by Tanya Huff
“Stand!”
It was the voice from her cell, speaking first in Imperial and then in Aydori.
Four sets of mage-flecked eyes turned to Danika. Who stood.
“If we behave, we’re treated well. If we don’t, we go back into the dark.” She hoped the rage that kept her lips back off her teeth couldn’t be heard. “It seems simple enough. We have more than merely ourselves to think of.” Then, sweeping her gaze around the circle, she breathed, Lull them.
Jesine stood first and gifted the guards with a tentative glance from under long, gold-tipped lashes. It was the kind of look that would have evoked protective instincts in a stone. It wasn’t sexual. It spoke to the best part of men, the part that wanted to protect, that wanted, sometimes in spite of themselves, to be a hero.
The other three stood at the same time. Stina wore her most placid expression. Annalyse looked young and frightened. Kirstin smiled, and Danika hoped she’d heard lull. She hated herself for thinking it, but the barely present Kirstin who traveled from Aydori to Karis had caused her less concern.
“Go with your guards!” Again in Imperial and then Aydori.
The guards broke into pairs, and pointed.
Danika breathed harmless at Mouth-breather and Hairy-knuckles and walked down the hall to her cell as gracefully as she could manage. She hadn’t been one of the season’s beauties, but Ryder had told her the first time they’d met that she walked like she was dancing.
Two new guards, Crooked-finger and Pocked-chin, arrived to take Danika back to the big room before she had time to get hungry or tired. She was almost certain they were the pair who’d escorted Stina to breakfast. It seemed the guards were working a variation of the way the soldiers had shifted in and out of the coaches.
Good. It wouldn’t be long before all twelve were convinced they were harmless. Guards who believed their prisoners were harmless grew careless. Their reaction time slowed.
In the big room, the debris of their meal and the two puddles of vomit had been cleared away. The room smelled of strong soap and held what looked like a Healer-mage’s examination table and a lectern with an inkwell and an open ledger. Standing between them was the woman who’d been waiting in the water room when they’d been brought up out of the dark. Danika guessed she was in her late thirties, early forties, light brown hair going gray and twisted up into a knot on the back of her head. Had they both been barefoot or both in shoes, Danika figured there’d have been no difference in their height. She was slightly stocky and wore a dark green bib apron over lighter green clothes so plain they had to be a uniform. Her hands and bare forearms looked strong. She wore a neutral expression like a shield, but it didn’t quite hide the resentment in the gaze that swept over Danika from head to foot and back again.
“On the table.”
It was the voice from the speakers. The voice who’d told them to rise and use the commode. It made sense. She’d spoken Aydori in the water room. Her accent had been twisted by Imperial and…Danika wasn’t sure, but she assumed Pyrahn. As the woman opened her mouth to repeat the instruction, Danika moved toward the table, having taken enough time to establish she moved because she chose to, not because she instinctively followed a superior’s command.
“Who,” she breathed, “are you?” The table was high enough, her feet dangled above the floor. She tensed as the woman pressed her hand against the swell of her belly, but there was no cruelty in the contact, only a familiar efficiency.
“How far along?” This close, she smelled of the same soap as the room.
“Who? Almost four months.” Closer to three.
The noncommittal noise could have been acceptance or disbelief. She crossed back to the lectern and dipped the pen and wrote a notation on the first page of the ledger. Her handwriting was also efficient, dark and blocky enough to see even from where Danika sat. “Any problems?”
“Who? Problems as a result of being kidnapped, exposed to an unknown and ancient artifact, dragged across three countries…” Danika touched the fading bruise on her face. “…beaten, and unlawfully confined, not to mention the emotional effect of not knowing what has happened to my husband, my family, and my country?” Pulled around by Danika’s words, the woman turned away from the ledger, brows drawn in, but before she could speak, Danika added, hands spread. “I don’t know.”
“You don’t know if you’re having problems?”
