by Terah Edun
“Well, that’s all you’re going to get,” Sara snapped. Margaret quieted.
Sara really didn’t like the lax way the Algardis camp was handling their one and only prisoner of war. Two guards, a fence made out of thin sticks, and no magical protections at all. She wasn’t even being held in a secure building.
Sara snorted in disgust as she thought to herself, Nissa had better security when she was being transported here. If I were a Kade, now is when I would be snatching her.
Margaret sighed in frustration. “I’m not real excited about the idea of losing two and half feet, but if just need to sneak a cloaked little person into the closed-off section, why can’t I be the one to do it?”
Sara answered absentmindedly, “Nissa’s vital.”
“Care to elaborate?” Margaret asked as she shifted for a better view of the tent. She sucked in a breath as she clearly recognized the person emerging.
“Who is it?” Sara whispered.
“Captain Kansid,” Margaret said quickly.
Sara nodded and took in the man with silvered hair and tan skin. She couldn’t see much more than that since there was some weird magical disturbance in his aura.
“What’s up with his magic?” Sara complained.
“You’re asking me?”
Sara sighed. “Right.”
Margaret cleared her throat, and Sara remembered she was supposed to answer why they needed to break Nissa Sardonien out of prison. “We’re doing this,” Sara said, “because she has information about my father. So does Ezekiel, but I have a feeling that Nissa’s secrets are more pressing. I’m going to make both of them spill their secrets before long, because I am through with being lied to.”
“Oh,” said Margaret.
“Yes, ‘oh’.”
“And what’s your plan to get into the healers’ encampment?”
Sara gave her an irritated look. “I don’t want to play ‘twenty questions’.”
“The more foolproof your plan, the easier this will be,” Margaret said loftily.
Sara rolled her shoulders to loosen up her stiff muscles. “We’ll need to carry Nissa through the camp like we would a sick child, but once we get to the healers and reveal a Florien, well, I doubt even they would be able to resist a mythical and extinct sub-species of human. They’ll let us in. We’ll get to Ezekiel. If she knows what’s good for her, Nissa will then slip away from the healers and back to us.”
Margaret stared at her. “That’s the stupidest plan I’ve ever heard.”
Sara glared. “You have a better idea?”
“Yeah,” drawled Margaret.
“Well, what is it?” Sara snarled.
“Give up on this and wait ‘til your friend comes out of the healers’ camp on his own,” Margaret said.
Sara raised an eyebrow. “Any idea when that’ll be?”
Margaret shrugged. “Not a clue.”
“Then we proceed as I’ve laid out.” Sara turned away, and while she couldn’t really hear Margaret roll her eyes, she felt it happening behind her back.
I’m beginning to think I lied to her better when she was afraid of me.
She watched as Kansid walked off and one of the guards signaled that he would be getting water. She knew there would be no better time.
“Now,” she hissed. She smoothly got up from her crouch and walked forward at a fast pace.
Before she could get within two yards of the guard, he said, “Halt! Passes?”
Sara’s shoulders drooped. She didn’t have passes.
To her surprise, though, it seemed that Margaret did. The woman stepped out from behind Sara with her former confidence and bravado. “Margaret Verhaas, escorting Mercenary Fairchild to see the prisoner.”
Sara almost winced. She didn’t want them knowing her name. But it was out there now, and there was no taking it back.
“Passes?” the guard asked mildly.
Margaret fished two bronze metal chips out of her blouse and handed them over. They didn’t seem important or valuable, but they were examined and apparently deemed satisfactory for top-level clearance.
The guard handed back the chips. “Purpose of visit?”
Margaret smiled and winked. “We’re old friends.”
The guard raised an eyebrow.
“From the road, of course,” Margaret whispered while leaning forward. “My friend here lost over two hundred fellow mercenaries to the Kade attack. Just wanted to pay back the sucker that had a hand in it.”
The guard looked between Sara’s scowl and Margaret’s conspiratorial half-smile. Then he nodded. “Be quick. Three minutes, that’s all I can give you.”
