“Darin of Serra,” I say. “I’m a friend.”
He responds with a dark chuckle. “A Martial as a friend? I think not.”
I look over my shoulder at the door. We have no time. “I know your sister, Laia,” I say. “I’m here to break you out at her request. We need to go—now—”
“You’re a liar,” he hisses.
The echo of a footstep outside, then silence. We don’t have time for this. “I can prove it to you,” I say. “Ask me about her. I can tell you—”
“You can tell me what I told the Warden, which is bleeding everything about her. No stone unturned, he said.” Darin glares at me with a searing hatred. He must be exaggerating his pain during interrogations so that the Warden believes he is weak, because from that look, it’s obvious he’s no pushover. Normally I’d approve. But right now, it’s damned inconvenient.
“Listen to me.” I keep my voice low but sharp enough to cut through his suspicion. “I’m not one of them, or else I wouldn’t be dressed like this and with wounds of my own.” I bare my arms, marked with cuts from the Warden’s latest interrogation. “I’m a prisoner. I broke in to get you out, but I was caught. Now I have to break us both out.”
“What does he want with her?” Darin snarls at me. “Tell me what he wants with my sister and maybe I’ll believe you.”
“I don’t know,” I say. “Likely he wants to get into your head. Get to know you by asking about her. If you’re not answering his questions about the weapons—”
“He hasn’t asked any questions about the bleeding weapons.” Darin runs a claw across his scalp. “All he’s asked about is her.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” I say. “You were captured because of the weapons. Because of what Spiro taught you about Serric steel.”
Darin goes still. “How the hells do you know that?”
“I told you—”
“I’ve never told any of them that,” he says. “As far as they know, I’m a Resistance spy. Skies, do you have Spiro too?”
“Wait.” I hold up a hand, baffled. “He’s never questioned you about the weapons? Only about Laia?”
Darin juts his chin out and snorts. “He must be even more desperate for information than I thought. Did he really think you could convince me that you were a friend of Laia’s? Tell him one other thing about her, from me. Laia would never ask a Martial for help.”
Footsteps pass in the main hallway. We need to get the hell out of here.
“Did you tell them how your sister sleeps with her hand on your mother’s armlet?” I ask. “Or that up close, her eyes are gold and brown and green and silver. Or that since the day you told her to run, all she has felt is guilt, and all she has thought about is somehow getting to you? Or that she has a fire inside her that’s more than a match for any Mask, if only she’s willing to believe in it?”
Darin’s mouth gapes open. “Who are you?”
“I told you,” I say. “I’m a friend. And right now, I need to get us out of here. Can you stand?”
Darin nods, limping forward. I put his arm around my shoulders. We shuffle to the door, and I hear the approaching footsteps of a guard. I can tell from the gait that it’s a legionnaire—they’re always louder than the Masks. I wait impatiently for him to pass.
“What did the Warden ask about your sister?” I say as we wait.
“He wanted to know everything,” Darin says darkly. “But he felt around for the information. He was frustrated. It was as if he wasn’t quite sure what to ask. As if the questions weren’t his to begin with. I tried to lie at first. But he always knew.”
“What did you tell him?” The guard is well away now. I reach for the door handle and pull it open with painful slowness, lest it creak.
“Whatever I could to make the pain stop. Stupid things: That she loves the Moon Festival. That she could watch kites fly for hours. That she likes her tea with enough honey in it to choke a bear.”
The pit of my stomach drops away. Those words are familiar. Why are they familiar? I turn my attention to Darin in full, and he looks at me uncertainly.
“I didn’t think it would help him,” he says. “He never seemed satisfied, no matter what I told him. Anything I said, he’d demand more.”
It’s a coincidence, I tell myself. Then I remember something Grandfather Quin used to say: Only a jackass believes in coincidence. Darin’s words swirl in my head, linking to things I don’t want them to, drawing lines where there should not be any.
“Did you tell the Warden that Laia loves lentil stew in the winter?” I ask. “That it made her feel safe? Or—or that she didn’t want to die without seeing the Great Library of Adisa?”
“I used to tell her about the library all the time,” Darin says. “She loved hearing about it.”
Words float through my head, snippets of conversation between Laia and Keenan overheard as we traveled. I’ve been flying kites since I was a boy, he’d once said. I could watch them for hours … I would love to see the Great Library one day. And Laia, that night before I left, smiling as she drank the too-sweet tea that Keenan handed her. Good tea is sweet enough to choke a bear, he’d said.
No, bleeding hells, no. All that time, lurking among us. Pretending to care about her. Trying to get in good with Izzi. Acting like a friend when he was really a tool of the Warden.
And his face before I left. That hardness that he never showed to Laia but that I sensed was there from the beginning. I know what it is to do things for the people you love. Damn it all, he must have told the Warden of my arrival, though how he could have gotten a message to the old man without using the drums is beyond me.
“I tried not to tell him anything important,” Darin says. “I thought—”
Darin falls silent at the sharp voices of approaching soldiers. I close the door, and we back up into Darin’s cell until they pass.
Only they don’t pass.
Instead they turn down the hallway leading to this cell. As I cast about for some way to defend myself, the door flies open and four Masks pour in, truncheons raised.
It’s not a fight. They are too fast, and I am injured, poisoned, and starved. I drop—I know when I’m outnumbered, and I can’t withstand any more serious injuries. The Masks desperately want to use those truncheons to pound my head in, but they don’t, instead cuffing me roughly and yanking me to my feet.
The Warden strolls in, hands behind his back. When he sees Darin and me confined next to each other, he doesn’t appear surprised.
“Excellent, Elias,” he murmurs. “Finally, you and I have something worthwhile to discuss.”
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
Helene
The redheaded Scholar reaches for his scim but halts at the simultaneous hiss of two blades leaving their scabbards. With a slight shift of weight, he eases himself in front of Laia.
She sidesteps him, her glare formidable. She is not the same, frightened child I healed in Blackcliff’s slaves’ quarters. That bizarre protectiveness grips me, the same emotion I felt for Elias in Nur. I reach out and touch her face. She starts, and Avitas and Faris exchange a glance. Immediately I pull away. But not before I discern from the touch that she is well. Relief sweeps through me—and anger.
Did my healing mean nothing to you?
She had a strange song, this girl, with a fey beauty that raised the hair on the back of my neck. So different from Elias’s song. But not discordant. Livia and Hannah took singing lessons—what would they call it? Countermelody. Laia and Elias are each other’s countermelodies. I am just a dissonant note.
“I know you’re here for your brother,” I say. “Darin of Serra, Resistance spy—”
“He’s not a—”
I wave off her protestations. “I don’t bleeding care. You’ll probably end up dead.”
“I assure you, I won’t.” The girl’s gold eyes spark, and her jaw is set. “I made it here despite the fact that you were hunting us.” She takes a step forward, but I give no ground. “I survived the Commandant’s genocide—”