That tone Danika knew. The beautiful are stupid. The rich are useless. The powerful have no common sense. It was, in its own way, as uncaring as Leopald’s belief they were animals but more familiar and easy enough to work with. She smiled and answered with the same gentle reproach she’d have used on a young Pack member being too aggressive. “I don’t know if the baby is having problems. It’s all happening on the inside, isn’t it?”
Given their relative ages, the reproach both was and wasn’t patronizing. The woman took a deep annoyed breath before responding. “Any problems on the outside, then.”
“Beyond the obvious?” Danika glanced over at the guards. “No.”
“First child?”
“Do I have children in Aydori crying for their mother? No.”
“Yes or no. I don’t care about the rest.”
Danika inclined her head in a gracious, silent apology and hid a smile as the woman spun on a heel back to the ledger. She made another notation, the pen’s metal nib digging into the paper, then pulled a watch from her apron pocket. Cradling it in the cup of her palm, she gently flipped it open. She cared about the watch. That might be useful.
When she turned to note Danika’s pulse, Danika breathed, Who? at her a fourth time.
“My name is Adeline Curtin. I’m a midwife. You’ll be in my…care.”
The slight pause before the last word made Danika think she’d only just stopped herself from saying something else. Custody? Control?
“How do you come to speak Aydori.”
Adeline’s eyes narrowed. “Answer when spoken to.”
Danika inclined her head again.
Before she left the room, she sent another suggestion toward Leopald’s rathole that he speak to her. On the way back to her cell, she breathed Adeline Curtin, midwife onto the air that found its way under the doors, knowing Kirstin at least would hear it, and one more harmless at Crooked-finger and Pocked-chin.
She pulled the pillow off the bed and waited on the floor for Kirstin to return.
“She was born in Pyrahn. Came to the empire with her husband.” Kirstin’s voice drifted down the hall and in under Danika’s door. “She doesn’t want to be here.”
“Who does? She can’t be angry at Leopald, so she’s angry at us.”
“She’s angry at the world. If you push, she’ll attack.”
That sounded familiar. “She wants to be Alpha, but every time she’s challenged, she’s lost the fight.”
After a long moment, long enough Danika thought the other Air-mage might not answer at all, Kirstin said, “We know how to work with that.”
If Adeline learned Aydori in Pyrahn, she had to have been born into one of the trading families. Her accent was too rough for negotiations, so probably carting; either learning the language when the drivers practiced at home or traveling back and forth across the border on the wagons.
I don’t know you yet, Adeline Curtin, Danika thought, curled by the door listening for Stina’s return. But I will.
Just as she began to get hungry, she heard the guards escorting the other women from their cells. Three of the other women…When Danika finally reached the big room where another meal had been laid out, Jesine wasn’t there.
They waited.
“They brought her back after she saw the midwife,” Kirstin murmured, “and I didn’t hear them take her away again.”
“She asked too many questions.” When they all turned to look at her, Stina shrugged. “She’s a Healer-mage in a room with a midwife. You know she’d have assumed they’d share information.”
Adeline
, as they knew her, would have resented that assumption.
Kirstin shot a narrow-eyed glance at the guards. “Do we demand to know what happened to her?”
“We know what happened to her,” Danika answered. “She’s locked in her cell for asking too many questions.”
“Sent to her room without supper,” Stina added.
“Treating us like children,” Kirstin snarled. When Stina sent a bland look toward the guards and another toward Kirstin, Kirstin reluctantly smiled. “Fine. Like potentially dangerous children.”
“Danika? What do we do?”
“We eat,” Danika told Annalyse, pulling out a chair and sitting down. “We stay strong.” There was a tureen of chicken stew with potatoes, carrots…She wrinkled her nose…. and parsnips in the center of the table. Next to it, a large basket of rolls. “Annalyse, you serve.” When Annalyse frowned, she added, “I thought it might help steady you, if you had something to do.”
The frown deepened.
Putting the serving spoon into the tureen, Danika stirred it once then pointed the handle at the younger woman. Annalyse flushed and took it, stirring twice more before she began to serve. Danika wasn’t certain purifying water would have any effect on possible drugs in chicken stew, but Annalyse was a powerful Water-mage and it certainly couldn’t hurt.