Margaret nodded. “Really appreciate it.”
The man took a step away from the entrance to make room for them. “Make sure she doesn’t scream too loudly. Don’t want to get in trouble, you see?”
“Got it,” Margaret quickly agreed. She ushered Sara into the tent ahead of her.
At first, Sara couldn’t see much. It reminded her of the first time she had met Nissa Sardonien. The woman had been bound and chained to a transport wagon that was soon overturned from the constant barrage of mage attacks, courtesy of the Kades. Her transport guards had either been killed or fled after the initial bombardment.
Captain Barthis Simon had been in charge of conveying her from the capital to the field location for the express purpose of procuring information from her. Why they did it in the first place, Sara couldn’t fathom. Who moved a prisoner away from the most secure place in the empire and literally to the doorstep of an enemy fortress?
Idiots, that’s who, Sara decided. But it didn’t matter now. So far, he’d gotten nothing and managed to lose her twice. Once by abandonment, and the second time when Nissa had been allowed to wander the Algardis camp like a loose babe. Sara still wondered at that, but judging by the loose restrictions surrounding who could and could not interrogate a capital prisoner, she was becoming less and less surprised at the incompetence of the mercenaries and soldiers stationed here as a whole.
First, the Kades attack a convoy with zero repercussions, then I find a thief lord ruling the entire encampment like his own person fiefdom. What can happen next? Sara wondered. She wasn’t happy about this situation. It went against her core values of service and loyalty to the empire and its people. But I’m not here for the crown or its citizens, she reminded herself harshly. I’m here for my father.
Chapter 26
Sara let her eyes adjust, and in the darkness she saw one massive tent pole in the center of a circular enclosure. The ground was bare of everything but earth, and nothing else lay in the tent besides the pole in the center and the still individual that was bound to it. Thick ropes wrapped around her like a desperate lover’s grasp.
The rope was so tight that Sara could tell that Nissa couldn’t turn around to see who approached her. However, judging by the movement of her head as she strained to look behind her, she could hear them.
Heart pounding, Sara walked forward. She wasn’t nervous about meeting Nissa Sardonien again. She was nervous about why she had come here. Despite the confident tone that she had used to explain her hare-brained scheme to Margaret, Sara felt wracked with guilt. No matter how she spun the tale in her head or thought it through, she was breaking the law. The empress’s law.
But she knew it had to be done. It has to be this way, Sara chided herself. No one came to my family’s aid when we were thrown out on the streets. None of our wealthy friends or my father’s former patrons. When my home was set ablaze and my mother was killed, no one tracked me down in the middle of night. And most all, when Simon sacrificed the majority of his men for the sake of one person—a person accused of crimes against the empire, no less—not a word of censure or a proper criminal sentence was given.
Sara knew he strode about the camp as a free man at this very moment. It rankled her like nothing else. She wasn’t sure if that was because of Simon’s impending promotion in rank, or the fact that he acted under the empress’s order
s to capture Nissa Sardonien regardless of the cost, but she couldn’t stand it.
Not for one minute more, not if it meant the possibility that a good man, as she knew her father had been all his life, had been sacrificed for the greater good of the empire, or worse—had been murdered because of the criminal actions of another.
Sara had no other theories to go on, and no proof aside from Nissa’s word and an unconscious man’s muttering. But if either could bring her closure about her father’s death, or even bring her closer to Matteas Hillan, who she still had to find among thousands of troops, then she believed it was the right choice.
But that still didn’t mean she wasn’t nervous as heck about what she had to do.
A few feet behind her, Margaret hissed, “Psst, Sara, hey! Hurry it up! We haven’t got all day.”
Sara stopped and turned. She just looked at her.
Margaret swallowed any further words and judiciously chose to look away, at the other side of tent. The look on Sara’s face was probably enough to scare any sane person.
