Chapter Twelve
As I follow a stumbling Seth back into the tent, I realize the sleep elixir is still in my hand.
I could knock him out with it easily right now. He’s so incapacitated already that it might leave him unconscious for hours.
But then what will I do?
I can’t leave Taran. They’ve laid him on a cot, one of the low, leather ones the common soldiers use, and a pair of healers is working on his arrow wounds with a wash basin nearby.
He’s in no condition to escape right now even if we manage to get past Seth and the rest of the camp, which remains on high alert searching for Ronan.
I don’t dare approach Taran in case it sets Seth off, but from his movements on the cot, he doesn’t seem to be in too much pain as they wrap his shoulder.
“Who said you could use my personal elixirs?” Seth asks as he leans against his desk, picking up a brown bottle.
It’s the bottle I left out by accident earlier. I slip my hand with the sleeping elixir behind my back. I need to find a way to get rid of it before he realizes I have it.
“It was there already, sir. We thought you meant for us to use it.”
Seth shakes his head and then regrets the action immediately as his face takes on a greenish hue. “Did I?” he asks, blinking back the nausea.
“It’s willow bark, sir. For the pain?”
“No pain relief,” says Seth. Then he turns back to me. “We have to motivate you somehow.”
“Seth, please. It doesn’t work like that,” I say. I take advantage of him taking the time to put the elixir bottle away to walk past him to my bed, which has been moved to accommodate Taran’s cot. I reach under the pillowcase for the cork to cover the bottle, but it isn’t there.
Fuck.
“We’ve already given him the elixir, sir,” says the other healer.
Seth is spending an awfully long time in his elixir drawer. A wave of panic sends my heart into my throat as I realize he may notice the missing sleep elixir.
“Seth, I’m telling you. It’s not as simple as fear,” I say, trying to distract him from the drawer. “If it were, I would have summoned them when Adria attacked me in my room.”
Seth’s shoulders still as he considers what I said. “Maybe not fear for your own life, but fear for someone you care about.” He slams the desk drawer shut, and I breathe a sigh of relief.
Now to find that cork before he puts my shackles back on.
“You care about him,” Seth says, lifting his chin in Taran’s direction with a bit of a wobble. “An Orsa, Sylvie. Our enemy.”
I can’t decide if it will be better or worse for Taran if I admit that I do care about him despite everything that has happened between us. He’s one of Ronan’s closest friends. I can’t imagine how much it would hurt Ronan to lose him.
“Why are you healing him then, if he’s your enemy?”
“Because he’s clearly important to you or you wouldn’t have saved him.
And because he’s General Taran Orinsen, Ronan’s bodyguard and right hand.
You forget that I know these people better than you do.
I may have never met him, but I know him by reputation.
I know where he came from and how he came to be with Ronan. ”
“I very much doubt you do,” I say, my words as cold as Taran’s ice.
If Seth knows about the murder of Taran’s village, if he knows about the depraved things that were done to Taran’s family…
“If you do know, and you’re fine with what happened to him, then there’s nothing you can say that will earn my forgiveness. ”
Seth laughs, a harsh, grating sound that might have been intimidating if he didn’t hiccup at the end of it. “Earn your forgiveness? I will give you this one thing, sister. You talk like a Verran.”
Seth pushes himself off the desk to check the healers’ work. “Clean this blood from his face. I won’t have him staining the sheets.”
Then he leans down close to Taran. “I’ve wondered for some time what you were like, Taran Orinsen. A nothing, backwoods savage elevated far beyond your station. You stand beside the throne as if you’ve earned the right.”
Taran’s voice scrapes in a way that makes my stomach sick. Please, Vayla, let the healers’ elixirs work. “And what have you earned? What do you have other than what was given to you? That was handed to you by your birth?”
Seth’s eyes flash malevolently, and then he turns to me and smiles unnervingly. “Oh, this is going to be fun.”
Then he claps his hands together and turns back to his desk, withdrawing a stack of papers and a quill and beginning to scribble.
As he writes, I roam my hands under the pillow and through the sheets of the bed, searching for the missing cork but coming up empty.
Then, as the healers take their leave, I spot it as one of them kicks it across the rug towards the desk.
Godsdammit.
I look at Taran on the cot. His eyes are closed and his face is turned away from me, but I can see his condition well enough.
