The Silvered (69 page)

“Let me keep your promise for you.”

After a long moment, Danika tipped her head to one side. Behind her, Annalyse gasped, but the others were silent. Kirstin, who’d challenged and challenged and challenged, would have had something to say. Danika suddenly missed her so much she had to press both fists to her chest to hold in the pain.

Mirian looked past her to the captain and said, “I’m trusting you.”

“I’ll get them out.”

And Danika heard
if it’s the last thing I do
in Captain Reiter’s voice even if Mirian didn’t. Even if she was too young to realize that by helping them, by doing the right thing, he’d destroyed his own…

Mirian stepped off the edge.

Danika choked back a scream.

“What?” Mirian frowned up her as she floated gently to the lower level. “If I can float a leaf, I can logically float myself.”

“The Air-master said it was impossible.”

The frown became pique as she touched down. “Not to me.”

Stina snorted. “They’ll be fine.”

Mirian was close enough to Tomas when she landed that her skirt wrapped around his legs, the deep burgundy making his skin look even paler than usual. “Your clothes?”

“I’ll be more use in fur.”

“Told you you wouldn’t be in a jacket long enough to buy the expensive…” A sudden noise pulled her attention to the far end of the room. The guards weren’t banging on the door, not yet, but they’d definitely realized they couldn’t get it open. Reaching out, she touched Tomas’ shoulder, ran her hand down his arm, and finally laced their fingers together before she glanced up at the emperor’s nasty little room. “Where is he keeping the Pack?”

“Down the stairs,” Lady Hagen answered. “Turn left and go through a metal door to a row of cells.”

“Down the stairs behind the door that’s jammed shut and has increasingly frustrated armed guards lined up behind it?”

“Only two at this hour. They start the day by escorting us one by one to the water room.”

“Only two.” Although she couldn’t see faces, it wasn’t hard to find Captain Reiter. He was the only one up there not dressed head-to-toe in white. “Next time we do this, we’re coming up with a better plan.”

“Next time.” She could hear the smile in his voice. “Mirian, the…the Pack…” The smile was gone. “…you have to know, one of them, he ate the other mage.”

“It was Kirstin’s choice!” Lady Hagen protested.

Mirian didn’t want to know what the alternative had been.

“And she convinced him to do it,” Lady Hagen continued. “He was starving, but she convinced him to take her strength.”

“So he could what?” Mirian asked.

“Survive. Kirstin couldn’t live as a captive, and it’s not like she knew what the arrival of the sixth mage meant.”

Jake had told them to hurry. They hadn’t moved fast enough.

“And now,” Lady Hagen added, “he’s lived long enough for you to save him.”

“The emperor could have had him shot after we left.” Reiter spread his hands as Lady Hagen turned on him. “We don’t know.”

Kirstin’s decision sounded crazy to Mirian, but then she hadn’t been locked up by a madman. “It doesn’t matter if he’s been shot. Well, to him, obviously, but he wasn’t alone, was he? He wasn’t the only Pack held captive.”

“No.”

“Then thank you for the warning, Captain, but it changes nothing.” At the other end of the room, the guards’ attempt to open the door grew more vigorous. At her feet, the woman taken down by the baton groaned. Mirian bent and touched her. “Sleep.” She looked up again and couldn’t believe they were all still watching. She’d thought Lady Hagen, at least, had more sense. “Get them out, Captain!” Slipping her hand in Tomas’, she dropped her voice into his ear alone. “Leave the lantern and take me to the door.”

“You can’t…” He grunted when she shifted her grip and pinched the back of his hand. Pulling her close, he turned her toward the other end of the room and under the sound of the Mage-pack
finally
leaving said, “We have to talk about this.”

“You could leave with them.”

He snarled, but kept them moving. “
We
could leave with them.”

“No.” She thought about closing her eyes and seeing if it made any difference, then remembered they were crossing a dark room. Maybe her vision wasn’t as bad as she thought. Although it was bad. “I can’t see well enough to adjust to other people reacting up in the palace. If I go with them, I’d endanger their escape. I’d be responsible for the Mage-pack being recaptured. If
we
go with them, you’ll defend me instead of them. Of course, if you go with them on your own, you’ll be able to help protect them.”

“You can’t…How much
can
you see?”

That would be what he got his teeth into. “When we were standing by the lantern, I could see where you were, but not beyond you.”

“It’s dark. Really dark,” he added as though that made the difference.

“I’m afraid…” She took a deep breath and let it out. “I’m afraid that at the rate I’m losing vision, I’ll be blind before I finish what needs to be done.” She was impressed by how calm she sounded. Saying
blind
like it didn’t mean what it did.

“So floating down from that upper level wasn’t the
sensible
thing to do.”

“I guess not.”

“You were showing off for Danika.” He sounded amused.

“Shut up.”

