Chapter 36
Melodie leanedback against the wall of Marchant’s house and dozed.
She had spent a half hour working through his papers, but she was bruised and exhausted. She refused to stay in the house to sleep, though. The smell of ingrained decay, as well as the blood Theo had spilled, chased her out into the cool air, and she’d eventually found a spot on the porch to rest for a bit.
“Do you want me to find you a blanket?”
She opened her eyes and saw Theo standing on the bottom step, looking up at her. He had washed himself off somewhere, perhaps at the water pump she’d noticed beside the stables, and his hair was spiky and wet.
She shook her head. “I don’t think anything here will smell clean enough.”
“I found some of your things in his workshop.” He lifted her pack, as well as a small cloak. “I think this is Vivi’s cloak. He must have stolen it from her.”
“It’s full of spell work,” Melodie said, voice a little husky with sleep. “It glows.”
“It does?” He jogged up the steps lightly and sat down shoulder to shoulder with her, handing her her things as he spread the cloak over them both.
“Hmm.” She leaned her head against his shoulder. “It’s the same glow that’s on the shirt sleeves or collars of Kassia and Cervantes soldiers in the Illoa market square.” She closed her eyes again.
“It’s best you don’t mention that to anyone else,” he said, shifting to bring her closer against him.
“To protect the queen?” She nodded her head. “I know about keeping magical secrets.”
“Maybe you and the queen can have a chat,” Theo said.
“Mmm.” She barely registered his words.
He tightened his hold and she thought he might have kissed the top of her head as she drifted off.
It wasn’t a comfortable night, but she was warm under the cloak and with Theo’s body heat, and when the sun rose, she refused to move, enjoying the warmth of the first rays of light on her outstretched legs.
“I don’t want to go back in there.” She stretched out the kinks, and then looked over at Theo.
“The sooner we get Marchant’s things sorted, the sooner we can leave.” Theo lifted her up with him as he stood, and she had to stamp her feet to ease the pins and needles.
She hated the thought of going back inside, but he was right. And if the people Marchant had taken through the years could be found, she had a duty to get that information.
They made tea in Marchant’s kitchen and ate what they had left in their packs, then went back into the study to look it over more carefully in the light of day.
A tiny box on Marchant’s desk suddenly gave a light ting of sound, and Melodie was about to pick it up to study it, when Theo made a sound of outrage.
“Here’s a ledger.” He held up a big, hardbound book which he’d opened to a neat row of names and numbers.
Melodie studied it. “First name, age, type of magic, amount, destination.” She lifted her head. “He only gives the general area, not an exact address, or even who he sold the person to.”
“Covering himself and them, no doubt. I can’t think there would be a large number of people who had the funds or the inclination to enslave another, so he probably didn’t need to detail their name and address. The general area told him exactly who he meant.”
“There are over fifty names in this ledger.” Melodie’s hands shook as she set the book down. “Fifty people taken and sold.”
Theo looked down and pointed to the first date. “It goes back more than thirty years.”
Her father had tried to impress on her the horror of being forced to work for someone against her will, to keep her from exposing herself to danger, so she had imagined it many times. She didn’t need to think about the terrible life every name on this list endured.
“I wish I could have killed him,” she said.
“You helped,” he said, brushing her cheek with his thumb.
She tilted her head back, about to say something rude, when the wooden floorboards began to vibrate beneath her boots.
She looked down. “What?—?”
Theo lifted his head sharply, then set her away from him and ran out the study.
Her gaze caught sight of the tiny box, and she suddenly understood.
Someone had triggered the web across the track.
Stupid. Stupid.
She raced after Theo, saw he’d gone straight out of the open front door, and leapt off the porch, heading straight for the forest.
“Stop!”
He turned, running backward as he faced her. “It has to be the Commander.”
“The trap!”
Her words finally sunk in, and he stopped a few steps from the spell on the path that shone weakly in the morning light.
He look at the path, then turned back to her. Shook his head. “I forgot.”
As he said it, a wall of riders emerged from the trees, and he spun to face them, hand out.
