“Then we thought the march would be the moment for us to ensnare you; after all, you came right through the Crossroads. We worked carefully with the North after the Night of Fire and Wind to hide our movements. It was easier to let them create chaos, to let them capture you and throw Solaris and Ci’Dan off our trail. But they didn’t seem to quite grasp the idea of needing you alive.” Vhalla shifted the rag in her mouth, letting Schnurr ramble on his self-serving tale. “The two at the Crossroads quite missed the mark.”
Vhalla stilled. It was the second time the major had mentioned the Northerners who had attacked her the last time she was at the Crossroads. The night Larel Neiress had died was burned upon Vhalla’s heart.
“We couldn’t make a move ourselves, not then. The Knights haven’t survived centuries by being reckless. But the Crossroads served us well enough when it became clear that we needed to remove the son of the Ci’Dan slut to get to you.” He sighed dramatically. “And the North couldn’t do that right either, even when we fed misinformation to lead the army right into their attack at the Pass.”
Larel, then Aldrik in the Pass.
“We were at a loss when you arrived in the North. I never even contemplated the Emperor would be the one to push you away after he had you in his hands. Then again, I’ve never seen the whore’s son so taken with anyone. Power, or the loss of it, makes men quite illogical.”
“You’re one to talk.” Vhalla spit out the rag, letting it fall to the sand below the mount. “You were going to kill me for power, for the Emperor’s favor.”
“I would’ve made quite the show of seeming to do so.” The major stroked his mustache with a wicked smile. “It’s a special skill to carve a human carefully enough that nothing vital is damaged beyond repair while still having them appear to be quite deceased. It would’ve been my honor to see your corpse carried away only to have my men put you back together.”
“You’re disgusting,” Vhalla muttered caustically.
“You don’t get to say that.” The man’s eyes gleamed with dark pride. “You’re less than human. You’re nothing more than a tool. And it’s been a frustrating century and a half trying to hunt you down in the East.”
“Hunt me down?”
“The East has become quite good at hiding creatures like you; they don’t even speak of magic any longer. It’s been nearly twenty-six years since we got our hands on the last one. But we won’t mess up this time.” The major ran his hand up her thigh. “Not with you.”
Vhalla shivered as he left her, despite the residual heat of the desert still hanging in the air. She’d been hunting for connections, to see the bigger picture between seemingly unrelated events. But was she ready to see what was bubbling to the forefront of her mind as truth?
Why was everyone so ready to believe that no Windwalkers were being born when it made so much more sense that the East had simply perfected the art of hiding them? The laws following the Burning Times, the outlawing of all magic, the urge to forget, it was all to hide people like her.
She stilled, and the pain of her bindings was ignored for the briefest of moments. Vhalla suddenly had a thousand questions she wanted to ask her own father. How determined he was to go fight in the War of the Crystal Caverns, how outspoken he had been about sorcerers tampering with the crystals.
Vhalla remembered her mother instilling a fear of magic in Vhalla from a young age. A distaste for it that ran so deep Vhalla had never questioned or thought twice about it. She remembered the first time she’d fallen off the roof after climbing up fearlessly, unharmed. The argument of her parents she had overheard. She had never thought of it before, it seemed so normal. Her parents had been afraid for her wellbeing. They believed in fearing magic like the rest of the East; they’d never think their daughter was a sorcerer.
The shackles around her wrists suddenly felt heavy, and Vhalla blinked at them bleary eyed. What if it hadn’t been as normal as she thought? What if she had been hidden?
The thought echoed in her mind through the long ride the next day, sobering her to a withdrawn silence. The Knights made jokes about clipping the Windwalkers wings and how easy she’d been to break. Schnurr made it a ritual to impart knowledge of the twisted practices of the Knights of Jadar. He told her of the experiments conducted on Windwalkers with such detail that it soured her stomach and stilled its growling.
They never untied her from the saddle, never removed her cuffs. Someone could cut off her feet and Vhalla doubted she’d be able to tell. Her lower body had gone numb from the ropes long ago.
The Knights had the arrogance to think they were breaking her, but it couldn’t be further from the truth. Every waking hour, she plotted. She wiggled, tugged, and worked at her ropes. She watched as Schnurr checked his saddlebag every morning and night, leaving Vhalla no need to guess where the axe and key to her shackles were hidden. If she could remove her shackles, she would have her wind and her Bond with Aldrik—she could make them suffer.
But how to get the key?