He stopped, tugged her to a stop beside him. When Mirian stretched out her hand, she felt the wood of the door and the vibrations of the guards banging on the other side. It was either thick enough she couldn’t hear them shouting or they were trying to get through in complete silence. The latter was a little creepy.

Before she could decide what to do, Tomas wrapped a callused hand around her jaw and turned her face to his. “You don’t need to see beyond me.”

It took a moment to figure out what he meant. “Because you’ll always be there to be my eyes.” She didn’t mean for it to sound as much like a question as it did. This was absolutely not the time to be questioning…things.

But Tomas only laughed as though he had complete confidence in her ability to make the right decision. As though he didn’t know she was making it up as she went along. “Both metaphorically and actually.”

She rubbed her cheek against his hand. “Big words. I’m going to open the door and sleep these guards now.”

“You sure you can do it on purpose?”

Skin changed to fur under her hands as she poked him in the side where he was ticklish in both forms, well aware they were whistling in the dark.

The door had been saturated with water and the wood swollen to the point where the top of the doorjamb had buckled. Mirian moved the water out, then pushed the puddle far enough along the floor it would be out of their way.

Parting water. Moving water. Logically, it was still nothing more than second level water.

The door cracked and light from the guard’s lantern traced patterns around and across it. A boot pounded once. Twice…

Mirian jumped back as the door slammed open and shattered against the wall.

The guard at the top of the stairs managed to clear his weapon from the holster. It fired as he fell, the lead ball flattening against the stone. His weight bowled over the guard behind him. One of the two
lanterns went flying, the other landed upright, not only unbroken, but still lit.

When Mirian could hear again, she heard boots against stone. Running. Running away from the bottom of the stairs. Lady Hagen had been wrong. There were three guards.

Tomas dove past her.

Mirian picked up the unbroken lantern and followed, feeling for each step, extinguishing the flames devouring spilled lamp oil as she went.

“Gunfire!” Danika jerked around, the others turning with her as though they were connected by strings.

Reiter had to move quickly to stop them from racing back. “Keep moving.”

They weren’t soldiers. They didn’t follow orders. They looked to Danika, not him.

“If it rouses the palace…”

“No one hears the sounds that come out of the north wing,” Reiter told her grimly. They locked eyes for a moment—he had to fight to look at her, not the blue flecks—then she nodded. Kirstin may not have screamed, but someone surely had.

As they reached the end of the short hall, he raised a hand and checked that the way was clear before beckoning the mages forward. Emerging into the larger Imperial shortcut, he was amazed by how much better they looked than they had up in the emperor’s rathole—where they’d looked like women wearing sheets over nightgowns. He started to think they might be able to pull this off.

“Da…Lady Hagen is weaving a glamour,” the redhead told him quietly, falling into step beside him. Reiter glanced past her. Danika’s lips moved as she walked and the edges of the robes…
sheets,
the edges of the sheets moved as though in a constant breeze. “She’s telling anyone who looks our way, that they’re seeing Sisters of Starlight. It’s very high level. She’s probably the only Air-mage alive who can…”

Her voice trailed off and Reiter knew she was thinking of Mirian. Who’d flown, or floated, when that wasn’t apparently possible. He thought of Mirian facing the wolf…thought of turning, of needing to be by her side, thought of the wolf already by her side…

“Get them out, Captain.”

He had his orders. He forced his thoughts back to the problem at hand. “If she can make a glamour, why waste time on a physical disguise?”

“She can only convince people to see what they want to see. When they look at us, they already think first of the Sisters of Starlight. Lady Hagen is smoothing out the edges.”

Given that he knew what they looked like and the glamour still affected him, Reiter was impressed. And uneasy. Out of the nets, the mages of Aydori could change a man’s thoughts.

“Get them out, Captain.”

She’d changed his.

Helped change his.

Had she used mage-craft?

Did it matter? He couldn’t leave the mages where they were, so he was either under the control of a mage barely out of her teens or he was a decent man. He knew what he wanted to believe. Needed to believe.

“Captain?”

Careful not to brush against the illusion, Reiter moved through the women, preferring to lead rather than herd. “Keep your eyes down. This glamour thing, it’s not hiding the mage marks.”

It was no darker at the bottom of the stairs than it had been at the top—an absence of light was an absence of light—but as Mirian stepped off the stairs onto the uneven slabs of stone, the darkness took on an almost physical presence. The circle of lantern light seemed both dimmer and smaller than it had a moment before.

Which was ridiculous.

It might have lessened the oppressive weight if she could have seen into the darkness, seen what it was hiding—in her admittedly limited experience, imagination added weight to the unknown—but she could see nothing past the line between dark and light. On the other hand, it felt damp and smelled terrible, and maybe she didn’t need to know.

She could hear Tomas, so she turned, lantern in her right hand, fingertips of her left running along the wall as she moved toward him.

“Mirian, he’s bolted it behind him.”