The Silvered (45 page)

The report jumped from “
…gave her a little privacy to relieve herself…”
to “…
opened my eyes in the infirmary with no idea how I’d got there.”
but was, otherwise, complete. While the colonel chewed at it, Reiter marveled at how much difference leaving out a single sentence made. A single sentence:
I let her go.
And a name. Mirian.

“How did she knock those trees down?”

“She’s a mage, sir. Other than that I can’t say. I wasn’t conscious when it happened.”

“Mage-craft is a dying art, Captain. There isn’t a mage in the empire who could do half—no a tenth—that damage.”

Depending on how the battle at Bercarit was going, that might no longer be true. If the empire tried absorbing Aydori, they’d find themselves suddenly in possession of any number of powerful mages. For a while.

“Did she have a weapon?”

“Just her mage-craft, sir.”

“Impossible.”

It hadn’t been difficult to see why the colonel had been left behind in Lyonne rather than given a role in the winter campaign or the spring advance.

Fortunately, Major Halyss had confirmed Reiter’s identity and supported his report as far as he’d been able.

“Can’t say I’m not happy to be leaving,” Chard muttered, finally turning from the window. He pulled his stained and nearly shapeless bicorn down over his forehead, then slapped the barrel of his musket back and forth between his palms. “You get taken out by a girl and they look at you funny, you know?”

“She was a mage.”

“Still a girl, Cap.” Chard grinned across the coach at him as though that, at least, was undeniable.

Reiter didn’t plan on denying it.

He’d tried to leave Chard behind, the way he’d left Armand and
Best in Aydori, at least partially because what was waiting for him in Karis was likely to be unpleasant, but Chard been surprisingly stubborn.

“You’re an officer and you can leave me where you like, sir, but I think I need to go with you to Karis. I was there. You might need me to back you up.”

Reiter knew flaming well that Chard’s word would carry no weight at all with the men who’d sent them out chasing prophecy’s tail, but he was selfish enough not to want to face them alone.

T
HE CEILING OF THE
ROOM
was too high for Danika to get a good read on the air currents. Words she set loose might go anywhere, so she had to choose those first words carefully. Hands over her face, as though to block the memory of the dangling pelt, she stared up at the piece of wall once again covering Leopald’s rathole and breathed out through the crack between her hands,
Talk to me.

To me
not
to us.
Her position meant she’d played more power games than the rest even if some of those games had been against Kirstin.

The wall fit snugly; Leopald might never hear her. He certainly wouldn’t if she didn’t try.

“Why?”
Mouth partially covered by a napkin, Kirstin seemed to be listening to Stina’s low murmur of comfort, but her voice brushed past Danika’s ear.

“
He likes to talk, we need information. Knowledge is power.”

Kirstin rubbed her thumb over the white lines the net had etched into her fingertips.
“Power is power.”

Without the net, the five of them had power enough to free themselves
and while they’d never used that power aggressively, Leopald had ensured they’d be willing to. Telling Kirstin to leave the net alone would only annoy her, and, in all honesty, with the lingering headache from her own attempt pressing needles behind her eyes, Danika didn’t feel she had the right.
“Remember, we’re terrified.”

Horrified. Furious. Not terrified. Annalyse, still weeping silently in the circle of Jesine’s arms, her knuckles white around a fistful of her skirt, was grieving for the dead, not terrified or submissive. Marrying into the Pack required power, but it also required the ability to stand up to teeth and strength and instincts and face them down. Submitting in Aydori came with more layers of power and politics than Leopald could imagine.

“Stand!”

It was the voice from her cell, speaking first in Imperial and then in Aydori.

Four sets of mage-flecked eyes turned to Danika. Who stood.

“If we behave, we’re treated well. If we don’t, we go back into the dark.” She hoped the rage that kept her lips back off her teeth couldn’t be heard. “It seems simple enough. We have more than merely ourselves to think of.” Then, sweeping her gaze around the circle, she breathed,
Lull them.

Jesine stood first and gifted the guards with a tentative glance from under long, gold-tipped lashes. It was the kind of look that would have evoked protective instincts in a stone. It wasn’t sexual. It spoke to the best part of men, the part that wanted to protect, that wanted, sometimes in spite of themselves, to be a hero.

The other three stood at the same time. Stina wore her most placid expression. Annalyse looked young and frightened. Kirstin smiled, and Danika hoped she’d heard
lull.
She hated herself for thinking it, but the barely present Kirstin who traveled from Aydori to Karis had caused her less concern.

“Go with your guards!” Again in Imperial and then Aydori.

The guards broke into pairs, and pointed.

Danika breathed
harmless
at Mouth-breather and Hairy-knuckles and walked down the hall to her cell as gracefully as she could manage. She hadn’t been one of the season’s beauties, but Ryder had told her the first time they’d met that she walked like she was dancing.

Two new guards, Crooked-finger and Pocked-chin, arrived to
take Danika back to the big room before she had time to get hungry or tired. She was almost certain they were the pair who’d escorted Stina to breakfast. It seemed the guards were working a variation of the way the soldiers had shifted in and out of the coaches.

Good. It wouldn’t be long before all twelve were convinced they were harmless. Guards who believed their prisoners were harmless grew careless. Their reaction time slowed.

In the big room, the debris of their meal and the two puddles of vomit had been cleared away. The room smelled of strong soap and held what looked like a Healer-mage’s examination table and a lectern with an inkwell and an open ledger. Standing between them was the woman who’d been waiting in the water room when they’d been brought up out of the dark. Danika guessed she was in her late thirties, early forties, light brown hair going gray and twisted up into a knot on the back of her head. Had they both been barefoot or both in shoes, Danika figured there’d have been no difference in their height. She was slightly stocky and wore a dark green bib apron over lighter green clothes so plain they had to be a uniform. Her hands and bare forearms looked strong. She wore a neutral expression like a shield, but it didn’t quite hide the resentment in the gaze that swept over Danika from head to foot and back again.

