Chapter 16 #3
There was a soft gasp, and whoever was in the room held their breath when I passed the station where someone had been carefully packing gold powder into a glossy ivory tin.
I waited, curious how long they could hold their breath. After sixty heartbeats, there was a loud exhale and a gasp. I grinned down at the table.
Taking a step back, I said, “Come out.”
There was a long pause, followed by a desperate breath, the puff of air bitten off. I unsheathed my dagger, tapping the handle on the tabletop.
“Come out.”
I took another step back, watching for movement.
First I saw hands, too small to be fully grown, the arms wrapped in dark green vines.
A small child pulled herself out from under the table.
She looked no more than seven or eight, but Lord Fuyii had taught us that elves looked like children for decades longer than the rest of us did.
She wore a white shift—peasant clothing—but her hair was a glossy purple, the color of water lilies. The vines that grew around her arms circled her neck before disappearing under the shift.
I watched her. She looked like a child, and the unhappy expression on her face made her seem all the younger, but I had once been a child. I had once been a child who had trained to kill the emperor. Just because she was young did not mean she was harmless.
“Who are you?” I asked.
Her eyes searched my face, and despite her clearly elven appearance, the brown in her gaze was as imperial as any of Saxu’s men.
For all the evil they did, the elven schools were the one place children abandoned because of their half-blood status could live freely.
“Riini,” the girl whispered. Her hands twisted the skirt of her shift and then she looked up fiercely. “Is it true the emperor’s here? His Dogs are with him?”
“Why? Are you hoping to kill him?” I asked. “I warn you, his Dogs are more lethal than you.”
“No.” She shook her head. “I don’t want to kill him.”
“Weren’t you sent away with the rest of the children?” I asked.
“Yes,” she admitted, embarrassed.
I looked around the room where children were being forced into labor that grown men and women had no interest in doing, labor so difficult that many of them would die before they were fully grown from inhaling the dust in the air.
“Shouldn’t you be grateful to have a day’s reprieve from all this labor?” I raised a finger, dipping it in the powder she had been carefully packing into the ivory case.
My finger came away gold, and I rubbed the pigment between my thumb and forefinger, watching as it spread evenly. This was the sort of expensive powder that nobles would fight over. And she was laboring over it for no more than a bed and hopefully enough food to fill her belly.
“It’s not that hard.” She looked at me as though I was foolish. “We only have to work a few minutes a day. The rest of the time, we, um…” She stuttered to a halt.
“What do you mean you only have to work a few minutes a day?” I picked up the heavy stone made of a mineral that appeared golden.
It had been slow baked in a fire to heighten the color.
I tapped it against the table, hearing the solid thump.
“Even a grown man would take several days to grind this much powder from the stone.”
She grinned at me, her lips pulling back to reveal childlike joy. “Is that what you think?”
The tendrils unwound from her arms, two of them plucking the stone from my hand. They put it back on the tabletop, and she raised a nearby hammer with her hand, bringing it down hard on the large stone, shearing off a few shards.
She gently placed them inside a mortar, holding it steady with another pair of vines, then used the pestle with three vines and her hand to direct them. Within a few breaths, the rock had turned to a fine powder.
I gaped at her, both of my eyebrows going up. The elves I had fought on the whaling ship had been strong, but I had assumed that was because they were fully grown. Perhaps I had only been lucky, catching them off-guard and using my skills as an assassin to spill their blood.
If I had faced them full-on, they could have snapped me into pieces just as easily as she had crushed solid stone.
I touched my finger to the powder inside the mortar, rubbing it back and forth. It had the same consistency as what was already in the tin. “Why did you stay?”
“The Dogs are with him?” she asked again. “Do you know their names? Is there one called Sagam?”
I looked at her sharply, frowning. “Sagam?”
“Riini,” Lady Chaliko said from the door, her eyes wide, face pale.
“I’m sorry, Your Highness. We sent the children away.
But Riini is such a hard worker, so loyal to the Imperium.
” As she spoke, she crossed the room, grabbing hold of Riini’s hand, touching the twisting vines with her other, her gaze fixed on me.
She was sweating, the silver makeup she wore beginning to run in rivulets down her face. “She’s a child.”
She said the last as though reminding me. I nodded, my eyes still fixed on Riini. The eyes were the same as Sagam, just as they were with Joxii, although the Kennelmaster was right. She was far too elven to have survived in the Imperium.
“Forgive me, I was under the impression that all of the elves living in the Tavornai schools had their… extra appendages removed.” I pulled my gaze away from Riini, asking Lady Chaliko as though it was an innocent question.
Her hand tightened on Riini’s, and the girl pulled all of her tendrils beneath her shift, making them disappear.
“Of course we follow His Imperial Majesty’s commands. We cut them off and they grow back so quickly.” Lady Chaliko was not the liar her father was. I had seen that when she had tried to speak to me at a garden party what felt like years ago.
I had seen the scars on the elven pirates’ bodies, where someone had cut off their connection to the woods. Perhaps that was why I had survived. Perhaps removing their tendrils had been like cutting off a hand.
“Riini, the other teachers will be waiting for you. Go now.” Lady Chaliko squeezed Riini’s hand again, her knuckles pale under the silver powders.
Riini jerked away, running out the door. I looked at Lady Chaliko, too young to play the part of the protective matron, but then again, she had watched when the Imperium had killed all of the blood mages and citizens of the Blood Mountains that her father had managed to save.
“Lady Chaliko, I am seeking someone in these swamplands, and I think you can help me find them.”