The Silvered (46 page)

The frown deepened.

Putting the serving spoon into the tureen, Danika stirred it once then pointed the handle at the younger woman. Annalyse flushed and took it, stirring twice more before she began to serve. Danika wasn’t certain purifying water would have any effect on possible drugs in chicken stew, but Annalyse was a powerful Water-mage and it certainly couldn’t hurt.

Without Jesine, they were quieter than they’d been at the last meal.

“Kirstin, talk to Stina. Need distraction.”

As Kirstin held forth about how bored she was alone in her cell, Danika set up communication tests with Stina and Annalyse, kicking Annalyse once in the ankle when the younger woman nearly replied to a question no one watching would have heard asked.

Leopald didn’t make an appearance. That didn’t mean he wasn’t up there in his rathole, watching.

“Creepy stalker,”
Kirstin muttered.

Danika leaned back in her chair, stretched as though she was working the kinks out of her neck and breathed at the wall.
“Talk to me.”

On the way back to her cell, she breathed
harmless
at Gouge-in-boot and Crooked-front-tooth.

Although they’d just eaten, there was bread and cheese and barley water in the cell as well as a clean nightgown across the end of the
bed. Danika glanced up at the lamp, still burning brightly, then lay by the door.

“Me?” Stina was speaking quietly, mouth pressed as instructed to the crack under her door, but it was still dangerous if those listening heard her.

“Stina, I hear you.”
Kirstin’s voice rode the air currents.
“Can you hear me?”

No answer.

“Stina, I hear you.”
Danika took her turn.
“Can you hear me?”

No answer.

Danika recited the first three verses of the ancient epic
The Hunt
, memorized and dreaded by every Aydori schoolchild and took comfort from knowing Annalyse was doing the same.

“Me?” If Stina had nearly breathed it, Annalyse hummed. Smart. Hide the word in singing done to keep up failing spirits.

Like Stina, both Air-mages could hear her but couldn’t make themselves heard.

“It’s not much, but it’s something.”

“It’s nothing much,”
Kirstin snarled.
“We should tell the guards to free us.”

“We can’t convince them to do anything they don’t want to do.”

“Berger didn’t want to die.”
Before Danika could answer, before she knew what she was going to say, Kirstin added,
“We have to escape!”

“We’ll only get one chance. I’ll listen to any plan that allows us all to survive the attempt!”

It was a higher-stakes version of an argument they’d had before. Being Alpha was as much about knowing when to be cautious as when to attack. Kirstin had never been good at either caution or compromise.

Singing, as it turned out, was also a way to stave off boredom. Danika had a nap. Grew hungry. Ate the bread and cheese and drank the barley water. Had another nap. Made plans. Threw those plans away. Made more plans.

The door at the end of the hall opened. The movement of the air changed.

“Annalyse?”

And just barely, over the sound of boots against tile, a joyful, “Yes.”

The lamp went out.

Heart pounding, Danika reminded herself that the same thing had happened last night. Although she had no idea if it was night. It was dark at least. She put on the nightgown, threw her pillow back down by the door, and waited for a howl that never came.

She hoped it was because he’d heard her and had been comforted, not because he’d been killed and skinned.

The next day began almost exactly the same way.

Different guards. Chipped-tooth and Dry-lips.

Jesine was there at breakfast. “I kept asking questions when told to be quiet. That’s what the voice in the room…”

“Cell,” Danika corrected quietly. “They’re cells.”

Jesine’s gold-flecked eyes narrowed thoughtfully and she nodded. “That’s what the voice in the cell said. I’m really hungry.”

While Jesine talked, a normal enough reaction given her taste of isolation, Danika told Stina to work at the wood of her cell door. They had no Metal-mage among them, but Stina had once brought a rosewood sideboard into bloom. If she could weaken the wood enough to break it free of the hinges, the latch, and the bolt, then she could open all the other cells.

It would be slow work at the level the nets allowed, but it was a start.

The guards had taken her to the shower first but brought her to any communal time in the large room last. Danika thought if she could figure out why, she might be able to put the information toward their escape plan.

This morning, she was returned to the room to find the breakfast debris gone and the other four women standing in a line facing the wall where Leopald had appeared, their guards behind them close enough to grab them, far enough away to use their batons if necessary.

As she was herded toward the line, she noticed the other two guards standing at the base of the wall on either side of a large pile of multicolored fabric. The room smelled of…coriander.

The moment she stopped in the place left for her—Mole-under-ear and Dry-lips in the place left for them—the sections of the wall folded back, the guards all snapped to attention, and Leopald smiled down at them, leaning forward in the high-backed chair. The pelt he’d rolled out was still there but had been rolled back. Although
they could no longer convince themselves it was a carpet, that helped. A little.

“Just so you know…” He actually looked a little sheepish although Danika assumed the expression was as false as their compliance. “…the Soothsayer’s Voice objected to me taking Terlyn out of his room. He hasn’t left it for thirteen years, so you’ll have to excuse him if he’s a little shy.”

Terlyn? Danika turned her attention to the pile of fabric. It seemed to be undulating in response to Leopald’s voice.

“Now, what I want you all to do is, one at a time, go forward and touch his hand. If you can’t find his hand, any exposed skin will suffice, but do be brief. He’s precious to me. He doesn’t See very far ahead, so there are days when he’s almost coherent and you have no idea how much I appreciate that. You start.”

The hand shoving her forward seemed to indicate Leopald had been speaking to her. Searching the pile of fabric for the flesh within, Danika walked toward the Imperial Soothsayer, telling herself she wasn’t doing it for Leopald, she was doing it to satisfy her own curiosity. She’d met two Soothsayers. One had to be kept in restraints to keep from harming himself and the other had walked out into a lake with a concrete block tied around her neck barely a month after Danika had met her. Their families tended to keep them out of sight—there’d never been a Soothsayer in the Pack—and they certainly had no place in Aydori politics.