“On the table.”

It was the voice from the speakers. The voice who’d told them to rise and use the commode. It made sense. She’d spoken Aydori in the water room. Her accent had been twisted by Imperial and…Danika wasn’t sure, but she assumed Pyrahn. As the woman opened her mouth to repeat the instruction, Danika moved toward the table, having taken enough time to establish she moved because she chose to, not because she instinctively followed a superior’s command.

“Who,” s
he breathed,
“are you?”
The table was high enough, her feet dangled above the floor. She tensed as the woman pressed her hand against the swell of her belly, but there was no cruelty in the contact, only a familiar efficiency.

“How far along?” This close, she smelled of the same soap as the room.

“
Who?
Almost four months.” Closer to three.

The noncommittal noise could have been acceptance or disbelief. She crossed back to the lectern and dipped the pen and wrote a notation
on the first page of the ledger. Her handwriting was also efficient, dark and blocky enough to see even from where Danika sat. “Any problems?”

“
Who?
Problems as a result of being kidnapped, exposed to an unknown and ancient artifact, dragged across three countries…” Danika touched the fading bruise on her face. “…beaten, and unlawfully confined, not to mention the emotional effect of not knowing what has happened to my husband, my family, and my country?” Pulled around by Danika’s words, the woman turned away from the ledger, brows drawn in, but before she could speak, Danika added, hands spread. “I don’t know.”

“You don’t know if you’re having problems?”

That tone Danika knew. The beautiful are stupid. The rich are useless. The powerful have no common sense. It was, in its own way, as uncaring as Leopald’s belief they were animals but more familiar and easy enough to work with. She smiled and answered with the same gentle reproach she’d have used on a young Pack member being too aggressive. “I don’t know if the baby is having problems. It’s all happening on the inside, isn’t it?”

Given their relative ages, the reproach both was and wasn’t patronizing. The woman took a deep annoyed breath before responding. “Any problems on the outside, then.”

“Beyond the obvious?” Danika glanced over at the guards. “No.”

“First child?”

“Do I have children in Aydori crying for their mother? No.”

“Yes or no. I don’t care about the rest.”

Danika inclined her head in a gracious, silent apology and hid a smile as the woman spun on a heel back to the ledger. She made another notation, the pen’s metal nib digging into the paper, then pulled a watch from her apron pocket. Cradling it in the cup of her palm, she gently flipped it open. She cared about the watch. That might be useful.

When she turned to note Danika’s pulse, Danika breathed,
Who?
at her a fourth time.

“My name is Adeline Curtin. I’m a midwife. You’ll be in my…care.”

The slight pause before the last word made Danika think she’d only just stopped herself from saying something else. Custody? Control?

“How do you come to speak Aydori.”

Adeline’s eyes narrowed. “Answer when spoken to.”

Danika inclined her head again.

Before she left the room, she sent another suggestion toward Leopald’s rathole that he speak to her. On the way back to her cell, she breathed
Adeline Curtin, midwife
onto the air that found its way under the doors, knowing Kirstin at least would hear it, and one more
harmless
at Crooked-finger and Pocked-chin.

She pulled the pillow off the bed and waited on the floor for Kirstin to return.

“She was born in Pyrahn. Came to the empire with her husband.”
Kirstin’s voice drifted down the hall and in under Danika’s door.
“She doesn’t want to be here.”

“Who does? She can’t be angry at Leopald, so she’s angry at us.”

“She’s angry at the world. If you push, she’ll attack.”

That sounded familiar.
“She wants to be Alpha, but every time she’s challenged, she’s lost the fight.”

After a long moment, long enough Danika thought the other Air-mage might not answer at all, Kirstin said,
“We know how to work with that.”

If Adeline learned Aydori in Pyrahn, she had to have been born into one of the trading families. Her accent was too rough for negotiations, so probably carting; either learning the language when the drivers practiced at home or traveling back and forth across the border on the wagons.

I don’t know you yet, Adeline Curtin,
Danika thought, curled by the door listening for Stina’s return.
But I will.

Just as she began to get hungry, she heard the guards escorting the other women from their cells. Three of the other women…When Danika finally reached the big room where another meal had been laid out, Jesine wasn’t there.

They waited.

“They brought her back after she saw the midwife,” Kirstin murmured, “and I didn’t hear them take her away again.”

“She asked too many questions.” When they all turned to look at her, Stina shrugged. “She’s a Healer-mage in a room with a midwife. You know she’d have assumed they’d share information.”

Adeline, as they knew her, would have resented that assumption.

Kirstin shot a narrow-eyed glance at the guards. “Do we demand to know what happened to her?”

“We know what happened to her,” Danika answered. “She’s locked in her cell for asking too many questions.”

“Sent to her room without supper,” Stina added.

“Treating us like children,” Kirstin snarled. When Stina sent a bland look toward the guards and another toward Kirstin, Kirstin reluctantly smiled. “Fine. Like potentially dangerous children.”

“Danika? What do we do?”

“We eat,” Danika told Annalyse, pulling out a chair and sitting down. “We stay strong.” There was a tureen of chicken stew with potatoes, carrots…She wrinkled her nose…. and parsnips in the center of the table. Next to it, a large basket of rolls. “Annalyse, you serve.” When Annalyse frowned, she added, “I thought it might help steady you, if you had something to do.”