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Sirah had instructed Quinn to go straight to Sammah’s suite and wait for him. Two silent bodyguards escorted her. She didn’t know who was in charge of them now Elias had been exiled to the quarries, but there was no danger of her running away from them. The courtroom exchanges had left Quinn exhausted. As soon as she reached the apartments, she folded herself up on a carpet near a cool brazier. One of the mercenaries made to set it alight. Before its warmth even began to reach her, Quinn was asleep. She didn’t dream. For that much peace, she was glad.

* * *

Someone gently rocked her awake. It wasn’t a malicious gesture. That would have been a kick, and she was certainly in a vulnerable enough position to have one of those aimed at her. People kicked dogs when they were curled up on the floor, and beggars when they were in the gutter. Why not her? Quinn had expected to see Maertn, but it was Sammah’s smooth features that greeted her when she opened her eyes. Looking up at her father, a man she had not so long ago adored, she felt inexplicably overburdened with sadness. To her surprise, Sammah crouched down next to her so that he could talk to her on her own level. He hadn’t been this amiable—this fatherly—to her for years.

“I’m sorry for what you just had to experience Quinn. Believe me, if there had been a different way to guide that courtroom, then I would have done it.”

Quinn didn’t believe Sammah as far as she could throw him, but she didn’t dare tell him that.

“What is paramount here, is to keep us all safe. I cannot be held accountable for anything that Elias may or may not have tried to do to you. It’s all for a greater good, you see. King Vance would have barely reacted to Broc’s death, if Shiver and I had not intervened. He doesn’t care about what happens to the succession in Broadwater, so long as it happens. If he doesn’t care about what happens to his lords, why should he be allowed to rule? So I did what I could, and whilst yes, they are going to be looking for the Satori, they are not going to be looking for you at all. I have painted the picture they wanted. They want a monster. The Satori is going to be a big, vicious creature capable of tearing down the walls of trust built between the people of Sha’sek and Everfell, and starting kingdom-wide wars. What they won’t be expecting,” he cupped her chin and looked in to her eyes, “is a little girl that faints every time someone shouts at her too loudly.” Quinn blushed. Sammah’s eyes were nasty, beady, squinting as if to judge her. He continued. “The problem I have now, Quinn, is I know that you’re not that little girl anymore. You’re growing up. Your power is growing with you. You’re not overwhelmed by emotion any more. I knew that day would come. So what we have to do now—and carefully—is to make sure that no one notices this. It’s a sudden change. As sudden as if the king were to declare tomorrow that Everfell and Sha’sek were once again one kingdom. You have to start pretending, to everyone, including Maertn, that you are that vulnerable little girl again. In time, you can become the woman you already are. But until your naming ceremony next year, you are a witless, clumsy, fragile little girl that hardly anyone likes and that no one takes seriously. Do you understand me?”

Quinn nodded. She couldn’t talk past the lump in her throat, and she desperately wanted to wish away the tears that stung her eyes and rolled down her cheeks. Her reaction to his bitter examination of her told Quinn that she was, indeed, what Sammah told her. It didn’t matter how her power was changing nor how she was growing up. She was vulnerable and she was weak, and now more than ever she would need Sammah in order to stay alive. Sammah nodded firmly. Quinn was a broken girl, and that was the way he preferred her. He couldn’t control Quinn if she had spirit. It had to be crushed, and stay that way.

Sammah stood, ignoring the silently sobbing girl that curled herself up again on his carpet. Sirah, standing by the doorway, gave a cruel curved smile. Sammah returned it, though he secretly noted that he would, at some point, also have to do something about this spiteful bitch that constantly considered herself above her station in his plans. Sirah had been interesting to him at first, and certainly enjoyable company in more ways than one, but she had no abilities to speak of, and brought him no enhancement in status or in wealth that he could not acquire from someone more beautiful both visually and internally. Sirah also knew that Quinn was the Satori, and from this point forward this made her a dangerous ally to have. Luckily, along with all of her other defects, Sirah was monumentally single-minded. This meant that, as long as Sammah pretended to have an interest in her, she would return this two-fold, so desperate was she to weave herself some power in life. As with many people that tried to stretch for something beyond their reach, this would be Sirah’s downfall. Quinn’s ruin would be that she didn’t know enough about what power she could have, if only she resolved to take it. In between both of them, Sammah would take and take from everyone weak enough to supplicate to him.