Sighing heavily, Sara walked closer and closer to Nissa until she had circled around the central pole and stared down at the woman kneeling in the dirt. She was bare of any scrap of clothing, wearing only the metal mage shackles on her wrists and the thick rope that bound her to the pole she was braced against.
Nissa was looking up at her with dead eyes, and something caught Sara’s eyes when she stood close enough to her to touch. At the corner of her waist, a red slash gleamed with wet stickiness to Sara’s sharp eyes.
Mouth suddenly dry, Sara followed the line of red with her gaze until she had to move around Nissa in a circle to truly see what had been wrought upon her. When she stood back in front of the beaten mage, Sara Fairchild’s eyes were as dead as those of the slumped mage in front of her. Despite her earlier misgivings about freeing the prisoner, a little part of her was glad she was doing so now, even if the rescue operation wasn’t her primary goal. Just like the time she’d take Nissa from her gilded cage previously, this time the mage would also serve as a means to an end. But Sara wouldn’t lie to herself. She wasn’t precisely sure she could have left the woman in the state she was knowing that more was to come. No one deserved what the sun mage was being subjected to.
It made Sara wonder if the lax nature of the guards earlier in the day had simply been a way to break Nissa faster. Let her have a taste of the true pleasure of freedom before she succumbed to the true pain of torture. Whatever had happened to her after that little stroll, it had happened in pain. Horrendous pain.
The marks of a whip covered her back, and as Sara took a careful look at her belly and breasts, she could see the light scoring of knife marks that covered her front. There were two reasons why they weren’t obvious before. First, the wounds had been washed so that no blood stained her front. Second, they had been healed by a skilled practitioner so that only the thinnest of scars were present to an inspection. On top of that, they were layered like thin grooves parallel to the original marks Nissa had borne, fresh and bloody, to the bathing pools, and Sara could see that the Algardis torturers were hard at work.
And the healers are there to clean up their mess, she thought with a shudder. What must it feel like to be cut and whipped over and over again, knowing that a healer can step in to allay your pain, only to have the torture renewed with a fury the moment they stepped back?
“Hell,” Sara decided in a whisper. “It must have felt like hell.”
Her concentration refocused on Nissa’s gaze when the woman caught her eyes, and Sara was able to break away from the morbid fascination with Nissa’s new wounds.
“I see they punished you,” Sara said while kneeling down on her haunches.
“They did more than that,” Nissa said in a dark whisper.
“You’re a prisoner of war,” responded Sara. She wasn’t apologizing. Just stating the facts.
“I never said they were wrong.” Nissa coughed and a dribble of blood slowly crept down the corner of her mouth.
Sara cracked a sad smile. She didn’t necessarily believe in torture; she did, however, believe in getting answers.
“Did you tell them what they wanted to know?”
Nissa laughed. “After they threatened to break my ribs? Of course. I’m loyal to the cause, but I’m not a martyr.” Nissa groaned in pain. “Not yet, anyway. But if they keep this up, I might just die to get away from them.”
Sara believed her. She had no way out and no reason to think they’d free her once they were through with her. Alongside her cohort, Nissa Sardonien was accused of crimes against the empire. The only punishment befitting that crime was the capital kind.
Death.
Swallowing harshly, Sara said, “What if I could get you out of here?”
Nissa gave her a sad smile. “Is the fierce lioness finally showing her claws?”
Sara was silent for a moment, carefully thinking her answer through.
“For the information you can give...about my father,” she said quietly, “I’ll get you out of here.”
I’ve got nothing to lose anyway, Sara thought sadly. No home to go back to. No family who will mourn me. The least I can do is clear my father’s name. If the truth can come out and I have to disappear forever to do it, it’s worth it.
Sara thought she should be more troubled at the prospect of freeing an enemy of the empire. But to be honest, the empire had shown her in the last few years that it cared no more for her than she for it.
Sara had waited for the truth. She had waited for avengers to step forward and fight by her side in the streets of Sandrin. Instead, she got nothing but hunger for her troubles and constant censure for her prideful stance.
