhere else for them to go.

      After a while, the one who was obviously their leader came and sat down opposite Thanos, crossing his legs on the hard stone of the cave floor. He pushed across a hunk of bread that Thanos devoured hungrily. He wasn’t sure how long it had been since he’d last eaten.

      “I am Akila,” the other man said. “I command this rebellion.”

      “Thanos.”

      “Just Thanos?”

      Thanos could hear the curiosity there, and the impatience. He wondered if the other man had guessed who he was. Either way, the truth seemed like the best option right then.

      “Prince Thanos,” he admitted.

      Akila sat there opposite him for several seconds, and Thanos found himself wondering if he was going to die then. It had been close enough when the rebels had thought he was just some noble without a name. Now that they knew he was one of the royal family, close to the king who had oppressed them so much, it seemed impossible that they would do anything else.

      “A prince,” Akila said. He looked around at the others, and Thanos saw the flash of a smile there. “Hey, lads, we’ve got ourselves a prince here.”

      “We should definitely ransom him then!” one of the rebels called out. “He’d be worth a fortune!”

      “We should definitely kill him,” another snapped back. “Think about all his kind have done to us!”

      “All right, that’s enough,” Akila said. “Concentrate on the fight ahead. It’s going to be a long night.”

      Thanos heard a faint sigh from the other man as the men went back to their fires.

      “It’s not going well, then?” Thanos said. “You said before that your side was losing.”

      Akila gave him a sharp look. “I should know when to keep my mouth shut. Maybe so should you.”

      “You’re wondering whether to kill me anyway,” Thanos pointed out. “I figure that I don’t have a lot to lose.”

      Thanos waited. This wasn’t the kind of man he could push into giving him answers. There was something tough about Akila. Unyielding and straightforward. Thanos guessed that he would have liked him if they’d met under better circumstances.

      “All right,” Akila said. “Yes, we’re losing. You Imperials have more men than we do, and you don’t care about the damage you do. The city is under siege from land and from water, so that no one can get away. We’ll fight from the hills, but when you can just resupply by water, there’s not a lot we can do. Draco may be a butcher, but he’s a clever one.”

      Thanos nodded. “He is.”

      “And of course, you were probably there when he planned all of it,” Akila said.

      Now Thanos understood. “Is that what you’re hoping? That I know all of their plans?” He shook his head. “I wasn’t there when they made them. I didn’t want to be here, and I only came because they escorted me onto the ship under guard. Maybe if I had been there, I would have heard the part where they planned to stab me in the back.”

      He thought of Ceres then, about the way he’d been forced to leave her behind. That hurt more than the rest of it put together. If someone in a position of power was going to try to have him killed, he wondered, what would they do to her?

      “You have enemies,” Akila agreed. Thanos saw him clench and unclench one hand, as if the long battle for the city had started to make it cramp. “They’re even the same as my enemies. I don’t know if that makes you my friend, though.”

      Thanos looked around pointedly at the rest of the cave. At the shockingly low numbers of soldiers left there. “Right now, it looks as though you could do with all the friends you can get.”

      “You’re still a noble. You still have your position because of the blood of ordinary folk,” Akila said. He sighed again. “It looks as though if I kill you, I’m doing what Draco and his masters want, but you’ve as good as told me that if I ransom you, I get nothing for you. I have a fight to win, and no time to keep prisoners around if they don’t know anything. So, what am I supposed to do with you, Prince Thanos?”

      Thanos got the impression that he was serious. That he actually wanted a better solution. Thanos thought quickly.

      “I think your best choice is to let me go,” he said.

      Akila laughed at that. “Nice try. If that’s the best you have, hold still. I’ll try to make this as painless as possible.”

      Thanos saw his hand go to one of his swords.

      “I’m serious,” Thanos said. “I can’t help you win the battle for the island if I’m here.”

      He could see Akila’s disbelief, and the certainty that it had to be a trap. Thanos went on quickly, knowing that his best hope of surviving the next few minutes lay in convincing this man that he wanted to help the rebellion.

      “You said yourself that one of the big problems is that the Empire has its fleet supporting the assault,” Thanos said. “I know that they left supplies on the ships because they were so eager to get on with the attack. So we take the ships.”

      Akila stood up. “Have you heard this, lads? The prince here has a plan to take the Empire’s ships from them.”

      Thanos saw the rebels start to gather round.

      “What good would it do?” Akila asked. “We take their ships, but what then?”

      Thanos did his best to explain. “At the very least, it will provide an escape route for some of the people of the city, and for more of your soldiers. It will take away supplies from the Empire’s soldiers too, so that they can’t keep going for long. And then there are the ballistae.”

      “What are they?” one of the rebels called out. He didn’t look much like a long-term soldier. Very few of those in the room did, to Thanos’s eyes.

      “Bolt throwers,” Thanos explained. “Weapons designed to damage other ships, but if they were turned against soldiers near the shore…”

      Akila, at least, looked as though he was considering the possibilities. “That could be something,” he admitted. “And we can set light to any ships we can’t use. At the very least, Draco would pull his men back to try to get his ships back. But how do we get these ships in the first place, Prince Thanos? I know that where you come from, if a prince asks for something, he gets it, but I doubt that will apply to Draco’s fleet.”

      Thanos forced himself to smile with a level of confidence he didn’t feel. “That’s almost exactly what we’re going to do.”

      Again, Thanos had the impression of Akila working it out faster than any of his men could. The rebel leader smiled.

      “You’re mad,” Akila said. Thanos couldn’t tell if it was intended as an insult or not.

      “There are enough dead on the beaches,” Thanos explained, for the benefit of the others. “We take their armor and head to the ships. With me there, it will look like a company of soldiers returning from the battle for supplies.”

      “What