I looked at Wren. She eyed me with that lethal stare of hers. “Go torment someone else.”
Surprisingly she did. She rode ahead with Synové. No doubt it was she who’d be keeping a close eye on me next. It wasn’t as if I could go anywhere. My team of horses could never outrun them, and if I tried my back would be a sure target for one of Synové’s arrows.
“We can take them,” Beaufort said when he realized no one was there to hear.
I looked back at him over my shoulder. “No,” I answered. “They’re armed and they’re Rahtan.”
Sarva’s lip lifted in a snarl. “But they still have soft skulls like anyone else.”
Bahr lifted his shackled wrists. “Next time they unchain us to leak our lizards, we grab a rock and bash in their heads—”
“We’re not bashing in heads,” I said.
“Easy for you to say,” Kardos jeered. “You don’t know their queen. She’ll have all our heads on pikes before we can say hello—including yours.”
“He’s right,” Beaufort said. “She has a vicious streak, and a vendetta against anyone who defied her.”
“You all fought against her?”
“Except for the scholars,” Sarva answered. As usual, the scholars remained silent. They both seemed terrified.
“The rest of us fought with the Komizar,” Bahr said. “Now, that man was a real leader.”
The man who chopped off children’s fingers?
I had heard rumors about him. That he was twelve feet tall. That his sword was made from the teeth of dragons. That he was an Ancient who had survived the centuries. That he wasn’t really slain because it was impossible to slay a man who was part god. The stories surrounding him were as embellished as the ones that explained the stars in the sky. By the time information reached Hell’s Mouth, it was hard to tell fact from myth. Even Bahr’s firsthand account seemed more myth than truth. No one disobeyed his commands. He could silence the devil with a whisper.
His cruel punishment of children was the only story that didn’t feel like myth. I remembered Kazi’s eyes when she flung her fingers up in front of me. Look at my fingers, Jase! Take a good long look. In that moment, her eyes told me everything. I saw the desperate life she’d been forced to live.
*
Synové had caught some game—a small antelope—and its split carcass sizzled over a spit. We were camped in a copse of spirit trees that sprouted up among ruins. Trees walked up circular staircases and perched in windows like thin ghosts. Bahr didn’t seem so brave about bashing in heads now. His head turned at every rustle, and I doubted he’d want to step alone into the dark to leak anything now.
I was chained to a tree. We all were. I had a shackle around my ankle once again.
Kazi was off tending Mije. She managed to avoid me all day, which took some effort since we were headed in the same direction.
Natiya reached over the fire and split the ribs of the antelope to help it cook faster.
“Hungry?” I asked. “Are you still eating for two? Or maybe it’s eight by now? Your lies seem to multiply like maggots.”
“Watch your mouth, Patrei,” Eben warned, brandishing his knife. At least that much of what Natiya had said was true, he was good with a knife.
“Just eating for myself,” she answered, cheerfully patting her flat stomach.
“Your queen never intended to come, did she? She’s not just an invader but a liar too.”
“I said, watch your mouth!” Eben snapped.
“Her letter was a farce,” I snarled.
“My letter to her was a farce,” Kazi answered. All our heads turned. She stepped out of the shadows into the light of the fire. “And the queen knew it. I gave her ample clues—ones you and your brothers didn’t see. Golden thannis? It’s poison. I asked her to bring you a gift of poison.” Her tone was thick with sarcasm. “I would never have asked her to come to Tor’s Watch.”
She said it with scorn, like my home was beneath the queen. I stared at her. From the very beginning, everything was a lie. “Was there ever anything truthful about you?”
She met my gaze. “You will not lecture me about truth. Ever.”
“I was under no obligation to tell you about family business.”
“Business? That’s what you call it? Stockpiling an arsenal of weapons?”
“Yes! That is our business! And we had every right—”
“To put all the kingdoms under your thumb? To put a rope around the queen’s neck?”
“There you go with your Vendan embellishments again!”
“You were hiding known fugitives!”
“And you were—”
“Back, both of you!” Eben came between us, pushing us apart, our chests still heaving. I hadn’t realized I had stood up or that she had stepped so close we were screaming inches from each other.
She glared at me, her breaths still coming in gasps. “The queen is not a liar. She couldn’t submit to your thinly veiled demand to come to Tor’s Watch because she’s confined to her bed. She can’t travel. Or I promise you she would be here to take this scum back to face justice herself!”
Her eyes glistened. “Don’t ever talk to me about truth again.” Her voice was broken, shaky. She turned on her heel and disappeared back into the shadows.
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
KAZI
I stooped at the creek’s edge, filling the last water skin. Broken stone walls jutted up from the landscape around me. I had been grateful for the ruins last night and the dark cave they gave me to sleep in away from everyone else. It was likely the last shelter we would have for a while.
I corked the full water skin, and when I stood and turned Eben was there watching me.
“I’ll help you with those,” he said. He gathered five skins up in his arms, paused and looked at me again. “You all right?”
It wasn’t like Eben to ask a question like that. You had to be all right, always. “What do you mean?”
He looked at me hesitantly. “That was him back there?”
Him. My blood rushed a little faster. Now I understood. Of all his secrets, how could Jase have not told me this? He knew what Zane had done. “Yes,” I answered. “That was him.”
Eben’s lip lifted in disgust. “The bastard. But you did the right thing, Kazi. I know it wasn’t easy for you to leave him behind. There will be another chance. We’ll go back.”
I shook my head. “No, Eben. We both know he won’t be there. By then he’ll be long gone, hiding in some other faraway hole. I can’t spend another eleven years looking for him.”
“I’m sorry.”
“No need to be sorry,” I said, trying to force cheer into my voice. Instead my words came out wooden. “Look at the other bastards we caught. The one we set out for and a bonus of five.”
“Six,” he corrected. “What about the Patrei?”
I swallowed. “Yes. Six. The Patrei too.”
But there was something I needed to tell Eben.
Something I had to tell them all, including Jase.
*
It was the laughter.
It had always been the laughter that needled through me, a repeated stitch that surfaced over and over again.
Laughter reveals in the same way a sigh or a glance does. It’s an unintentional language. Worry, fear, deceit—they hide in the things unsaid.
Something about the laughter hadn’t felt right that first night I discovered the captain and the others in the enclave, but the shock of their words had overshadowed it.
Last night when I had disappeared into the shadows I heard it again, all of them laughing, thinking Jase had gotten the better of me. That he had driven me away.
It wasn’t laughter filled with merriment. It was filled with smug derision. The kind I remembered hearing from merchants when they tricked someone into paying more than they should, the kind of laughter that always came later, after their sucker was gone.
It was that kind of laughter I’d heard that first night when I heard them discussing the Ballengers. It wasn’t a laughter of mirth but of mockery. The captain and his cohorts had been laughing at the Ballengers.
Was it a double-cross?
A betrayal?
Thanks to the Ballengers, our riches will only become greater.
Was Illarion using them?