Eventually, he would take the throne. No one was clever enough, strong enough to stand in his way. Quinn had been the only one. Maertn, even, could be a threat if he even knew the smallest amount of power at his fingertips. No. Sammah’s control of the bastard Sha’sek children that had been left scattered around the kingdom after the end of the last war had been a masterful stroke. They would not be able to rise to confront him, and with Everfell not allowing any other Sha’sek citizens past its borders, there would be no one of his own kind to challenge him either.

Baron Sammah might only be a youngest son of a youngest son in his homeland, unable to inherit and incapable of fighting, but he was a cunning and patient man. A waiter, and a planner. It had taken him over a decade to carefully maneouvre his machinations to this point. He was so close to achieving his final goals that he was almost tempted to rush, to push forwards beyond what he had planned to snatch the throne that dangled so tantalisingly right in front of him. Only years of discipline; of deriding the weak and leeching from the strong, restrained him. Sammah knew, that to rush was to fail. This had been Sammen’s mistake, and his undoing. Sammah would learn from history. He wouldn’t tread those same roads. He would make his own route through the annals of Everfell, and the chapters they would write about him would be spectacular.

30

When Quinn had cried herself out, Sammah was gone. She had been left alone in his rooms, and night had long since fallen. Her cheeks were dry, but she could feel tightness on her skin where the salty tears had left their erratic trail. The brazier was cooling down. Even the mercenaries, ever-present in Sammah’s suites, had left her to her own devices.

“I’m not a threat to him.” Quinn whispered to herself. Was this a statement of fact, a realisation, or a challenge to herself? She repeated his words back to herself. Fragile. Witless. Clumsy. Maertn took her seriously. No matter what Sammah said to her in malicious confidence, he couldn’t take away the truth of that. He might like to throw his power around when he had her cornered, but what Sammah had to acknowledge was that, of the two of them, Quinn most certainly knew how people felt about her. What stung the most, was that the majority of what Sammah had said was right. Very few people in Everfell had considered her without derision, excluding Sammah. Maertn, obviously, was one. Ross was another. The only other addition to this exclusive collection was Eden. He had been the first, however, who had not judged her on sight. On the contrary, he had been curious, and appeared to have completely overlooked the fact that she seemed to involuntarily collapse whenever she was near him.

Quinn stood and smoothed down her clothes. She thought about going to draw herself a bath, or even risk going down to the communal bathing chambers. It was too late, though, and she still felt drained despite her sleep. The floor had left her stiff, she told herself, and the steam of the bathing chambers would help her to relax. Quinn had historically avoided the bathing chambers for the same reason she avoided everything and everyone in the castle. She didn’t want to be around people, because she already knew without wanting to know it, that people did not want to be around her. As she padded silently out of Sammah’s suites and through the halls, she knew that the bathing halls should be all but deserted. Only those that worked the night, like her, would be awake enough, or odd enough, to want to bathe at this kind of time. She hadn’t been instructed yet, by either Ross or Sammah, to return to her maid duties. Odd, too, that Sammah hadn’t yet challenged her about her attempt to leave the city. Still, if she had a chance of experiencing a night of silence, without being ordered around by the myriad of men in her life, she would take it. Quinn headed down to the bathing halls.