They’ve removed his shirt to bandage his chest and draped a blanket over his lower body, which looks to be uninjured.
There’s a glob of some healing elixir on his ear where it was grazed by an arrow.
All in all, it looks like the healers have done a good job of caring for him.
He won’t die. At least not from these injuries.
“Now, I do hope you realize that the little show you put on earlier isn’t going to go unnoticed,” says Seth, still busy writing with his back turned.
“The news is spreading through the camp as we speak. I suspect Adria will know before we get going in the morning, and she’ll likely be here to collect you by the afternoon. ”
“No,” I say, my chest tightening. “Seth, she’ll kill me. I did what you asked. I showed you my power.”
Seth drops the quill and slams his hand on the desk. “No, you did not. You used your power to save his life.”
“I told you I can’t control it. But if you let me stay here, I’ll try. I’ll do whatever it takes. Please, Seth.” I slip the open sleep elixir on the floor beneath my bed, and then I creep towards the desk.
He turns back suddenly, startling me.
“I told you I wouldn’t defy her. What am I supposed to tell her about why I should be the one to keep you?”
I have absolutely no idea how to convince Adria not to take me back if that’s what she wants. “You could tell her I didn’t manage to escape from you like I did from her.”
He grins, his mood turning suddenly. “That’s true.” He turns back to the desk and shuffles through the papers, making more notes.
I’m nearly to the cork. I lean down to grab it—
“Say, how did you give Adria the slip?” Seth asks, turning back to me again. I scratch at the nightgown’s lace hem where it touches my ankle, hoping he doesn’t notice the odd gesture. “Didn’t she have you shackled?”
I freeze. He’s about to realize that I’m no longer shackled. His maid ran during the commotion with the griffin, but she’s likely in a tent nearby, waiting until the camp bells ring the all clear. At which point he’ll have her shackle me again.
I’ve got to get this damn cork.
“She had me in a dog kennel,” I say, straightening back up. I can’t see any value in concealing the truth of what happened. Adria has certainly put together Larus’s betrayal by this point. “Larus broke me out.”
Seth turns back around, shaking his head. “He always did have a soft spot for you.”
I grab the cork between my toes and limp back to the bed before he can turn around again. Taran lifts his head to look at me as I silently retrieve the bottle from the floor, deepening the shadow beneath the bed. I hold my finger to my lips and then I cork the bottle.
It makes a tiny squeak.
I shove the bottle under the sheets as Seth turns. “Did you hear that?”
“It sounded like a mouse.”
Seth shudders. “I agree. I’ll have the servants find it when we move. Or a cat, I suppose, if they fail.”
When he turns back around again, I slip the bottle deep inside the pillowcase as he folds each letter one by one.
“Well, it’s time to get a few hours’ rest, I suppose,” he says as he rises. “I’ll come and get you in the morning when it’s time to take the tent down.” He heads to the tent flap with the letters in hand. He’s one step away from it when he realizes. “Your shackles. You were wearing shackles.”
Well, it was too much to hope that he would forget entirely. “I took the key from your maid with my shadows.”
Even from across the tent, I can see the shift in his demeanor. He’s fascinated. “Really?”
I can use this, his desire for information about my power. I don’t know why it fascinates him, but I can use it to get him to keep me instead of giving me back to Adria. “It’s like—I mean, well, it’s difficult to explain.”
He walks back over, his steps far surer than before. Either he really wants to hear this, or all of his letter writing has sobered him up. “Try.”
“Well,” I say, drawing out the suspense as long as I can. “It’s like they’re an extension of me. Like an extension of my hand.”
“You can feel things with them?” He sits backwards in his chair again, ready to gossip.
“Yes.”
“What does it feel like?”
“Like having another hand, I suppose. I can feel objects. I can maneuver them.”
“With some precision,” he adds. “If you opened a lock with them.”
“I threw a knife with them once.” This isn’t exactly true. When I fought Marcella, I stopped her knife with the shadows, but what I threw in her face was an elixir just like the one concealed in my pillowcase.
But I don’t want him thinking of elixirs right now, and I can use the lie to fuel my magic.
“Snuffing flames, maneuvering objects, throwing things. What else? Restraining someone?”
“I—” No, I hadn’t tried that yet, but it was a very good idea. “Not yet. They’re strong enough. I pushed your maid with them. And your soldiers.”
“How many tendrils can you summon?”