“Thank you.”
She forced herself to sit down on a pile of bags on the ground. The slaver dog trotted over and lay by her feet between her and the cage. Richard raised his eyebrows.
“éléonore is dead,” she said. “They killed her, and they killed a young woman, Daisy. Then they set my house on fire.”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
There was an unexpected sincerity in his voice.
“You brought this nightmare on me,” she said.
He nodded. “I did. It wasn’t my intention, but the responsibility is mine.”
“I want to know why. Why did they do this to us?”
Richard shifted in the cage. His hands were tied behind his back. It must hurt, Charlotte realized.
“These men are slavers. They raid the isolated settlements in the Weird and the Edge and sometimes even in the Broken. They kidnap men and women, and deliver them to the coast to the secret meeting points, where ships pick them up. From there, the captives are taken to the Market, a hidden auction house where they are sold off to the highest bidder. Slavery has been outlawed for three hundred years, but they prosper.”
“How? If slavery is illegal . . .”
“The border barons always need fodder for construction and armies. Mine owners use slave labor. The magic users who tangle with outlawed applications of magic theory buy subjects for their experiments. And others, well, when you see a rich man with a young, beautiful woman on his arm, would it occur to you to ask if she was free?”
“That’s barbaric.”
Richard’s eyes turned hard. “You would be surprised how many ‘servants’ come from the Market.”
He was right. It would never have occurred to her to ask anyone if their attendants were slaves. She simply assumed they weren’t.
“The slavers feed their own legends,” he said. “They dress in black, they arm themselves with wolfripper dogs, they ride dark horses. They appear from nowhere in the middle of the night, reap their human harvest, burn the settlements to the ground, and vanish like ghosts.”
“Like a night terror,” she said. Bastards.
Richard nodded. “They want to be the stuff of nightmares because fighting one’s fear is always harder than fighting another man. They see themselves as outside the law, as wolves who prey on sheep. Most of them didn’t amount to much, and they cling to their illusions of grandeur both because they have nothing else and because they find cruelty empowering. So if you wish an honest answer, here it is. They killed éléonore and Daisy, and burned your house because that’s what they do. It wasn’t personal or planned. They didn’t give it a second thought. They simply did it because that’s the way they do business. Other people’s lives matter to them not at all. They’re slavers.”
His words only fueled her rage. “And you?”
“I hunt the slavers. I’ve killed dozens over the past months. They think themselves wolves, so they call me Hunter. They’re not fond of me.”
“I can see that.”
“I made a mistake, and they finally caught me. They were taking me to the Market for a public execution.”
That explained things. The slavers had beaten him not to hurt him—he was unconscious—but to make him less frightening. They were terrified of him. If they were the night terrors, he was their legendary killer, and when you kill a legend, you must make it as public as possible, or it might not take.
“Are there more of them?” she asked.
“Many more.” Richard grimaced. “No matter how many I kill, there are always more.”
Many more. That meant many more dead Daisies and éléonores, many more Tulips, weeping over bodies. Many people like her, left with a gaping hole ripped in their lives, not sure how to pick up the pieces and move on. Her magic seethed within her. Her body was nearing exhaustion, but she wanted to scream in outrage. Why did this go on? Who allowed this to keep happening? Did they think nobody could stop them? Because she could, and she had, and she would do it again. It wasn’t finished. She wasn’t finished.
“Tell me more,” Charlotte said.
He shook his head. “Not through the bars of the cage.”
She leaned back. “I’m not sure it’s a good idea to let you out. I don’t know what you might do.”
His eyes met hers. “My lady, I assure you, I’m not a danger to you.”
“Says the Hunter of wolves.”
“You view me as dangerous, but you allow a slaver dog with bloody teeth to lay by your feet.”
“I’ve known the dog longer than you.”
He grinned at her. “‘Can two people ever truly know each other through the bars of the human cage?’”
Charlotte blinked. He’d quoted the Prisoner’s Ballad, a work that was considered to be one of the pinnacles of Adrianglian literature. She was sitting on some dirty bags in the middle of a clearing filled with corpses, and a man who, by his own admission, was a serial killer just quoted a philosophical masterpiece to her. This had to be some sort of surreal absurd dream.
“I can simply walk away and leave you in the cage,” she said.
“I don’t think you will,” Richard said.
“What makes you so sure?”
“You healed me,” he said. “I remember your eyes. You wouldn’t sentence a man to slow death.”
He’d called her bluff. Leaving him to starve to death was beyond her now, no matter how dangerous he was. “If I open this cage, you’ll answer my questions.”
“As honestly as is in my power.”
“Before I let you out, typhus, malaria, red death, Ebola, tuberculosis . . . Do you have any preference? I have others, as well.”
“Where?” Richard asked.
“I carry dormant samples of them within my body. To cure a disease, you must first understand it, and sometimes a deliberate infection is necessary for vaccination. If you attempt to attack me, I will end you, Richard. Look around you if you have any doubts.”