Both had murmured, ‘Yes, Master,’ and their servitude had begun in earnest.
It was the beginning of their imprisonment. Since that day they had been confined to separate cells, always kept apart and solitary. They lived within their tiny dark spaces and awaited their Lord’s pleasure. Their magic, which should have served them well, was useless. Redden had tested his early, and the resultant pain had persuaded him not to try again. He had fiddled once with loosening the conjure collar and suffered a similar fate. He assumed it was the same for Khyber. He had examined his cell from wall to wall and floor to ceiling, searching for a way to escape. There was none. He had considered trying to overpower his jailers, but they almost never appeared when he was awake and then only in force.
He wondered anew what had become of Khyber. In that first meeting, Tael Riverine had demanded to know what had become of the Straken Queen, how Khyber dared to call herself Ard Rhys, how she had found her way into the Forbidding, who else knew there was an entry, and so on. Dozens of similar questions were thrown at her, one after the other. When she had failed to answer him fully enough, fast enough, or respectfully enough, he had used the lash of the conjure collar on her until finally she collapsed unconscious at his feet.
He had not bothered with Redden. In truth, the boy was not even sure why he was still alive.
By now, he had come to believe it didn’t matter. His life was over in any event. No one was coming for him. No one knew how to reach him. Not even Railing and Mirai—though he believed they would try—could save him from this.
He looked down at himself. He had not washed since he had been brought here. He had not shaved or cut his hair. He wore the same clothes in which he had been captured. He smelled and he itched from things he did not want to think about. He was miserable all the time, and what small hope he had harbored at the beginning of his misery had long since faded away.
Now and then, he found himself thinking about the reason he had come here in the first place—to search for the missing Elfstones. How far away that seemed. How unimportant. He thought of it as a monumental miscalculation, an effort that never should have been attempted, a foolish and reckless undertaking that had killed more than half their company and left them with nothing to show for their loss.
If he had it to do over again …
But he didn’t have it to do over, so there was no point in dwelling on it. Each time the subject surfaced he quickly let it slip away.
He did, however, wonder frequently about Tesla Dart. What role had she played in the fate of the expedition? Had she arranged their capture or had she tried to warn them away from it? He was uncertain even now. Tesla had appeared and vanished again too often for him to know what to think. It might have been her intention to help them, but she might just as easily have been leading them into a trap.
He had no way of knowing this, just as he had no way of knowing much of anything else, and trying to come to terms with his uncertainty was the worst part of his suffering.
Then, all of a sudden and for no discernible reason, his jailers came for him, accompanied by the creature called Tarwick, and brought him to a room where a tub of hot water waited and allowed him to bathe. Afterward, they cut his hair and gave him clean clothes and hot food. They took him to a different room—still a cell, but with a barred window that allowed in light and fresh air and let him look out over a ragged, rolling landscape as riven and desolate as everything else.