Without Jesine, they were quieter than they’d been at the last meal.
“Kirstin, talk to Stina. Need distraction.”
As Kirstin held forth about how bored she was alone in her cell, Danika set up communication tests with Stina and Annalyse, kicking Annalyse once in the ankle when the younger woman nearly replied to a question no one watching would have heard asked.
Leopald didn’t make an appearance. That didn’t mean he wasn’t up there in his rathole, watching.
“Creepy stalker,” Kirstin muttered.
Danika leaned back in her chair, stretched as though she was working the kinks out of her neck and breathed at the wall. “Talk to me.”
On the way back to her cell, she breathed harmless at Gouge-in-boot and Crooked-front-tooth.
Although they’d just eaten, there was bread and cheese and barley water in the cell as well as a clean nightgown across the end of the bed. Danika glanced up at the lamp, still burning brightly, then lay by the door.
“Me?” Stina was speaking quietly, mouth pressed as instructed to the crack under her door, but it was still dangerous if those listening heard her.
“Stina, I hear you.” Kirstin’s voice rode the air currents. “Can you hear me?”
No answer.
“Stina, I hear you.” Danika took her turn. “Can you hear me?”
No answer.
Danika recited the first three verses of the ancient epic The Hunt, memorized and dreaded by every Aydori schoolchild and took comfort from knowing Annalyse was doing the same.
“Me?” If Stina had nearly breathed it, Annalyse hummed. Smart. Hide the word in singing done to keep up failing spirits.
Like Stina, both Air-mages could hear her but couldn’t make themselves heard.
“It’s not much, but it’s something.”
“It’s nothing much,” Kirstin snarled. “We should tell the guards to free us.”
“We can’t convince them to do anything they don’t want to do.”
“Berger didn’t want to die.” Before Danika could answer, before she knew what she was going to say, Kirstin added, “We have to escape!”
“We’ll only get one chance. I’ll listen to any plan that allows us all to survive the attempt!”
It was a higher-stakes version of an argument they’d had before. Being Alpha was as much about knowing when to be cautious as when to attack. Kirstin had never been good at either caution or compromise.
Singing, as it turned out, was also a way to stave off boredom. Danika had a nap. Grew hungry. Ate the bread and cheese and drank the barley water. Had another nap. Made plans. Threw those plans away. Made more plans.
The door at the end of the hall opened. The movement of the air changed.
“Annalyse?”
And just barely, over the sound of boots against tile, a joyful, “Yes.”
The lamp went out.
Heart pounding, Danika reminded herself that the same thing had happened last night. Although she had no idea if it was night. It was dark at least. She put on the nightgown, threw her pillow back down by the door, and waited for a howl that never came.
She hoped it was because he’d heard her and had been comforted, not because he’d been killed and skinned.
The next day began almost exactly the same way.
Different guards. Chipped-tooth and Dry-lips.
Jesine was there at breakfast. “I kept asking questions when told to be quiet. That’s what the voice in the room…”
“Cell,” Danika corrected quietly. “They’re cells.”
Jesine’s gold-flecked eyes narrowed thoughtfully and she nodded. “That’s what the voice in the cell said. I’m really hungry.”
While Jesine talked, a normal enough reaction given her taste of isolation, Danika told Stina to work at the wood of her cell door. They had no Metal-mage among them, but Stina had once brought a rosewood sideboard into bloom. If she could weaken the wood enough to break it free of the hinges, the latch, and the bolt, then she could open all the other cells.
It would be slow work at the level the nets allowed, but it was a start.
The guards had taken her to the shower first but brought her to any communal time in the large room last. Danika thought if she could figure out why, she might be able to put the information toward their escape plan.
This morning, she was returned to the room to find the breakfast debris gone and the other four women standing in a line facing the wall where Leopald had appeared, their guards behind them close enough to grab them, far enough away to use their batons if necessary.
