Sitting at the base of one of the posts was a sun elf with a black eye who looked up at them as they entered. There was an iron collar carved with runes around his neck—a magic inhibitor.
The woman shoved her toward the post across from the sun elf, and Novikke caught herself against it. She resisted the urge to turn and glare. There could be no benefit from defiance, only punishment.
The woman jabbed a finger toward the floor at Novikke’s feet. Novikke hesitated, then knelt beside the post. Impatient, the woman walked behind her, grabbed her arms, and tied her wrists together on the other side of the post. Then she left the way she’d come in, locking the door behind her.
There were no lights in the hut. It was too dark to see much.
Novikke closed her eyes and measured her breaths, counting seconds on each inhale and exhale. A tense presence had rolled up her throat, like a scream trying to escape. She was sure that if she let any sound come out of her mouth, it would immediately turn into a sob. She stopped breathing until it passed.
She was afraid, but she was also angry. She latched onto that feeling, pulling it up beside the Panic and feeding it, growing it.
She didn’t mind being angry. Being angry, she found, kept the Panic at bay. And she preferred anger to panic. Anger made you act. It was productive. It was strong, while panic was weak.
It wasn’t hard to be angry in that moment. Every part of this was unfair and wrong and infuriating and she wished some sympathetic god would just strike down everyone here in a rain of righteous lightning.
Maybe she should try praying to Volkan.
“Thanks for nothing, Aruna, you godsdamned spineless asshole,” she muttered, and felt a little better.
A sliver of firelight came in under the door, and when her eyes had adjusted, it was enough to see a little by. She turned to the sun elf. He was not looking at her, almost pointedly.
He looked perhaps ten years older than she and Aruna, though it was probably more like twenty years when you took into account the delayed aging that elves were gifted with. He had the golden skin and light hair that were typical of his race, though you could hardly tell with all the blood on him.
Along with the black eye, bruises and scratches dotted his face. He wore an Ysuran military uniform, black and red and gold and emblazoned with the Ysuran sun, but if he’d had armor or weapons, the night elves had removed them.
If he was a mage, he could help her escape, and potentially offer protection long enough to get out of the forest. Even if he wasn’t a mage, he would still have the affinity for fire magic that all sun elves were born with. He would be deadly to anyone who crossed him, if only she could get that collar off.
“Well met, friend,” Novikke said—quietly, for fear of drawing the attention of anyone outside.
He tilted his head away from her, uninterested. “I’m not your friend, human.”
She pursed her lips. “In Ardani, it’s said that the enemy of your enemy is your friend.”
He gave in and looked over at her. As Ysurans were wont to do, he looked at her like she was something he’d scraped off his shoe. She was impressed by his ability to look aloof even while bound, collared, and covered in grime and dried blood.
“That much is true,” he conceded.
She smiled at him.
His eyes flicked down to her uncollared neck. “Can you use magic?” he asked. She noticed his accent for the first time on that last word. He spoke Ardanian almost perfectly—with a more refined accent than Novikke, if she was honest. It was how a lot of sun elves talked. Something to do with the dialects of Ardanian they were taught in Ysura.
“Unfortunately, no.”
He made a disapproving face, then leaned back, looking away again. “I thought not.”
It occurred to her that this was the first time she’d had a real, non-written conversation with someone in days. It was a comfort, despite the poor company.
“Have you been here long?”
He gave her a sharp look, like he was annoyed that she was still talking. But maybe he had gotten bored in his isolation here, because he answered anyway.
“Two days, I think, since my people abandoned me,” he said. “The Varai will probably execute me soon.”
“Abandoned?” she asked.
His eyes were heavy-lidded, tired and disappointed. “They ambushed us at the height of night, when we couldn’t see them coming, like the cowards they are. Then the honorless bastards I called friends left me to die after an arrow caught me. They escaped unscathed while the Varai were occupied with me.” He looked truly disgusted.
Novikke was pleased. He was angry, too. Good. Anger was useful.
She glanced at his legs. There was a thick bandage wrapped haphazardly around his thigh, darkened with large splotches of blood. It didn’t look well-cared-for. Even if they didn’t execute him, the wound would go rotten and kill him if he didn’t find a healer soon.
“I was abandoned, too,” she said. By Ardani, and by Aruna.
He gave her an examining look. “What are you doing here? The Ardani border is miles away. Surely even an Ardanian isn’t stupid enough to wander into Kuda Varai alone.”
“I could ask you the same thing.”
“Scouting mission,” he said. “Someone has to keep an eye on the Varai.”
“Scouting, or burning things?” Novikke asked wryly, remembering the bridge.
“Maybe both, if the opportunity arises.”