Gallain rode in the front line, as well as Jacinta, and Melodie saw a grim-faced man in his early forties in the center of the group.
They pulled up at the sight of Theo.
“There’s a magical trap here. You need to go around.” Theo pointed and the riders streamed forward, curving around the spot, and came to a stop in front of the house.
Melodie wondered who had tripped the web across the road. Gallain and the others knew about it. “If we hadn’t already dealt with Marchant, he’d have been warned you were coming,” she said.
Gallain shook his head. “One of the younger soldiers in the group apparently wasn’t paying attention when that fact was relayed.” He glanced back at someone, who squirmed in their saddle. “Why do you think we came in so fast? It was to give Marchant as little time as possible to react, if he was still around.”
Theo jogged back, his whole demeanor relaxed as he called and joked with the mounted soldiers, until he reached the porch steps again.
“Commander.” He put his fist over his heart as the grim-faced man slid from his horse.
Another, older soldier had dismounted as well, and he pulled Theo into a fierce hug. “Where’s the bastard?” he asked.
“Dead.” Theo pointed to the prison.
“And this is Melodie.” The Commander was watching her, and he seemed less grim now. Perhaps because he knew Marchant was dead.
She gave a nervous nod.
“You gave yourself in exchange for my daughter,” he said.
“For everyone,” she corrected, and he gave a nod of acknowledgement.
As they spoke, most of the soldiers dismounted, and a slim woman moved to stand at the Commander’s side.
It was a face she knew. A face she had never forgotten.
Melodie blinked. “Sue?”
“Avasu,” the woman said. Then she climbed the steps and put her hands on Melodie’s shoulders. “That’s what my friends who are Venyatux call me.”
“And other people?” Melodie asked.
“Other people call me Queen Ava of Kassia and Cervantes.”
“I lookedfor you and your father for years.” Ava had her arm through Melodie’s and she tugged her a little way away from the buildings. “I offered your father a place to stay at my grandmother’s estate in Grimwalt, but he never came.”
Melodie glanced behind her, grateful for a little time away from the curious stares and sidelong glances.
Ava would not countenance leaving Marchant’s things to be stolen and used by those as bad as he was, and Melodie couldn’t allow the soldiers to handle things she knew were dangerous, so she had personally sorted all the items into a useful pile and a dangerous pile.
In doing so, she had exposed her gift to all thirty of the Commander’s unit, and she felt naked and vulnerable now.
Ava seemed to understand, and had suggested a walk while some of the men and women stacked the useful items onto Marchant’s cart, to take back to Kassia and Cervantes, and others built a fire to burn the rest.
“My father sometimes wished he had taken you up on that offer, when times got hard for us.” Melodie wondered what their lives would have been like if her father hadn’t been so suspicious and stubborn.
Ava sighed. “I wish I had known you were living in Illoa.”
“My father circled back there after years of wandering around Grimwalt, and when he died, I had no connections anywhere else.”
“And you were too young to remember my full name.” Ava shook her head, but Melodie laughed.
“Even if I had remembered it, I’d never have put it together with the queen of Kassia and Cervantes.”
Ava made a face. “The thing that makes my blood run cold is that I should have realized that some people can see spell work. I knew you could. The fact that Marchant was wandering around looking at my shirts on soldiers makes me wonder who else knows.”
“I think it was just him and me,” Melodie said. “And he’s dead.” She touched Ava’s arm. “And while our abilities were similar, I don’t think they were the same.”
“What do you mean?” Ava asked.
“I think he could see magic. I can see spell work. He could tell if someone had magical ability, and he could see the magic in a spell-worked item, but he couldn’t discern the difference.”
“So he saw Viviane’s magic, but she tells me she was able to fool him into believing it was her cloak that he saw. And she wove a spell to hide her magic into her hair, and fooled him into thinking he was wrong about her magical ability.” Ava spoke slowly.
“Yes. I can’t see the magic inside someone. I can see the spell work woven into an item.”
“But he didn’t understand that.” Ava glanced at her to confirm.
