It was an effort of will to leave Lysandra with him in that hellhole.
She could feel the Valg sentries monitoring her, feel their indecision and malice, and hoped that Chaol and Nesryn didn’t run into trouble as she vanished into the open, cool night air.
She hadn’t asked them to come just to watch her back, but to make them realize precisely how stupid they’d been in trusting a man like Arobynn Hamel. Even if Arobynn’s gift was the reason they were now able to track the Valg back to wherever they were squatting.
She just hoped that despite her former master’s gift, they at last understood that she should have killed Dorian that day.
CHAPTER
25
Elide was washing dishes, carefully listening to the cook complain about the next scheduled shipment of supplies. A few wagons would arrive in two weeks, it seemed, carrying wine and vegetables and perhaps, if they were lucky, salted meat. Yet it wasn’t what was coming that interested her, but how it was carried, what sort of wagons might bear it. And where Elide might best hide in one.
That was when one of the witches walked in.
Not Manon, but the one named Asterin, golden-haired with eyes like a star-flecked night and a wildness in her very breath. Elide had long ago noted how quick she was to grin, and had marked the moments when Asterin thought no one was looking and gazed across the horizon, her face tight. Secrets—Asterin was a witch with secrets. And secrets made people deadly.
Elide kept her head down, shoulders tucked in, as the kitchen quieted in the Third’s presence. Asterin just swaggered right up to the cook, who had gone pale as death. He was a loud, kind man most days, but a coward at heart.
“Lady Asterin,” he said, and everyone—Elide included—bowed.
The witch smiled—with white, normal teeth, thank the gods. “I was thinking I might help with the dishes.”
Elide’s blood chilled. She felt the eyes of everyone in the kitchen fix on her.
“As much as we appreciate it, Lady—”
“Are you rejecting my offer, mortal?” Elide didn’t dare to turn around. Beneath the soapy water, her pruny hands shook. She fisted them. Fear was useless; fear got you killed.
“N-no. Of course, Lady. We—and Elide—will be glad for the help.”
And that was that.
The clatter and chaos of the kitchen slowly resumed, but conversation remained hushed. They were all watching, waiting—either for Elide’s blood to spill on the gray stones, or to overhear anything juicy from the ever-smiling lips of Asterin Blackbeak.
She felt each step the witch took toward her—unhurried, but powerful.
“You wash. I’ll dry,” the sentinel said at her side.
Elide peeked out from behind the curtain of her hair. Asterin’s black-and-gold eyes glittered.
“Th-thank you,” she made herself stammer.
The amusement in those immortal eyes grew. Not a good sign.
But Elide continued her work, passing the witch the pots and plates.
“An interesting task, for a lord’s daughter,” Asterin observed, quietly enough that no one else in the bustling kitchen could hear.
“I’m happy to help.”
“That chain says otherwise.”
Elide didn’t falter with the washing; didn’t let the pot in her hands slip an inch. Five minutes, and then she could murmur some explanation and run.
“No one else in this place is chained up like a slave. What makes you so dangerous, Elide Lochan?”
Elide gave a little shrug. An interrogation—that’s what this was. Manon had called her a spy. It seemed her sentinel had decided to assess what level of threat she posed.
“You know, men have always hated and feared our kind,” Asterin went on. “It’s rare for them to catch us, to kill us, but when they do … Oh, they delight in such horrible things. In the Wastes, they’ve made machines to break us apart. The fools never realized that all they needed to do to torture our kind, to make us beg”—she glanced down at Elide’s legs—“was to chain us. Keep us tied to the earth.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
Two of the fowl-pluckers had hooked their hair behind their ears in a futile attempt to overhear them. But Asterin knew how to keep her voice low.
“You’re, what—fifteen? Sixteen?”
“Eighteen.”
“Small for your age.” Asterin gave her a look that made Elide wonder if she could see through the homespun dress to the bandage she used to flatten her full breasts into an unnoticeable chest. “You must have been eight or nine when magic fell.”
