Kinked (Elder Races, #6)

She uncurled slowly, moving as though her whole body ached. She mumbled, “Brandy.”


“Okay, but you can only have half of it.” He was not quite lying, just withholding information. He had a second bottle in the sack. He uncorked the first bottle and set it into her groping hand.

Then he placed one of the folded tablecloths in her lap, and he pulled out the different kinds of food, setting it out in front of them. He chose a hunk of cured meat and tore into it caveman-style, washing down the dry bites with swallows of water. Exhaustion pulled at his bones. With one part of his attention, he noticed how Aryal drank the brandy but didn’t reach for any of the food.

Various reactions occurred to him. He considered each one and set them aside.

Finally he said, “You want to hunt the bitch, you’ve got to eat properly and get more rest, because, sunshine, you can barely sit up straight. I’m not going to take you with me or have you as a fighting partner if you’re going to be a liability.”

The silence in the cell was sour. Then she reached forward to slap her hand down randomly on a pile of food. “Oh gods, you brought more wayfarer bread.”

“All you got is bitching and whining?” he said irritably. “That’s not all I brought. Most of it is meat.”

He sensed her leaning further, feeling over the offerings. She picked up a jar and shook it. “What’s this?”

“Pickled eel,” he told her. “If you don’t like it, I’ll eat it.”

She said, her voice slow and tired, “Pickled eel and apple brandy. Huh.”

For some reason that made him laugh. “Put that way, it sounds pretty awful.” He paused, then reached for the bottle. She put up a token resistance but let him take it. He drank, and the light, fiery liquor sliding down his throat was one of the few good things that had happened that whole, gods-cursed day.

In the other hall, the Elves talked quietly together. Already they sounded more animated. Hope and carbohydrates were a powerful combination.

When the hollowed-out feeling in his gut had eased, he said quietly, “After we eat and get some sleep, I want to send the others back. They aren’t equipped to hunt the witch. They can cross back over to the Bohemian Forest and stand guard as per their original orders, and maybe send someone out to update Ferion and Dragos.”

Aryal was silent for a while. She said, “If Galya reaches the passageway, you’re setting them up for a bad confrontation.”

“They don’t have to engage. They can let her go, and she can be tracked down to wherever she lives in Russia.” Tired of the dryness of the cured meat, he set it aside and reached for a wheel of cheese and a small jar of olives, set with a honeycomb wax seal. “Besides,” he said, “we’re not going to let her reach the passageway.”

He sliced off a piece of cheese and handed it to her, then sliced off some for himself and broke open the jar of olives. As she chewed, Aryal said, “I want one of these bars.”

He didn’t understand that. He hadn’t brought any food that came in bars. “What?”

The indirect moonlight from the single window was so faint, for many races the cell would be in total darkness, but his eyes were especially suited to the night. He saw her gesture to the cell door that stood wide open. “These bars. I want one of them with the dampening spell still on it so I can stab her with it.”

His eyebrows rose as he considered that. “That’s actually an awesome idea,” he said. “Unfortunately, the cells are so well constructed that I don’t think it’s feasible. We’d need a blacksmith, and by the time the smith separated one of the bars, probably the dampening spell would be broken.”

“A girl can dream, you know,” she said. She had sounded bad before, and now she sounded utterly exhausted. “Give me that bottle again.”

He passed it over to her. “So, who do you love?”

She drank from the bottle and wiped her mouth. “Excuse me?”

“Name somebody you love.”

“Why?” She sounded baffled.

Impulse was driving him, and he didn’t want to try to explain it. “Just because,” he said. “You’re friends with Niniane. Do you love her?”

“Ye-es.” Now she sounded cautious.

“Suppose Niniane was in trouble, and it was bad.” She nudged his arm with the bottle and, surprised she offered, he took it and drank. “Suppose,” he said, “someone Powerful that you didn’t know had threatened her.”

“Are you telling me that you know some plot against Niniane?” she asked suspiciously. “And you’re only just now bringing it up?”

“No! I’m creating a hypothetical scenario.”

“I’m back to ‘why’ again.” She wrapped the tablecloth around her shoulders and lay down. “But go on.”