“He didn’t. And I made sure he never did.”
Ava stopped and turned to face her. “Can I persuade you to work in my court? Obviously there is an entire cohort that knows what you can do after this morning, but we can try to keep your ability as secret as possible.”
Melodie glanced at her. “My father would strongly object.”
Ava smiled. “I’m aware. I spoke to him about you on that journey.” She lifted a hand to Melodie’s shoulder. “How did he die?”
Melodie closed her eyes. “I saw a woman in the market square in Illoa, selling little wooden tokens. People were taking them, and then opening their purses and emptying everything in them into a hat she held out.” She shook her head. “I tried to tell one of the men who’d just bought one that he was being cheated. I could see the spell work covering each token, but instead of confronting her, he turned and struck me. I fell to the ground and the woman started edging away. I watched her look very deliberately from me to him, and then she said: Kill her.”
“And your father jumped between you?” Ava guessed.
Melodie nodded. “He had just come to look for me. He roared something and rushed forward just as the man pulled a knife from his boot and struck out at me.”
“The crowd around us was suddenly galvanized and pulled him away, held him down. There were witnesses to the whole thing, but when the guards tried to find the woman, she was long gone. The man was sobbing when the guard took his token. He claimed he never meant to do anything to either me or my father.” She sighed, shared a look with Ava. They both knew that he had been telling the truth.
“The woman sounds like someone I knew, back in the early days of the Rising Wave.” Ava patted her hand in sympathy. “I know your father would be horrified, but you’ve always seemed to push against his strictures.”
Melodie hesitated. “Theo says he’ll help me help others. All those people my father wouldn’t let me help, or who I wasn’t able to warn. They weigh on me.”
“We can work something out.” Ava gave a slow nod. “We can call it fieldwork and palace duty.”
Melodie liked the sound of that. “Did you see the ledger?” she asked. “Over fifty people like you and me, sold as slaves?”
“I saw.” Ava’s voice was quiet. “So fieldwork will definitely be part of it. You can move around Kassia and Cervantes, using that ledger, and find those people.”
“What about in other countries? Marchant sold people all over the continent.”
“I saw that.” Ava’s lips twisted. “We’ll have to make a plan. Find people we trust to look into it.”
Melodie searched her face, hoping she was being sincere.
“We won’t leave them to rot,” Ava promised her. They turned and headed back to the house. “I was like those people in the ledger at one time in my life. You would have become one, if Marchant got his way.” She glanced over at Viviane, who along with Genevieve, Jon and Ricardo were helping to burn everything Melodie had judged dangerous in the fire that had been lit, throwing things into the flames with gusto. “As well as my daughter.”
As they made their way across the lawn, Melodie saw Theo was standing with Ava’s heart’s choice, Luc Franck, near the porch, and both men turned and watched them approach.
They were both so clearly warriors, their faces so serious, their bodies so honed and dangerous, she suddenly felt flustered by the attention. Before she could help herself, she blurted out the first thing that came to mind. “Commander, did you know your sword is enspelled?”
There was a sudden silence all around her, and she glanced quickly to the side, and saw everyone in earshot had stopped what they were doing and were staring at her.
“Is it, now?” Luc Franck angled his sword away from him, looking down the length of the blade with interest.
She felt the heat rise in her cheeks. “Obviously, you already know that.”
“Oh, no,” Theo said, and there was a suspicious amusement in his voice. “He doesn’t. What spell is it?”
She looked uncertainly between the two men, and then at Ava.
Ava gave her an encouraging smile.
“You must have noticed the blade is always sharp?” she said, tentatively.
“A blade that’s always sharp,” Luc Franck murmured. Then he looked up and smiled. Sent her a wink.
Ava gave a snort of amusement, and all around them, soldiers began to laugh.
Melodie turned in astonishment, trying to work out what was going on, and Theo grabbed her up and swung her around, still chuckling.
“You have finally solved a very long-standing debate,” he said, and kissed her on the lips before he set her down. He draped an arm over her shoulder and hugged her close. “I think you’re truly one of us, now.”