“Does the forest’s magic not affect you? Don’t you get lost?”
“Not if we don’t stay too long. I suppose humans have so little resistance to magic that the forest ensnares you as soon as you enter it,” he said, unnecessarily condescending.
“I guess.”
The elf gave her another up and down look, noting her muddied and torn uniform. “You are with Queen Vasso’s army,” he observed.
“Yes.”
“They’re the ones who abandoned you?” he said, giving her a humorless smile.
She shrugged. Could one really abandon something that one had barely claimed in the first place?
He sniffed. “So this is the reward for our loyalty,” he said, his tone laced with irony. “We devote our lives to them, and we’re still expendable. We are the sacrifices that must be made for the greater good. Did you ever think, when you made the decision to serve your country, that that decision would result in you dying alone in a dirty hut at the hands of a bunch of semiliterate bloodthirsty savages, not even halfway through your life?”
“No, I didn’t.”
They sat in mutual silence that felt almost companionable.
“I’m Novikke.”
He gave her a long look and then said, reluctantly, “Neiryn.”
“Good to meet you, Neiryn,” she said with a nod. “I think we should try to escape.”
He scoffed. “You think so, do you?”
“Do you agree?”
He stared at her dumbly. “Yes,” he said with the most patronizing tone she’d ever heard. “If you think of a way to untie yourself and get past a hundred night elves and out the gates without being seen and promptly shot in the back, do let me know.” He leaned back against his post. “Unfortunately, I don’t foresee that happening any time soon.”
“We’ll see.”
◆◆◆
Novikke squirmed against her ropes for the next several hours. Neiryn occasionally gave her a glance that said he thought she was an idiot for trying. He might have been right, because she didn’t make any progress.
Eventually the light beneath the door begin to shift, changing from fire orange to early morning gray.
She jumped when the door opened. Dim light, which seemed very bright after the darkness, poured into the room.
“Look at this. My favorite human has arrived.”
Novikke stiffened. She squinted into the brightness as her eyes adjusted. Zaiur was smiling down at her. He crossed his arms. “You took your time getting here, didn’t you?”
Novikke thought it best not to respond. That didn’t deter him, though.
“Was there some kind of delay? Was it because you tried to escape? How far did you make it before you realized that running is useless?”
She looked at the floor, at the walls, anywhere but him.
“Or did you try to fight? I wish I could have seen that. That pathetic display on the road was the most entertaining thing I’ve seen in weeks.”
“Is there a point to this visit or do you just like to hear yourself talk?” she asked finally.
Zaiur’s smile went stiff.
In her peripheral vision she could see Neiryn giving her a judgemental look. He shook his head slowly at her.
Zaiur stared unnervingly for a moment longer, then went behind her. Novikke held her breath. She looked up at Neiryn, who had a better view of what was happening behind her. He was watching, dead-eyed. He glanced down to meet Novikke’s eyes, but his expression showed no feeling except resignation.
She jumped when Zaiur touched her. Then she realized he was untying her.
“How would you like to die?” he asked. “Have you ever thought about that? Do you have a preference?”
She wished she could have said that the words didn’t affect her. But her heart raced. Every part of her was tense. She felt ill.
He pulled the ropes off her, then came around to stand in front of her again.
“Get up,” he commanded. He watched her slowly climb to her feet.
“I am the one who will have the privilege of killing you when they are finished with you. So what would you like? I am open to suggestions. The traditional method would be beheading. Dramatic, but not very interesting. Maybe I could hold you underwater. Drowning is a painless way of passing, I am told.”
Novikke didn’t look at him. Whatever Aruna had done—if he’d done anything at all—hadn’t worked, it seemed. Not that she’d expected it to.
“We could try poison, though I do not know what the alchemist here stocks. It may be the kind that puts you to sleep quietly, but it could also be the kind that makes your guts turn themselves inside out over the course of days.”
He smiled over at Neiryn. “And we have already discussed what I am going to do with you,” he said. “Haven’t we?”
Neiryn just looked at him expressionlessly.
He turned back to Novikke. “You are awfully quiet now. Your countrymen were quite loud while they were gleefully murdering our children and elderly in Charna last month.”
She glanced toward him, frowning slightly. Children and elderly?
A muscle in his cheek twitched as he clenched his jaw. It was the only outwardly visible sign of anger Novikke saw. “I guess having the tables turned has a way of stilling your tongue,” he said.
He leaned in close to her, near enough that she could smell the leather of his clothes. “Maybe I could be persuaded to be merciful,” he murmured in her ear. “I could decide to release you into Kuda Varai and see how far you can make it on your own. What do you think of that?”
He waited for an answer. She gave none.