Elide scrubbed at the pot. She’d finish it and go. Talking about magic around these people, so many of them eager to sell any bit of information to the dread-lords who ruled this place … It would earn her a trip to the gallows.
“The witchlings who were your age at the time,” the sentinel went on, “never even had a chance to fly. The power doesn’t set in until their first bleeding. At least now they have the wyverns. But it’s not the same, is it?”
“I wouldn’t know.”
Asterin leaned in close, an iron skillet in her long, deadly hands. “But your uncle does, doesn’t he?”
Elide made herself smaller and bought herself a few more seconds of time as she pretended to consider. “I don’t understand.”
“You’ve never heard the wind calling your name, Elide Lochan? Never felt it tug at you? You’ve never listened to it and yearned to fly toward the horizon, to foreign lands?”
She’d spent most of her life locked in a tower, but there had been nights, wild storms …
Elide managed to get the last bit of burnt food off the pot and rinsed it, handing it to the witch before wiping her hands on her apron. “No, Lady. I don’t see why I would.”
Even if she did want to flee—wanted to run to the other end of the world and wash her hands of these people forever. But it had nothing to do with the whispering wind.
Asterin’s black eyes seemed to devour her whole. “You would hear that wind, girl,” she said with expert quiet, “because anyone with Ironteeth blood does. I’m surprised your mother never told you. It’s passed on through the maternal line.”
Witch-blood. Ironteeth blood. In her veins—in her mother’s lineage.
It wasn’t possible. Her blood flowed red; she had no iron teeth or nails. Her mother had been the same. If there was ancestry, it was so old that it had been forgotten, but …
“My mother died when I was a child,” she said, turning away and nodding her farewell to the head cook. “She never told me anything.”
“Pity,” Asterin said.
The servants all gawked at Elide as she limped out, their questioning eyes telling her enough: they hadn’t heard. A small relief, then.
Gods—oh, gods. Witch-blood.
Elide took the stairs up, each movement sending shooting pains through her leg. Was that why Vernon had kept her chained? To keep her from flying off if she ever showed a lick of power? Was that why the windows in that tower in Perranth had been barred?
No—no. She was human. Fully human.
But at the very moment these witches had gathered, when she’d heard those rumors about the demons who wanted to … to … breed, Vernon had brought her here. And had become very, very close with Duke Perrington.
She prayed to Anneith with every step upward, prayed to the Lady of Wise Things that she was wrong, that the Third was wrong. It wasn’t until she reached the foot of the Wing Leader’s tower that Elide realized she had no idea where she was going.
She had nowhere to go at all. No one to run to.
The delivery wagons wouldn’t arrive for another few weeks. Vernon could hand her over whenever he wished. Why hadn’t he done so immediately? What was he waiting for? To see if the first of the experiments worked before offering her as a bargaining chip for more power?
If she was such a valuable commodity, she’d have to go farther than she’d suspected to escape Vernon. Not just to the Southern
Continent, but beyond, to lands she’d never heard of. But with no money, how would she? No money—except for the bags of coins the Wing Leader left scattered around her room. She peered up the stairs stretching into the gloom. Maybe she could use the money to bribe someone—a guard, a lower-coven witch—to get her out. Immediately.
Her ankle barked in pain as she hurried up the staircase. She wouldn’t take an entire bag, but rather a few coins from each, so the Wing Leader wouldn’t notice.
Mercifully, the witch’s room was empty. And the various bags of coins had been left out with a carelessness only an immortal witch more interested in bloodshed could achieve.
Elide carefully set about stuffing coins into her pocket, the binding around her breasts, and her shoe so that they wouldn’t be discovered all at once, so they wouldn’t jingle.
“Are you out of your mind?”
Elide froze.
Asterin was leaning against the wall, her arms crossed.
The Third was smiling, each of those razor-sharp iron teeth glinting in the afternoon light.
“Bold, mad little thing,” the witch said, circling Elide. “Not as docile as you pretend, eh?”
Oh, gods.
“To steal from our Wing Leader …”
“Please,” Elide whispered. Begging—maybe that would work. “Please—I need to leave this place.”