Chapter 5 #2
She held his gaze for three seconds. Enough to say what the bond was already saying. There was nothing she wouldn’t do to make sure she was by his side, where she belonged. She stared long enough to let him see her clearly before she turned away.
Then she squared her shoulders and stepped toward the king.
Every troll in the cavern watched. She could feel the weight of it pressing against her skin like a change in atmospheric pressure, dozens of enormous, ancient gazes tracking her movement with the collective, unreadable attention of creatures that seemed to have been waiting, across years she couldn't begin to quantify, for something to happen. Even Aphid, who no doubt had survived enough to be unnerved by very little, had gone very still in his cage, his bright fae eyes trained on her with an expression she’d never seen on his face before.
That, more than anything else that had happened in this cavern, reached through the carefully constructed barrier of Kara’s composure and prodded the thing she was trying very hard not to call fear.
The Troll King lifted one massive hand, not toward Kara this time, but toward a shadowed opening at the far side of the cavern, where the torchlight failed to reach and the darkness held itself in a way that suggested it had something to hide.
“Bring me Torvik.”
The name rolled through the chamber the way a stone rolls downhill, gathering weight as it traveled, drawing every eye, shifting every enormous body in a ripple of unease that moved through the assembled trolls like a current through standing water.
Several of them exchanged glances that Kara, in her professional experience with people who knew things she didn’t, recognized as the specific look of individuals who understood what was coming and had decided, collectively, that understanding it was not the same as being comfortable with it.
Kara frowned at the nearest troll, who declined to acknowledge her. “I don’t love how ominous that sounded,” she said, mostly to the air, since the air seemed to be the only party willing to receive the observation.
No one answered.
A smaller troll–though the creature in question still looked perfectly capable of carrying a carthorse under each arm–separated himself from the group and disappeared into the darkness with the efficiency of something accustomed to following orders it didn’t ask questions about.
Nick’s hands wrapped around the bars again, the metal groaning softly under the pressure of his grip. “What are you doing?” he demanded, directing the question at the king’s back with the precise, clipped restraint, of someone who was working very hard to keep their register below a roar.
The king ignored him with the thoroughness of a mountain ignoring a cloud.
Kara folded her arms across her chest. It was a defensive posture, and she knew it, and she committed to it anyway, because if she was being marched toward whatever fresh catastrophe “Bring me Torvik” implied, she was at least going to face it with attitude and the appearance of structural confidence.
“I just want it on the record,” she muttered, pitching her voice low enough to carry to Wadim without reaching the king, “that if a troll child comes out of that hallway carrying ceremonial knives and reciting prophecy, I am leaving a genuinely scathing review of this realm. Zero stars. Terrible ambiance.”
From his cage, Wadim made a sound that was technically a cough and technically covered by the ambient noise of the cavern. It convinced no one.
“Was that a laugh?” Rachel’’s voice came from the cage to Kara’s left, low and carefully amused, her healer’s calm intact even through iron bars and existential dread. “Wadim, are you laughing?”
“I am managing a respiratory response to the air quality,” Wadim said with great dignity.
“The air quality,” Gavril repeated flatly, his deep voice carrying the particular inflection of a man who had decided that dry commentary was the only sane response to his current circumstances. “We’re in a troll cavern. The air quality is what concerns you?”
“There’s a great deal that concerns me, air quality is on that list and the first thing that popped up into my mind. You probably don’t want to know about the other things that I’m concerned about at the moment.” Wadim said.
Zara snarled at her mate. “Are you serious right now?”
Wadim didn’t say a word.
“Fair point,” Gavril conceded.
“I still want to know about the ceremonial knives,” Aphid said, his voice bright and entirely inappropriate for the situation, the way his voice generally was.
The fae was perched at what appeared to be a very deliberate angle in his cage, one leg drawn up, observing the proceedings with the detached, glittering interest of someone attending a show he hadn’t paid to see but was prepared to critique anyway. “I think it would add something.”
“It would add something to my stress levels,” Kara told him.