She didn’t think she was wrong to believe in the goodness of a man she had known her entire life.
She didn’t think it was wrong to vow to find out the facts, just as they stood, of a man condemned without a trial.
She didn’t think it was wrong to want to know the final days and moments of a man whose body she still hadn’t buried, a man who had been laid to rest like some unknown criminal when he had been the empire’s fiercest protector for so long.
She didn’t think she was wrong about her father, and as she stepped off the platform of righteous indignation into the moral abyss of an-eye-for-an-eye, she knew she had to prove it.
Because no one else would risk their lives or careers to prove her father’s innocence for her.
“You’ll have that, and more,” Nissa Sardonien said with a stretch of her neck. “That and more than you could possibly dream.”
Sara snorted. “Just his connection to you and the Kades will do.”
“Then free me,” Nissa said abruptly. “Free me and take me where you will. Only then will I tell you what I know.”
Sara unsheathed her knife at her waist and began sawing through the thick ropes. “I’m taking you to Ezekiel Crane. You’ll tell me what you know when we get there. Then you’re on your own.”
Nissa narrowed her eyes and hissed as several of the ropes fell away from her body. “Then I’m as good as dead.” She held up her shackled hands angrily. “With these on my wrists, I’ll be recaptured by dusk.”
Sara smiled. “Which is why I intend to break you from their grasp.”
Nissa looked pleased.
Sara hurried to add, “But not before I have what I want.”
“Very well,” purred the sun mage. “Very well.”
As the ropes came off and Nissa was freed, Sara hurried to take her knapsack from her back and bring out the strange contraption.
Nissa glared at the leather and metal bunch into her hands. “That’s your plan?”
“That’s what I said,” Margaret called out dryly from her post at the entrance to the tent.
Sara rolled her eyes. “Just put it on.”
Nissa pouted, though it looked more indignant than petulant. “Why can’t we just kill them all?”
“Because,” said Sara tiredly, “I migh
t be willing to do most things, but I draw the line at killing my own people. I’m still on their side, and those guards are just doing their jobs.”
“And I was just trying to save an empire,” shot back Nissa.
Sara bit her lip. “You’ve said that before. What do you mean?”
Nissa chuckled harshly. “It doesn’t matter. What’s your plan?”
Sara grimaced, but she knew they were running out of time. “I brought a sleeping and healing potion for you. It’ll knock you out for ten minutes while you take on the appearance of a mythical creature we’re going to use as a bargaining chip to get inside the healers’ special ward.”
“Is that all?” asked Nissa wryly.
“Pretty much,” said Sara, “Once we get in and you’re awake, you come find us. I question you. You answer. You get the mage cuffs removed.”
Nissa swallowed harshly. “Any other options?”
“No,” said Sara flatly.
“Very well.”
Sara smiled in approval. She liked a woman who could come to fast decisions and would see a plan through...as long as it was in her best interests.
“If you wouldn’t mind administering the potion now,” Nissa said with another cough, “I’m feeling a little lightheaded.”
Sara acknowledged that by pulling a vial out of her vest and tipping the light blue contents down Nissa’s throat. As Sara slipped the leather harness over her head and bound the thin straps around her upper arms, Nissa asked, “You really want to know what I meant?”
“Yes,” said Sara firmly as the last buckle snapped into place.
Sara looked at her obliquely as Nissa opened her mouth to speak. The woman looked damned odd with several straps of leather running down the course of her back. Then she realized Nissa wasn’t speaking anymore because she couldn’t. Magic enveloped her entire seated body in a thin tan mist that almost looked like a second skin.
A second skin, that is, until it began to restrict itself into a smaller and smaller circumference with Nissa inside of it.
Margaret gasped and walked over to watch. “Gods be praised.”
Sara was silent. Nissa’s whole body was still, as if the magic refused to let any part of her body move. Even her fingers didn’t twitch. Her eyes didn’t flutter. She was like a living statue.