As she was herded toward the line, she noticed the other two guards standing at the base of the wall on either side of a large pile of multicolored fabric. The room smelled of…coriander.
The moment she stopped in the place left for her—Mole-under-ear and Dry-lips in the place left for them—the sections of the wall folded back, the guards all snapped to attention, and Leopald smiled down at them, leaning forward in the high-backed chair. The pelt he’d rolled out was still there but had been rolled back. Although they could no longer convince themselves it was a carpet, that helped. A little.
“Just so you know…” He actually looked a little sheepish although Danika assumed the expression was as false as their compliance. “…the Soothsayer’s Voice objected to me taking Terlyn out of his room. He hasn’t left it for thirteen years, so you’ll have to excuse him if he’s a little shy.”
Terlyn? Danika turned her attention to the pile of fabric. It seemed to be undulating in response to Leopald’s voice.
“Now, what I want you all to do is, one at a time, go forward and touch his hand. If you can’t find his hand, any exposed skin will suffice, but do be brief. He’s precious to me. He doesn’t See very far ahead, so there are days when he’s almost coherent and you have no idea how much I appreciate that. You start.”
The hand shoving her forward seemed to indicate Leopald had been speaking to her. Searching the pile of fabric for the flesh within, Danika walked toward the Imperial Soothsayer, telling herself she wasn’t doing it for Leopald, she was doing it to satisfy her own curiosity. She’d met two Soothsayers. One had to be kept in restraints to keep from harming himself and the other had walked out into a lake with a concrete block tied around her neck barely a month after Danika had met her. Their families tended to keep them out of sight—there’d never been a Soothsayer in the Pack—and they certainly had no place in Aydori politics.
Lifting her dress, Danika dropped to one knee at the edge of the fabric. If Terlyn was an adult, he was sitting on the floor under what appeared to be layers of scarves. There were fewer layers at the top where the faint outl
ine of a face was just barely visible and an impressive number of layers farther down. Danika moved one. Then another. An undulation slid a third scarf aside, exposing a hand so pale it made Kirstin’s milky skin look ruddy. The Soothsayer had bitten his fingernails short and ragged.
When Danika touched him, his skin felt warm, almost feverish. He shivered.
But he said nothing. He sat unmoving as Annalyse, Jesine, Kirstin, and Stina came up to him in turn and briefly pressed a finger to the back of his exposed hand, wiping the finger off against their skirts as they left him.
“Well,” Leopald sighed as Stina returned to her place in line. “That was a disappointment. Terlyn has been quite vocal about how the sixth mage is being pulled toward the palace. I had hoped with you all together he might…”
“Two, two, two, zero, three.” Terlyn slapped the floor. “Sixth! Two, two, two, zero, three.” Slap. “Sixth!”
“Ah, confirmation that she’s on her way.” For a moment, Danika thought Leopald was going to applaud. “The numbers are new. Are they dates? They could be, couldn’t they? Or measurements. Or coordinates. It’s always fascinating to hear what they’ll come up with, isn’t it?”
“Bag of nothing.” Terlyn’s voice was surprisingly deep.
“Not that it’s always immediately useful.”
“White light!”
Leopald leaned forward far enough to smile indulgently down at him. “I’m sure the Interpreters will eventually discover where these particular puzzle pieces fit into the larger rhyme. And can you believe the Voice said he’d be too frightened to speak outside his usual environment?”
They left the room as Terlyn repeated the list of numbers, over and over. The skin between Danika’s shoulder blades tightened. Although his face remained covered, she could feel the Soothsayer’s gaze on her back.
“Remove your garment.”
Danika smiled and unbuttoned the dress, slipping it off her shoulders and laying it neatly across the examination table. The room was cool enough her nipples hardened, but it wasn’t uncomfortable.
Eyes narrowed, ignoring the new guards, Dimples and Freckles, so vehemently she might as well have been pointing at them, Adeline took measurements. Not only height and weight, but every possible measurement—length of fingers, width of nose, circumference of head. Danika cooperated so graciously, it appeared she was doing the midwife a favor.
