Nisse looks at his son, and they share a moment. “Perhaps that was her intention.”
Jaspar gives him a curt nod. “It had occurred to me. I was trying to call off our archers and calm things down when Thyra hit Ansa.”
“Thyra wouldn’t . . .” The protest dies on my tongue as they echo my suspicions. “I saved her,” I say lamely.
Jaspar kneels in front of me, his blond hair glinting gold as he leans into a shaft of light. “And once again I must ask: How has she rewarded your loyalty?”
I close my eyes. “I need to rest. Please.”
They do not press me further. Nisse calls the guards but tells them to keep their weapons sheathed as they take me back to my chamber. Jaspar gives me a long, hard look before I go, wrapping his hand around my upper arm and stroking his thumb over the kill mark he gave me, as if he is drawn to it. “We’ll talk again soon, I promise,” he says.
I cannot meet his gaze. I let Sander and the others lead me back down into the earth, the stone behemoth swallowing me down until I find its stomach, the little windowless tomb where I am to be kept. Halina is waiting when we reach it. She bows her head meekly and nods as Sander tells her to get me dinner and make sure I am comfortable.
As soon as I sink onto my bed, though, she is pulling me up again. “Come with me, little red. Dinner is this way.” Her tone isn’t amused and joking as it was earlier, but nor is it meek and scared like it was in the hallway. Instead, it is urgent. Determined.
“Where? I can’t be around the other warriors right now. They all hate and fear me.” If I am to win my way back into the tribe, it will require me to loose fire and ice on Kupari. I glance at my arms, where the scars lie red and silver beneath my sleeves. The curse would have eaten me alive that day. If I unleash it again, will it kill me?
Halina has the door open and is peeking into the corridor. Evidently satisfied with what she sees, she comes back inside and pulls me by the wrist. “Stop your spinning mind and follow me,” she says. “You may find something that will nourish you.”
Fatigue gnaws on my bones, but the desire to see the sky again brings me to my feet, along with the need to be in the open, out from under all this rock. I have no idea where she’s taking me, but the question temporarily silences the blizzard of knowledge and questions raging in my head. Grateful for the relief of curiosity and purpose, I trail Halina out the door and into the corridor.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
My wish for sunlight is crushed as Halina leads me through a recessed wooden door to a staircase that descends further into the earth. But when I balk, she tugs at me, relentless. “Come now,” she whispers. “Time is never our friend.”
“How do you know our language?” I ask as I begin to follow her again, needing something to get my mind off the press of stone and dank air as we enter a tunnel so low that even though I’m not that tall, I must hunch to keep from conking my head.
“I am good with language,” says Halina. “I know Kupari as well. And Korkean. Ylpesian, too. My father was a trader and he took me on his travels when I was little. As for Krigere . . . I learned fast out of a sincere desire to survive.” She tosses me a smile pulled taut by the ghosts in her eyes.
I clear my throat. “Ylpesian? Korkean?”
“The city-states of Korkea and Ylpeys lie west of here, through the Loputon Forest.” She looks back, and her gaze is cautious. “Allies.”
“Does Nisse know of these city-states?”
Her eyes linger on mine. “Well, now. I don’t know, little red. What did his big map say?”
If she means his map on the table in the tower, the answer is no. The area to the south and west of Kupari was blank. Unpainted. “He’ll find out.”
“Because you tell him?”
I run my tongue along my teeth, uncertainty filling me again as all the revealed secrets of the afternoon stack on one another, high as the tower itself. “I don’t know.”
Her eyes narrow. “Maybe I’ll help you figure it out. Best believe old Nisse is cautious, though. He doesn’t allow riders to leave the city, not since we sent an envoy to the Kupari to beg for help after the initial attack. No one in or out, save Krigere. That’s the way of it now. Vasterutians are prisoners in our own city.”
But considering how easily we just departed my little prison chamber, perhaps things are not as locked down as Nisse hoped. “Where are we going?”
“Not far now.” She skitters along the passage, raw earth held up with wooden posts, some still green. As if it has been newly dug and braced, though such an endeavor would take months. Months . . . perhaps since the early spring.
I stare at her back with new suspicion. “Where do your loyalties lie?”
“What a question.”