Phryne went back to thinking about Isoeld’s offer. Was there some way that Phryne could turn it to her advantage? Maybe she should pretend to accept, wait until she got clear of this room, and then make a run for it. But she knew it wouldn’t work like that.
Whatever sort of confession they extracted, they would put it on paper and have her sign it before they let her take a single step outside her prison. Besides, she knew she couldn’t make herself confess to killing her father; the very thought of such a thing was revolting.
Still, why had Isoeld threatened her with compromising her grandmother’s safety?
What was it that she hoped to gain?
She thought back over the words her stepmother had spoken, trying to remember them exactly, hoping for a clue. But nothing revealed itself, nothing seemed out of place. It all fit together nicely.
Except …
At the very end, she remembered suddenly. When Teonette was beating her to within an inch of her life, when everything was so crazy for those few seconds, what was it Isoeld had said?
If you kil her, we’l never find them.
Them.
Phryne’s triumphant smile would have been broader if it hadn’t hurt her face so much to stretch her mouth. Them. Isoeld had to be talking about the blue Elfstones! Nothing else made any sense. She would have known about them, of course—a valuable talisman, a legacy from the time of Kirisin Belloruus. How she had found out they were in the hands of Mistral, Phryne couldn’t imagine. But once her father was out of the way, her stepmother would have gone searching for them first thing.
Apparently, she hadn’t found them. But she seemed to know that they were destined for Phryne and might now believe that they were in her possession. Hidden, perhaps, but waiting to be found. Isoeld would be intent on finding and gaining possession of them so that her hold on the throne was more than mere words; it was backed by the power of Elven magic.
All this reasoning was something of a leap of faith, a broad extrapolation of a conclusion drawn from a raft of possibilities. Yet Phryne could feel in her heart that she was right.
But what was she going to do about it? She had to get out of this room before she could do anything, and just at the moment that didn’t seem like a very strong possibility. Or even a weak one, for that matter. Not unless someone outside the room chose to help her.
If she could just find a way to get word to her cousins!
She was considering various impossible ways to do that when dinner arrived. The storeroom door opened and the little serving girl entered with her tray, setting it down carefully just over the threshold before she backed out again and the door closed anew.
Phryne stared at the tray and the food for several minutes, trying to decide if she was hungry. She wasn’t, but she knew she had to eat.
She climbed to her feet gingerly and crossed the room to the tray. She sat down again, too weary even from that little effort to try to take the tray back across the room. She would eat on the floor and then maybe sleep. It had been long enough now that she no longer felt concussions were a worry.
The tray contained a hard roll, some cold meat and cheese, and a cup of water.
Reasonable, if not very exciting.
She began to eat.
She had just finished pulling the hard roll apart and was about to take a bite of one section when she saw the folded slip of paper that was lodged inside.
Something was written on the paper—three words in large block letters.
HELP IS COMING
WHO HAD SENT THE NOTE?
It had been hours since she had split open that hard roll and found the slip of paper hidden inside, and she couldn’t stop thinking about it. There were a limited number of possibilities that made sense, and she had gone over every one dozens of times. But none of them felt quite right.
The Orullian brothers, Tasha and Tenerife, were her first choice. Her cousins and friends, they would be the ones best able and most likely to try to help her. But they were stationed at Aphalion Pass as part of an Elven Hunter contingent charged with keeping the Drouj army from entering the valley. They had been up there for weeks, and while they must know by now what had happened to her there was no way they could return to Arborlon without permission. Because Isoeld knew of their close relationship, permission was likely to be a long time coming. They were the first ones she would think of when it came to making a list of friends and relatives who needed to be kept far away. So unless they had abandoned their post—something they were unlikely to do, in Phryne’s estimation—they weren’t the ones who had sent her the note.
Besides, even if they had come back into the city without permission, their absence in all likelihood would have been discovered by now and they were already being hunted.