Heart of Flames Page 8

  The rockwine sang in his veins as he approached the archway, and he veered right, toward the apprentice barracks. He lingered outside the building, staring at the window where he knew Veronyka’s hammock hung. He stood there for a long time, imagining tapping on the windowpane or crawling in through the open shutter. What would happen then? His heart raced at the thought, but then he remembered his father’s words.

  We developed a friendship, a foundation, and didn’t allow our feelings to distract us from our duty. There was no resentment or regret.

  The last thing Tristan wanted was for Veronyka to resent him. He’d almost crossed that line during their most recent match, when his feelings for her had become a problem, a barrier to her success. He couldn’t risk it. Maybe his father was right and waiting would make it sweeter.

  Tristan walked away, past the scorched walls and still-charred remnants of what had once been a storage shed. Maybe his father was wrong and waiting was going to get them all killed.

  Later, I realized my parents were more like falling stars,

  destined to light my world for only the briefest of moments.

  There and then gone again, my life colder after their passing.

  Except, of course, for my sister.

  - CHAPTER 7 - SEV

  FOUR DAYS LATER, SEV was set to meet with Lord Rolan in the governor’s rooms instead of his own. If Sev thought the small chamber he was sleeping in was grander and more finely appointed than anywhere he’d had the privilege of entering before, Rolan’s personal suite of rooms was a palace in and of itself.

  There was marble everywhere, from the shining white floors to the fountain in the center of courtyard gardens, visible out the open double doors, to the massive fluted columns with their gilded capitals carved in flowers and twisting vines. Golden sculptures were perched on pedestals and in carved niches, while the fabrics ranged from the thick velvet hangings on Rolan’s bed, embroidered with silver thread, to the whisper-thin silk tulle curtains stirring in the evening breeze.

  Sev had seen grandeur in the rest of the compound—even the plates and cups were beautiful pieces of art that he was terrified to drop—but the corridors where soldiers and servants prowled were different from those Lord Rolan used, the walls punctuated with paintings and niches of statuary and the floor plush with rugs.

  Rolan’s personal attendant, Bertram, met Sev at the door and quickly guided him into a side chamber. It was a bare-bones room—probably once used for storage—and featured a simple wooden desk and three chairs, as well as a second door in the opposite wall, which undoubtedly led into the servant corridors.

  The walls were pristine, as if they had been newly painted, and the lingering scent of lemon and pine oil told Sev that the room had recently been scrubbed down. Something about the stark plaster and the windowless walls caused apprehension to tighten his gut. This was no longer a simple storage space… it was an interrogation chamber.

  Rolan was already seated. He waved Sev toward the chair next to him, and Sev sat gingerly, unease prickling his skin and making his shoulder, wrapped in a sling, ache.

  He had been thinking about this moment every day since their first meeting, running through the possibility of who he might be faced with and how he would respond. He didn’t want to condemn anyone, and his instincts told him to fall back on his old trick—playing dumb—but if he declared them all innocent, or said he didn’t know anything, wouldn’t Rolan become suspicious? What if Rolan started to question Sev’s loyalty? Not only would his life be in danger, but his mission here as a spy would be over before it had even begun.

  Sev didn’t want to lie and claim someone was guilty when they weren’t…. But what if they were? What if he came face-to-face with some of his fellow conspirators?

  His instincts warred with one another, old and new.

  The old Sev would have looked out for himself no matter what, but he didn’t want to be that way anymore. But if Sev’s new self served a greater purpose—protecting the Phoenix Riders and opposing the empire—then it was his duty to do whatever he could to help, which in this case meant remaining in place as a spy. Which circled back around to self-preservation.

  Sev’s head spun. In order to be better, he had to do his worst.

  Bertram had barely shut the door behind Sev when a firm knock came from the other.

  “Enter,” Rolan called, and one of the estate’s guards opened the door wide, ushering in an old, bent-backed and gray-headed bondservant. He had leathery brown skin and short bristly hair, and even when he straightened, he barely reached the guard’s shoulder. He took the chair opposite them at the guard’s command, placing his bound wrists on the table before them. The knuckles were knobby, and his fingers twitched and trembled.

