Well, that could have gone better. Cato didn’t manage any quips on the walk back to his cell, not even armed with the new knowledge of his captor’s first name. What was wrong with him? He’d blown that audience well and truly. The flowery, poetic greeting hadn’t worked… then the false humility hadn’t worked, either. Had he misjudged yet another dragon? The queen had looked all of twenty-five, sitting there on her throne, but dragons never showed their age, did they? To be Queen she may well have been decades older than she looked, if not centuries. Would he have spoken to her the same way if she’d looked like a woman in her eighties? Of course he wouldn’t. Stupid, stupid…
But it wasn’t just those missteps that had thrown him off. It was the way they’d looked at him when he’d said he was from Isthmus. It was a lie, of course. He and his coven lived in the Fog, moving between safe houses as often as they could to keep their whereabouts secret. But they had no way of knowing that… and besides, they hadn’t reacted as if he’d lied to them. They’d reacted as if they’d never heard of the damned place. How did that make any sense? Isthmus was one of the easiest insulas to find—any Navigator worth a damn knew how to get there, the shape shone like a beacon. It had been one of the first ones he’d learned his way to. So how could these shifters not even know it by name?
Strange, that. They’d been all too eager to rush him out of there after that, which made him very curious indeed. The knowledge that Acantha had been assigned to basically interrogate him was unnerving, true, but Cato had always tried to be an optimist, or at least an opportunist. It was possible the stone-faced woman he’d been goading into hating him since they’d met had just been given instructions to torture him until he told her the truth about everything he’d ever done in his life—sure, that was the situation. But it was also possible that he could learn something from her at the same time.
Unless she made good on earlier threats and physically removed his tongue from his body first, that was.
“So,” she said when they got back to his cell, before he’d even had a chance to sit down in one of the three possible places for that. “Here’s how this is going to work. I’m going to ask questions, you’re going to answer them. Can you manage that, do you think?”
“Do I get to ask questions too?”
“Did I say that you do?”
“Would you say that I do if I ask you really nicely?”
“Enough,” Acantha snapped again, her green eyes burning. They got darker when she was angry, he noticed suddenly, his attention arrested. Was that a shifter thing, or just a trick of her expression? Either way, her green eyes were darkening as she glared at him. “Your contempt for this place is clear. Your conviction that I’m stupid is clear. That’s all fine by me as long as it doesn’t interfere with my objective, which is to do my job. I am not interested in hurting you unless that becomes necessary to do my job. I am not interested in permanently disfiguring you unless that becomes necessary to do my job. Am I making myself clear, or do I need to get more specific?
“Crystal clear,” he said, swallowing. Looking intimidated was only partially an act. There was something cold and dispassionate in her voice that sent a shiver down his spine that he didn’t need to fake. Something about how practiced it was, how easily he could believe that she’d made the same threat thousands of times in thousands of situations just like this one. Something about her, he realized, almost reminded him of Haspar.
That wasn’t a thought he liked very much. He decided to put it away.
“Good,” Acantha said, after a long moment spent staring at him. That was the other thing that was unsettling about her—those eyes. She might have looked like a young woman, but those eyes… no girl her apparent age had ever stared straight through him like that. Not for the first time, Cato felt a prickle of real regret that he’d underestimated dragonkind the way he had. He’d gotten cocky after the last heist he’d pulled off at the expense of a pack of wolves. They had their tricks, sure—that memory-sharing thing they did was pretty cool—but when it came to interpersonal communication, a wolf and a human were basically the same. Dragons were something else entirely.
“I wasn’t lying about my name,” he said, taking a seat on the bed and leaning his back against the wall. He didn’t want her sitting opposite him at the table, those eyes boring a hole through his skull… though she was already proving herself capable of doing that in this position, too. “I’m called Cato. I mean, my parents might’ve called me something else, but I’ve been called Cato as long as I can remember.”
“What’s with the tattoos?”
“Are you not even going to ask me about my parents?”
“No. The tattoos.”