The halls appeared desolate as the candle boys didn’t bother lighting more than one in three of the candles down here after dark. The effect was spell-binding, or so Quinn thought. The walls down here were almost soft. The steam from the baths was constant, and mossy mildew had been growing here steadily over the long years. Quinn trailed her hand over one side of the wall, stroking the damp green quilting. It smelled fresh down here, too. You would expect it to smell rotten, or at least damp and stale. Sammah and Maertn had both tried to explain to her how the waters were a natural hot spring, and the earth herself refreshed the waters. Quinn hadn’t understood, and they had given up trying to tell her. Eventually the carefully laid stone gave way to natural rock, and the walls, still covered with their carpet of moss, led to a massive enclosed cavern. The cavern had existed long before a city even stood in Everfell, and Quinn was sure it would endure long after, too. It was a curious place. The bathing caverns made some feel ill at ease. Many said it wasn’t natural, for such a thing to just exist underground.

There were many stories explaining the caverns, beyond the convoluted explanation about mountains that spewed liquid fire and water movements given to her by Sammah and Maertn. Quinn much preferred these. Her favourite was the story of Indigo, a warrior from Sha’sek who was famed for his bravery. Before the wars, when there had just been one country, before the Severed Desert had become the barren and desolate barrier it now was, Indigo had been a travelling prizefighter. He moved from town to town, fighting any that challenged him. He arrived in Everfell, as it had been back then, just a small collection of huts and villagers. The villagers lived in terror, it had been told, for a demon that came at night and stole their children. The demon lived in a cave and when they were taken, their screams could be heard at night, for miles around. Parents, robbed of their children and helpless to get them back, would cry themselves to sleep with what remained of their family, trying to block out the noise. Newlyweds were choosing to leave before having children. Everfell, as a village, was dying.

Quinn told herself the tale of Indigo as she removed her drab and dirty clothes, folding them gently and placing them at the side of the hot pool with care. Steam rose off the water. This time, as always, she dipped a toe in the water. At first, to her cold body, the water was stingingly hot. She crouched down on to one leg, dipping first her foot, then her shin, then her left leg up to the knee in the water. Happy that the rest of her body would be able to cope with the heat, she hopped off the side of the rock and into the luxurious waters. The feeling on her body was one of near-ecstasy. The water lapped at her skin and folded over her aching muscles, soothing her immediately. Quinn groaned quietly with relief, then became confused as she heard chuckling over her own voice. She floundered around in the water, unable to catch purchase on anything and so doing a creditable impression of a hooked fish. She finally slapped a hand back on the rocks and looked madly around the pool for the source of the noise. When she couldn’t see anything in her immediate vicinity, she tried squinting through the thin wisps of steam creating a constant mist just above the surface of the pool. There was someone in there with her. One person, and still she couldn’t avoid the mockery! Quinn was furious. Instead of lashing out with her voice, or struggling with her eyes, she went to the one sense she was gaining confidence in. Thinking on how she could possibly get a hold of someone if she couldn’t see them, she instead gave a mental push, like a fisherman would cast out a net to widen his catch. Quinn’s jaw dropped when this worked; she felt a tugging straight ahead of her. The emotion she felt though, wasn’t the malicious amusement she had felt before from Yvette, nor the detached scorn she felt from men like Sammah. It was happy, nearing joy. Quin almost ducked under the water to get away, to be anywhere but where she was right now. She had wanted to see Eden again, but not like this.

“Did you need that by any chance, my lady?”

“I’m not a lady, captain. Even if I weren’t just a maid, my naming ceremony isn’t until next year.”

“My apologies. I didn’t realise I had to wait until then to be courteous.”

Quinn blushed, though immediately blamed the heat of the pool. She heard water parting, and Eden swam slowly in to view straight in front of her. He stopped as soon as he knew she could see him, keeping a respectful distance. Quinn blamed the pool, too, on the way her heart started racing as soon as she knew it was Eden sharing the water with her. They were the only people in here at this time of night, and her blush grew fierce. No one bothered hiding their bodies in the bathing pools—or in many other parts of the castle, as she had discovered in her work as a night maid. There was something illicit though, about Eden having caught her unawares. She thought suddenly that she should probably be angry that he hadn’t announced his presence to her before she disrobed. What did he think of her, that she wasn’t? Had he actually seen her, or had he laughed in reaction to her groans? No, he had to have seen her. Why would he laugh at the noises a random stranger made in the baths?