  Sev remembered him at once, though they’d never spoken a word to each other. The tightness in his stomach eased. This man was innocent, and whatever Sev might be willing to do to protect himself, condemning an innocent man wasn’t it.

  Rolan looked at Sev expectantly, while the man stared at the table, refusing to meet Sev’s gaze. Luckily, Sev’s other instincts kicked in—the ones that had him noticing every detail and memorizing every face. He knew this bondservant was innocent, and he could prove it.

  “Well, Sevro?” Rolan prodded. “Do you remember this man?”

  “Yes,” Sev said, and Rolan straightened beside him. “He was part of the hunting party. A fisherman.” It was a rare ability among animages, communicating with fish, but this man could get fish to swim directly into whatever nets or baskets he had set up. He spoke little and kept mostly to himself. “And the night of the attack, he was finishing the salt-trout rations for the return journey. No fish was served that night.”

  The bondservant seemed surprised by Sev’s words, and the tremor in his hands lessened. Maybe he expected nothing good from a soldier. Sev remembered thinking the same thing, once.

  Rolan’s face was inscrutable. He glanced down at a sheaf of papers he’d brought in with him, as if confirming Sev’s story against the details written there.

  “Did you happen to catch his name, Sevro?”

  “Alastor,” Sev said, and Rolan nodded. He gestured to the guard standing by the door, who helped the bondservant to his feet and led him back out the door they’d come through.

  Before Sev could guess what would happen to Alastor, another knock sounded on the door, and the guard returned with a young woman. She was probably only a few years older than Sev’s eighteen, and despite having her hands bound like the old man before her, she held her chin high.

  Sev studied her face, but he didn’t recognize her. Her expression was defiant, if a bit cowed by Rolan’s cool, indifferent stare.

  “I’ve never seen her before, my lord.”

  “She was stationed with the secondary forces and would have arrived around the time the poisoning took place,” Rolan said, glancing down at his papers once again. “We are assuming the poisoning was at the hands of Captain Belden’s bondservants, but I wish to be thorough. You never saw her near the cook fires or food stores?”

  Sev shook his head. “No, sir.”

  “Very well,” Rolan said, though his voice sounded more tired than relieved as he bent over his papers and waved the girl and the guard away. Sev tried to read over Rolan’s shoulder and thought he caught the words “return to” before the governor leaned back and Sev hastily withdrew his gaze.

  The third bondservant was a plump woman who wept throughout the meeting, and the fourth was a burly man with an unkempt beard and forearms as thick as tree trunks. Neither had been involved, as far as Sev knew, and he did his best to recount where he last remembered seeing them or their assignments on the day’s duty rosters. It was a delicate balance—Sev knew more than the average soldier would, so he had to be vague in some instances and more specific in others.

  He measured each word he spoke, hoping every time the door closed that it would be the last time—while secretly, desperately hoping that it wouldn’t
be, that there would be just one more survivor….

  Even that was selfish, though. In a perfect world, Kade wouldn’t be caught—he’d have run as far from the war and the empire as possible. In some ways that was easier…. Sev could imagine him living somewhere safe in Pyra, free from bondage, but the hard part was that he’d never know for sure. The hard part was imagining the other possibility if Kade didn’t turn up today, the far more likely possibility that Kade had died like so many others that night. That Sev would never see him again.

  Rolan took notes, asking questions here and there, but it seemed that their full stories had already been recounted and recorded—likely by Officer Yara—and Sev was acting as confirmation for the details.

  He wasn’t sure if he should be relieved that none of Trix’s true conspirators had been caught, or if this meant that they’d all likely been executed atop Pyrmont.

  When the door opened for the fifth time, Sev’s heart plummeted.

  This was someone he knew—and not the person he’d secretly been hoping for.