“Your stress levels are already catastrophic,” Aphid said cheerfully. “A few ceremonial knives at this point would just be aesthetic.”
Zara, who had been quietly and methodically testing the structural integrity of her cage for the last several minutes with focused patience, paused long enough to look up. “Can everyone please be quiet so I can think about how to get us out of here?”
“Thinking quietly or loudly?” Kara asked.
“I find that thinking out loud can really benefit any part of your brain that might be wandering off into random thought territory because that’s what seems to happen anytime we need to be absolutely focused on getting out of a situation where we might die.
Kind of like I tend to ramble when I’m feeling a tad bit unsure—”
“Both options,” Zara cut her off, “would be improved by silence from the rest of you. You’re just going to have to keep the rambling in your mind.”
“Not to completely negate what you just said about needing silence, babe,” Wadim said, his eyes having begun to glow with his wolf. “But when did you become MacGyver?”
“Mc-who?” Zara frowned.
Wadim groaned. “And now I feel old and like a total creeper for mating someone who doesn’t know who MacGyver is.”
“Again,” Zara narrowed her eyes on her mate. “You can mourn your advanced age later. Let me focus.”
Kara’s attention was drawn back to the entrance where the Troll King was focused. The darkness at the far end of the cavern moved, and the smaller troll returned.
And Kara forgot, entirely and without warning, how sarcasm worked. In his arms lay a child.
A troll child, small only by comparison, no taller than a human child of perhaps six years, though broader through the shoulders and chest in the way that stone-kin tended toward even young, all stone-colored skin and too-large amber eyes that had gone dull with the specific exhaustion of something that had been hurting for a long time and had stopped expecting it to end.
One leg hung at an angle beneath him that was wrong in a way that Kara’s healer’s eye catalogued in the first second and refused to stop cataloguing: twisted, unset, the damage old enough to have begun adapting to itself.
The wound at his side was worse. An angry, swollen thing, the skin around it threaded with black that moved beneath the surface with a slow, deliberate pulse; not the spread of ordinary infection, not the creep of simple rot, this had direction, as if it knew where it was going.
The cavern had gone reverently quiet at the suffering of something small and innocent.
Even Nick stilled at the bars, the gold burning in his eyes going from fury to something harder and quieter.
The king was not watching the child. He was watching Kara.
She felt the weight of it, the deliberate, intense quality of his attention, the sense of a test being administered without the courtesy of announcing itself.
He had brought the child out for a reason.
He was watching her respond to the child for a reason.
Understanding assembled itself in her chest like words fitting together to make a sentence, and the conclusion it formed was one she greeted with full and sincere resistance.
No. The thought arrived with great clarity.
No. Absolutely not. We are not doing this.
I am not being emotionally manipulated by a troll king into healing his child so he can feel benevolent about keeping us prisoner.
I see exactly what this is. I am not falling for it.
The troll set the child down on a stone slab near the center of the chamber. The movement was careful, practiced, as if they had been carring for him for some time.
The child, Torvik, whimpered, a thin, exhausted sound, and turned his face toward the stone like he was trying to press the pain somewhere it couldn’t follow him.
And Kara’s heart did what it always did when someone around her was hurt, which was to betray her completely and without apology. She was totally doing this.
Because pain was pain, and a child was a child, and she had been a healer long enough to know that her instincts did not ask for specific confirmation before engaging.
They simply engaged. She had tried, on multiple occasions, to discuss this with them.
The instincts had declined to participate in the conversation.
She took one step forward before she’d made the conscious decision to move.
The Troll King noticed. He was watching for exactly that, and the slight shift in his expression when it happened was not satisfaction, exactly, but something adjacent to it. The look of something that had wagered correctly on the nature of a person and was not surprised to be proven right.
His voice, when it came, was quieter than she’d yet heard it, lower, stripped of its chamber-filling authority, something almost private in it. “What do you see, witch?”
Kara’s jaw was tight. “A child suffering,” she said, because it was the truth and she was not in the business of performing indifference she didn’t feel.
The king’s gaze sharpened by a fraction. “And?”