Lifting her dress, Danika dropped to one knee at the edge of the fabric. If Terlyn was an adult, he was sitting on the floor under what appeared to be layers of scarves. There were fewer layers at the top where the faint outline of a face was just barely visible and an impressive number of layers farther down. Danika moved one. Then another. An undulation slid a third scarf aside, exposing a hand so pale it made Kirstin’s milky skin look ruddy. The Soothsayer had bitten his fingernails short and ragged.

When Danika touched him, his skin felt warm, almost feverish. He shivered.

But he said nothing. He sat unmoving as Annalyse, Jesine, Kirstin, and Stina came up to him in turn and briefly pressed a finger to the back of his exposed hand, wiping the finger off against their skirts as they left him.

“Well,” Leopald sighed as Stina returned to her place in line. “That was a disappointment. Terlyn has been quite vocal about how the sixth mage is being pulled toward the palace. I had hoped with you all together he might…”

“Two, two, two, zero, three.” Terlyn slapped the floor. “Sixth! Two, two, two, zero, three.” Slap. “Sixth!”

“Ah, confirmation that she’s on her way.” For a moment, Danika thought Leopald was going to applaud. “The numbers are new. Are they dates? They could be, couldn’t they? Or measurements. Or coordinates. It’s always fascinating to hear what they’ll come up with, isn’t it?”

“Bag of nothing.” Terlyn’s voice was surprisingly deep.

“Not that it’s always immediately useful.”

“White light!”

Leopald leaned forward far enough to smile indulgently down at him. “I’m sure the Interpreters will eventually discover where these particular puzzle pieces fit into the larger rhyme. And can you believe the Voice said he’d be too frightened to speak outside his usual environment?”

They left the room as Terlyn repeated the list of numbers, over and over. The skin between Danika’s shoulder blades tightened. Although his face remained covered, she could feel the Soothsayer’s gaze on her back.

“Remove your garment.”

Danika smiled and unbuttoned the dress, slipping it off her shoulders and laying it neatly across the examination table. The room was cool enough her nipples hardened, but it wasn’t uncomfortable.

Eyes narrowed, ignoring the new guards, Dimples and Freckles, so vehemently she might as well have been pointing at them, Adeline took measurements. Not only height and weight, but every possible measurement—length of fingers, width of nose, circumference of head. Danika cooperated so graciously, it appeared she was doing the midwife a favor.

Adeline took her time, clearly waiting for Danika to be embarrassed by her nudity.

Danika resisted the temptation to box the midwife’s ears, so often so perfectly in position, and considered Terlyn’s prophecy.
Bag of
nothing
could mean he Saw empty cells and
white light
could stand for freedom. Of course, it could also mean he Saw an empty bag—there had to be a few around the palace—and a beam of moonlight through his window, if he had a window.
That
was the problem with Soothsayers.

Finally, after entering the distance between navel and hips in the ledger, Adeline growled, “You lay with beasts and you have no shame.”

“I’ve done nothing to be ashamed of,” Danika chided gently, but she spoke Imperial because she doubted the watching guards spoke Aydori.

“Talk to me.”

On the way back to her cell, she breathed
harmless
at Dimples and Freckles.

No one missed the second meal. The emperor did not join them.

Talk to me.

Later, lying on the floor by the door, Danika dug her fingernails into the wood as the young male howled.

“Can you hear him?”

“Yes.”

“Race you to the tree!” Holding the bedroll tight against her side so it wouldn’t bounce, Mirian took off running. They ran at least half the time now and every day she ran farther and faster. Her skirt felt looser where it moved over her hips, and her feet had become so callused she doubted any of her old shoes would fit.

A black wolf ran by, bundle of clothes gripped in his teeth, a dangling sleeve dragging through last year’s grass.

“Tomas, you cheater!”

He dropped the clothes at the base of the tree, circled it, and changed. “You didn’t say anything about staying on two legs.”

“It’s not much of a race if you’re on four!” she panted, throwing an arm around the trunk to stop herself.

Tomas grinned. “You only say that because you lost. If you want to rest here for a minute, I’ll go make sure we’re still on track.”

“Be careful.” The words were habit more than anything. Without a map, the road was their only way to Karis; the compass she’d taken
from Captain Reiter, no good without a heading. She watched Tomas run off to the south, then sank crossed-legged to the ground. Circling a breeze around the tree about ten feet out so she’d know when he returned, she settled in to practice.

By the time Tomas broke through her circle, she’d blown down three dead cedars, tipping their roots up out of the ground, pulled a scattering of old bird shot out of the tree behind her, re-formed it into a small lead bar, and had lifted a trio of fallen leaves about fifteen feet above the ground. She set the leaves on fire—one, two, three—and scattered the ash as Tomas settled beside her, the silver streak at his shoulder glittering in the first strong sunlight they’d had for a couple of days.

“It’s not silver like a standard silver wolf, is it?” The fur felt both coarser and sleeker under her fingers. “I mean, Jaspyr was really more a pale gray. This is almost a metallic silver. Very elega…”

“When did you meet Jaspyr?”

Mirian sighed and pulled her hand away. Tomas almost never changed when she was touching him now. She suspected it had to do with what they’d almost done. “At the opera.”

“In fur?”

“No, that was the next day.”

He stared at her for a long moment. Mirian lifted her chin and stared back. “You were the mage he had up his nose.”

It wasn’t a question, but she answered it anyway. “Yes.” It didn’t hurt anymore. Apparently, she wasn’t quite sensible enough to not miss the ache.

“Why didn’t you tell me before?”