  The man who shuffled into the room had steely gray hair and eyes to match. His skin was a deep, ruddy shade that came from a lifetime in the sun, and his thin body was wiry with age and decades of hard work. Sev recalled that he’d been a breeder of Stellan horses in the south but hadn’t been a registered animage and so owed fifteen years of back taxes. He’d probably be a bondservant until he died.

  Sev remembered him; he’d been part of the hunting party—the worst duty for an animage, being forced to lure animals to the slaughter over and over again.

  He’d also been a supporter of Trix. He’d helped to harvest the pyraflora—Trix’s poison of choice—while out on hunting trips, and Sev had seen him whispering with Trix many times throughout their long journey up Pyrmont.

  As soon as the man’s eyes fell on Sev, he stiffened in recognition, causing the soldier who held his arms to shove him more aggressively toward his seat, as if the man had been resisting his grip rather than reacting to the sight of Sev sitting there on the opposite side of the table.

  Just as Sev had seen him with Trix, so too had he seen Sev.

  His name was Ulric. They had never spoken, but Sev saw a familiar hatred in his eyes—the hatred he himself had carried toward soldiers, toward the empire, for most of his life—and knew that this was not going to go like the rest. For him to see Sev alive and well while he was imprisoned—and the majority of his co-conspirators dead—was obviously too much for Ulric to bear. His eyes glinted dangerously, near the point of looking deranged, and Sev understood in that instant that this man wanted to bring Sev down, his own life be damned.

  “All right, Sevro, let’s—”

  “That man is a traitor!” Ulric said, voice tight with suppressed rage as he cut Lord Rolan off. The room went silent. The soldier who’d deposited Ulric into his chair stepped forward, as if ready to apprehend the bondservant, though he glanced to Rolan for instruction.

  Rolan held up a hand to the soldier, halting his movement, before turning his attention to Ulric. “I do not recall asking you to speak.”

  Ulric laughed, a rasping bark that echoed in the cramped space. “No, but I will,” he said, the laughter dying as abruptly as it had begun. He leaned forward in his chair. “He’s one of us. He’s a traitor, and here he sits next to his lord, a war hero, while the rest of us bow and bend and scrape.”

  Out of nowhere, he lunged for Sev, but his hands came up short, missing their target—Sev’s throat—by inches, thanks to the soldier, who leapt forward and took hold of the back of Ulric’s tunic.

  Sev reared back anyway, almost toppling over in his chair, but Rolan gripped his good shoulder to steady him.

  When it was clear he’d not be able to move again, Ulric spat instead. It landed on Sev’s chest, and he clenched his jaw to stop from reacting. He was breathing heavily, the accusations stinging, despite the fact that he understood them. This man thought Sev had gotten away with it—which he had—but that he’d decided to return to his masters in the empire without a backward glance. Maybe he expected Sev to turn him in—Sev would have too, if faced with an empire soldier in his position—but what made Sev’s stomach twist painfully was the realization that now he had to do exactly what the man expected him to. He had to discredit Ulric’s claims.

  “He was one of hers!” Ulric shouted, struggling against the soldier’s hold, though he was weak and easily restrained. “That old woman needed a soldier. She needed one of them near the animals. She—”

  Sev lurched to his feet, turning his fear and panic into outward anger. “Shut your mouth, beast-talker,” he snapped, having heard the slur countless times and never once expecting to say it himself, and with such vitriol. With such hate. But he had to stop Ulric from speaking, stop him from saying something that Sev couldn’t explain away.

  He turned to Lord Rolan. “This man was a member of the hunting party—and he resented it. He—” Sev hesitated, his stomach clenched like a fist. “He wanted to work with the pack animals instead. Asked me to put in a good word, as if I’d put my neck out for a mageslave. I thought he just hated the hunt, but he must’ve wanted to be near the food supplies.”

  Ulric bared his teeth in a snarl. “She didn’t need me there when she already had—”

  Rolan said, in a bored voice, “Subdue him.”

  There was a loud thump—a fist to the jaw—and Ulric sagged dazedly in his seat, his lip bloody.

  Rolan turned an expressionless face to Sev. “And the night of the poisoning?”