“What do you mean, what’s with them?” He folded his arms across his chest, aggrieved. “What, have you been thinking about my naked body again?”
“You remember how sharp my sword is,” Acantha said, her expression not shifting. “I’ve got a dagger, too. Do I have to get it?”
“They’re just tattoos. I have tattoos. People have tattoos.”
“The braids. Gemstones, in your hair. And in the armor, too, the undersides.” So shehadnoticed the artifacts… but she mustn’t have known what they meant. “What’s that about?”
This was not a line of questioning that was going to take them anywhere good—there were only so many dodges he could make before he revealed one of the bigger cards in his hand. Time to test how strong her handle on the conversation was. “Not to tell you your business, but I’m pretty sure the Queen wanted you to find out what I was here to steal, not get a rundown on my fashion choices.”
“Who you are and why you’re here,” Acantha said levelly. “I’d imagine one will give me insight into the other. And if not… oh, well. You heard what she said. You’re staying here indefinitely, Cato. I’ve got all the time in the world to learn what I need to learn from you.” And then she smiled. He hadn’t seen her smile before. It wasn’t as comforting a sight as he’d have hoped.
“You’re going to get bored before I do,” he countered, knowing even as he spoke that it was a weak rebuttal. Acantha’s smile only widened.
“Oh, I hope not. Because if I get bored, I’ll have to get creative. And the thing about people like me—boring people who’ve spent their whole lives doing very little aside from training with sharp weapons—well, we’re not very creative.” Her hand was on the hilt of her sword. “We know a lot about blades, and not much about anything else. So if I were you, I’d do my best to tell a good story.”
There wasn’t much he could say to that, was there? He’d been threatened with torture a few times in his travels, and he liked to think he’d gotten pretty good at telling when people were bluffing… nobody he’d met had ever gotten beyond actually waving a knife vaguely near him. Was Acantha bluffing, too? It was hard to say. Maybe? Dammit, her face was just so still.
Cato hated to admit it, but he might just be a touch out of his depth here.
And so, as the days passed, he found himself giving over a bit more information than he’d originally intended. Acantha visited him every morning like clockwork (not that he had any way of telling the time in this strange, ever-lit underground prison). She was stone-faced each time, wearing the same uniform he now recognized as belonging to the Palace Guard, and invariably dedicated to getting the truth out of him and not much else. It took all his considerable wit to talk around her questions. She had very little patience for rambling, when she identified it, so he had to disguise a lot of his sophistry as honesty.
His one advantage, it turned out, was just how little these shifters seemed to know about the world they inhabited. That subject formed the backbone of most of their conversations for the first few days, Cato carefully teasing out the subject despite Acantha’s resistance to any questions from him. Eventually, though, he got a decent grip on the situation. Until very recently, the people here hadn’t even realized that their little world—their handful of mountain peaks surrounded by the roiling gray mass of the Fog on the horizon—wasn’t the beginning and end of all existence. If they’d thought at all about what lay beyond the Fog, Acantha wasn’t willing to tell him about it. And then their Queen had walked straight out of the Fog one day, a complete stranger with an odd accent and stories of another world… and though Acantha spoke of the Queen with nothing but reverence, something told him she wasn’t entirely comfortable with the situation yet. He noted that carefully. He was noting a lot of things as their conversations went on, adding them to a growing file of details that he told himself were just for use in his escape, though if pressed, he’d have to admit he was fascinated, too, by this little community. Why, their insula didn’t even have a name. They called it “the valley” occasionally, but that was a geographical reference, not a title as such.
All of this information, though, was hard-earned. Acantha knew she held all the cards here, and she drove a hard bargain… he found himself giving away more information than he was strictly happy about. At first, he was able to get away with just talking about Isthmus and the other insulas he knew by name—basic information about their world, he’d thought, but the way Acantha listened, he knew this was the first she and her people were hearing about it.
“You really don’t know, do you?” he asked on the afternoon of the third day, unable to resist. “You really did think that this… was the whole world. This tiny little insula.”