“And you feed and house them? Treat their wounds and illnesses?”
At the door, Simon stopped her with a touch on her arm. She turned back to him with a coy grin, but the innuendo on her lips died at the look on his face. He considered her in silence, like he was trying not only to read her face, but to look even past that and find a deeper truth.
Look all you want, she thought savagely. You’ll find nothing good.
“Yes,” he said at last. “We treat their wounds and illnesses.”
Eliana ignored the disquiet in her belly, gave him a slight hard smirk. “There are many such Red Crown camps throughout the country, I assume?”
“Yes.”
“Your rebellion might be more successful if you didn’t spend so much time nursing the damned.”
The door before them opened.
“Revolutions mean nothing if their soldiers forget to care for the people they’re fighting to save,” said a new voice. Two men stood there, and a woman. The man who had spoken was short, slight, pale-skinned with wild copper hair, and when Eliana’s gaze dropped to his waist, where a smallsword hung in plain view, the man clucked his tongue.
“Ah-ah,” he said, wagging his finger at her. “There will be no violence tonight.”
“Give me my knives and my brother, or I’m afraid I’ll be forced to disobey.” Eliana clucked her tongue. “And I was so hoping we could be friends.”
The other man, tall and muscular, with dark skin and black hair cropped close to his head, moved his hand to the revolver at his belt.
“Don’t bother,” said the first man, placing a hand on the other’s arm. “She’s afraid and lashing out.”
Eliana burst out laughing. “You think I’m afraid?”
“Everyone’s afraid. You’re just better at hiding it than most.” The man’s eyes flicked to Simon. “So Simon says, at least.”
Eliana’s laughter died, but a deadly smile remained. “I don’t believe we’ve been introduced.”
“Ah! Of course. How rude of me. I am Patrik, and I oversee Crown’s Hollow. This is Hob,” he said, gesturing to the other man. “My lieutenant and also my husband. And I believe you’ve already met Marigold,” he added, gesturing to the woman on his left.
She was older, with weathered brown skin and gray braids, and a malicious gleam in her eye. “I hit you on the head.”
Eliana grinned. “And I’ll soon return the favor.”
Patrik clasped Eliana’s hand, gave it a firm shake. “And of course I know you, Eliana Ferracora. Yes, I know exactly who you are.” When he smiled at her, it was not without kindness, but Eliana knew the glint of a killer when she saw one.
“Cause trouble in my home,” he said cheerfully, “and I will cut you from skull to navel, no matter how much I like your brother. And no matter how much Simon likes you.”
Simon gave a dismissive scoff, but Patrik was already guiding Eliana through the door. “Now then,” he announced, with a clap of his hands, “who’s hungry?”
17
Rielle
“I worry about Rielle. All children have tempers, but hers comes with a certain look I’ve not seen on the faces of others her age, or even much older. Her rage holds a delight, a hunger, that I’ll confess sometimes keeps me awake through the night. I haven’t talked to my husband about it. Sometimes I think I’m jumping at shadows. I should not be writing this. In fact, I think I will burn it.”
—Journal of Marise Dardenne
Confiscated by the Church of Celdaria in the Year 998 of the Second Age
“Again!”
Rielle exhaled sharply, blowing a sweaty dark curl out of her eyes, pushed hard off the ground, and jumped—first over a boulder, then over a pile of wooden rails. Then she scrambled up the rocky slope past the rails and down the steeper other side.
Don’t lose the pole, she told herself. Don’t. Lose. The pole.
She made it to the bottom, dropped to her belly, and slid under the net into the mud pit. If she touched the wide-weave net stretching above her, she’d have to start over at the beginning of the course, and her father would add another stone to her pack.
She’d made it halfway through before her hands slipped and she fell chin-first into the mud. Inhaling a mouthful, she choked and gagged.
“Up!” barked a voice from above.
She bit back a curse. Of course he would choose that moment for a fight. She found an opening in the net and crawled up through it, maneuvering her long wooden pole free just in time for her father’s attack.
His own pole flew fast at her shoulders. She ducked, raised her pole, and swung it around to strike. The poles met with a sharp wooden crash that hurt Rielle’s teeth. She swayed, lost her footing, caught herself on the net.
“Get up!” Her father’s pole swung again, rapped hard against her knuckles.
“Damn it!” She bit back smarting tears of pain and lunged to her feet, swinging wildly. “I was down!” But her feet got caught in the netting, and she tripped and fell hard on her tailbone.
“And you’re down again.” Her father made a soft sound of disgust and flung his pole to the grass outside the pit. “You didn’t even make it to the wall climb that time. Get up, and go back to the beginning.”
Rielle rose to her feet, shaking with exhaustion and rage. She kept her eyes to the ground, ignoring her ever-present guard, which stood silently around the obstacle course her father had engineered. If they thought she looked ridiculous, well, they weren’t wrong.
The course Rielle had described to Audric and Ludivine as her “woodland torture chamber” lay in a secluded area of the foothills of Cibelline, the highest mountain in Celdaria. The saints had constructed Katell’s castle, Baingarde, upon its slopes centuries before. Every day for six days straight, in preparation for the next trial, Rielle had met her father here—to strengthen her body, he’d said, and improve her agility.
So far, all it had done was make her sore. And angry as the darkest corner of the Deep.
“I’m not an athlete,” she spat at her father, picking her way out of the mud pit and tossing her pole away. “Nor am I a warrior.”
He let out a sharp laugh. “Never has anything been so clear as that.”
“And yet you insist on putting me through this for hours!” She marched across the grass, peeling off her mud-soaked gloves, gauntlets, shin guards, and at last the cursed, heavy pack of stones.
“We’ve been out here since dawn,” she muttered. “I should be studying with Tal by now, practicing with Grand Magister Rosier. Water’s always been my weakest element. Or I could be working on my costume with Ludivine.”
“A costume.” Her father scoffed. “Yes, a wise use of your time, that.”
“Ludivine’s idea, and a good one. If I want our people to love me—”
He laughed again, soft and unkind.
“—and show them I’m not afraid—”
“Even you’re not that good a liar.”
“Stop interrupting me!”
He fell silent, glaring at her. She glared right back, heat climbing up the back of her neck, up her arms, coiling in her belly.
Her father glanced at her hands, but she kept them clenched tight. She knew what he was looking for—wild sparks, the birth of a fire that would rage out of control and consume everything in its path.
As she fought back tears, fists clenched at her sides, she wished, not for the first time, that her father had been the parent she had killed—and that her mother had lived.
“If you are to have any chance of surviving these trials,” he said at last, “if you want to have more than raw power and dumb luck on your side, then you will need to become stronger, and quickly.”
“I’ve been studying for years, working on my control with Tal—”
“And that may not be enough!”