Chapter 24
It’s a comfortable bed.
I wake up startled, surprised I fell asleep at all.
The room’s empty of both Roiven and the swords.
I roll my neck and make for the door, then peer out.
Roiven lies on top of the small stone table, his feet on one of the benches, staring up at the sky.
Overhead stormclouds swirl and race across the sky.
The air tastes like it’s charged with electricity, and the ground in the courtyard is wet like it rained.
He’s fully dressed and his hair is pulled all the way back. There’s a smile on his face. It’s like part of him was missing, and now he’s got it back.
“How long did I sleep?”
“A few hours,” he says without looking. Roiven sits up slowly and turns to face me. “Do you feel rested?”
“Enough. Are your wounds…”
“I’m fine. Better than fine,” he says, and sits up.
He holds up a pear. I don’t know when the last time I even saw one was. I nod eagerly, and Roiven tosses it to me with the faintest hint of a smile.
The fruit is ripe and juicy. For a moment we just stare at each other as I chew. Roiven’s hands grip the edge of the stone table.
“About what happened in there,” Roiven says awkwardly. “I’m not used to stripping in front of people.”
“Don’t worry about it.” There’s a small voice in my head reminding me that sex can just be sex, and that nobody else would need to know if I fucked him.
But just because his body reacted the way it did doesn’t mean he is willing.
And just because my body wants his doesn’t mean I’d stoop so low.
It would disrespect the memory of all the lives he’s taken.
Then again, wasn’t he just protecting his people from knights like me? My lust evaporates, replaced with an uneasy heaviness.
“Do you still want to see the village?” he asks. I blink at him with a frown.
“I lost.”
“On a technicality,” he says with a shrug. I’m surprised to hear him admit it. “Besides… I might not trust you to wander on your own, lady knight, but I think it’s time you saw what I’m so desperate to defend.”
“Yes,” I say a little too excitedly.
I feel pathetically eager as Roiven leads the way out of my courtyard and into the one where Avreen stood guard this morning. I follow, my legs wobbling.
“Are you certain you’re up for this?” He glances at me out of the corner of his eye.
“I can walk.”
His own movements are stiff as he leads me through two more courtyards.
Each one is built on the same pattern as the last: wooden doors on the sides of a small, open stone room with beautiful, lush, plants growing throughout; an open arch behind us and another straight ahead.
It’s more like a hallway than a maze. I go slowly, examining everything as Roiven watches me closely.
“Beautiful,” I whisper to a bush with clusters of bright-pink roses, a color so vibrant I don’t think I’ve ever seen it before. The air smells fresh, and fragrant; flowers and dirt after a storm. I nearly cry.
And then we enter a courtyard with no other open archway but the one we came through.
“That can’t be it,” I argue. He can’t possibly call this a village. But Roiven points to the right. I follow his finger and then frown.
There’s a well, with a ladder sticking out of it.
He’s stopped walking, and I take the opportunity to lean against the courtyard’s wall, hoping I look nonchalant instead of exhausted. Do his people live underground?
“Promise me something before we go down.”
“I know you think I’m a stone-blooded killer, but you took my sword, so I don’t know what you’re worried about.”
“No.” Roiven smooths a hand over his face. He draws a breath and looks at me. “Will you try to believe in it?”
“What?” I blink. The expression on his face is perfectly grim as his eyes lock with mine.
“Believe in this place. Believe you’re one of us. Believe there’s good here.”
I squint at him. Roiven nods sharply and continues.
“Maybe in the end, you’ll still side with them. I’m just asking you to keep an open mind, Cai. Try believing it and see if it feels true.”
I shrug, and Roiven nods again, and leads the way to the ladder. I peer past him as he climbs down. There are ten or fifteen feet of shadow, and then the ladder emerges back into bright daylight at the base of the shaft. When Roiven reaches the bottom, I quickly follow.
The ladder lets me out into a small cave, like a pocket in the stone.
