It was then, while staring at the top of his dirty helmet, that a realization hit Safi. One that made her lungs hitch a second time.
What if Caden had told the Cartorran Emperor about Safi’s magic? What if the reason Emperor Henrick knew Safi was a Truthwitch—the reason he’d wanted her as his betrothed—was because of this Hell-Bard before her?
The Chiseled Cheater had tricked her. Then the Hell-Bard commander had trapped her.
Safi was beyond anger. Beyond temper. This was her life now—forever running, forever changing hands from one enemy to the next until eventually the enemy severed her neck. It had been inevitable, really. Her magic had cursed her from the day she was born.
But Iseult …
Iseult was out there somewhere, forced on the run as well. Forced to give up the life she’d built in Ve?aza City all because of Safi. All because of the Chiseled Cheater.
Cold hate spread through Safi’s body. Throbbed against the ropes, pulsed in the tips of her blistered fingers and toes.
The hatred grew when they resumed marching. Hours of agony until at last the Hell-Bards halted for a break. Zander tied Safi to a lichen-veiled beech, and she let him. Even when the knobs of old branches poked into her back, she didn’t fight him. Nor when he pulled up her arms, straining them behind her and forcing her back to arch. Then he tied off the rope high—so uncomfortably high—and her feet low. She was trussed up like the duck Mathew always roasted on her birthday.
Though Safi couldn’t see the empress being tied to a tree behind her, she heard the same twanging stretch of ropes. The same crackling pop of shoulders stretched too far. There would be no running, no fighting any time soon.
She also heard the empress asking, with such sweet politeness, “May I have some water, please?”
The giant grunted Lev’s way, and as Lev marched toward Safi, water bag in hand, Safi realized the Hell-Bard commander was nowhere in sight. Her gaze cut left, right … But he was gone. Vanished into the forest.
“Where is the commander?” Safi asked after gulping back four glorious mouthfuls of stale water. “He was hurt. You should check on him.”
A metallic laugh echoed out from Lev’s helmet. “I don’t think so.” More laughter, and after tying the water bag at her hip, Lev eased off her helmet.
The carmine light through the leaves showed a young face. Safi’s age, at most. Short brown hair, a wide jaw that sloped down to a soft point. Pretty, actually, even with the puckered scars that slashed across her cheeks and behind her ear, as if someone had taken a razor to her face.
Lev grinned slightly to reveal crooked canines, and the scars stretched painfully tight. Shiny.
“Where are you from?” Safi asked. She already suspected the answer.
“Praga. In the Angelstatt.” The northern slum, exactly what Safi’d expected with that accent—though of course, Safi’s witchery stayed silent. No sense of truth or lie on the Hell-Bard’s words.
Safi cracked her jaw, fighting the urge to ask why she couldn’t read the Hell-Bards. It was possible they had no idea she was a Truthwitch. Yes, the commander called her Heretic, but perhaps only he knew exactly what she was.
Instead, Safi asked, “How did you become a Hell-Bard?”
“Same way as everyone else.”
“Which is?”
Lev didn’t answer. Instead, she made a sucking sound with her tongue, her pale green eyes running over Safi’s taut rope and stretched arms. Then up Safi’s face, like a Hell-Bard inspecting a heretic. Though what Lev saw, what she sensed, Safi couldn’t begin to guess.
“It was the noose or the chopping block,” Lev said at last. “And I chose the noose. More water?” She hefted up the bag, and at Safi’s headshake added, “Suit yourself.”
Safi observed absently as Lev hunkered nearby and began to inspect her weapons, crossbow first. Until her her magic surged uncomfortably to the surface.
Lies. Happening behind her.
It was startling, that sensation. That ripple down her exposed arms. It had been so long since anyone had lied in Safi’s presence—or that she’d been able to sense it—and it wasn’t so much that the words lilting off the empress’s tongue were false so much as the tone and drama behind them.
“You come from near the North Sea?” Vaness asked, her tone deceptively gentle and kind. “I also grew up near water. But not a cold sea like yours. A warm, sunny river.” Her tone shifted to a faraway sound that rubbed, yet again, against Safi’s witchery. “I was on my way back to that lake, with my family. Not by blood, but by Threads. By choice. We were almost there, you know. Perhaps a day or two more of sailing…”
A long pause, filled only with a katydid’s refrain and a sighing breeze. Then: “Did you destroy my ship?”