“I might still accept your body as payment for such a mercy, if you beg convincingly enough.”
She suddenly wondered if Aruna had told anyone what they’d done. The idea of any of them knowing, particularly Zaiur, made her nauseous.
She really was pathetic, wasn’t she?
What had she been thinking?
Why sleep with one of them? She was nothing to them.
Zaiur leaned back, flashing another smile. “Well. I suppose I have heard myself talk enough. We should go.”
Bile filled her throat as he took her arm and pulled her out of the hut.
He took her across the outpost and into another building, down a dark hall and then into a small, mostly empty room. The woman she’d seen before was seated at a desk in the middle of the room. She waved to a chair across from her as they came in. Zaiur pushed Novikke into it and then, thankfully, left.
The woman studied her with deep emerald eyes. The intensity of her eyes made Novikke nervous. There was no hint of compassion in her face. She looked at Novikke like she was a thing, not a person. Novikke shifted uncomfortably in her chair, waiting for the inevitable. She expected to be attacked or killed at any moment. The room, at least, seemed not to be a torture chamber.
“My ranger tells me you were found hiding on the outskirts of our lands,” the woman said finally, in heavily accented Ardanian.
Novikke wondered if Aruna or Zaiur had told her that. She hesitated, unsure if she was allowed to speak yet. When the woman didn’t go on, she said quietly, “I… wasn’t hiding. I was on the road from Valtos to Livaki. I was only passing through.” Wanting to explain herself as thoroughly as possible, she added, “If it seemed that we were trying to be stealthy, it’s only because we feared attacks from Varai guards.”
She tensed, wondering if that second part could be taken as an insult. But if the woman cared, she didn’t show it.
She glanced up at something behind Novikke.
Novikke turned and found Aruna leaning against the wall by the door. He stood very stiffly, his eyes a little too wide and his mouth a hard line. He returned her gaze for a moment, then averted his eyes.
That didn’t exactly instill confidence.
The woman paused before going on, her gaze hard. “He also tells me you have a rebellious streak.”
This was Zaiur’s report, then.
“He tells me you fought. That you helped other humans escape them. A courageous act.”
The woman rested her elbows on the table and, to Novikke’s surprise, twirled her fingers and summoned a tiny flame between them. She was a mage.
Novikke’s eyes followed the flame. The woman swirled it and tossed it from hand to hand idly, not looking at it.
There was an eerie absence of emotion in her voice. “But we do not tolerate a lack of cooperation. Your life and death belong to us now. You will do as we say without hesitation and you will answer us truthfully when we question you, or you will suffer. Be obedient, and things will be better for you. Do you understand?”
Novikke had the strange sensation of not quite being in the room, like she was looking down on herself from above. Like it wasn’t real. She swallowed. “Yes.”
Another pause.
“Place your hands on the table.”
The woman’s gaze was terrifyingly cold and steady. Novikke hesitated, and she saw anger flaring in the woman’s eyes.
Novikke’s body went tense in anticipation of pain. She slowly raised her hands and laid them flat on the desk. There was a small sound behind her, like a shifting of feet.
The flame flared, suddenly huge and hot and blinding. Novikke flinched, and then the woman’s hand came down on her arm, along with the ball of flame. Her hand clenched around Novikke’s forearm. Fire engulfed her sleeve.
Novikke screamed. The woman held on for an agonizing second, then two, then three, before releasing her. Novikke fell out of the chair. White-hot agony shot through her, obscuring all other senses until she thought she would pass out.
Her jacket was on fire. She ripped it off. Her shirt sleeve beneath the jacket was black and half burned away. The flesh on her arm was bubbling and angry red and black. She could smell it, like smoke and burnt hair.
She was distantly aware of someone speaking, but she didn’t have any room in her head for understanding it. The only thing she could think about was pain. Overwhelming pain.
Someone held something in front of her face, then pulled her head back by her hair and forced something between her lips. Liquid ran down her throat, and she coughed and sputtered.
Then, slowly, the pain began to fade. She recognized the bitter, herbal, magic-tinged taste of a panacea.
She stayed kneeling on the floor, shaking. Her arm still throbbed with sharp pain. The burn had turned to red scar tissue roughly in the shape of a hand.
When a pair of feet in spotlessly clean boots appeared in front o
f her, she looked up, terrified that another attack was incoming.
The woman looked down at her. The flame in her hand was, thank merciful Astra, gone. She studied Novikke with little interest.
“Maybe you understand very well, now.”
Novikke tried to hold back a sob, and choked. She looked down, cradling her burnt arm.
The woman sighed. “It’s late. We will suspend this discussion until tomorrow.”
Night Elves of Ardani: Book One: Captive Page 10
