Jenna was still manacled to the wall, but Karn had given her a longer chain, maybe convinced that she didn’t intend to hang herself. So she used the extra bit to pace back and forth, burning off energy and trying to build her strength back up. If she had the chance to escape, she wanted to be ready.
She’d slid her pendant out of the lining of her velvet coat and had hidden it between two loose stones in the wall. She was tempted to put it back on, but worried that it would be discovered.
She was hungry, too—starving, in fact, like her body knew that it had fasted for a week and was making up for lost time. She had no way to mark the time, but it seemed forever since anyone had brought her food.
That wasn’t the only thing she was hungry for. She’d hoped the healer, Adam Freeman, would have come back to see her by now.
She was drawn to him in a way she hadn’t been since Riley, back when she was just a lytling, and easily smitten. It’s not easy to muster up a romance when you’re cold, and exhausted, and dirty most of the time. It didn’t help the cause that she’d been walking the world as a boy ever since Riley died.
Besides, after Riley, she’d realized that love was just a setup to get your heart broken.
So now she was locked in a dungeon, dirty as a miner on a bender, and she was falling for the enemy’s healer, who might be a wolf. Maybe she hadn’t learned much after all.
Wolf, she repeated in her head, like a besotted farm girl. She really should stop calling him “healer” and “Wolf,” but Adam Freeman didn’t sound right, somehow, and so she had a hard time saying it. Even when he said it, it sounded like a lie.
She was getting tired of the tight circle she could make around the bed. She scanned the room. The torches were mounted high on the wall. If she stood on the bed, she might be able to reach them.
Then what? Play with them? They wouldn’t burn hot enough to melt her shackles.
Still, for something to do, she climbed up on the bed and stretched up high, reaching, feeling the pull in the wound in her belly . . .
She heard somebody fumbling at the door and dropped like a rock, hitting the bed hard. Was it the healer? Her heart accelerated.
But, no. The door swung open to reveal Destin Karn with a goblet in one hand and her jeweled dagger in the other.
Oh.
“What was that noise?” His eyes flicked around the room.
“What noise?”
“Just now.”
Jenna gave him a look like you might give a lytling who’s making up stories. “I didn’t hear it.”
Karn crossed to the bed and pulled up a stool, resting the blade across his knees. At least the blade was clean now.
He raised the goblet. “Happy Solstice, Jenna,” he said. He took a long drink.
“Is it really Solstice? I didn’t know.”
Karn raised his glass again. “May the sun come again.”
“Where is my wassail?” she asked, eyeing his.
“You need to be careful, drinking wassail around here,” Karn said with a wink. His slow, deliberate speech said that he’d definitely been drinking, though he wasn’t stumble drunk.
“I’ll chance it.” When he didn’t respond she said, “What about something to eat?”
Karn furrowed his brow. “Are you hungry?”
“Nobody’s been down here all day,” Jenna said. “So, yes, I’m hungry.”
“Oh,” he said. “I’m sorry.” He seemed to think that handled it.
Jenna gritted her teeth. “Why are you here?”
“I need to ask you some questions,” he said, “now that you’re feeling better.”
Jenna’s empty stomach clenched. This was what she’d worried about, all along—that if she survived, she’d be put to the question. He’d brought nothing with him save a cup of wassail and the dagger, but there was a whole array of torture tools just outside her door.
“Look,” she said, “I’m not who you think I am.”
“Who do you think I think you are?” Karn said.
It took a while to hack through that word tangle. “You think I’m one of those Patriots, but I’m not. I worked in the mines and made a little coin on the side telling fortunes. Me and my da—we just tried to keep our heads down and stay out of trouble. Yet you came into my father’s tavern and you killed him.”
“It was an accident,” Karn said.
“Well, he’s just as dead as if you did it on purpose, isn’t he?” Jenna was having a hard time reining in her temper, partly because she was guilty and her father was innocent, yet he was the one who had died.
Karn waved this away. “Anyway, I’m not here about the Patriots.”
“You’re not?”
He shook his head. “I’m here about you.”
Fear lay like a stone in her belly. “Look, if you think you can get drunk, come down here and—”
He shook his head. “No,” he said flatly. “Tell me what you know about the symbol embedded in your neck.”
And that was how the truth she’d been beating away with both hands found a place to roost. “This is really about the magemark?”
“Yes,” Karn said. “It is.”
“Then you probably know more than I do,” she said, exploring it with her fingers. “You’ve seen it, I haven’t.”
“Were you born with it?”