That Prue Liss.
Girls were strange anyway, but she was stranger than most. First she screamed like she was under attack when she wasn’t and said she saw a ghost. Then she went looking for Panterra Qu and claimed she’d found him and was going off to join him. Alone.
Without coming back to tell any of it to Xac and without asking for his help—which she almost certainly would need—but instead sending Alif in her place.
No explanation for any of it.
How did she find out where Panterra was if all she was doing was searching for him in the Ashenell? She was already leaving the cemetery when she encountered Alif, so she hadn’t found him there. But where had she found him?
He started off in the direction she had taken—the one she must have taken to have encountered Alif where she did, not too far outside the south gates. Maybe it was too late to catch up to her, but he intended to try. He didn’t like being left behind like this.
She owed him an explanation, and if he could find her he would demand one. Hadn’t he done an awful lot for her? Hadn’t he stayed with her when he could just as easily have left?
But instead, she had left him! That was the thanks he had been given for all he had done!
He passed through the south gates and began walking toward the edge of the city and the Elfitch. Along the way, he stopped Elves he knew and asked if they had seen a young girl, describing her. A few had noticed such a girl, a strange one who was half running, half walking, staring off into the distance as if she were seeing something they weren’t. Xac Wen didn’t know about this last part, but the “strange” label certainly fit.
He picked up his pace, thinking he might still catch up to her.
But when he reached the Elfitch, he discovered she had passed the guards stationed there some time ago and no one had seen which way she went after that.
He stood at the top of the ramps, staring off into the distance. There were only two choices, really. She could have gone south and home to Glensk Wood or she could have gone north to Aphalion Pass. He couldn’t imagine why she would choose the former; Panterra Qu would hardly go back to his village after coming all the way to Arborlon to help Phryne. There was no imaginable reason for it.
He looked over his shoulder and back at the city. Of course, she might still be somewhere close by if she thought that was where Panterra might have surfaced.
What was he supposed to do?
Having no better plan, he backtracked into the city to gather together supplies before heading out to Aphalion Pass to relate what had happened to the Orullian brothers.
LOCKED AWAY IN THE BASEMENT STOREROOM OF the council chambers at Glensk Wood—the very same storeroom that had once imprisoned Arik Siq—Aislinne Kray wondered if everyone had forgotten her. She had been imprisoned for so long now that she no longer even knew if it was day or night. They had given her a box of candles so she wouldn’t be left in the dark, a pitcher of water and bowl with which to wash herself, a pallet and blanket so she would have a place to sleep, a chamber pot, and nothing else.
They came now and then with food and to empty the pot—guards who had been given the task of keeping watch over her—but they never spoke to her, not even when she asked them questions, and they never responded to her requests for sewing materials or books to read or even implements with which to draw.
Even now, she had no real idea what had happened to bring her to this sorry state.
What she did know, and even this was by way of an educated guess, was that she was being blamed for Arik Siq’s escape. She could not imagine why that was. That she would do anything to help one of the Drouj—especially the one responsible for the death of Sider Ament—was preposterous. She had no reason to want to help such a man and nothing to gain by doing something that would harm her own people.
Yet here she sat, accused of a gross betrayal and consigned to this room for what it seemed might be the rest of her life.
Rationally, she knew it wouldn’t really be that long, but it was beginning to feel like it. When you couldn’t see outside and know whether it was dark or light, when you couldn’t speak with anyone about what was happening in the larger world, it felt as if time had stopped completely.
That even Pogue had not come to see her was particularly hurtful. She knew their relationship had been suffering, especially since Sider Ament had appeared in the village with his news of the collapse of the protective wall. But she hadn’t thought he would abandon her completely. She had assumed he would at least want to hear her explanation of the charges her accusers—whoever they were—had placed against her.