There’s a ceiling above me, of course, the ground of the place we just came from, and a wall behind—but in front of us the sky is open, not covered.
The dead, lifeless mountain stretches up steeply to my right as far as the eye can see.
To my left, a rugged, natural-looking wall of stone and boulders rises only three or four feet past my head. I already miss the plants.
Avreen sits in one of the notches of that wall. She leans back to see what the noise is, then scowls when she sees me there.
“What happened?” she asks Roiven.
“We’re going to the village.”
“You—” Avreen squawks like a titan bird. She straightens, and her gaze shifts from Roiven to me, and then back to Roiven. “Can we talk,” she says to him, through gritted teeth.
Roiven sighs, then nods.
“Wait here. Don’t move,” the Witch King tells me.
Avreen drags him fifteen feet away, down the open corridor. I slide forward and peek into the nook where she’d been sitting.
And there it is: the ocean. My stomach knots as the familiar feeling of revulsion floods me. It’s only twenty or so feet below where I am now. If I peer nearly straight down I can see the shore below us, a black rock beach like the rest of the Wild Seas.
Suddenly I understand. With the natural-looking wall in front of me, we aren’t visible from the ocean.
I’m willing to wager none of their village is, or the courtyards we just walked through.
From the sea, this just looks like a barren mountain, but there are people and plants hidden carefully behind the stone ridges.
A chill strokes down my spine. This isn’t possible on the flatter stone isles or the narrow ocean spines, but how many of the bigger sea-rocks and mountains are hiding witches?
They’ve found a way to disappear from the Empire’s ships without needing a barrier enchantment like we use in the Empire.
It's a technique that we could never use against them. They fly. And this village? I bet it can only be seen from above, on a dragon’s back.
I know it isn’t how they’ve always lived. We’ve found plenty of villages and buildings in the past. The castle on the Bluff, and even the one on Amkrieg, used to be theirs.
Has the War-Father already figured this out, if he knows where the Gray Tower is, or would he praise me if I told him?
My heart feels uncomfortably heavy at that thought.
I know what he’d do with the information, if he doesn’t already have it.
And I should be fine with that. But something in me has changed.
If we were wrong about how the witches form bonds, what else are we wrong about?
“...Because you don’t have time,” I hear Avreen hiss, her voice quiet. I lean back from my view of the ocean, but carefully don’t look their way. I don’t want them to know I can hear.
“...Too important. We need every advantage we can get,” Roiven answers, his voice a low rumble.
“...Better to kill her than risk…”
“It hasn’t come to that yet. Take it up with the others if you don’t like it,” Roiven says.
“You’re lying to the others!”
Roiven shakes his head and calls to me. “Cai. Come on.”
I turn toward them, trying to keep the look on my face pleasant, like they weren’t just discussing killing me. Was freeing his magic a mistake? The enchantment still won’t let him attack me, but Sava and Avreen don’t have that problem.
As soon as I start walking toward him, he turns and takes off down the path. Avreen eyes me as I approach and pass her.
“I’m not fooled, knight,” she hisses under her breath. I shrug.
“I’m not trying to fool you.”
Who are the others he’s lying to?
We walk through the sloping corridor. Every now and then I catch a glimpse of the ocean through a crack in the stones.
The path curves as we navigate the mountain.
And then, after only a few minutes of walking, the path ends and a ravine opens up at our feet, stretching left and right. Another ladder leads down into it.
Roiven starts climbing down before me, giving me a chance to look around.
The drop is only some fifteen or twenty feet, so the ground below must be close to sea level.
The two cliff-walls of the ravine are ten feet or so apart, and from here I can already see signs of life down below.
Doors in the base of the rock. Neatly-kept pathways.
Potted plants, even though the sun must only shine down there at noon when it’s right overhead.
A group of children running, one holding a ball.
Roiven reaches the bottom and gestures for me to catch up.