  Sev felt as if he stood on a precipice, overlooking an expanse of dark, endless emptiness below. Could he do it? Could he cross that line and make that leap?

  Did he have a choice? This was spying, wasn’t it? Ruthlessness. Fearlessness. Trix had said she was ready every day for her own death—but she didn’t talk about how many times she’d defeated death. How many others she had condemned to die in her stead.

  Trix never talked about how hard it was to be good at surviving when it seemed so many others were good at dying.

  Sev swallowed thickly and stepped over the edge.

  “He was lurking near the cook fires,” he said, acid roiling in his belly, “and now I think on it, they decided to serve stew last minute—and he butchered the venison they used. He must have convinced the servants to change the menu and poisoned the meat when he couldn’t get at the other food stores.”

  It was true that they had been serving venison stew that night, among other things. And it was true that the stewpots were poisoned. Sev didn’t know if Ulric had helped with the actual poisoning, but he had been involved in making the poison itself. He was guilty.

  But so was Sev, and never had his position in this world—both as a soldier and as an animage—been clearer than when Rolan took his account without question, turned a look of disgust toward Ulric, and sent him and his soldier guard away. Where was Ulric going? To be locked up? To be killed? Sev would probably never know.

  Chest heaving, he fought to get his breath under control.

  With his eyes on his papers, Rolan handed Sev a handkerchief—meant for the spit that had spattered across his tunic. Sev accepted numbly, wiping all evidence of what had just happened away.

  “Thank you, my lord,” he said as soon as his voice was under control. He lowered himself back into his chair. It creaked.

  Rolan nodded, shuffling his papers.

  Sev was suddenly exhausted. His shoulder ached—whatever medicine Hestia had given him was wearing off—and he longed for solitude. Deep down, the ghostly wisp of hope he’d been clinging to that maybe, maybe he’d get to see someone else today was slowly dissipating like smoke in the wind.

  “Well, Sevro, that’s—oh, no,” Rolan said, coming to a final page and squinting down at it. “It seems we’ve got one more….”

  Sev stopped listening. Anticipation flared to life inside him, and somehow he knew, even before the knock sounded and the tall, broad-shouldered bondservant was shoved
into the chair opposite them.

  Sev stared, just barely managing to tamp down on his wild, swirling emotions, eyes boring into the top of the bondservant’s head. Slowly, as if it weighed a hundred pounds, the bondservant lifted his chin. Molten amber eyes, sharply carved jawline, and the unmistakable scowl of Kade.

  The breath whooshed from Sev’s lungs. Badly healing scabs and faded bruising marred the skin of Kade’s face and knuckles—he had clearly been fighting—and his eyes were cold and distant… until they landed on Sev. Something warm flickered inside. Something as bright and sudden as lightning.

  Sev wanted to cry. He wanted to laugh. He wanted to say a prayer to Teyke or Anyanke or whoever had pulled this off.

  But then he realized the terrible danger Kade was in. What had just happened to Ulric would be nothing if Sev couldn’t get Kade out of this unharmed. If the gods had brought them together only to rip them apart again, Sev didn’t think he could bear it.

  Kade was guilty, just as Ulric had been. But he wasn’t fool enough to shout accusations and goad Sev into revealing the truth. He would know that Sev was trying to save him.

  Wouldn’t he?

  There was something questioning in Kade’s eye… something uncertain. He had doubted Sev all along, hadn’t he? Was it so surprising that he’d doubt Sev now, safe and cared for by their enemies?

  “Yes,” Sev found himself saying, even before Rolan prompted him. “I know him.”

  Rolan waited expectantly, while Kade had gone still as a statue. “We were positioned together with the pack animals.”

  “The pack animals that carried the food stores?” Rolan asked, moving to make a note on his papers.

  Sev nodded. “Yes, sir. But,” he continued, “the bondservant was reassigned halfway through our journey.” No need to mention why he was moved—or where—unless Rolan asked. “He was nowhere near the food or the preparations. What’s more,” Sev added, when Rolan continued to frown, “he saved my life.”