Chapter 40
They questioned me before dawn.
Two of them, in a room that smelled of lamp oil and mold, asking the same questions in different orders, the way people did when they hoped the answers would change. Where had I come from? What was I doing in Bloomreach? Did I know the men in the street?
I told them I was a trailfinder and had been traveling south with companions. That I'd been separated from them amid the confusion of guards running in the street.
The rest I didn't tell them.
They wrote things down. They looked at each other.
They went away, came back, asked the same questions again, and wrote down the same answers.
I sat in the chair they'd given me, kept my hands in my lap, kept my face neutral, and thought about Crystallese, about the Watch in Eirhollow, about every official room I'd ever been in, and about the skill of being unremarkable in them.
By the time the light was coming through the high window, they'd run out of questions and moved on to waiting, which was the part that was supposed to break you.
I'd waited in worse places than this.
The officer came midmorning.
Shiny breastplate, crisp green cloak, a scar that ran down the side of his face that somehow made him look appealing, not dangerous.
He stood and watched me and said nothing.
I said nothing either.
He turned and left. I heard shushed whispers, then another guard. This one had a quality of danger around him that made me sit up straighter and take notice.
"Trailfinder," he said without looking at anyone but me. He held out his hand, and my pack was placed into it. He tipped it up and opened it on the table in front of him. My lodestone bounced once, and he picked it up, turned it over, and set it down. "From Crystallese."
"Yes."
"Traveling south."
So we were stating facts? Fine. "Yes."
He looked at me. "Alone?"
"Now I am.” I looked him over. “Well, you’re here and the others so, not alone…”
His expression didn’t change. "The men in the street."
"I defended myself."
"From men associated with Crystallese." He said it the way people said things they already knew the answer to. "Men you claimed had been following you."
I said nothing.
"And another man in the fountain square."
I kept my face still. "Is there a question?”
He looked at me for a long moment. He picked up the lodestone and turned it over in his hand. "A merchant was killed in his home, just south of Crystallese, near the border,” he said. "Do you know anything about that?”
“Why would I?”
"You'll come with me," he said. It wasn’t a question or a threat. It was simply a fact shared by someone who understood the situation and was patiently waiting for me to catch up.
I looked at the table. At the lodestone sitting there, small, ordinary, the thing I'd carried for years, that had found north when I couldn't. I felt like my north was being taken from me.
"Do I have a choice?" I asked.
He considered this seriously, which was more than most people would have done. "You have the choice of how you come," he said with careful precision. "That's not nothing."
I looked at him. At the uniform, the trained attention, the way he held himself with quiet certainty.
I stood. "Alright," I said. “Where are we going?”
“Virellan first.”
“First?”
He didn’t clarify.
I watched as they packed my belongings back into my pack, shoving things in without thought or care.
They gave me back my pack. Not my weapons, those stayed, which was expected. Not my coin, which I noted and didn't comment on. But the pack, and the cloak, and the lodestone, they’d apparently decided those things were not a threat.
I was escorted through the garrison into the Bloomreach morning. I walked with the soldier and his companion to a small wagon, which was enclosed except for two high windows on either side, each with three bars running across it.
I thought about what I carried within me.
The column and the size of what it had shown me. Thiece's pale eyes and her knowing look. The sound of birds in the Florlunia trees, which had never stopped singing. The almost blue sky at the border, promising something. Promising what?
The warmth of his hands against my face. The particular way a kiss could be a goodbye, a calculation, and something else entirely, all at once.
“In you go.”
Like it was an invitation into a carriage and not a prison wagon.
I stepped up and got in, and the door closed firmly behind me.
I looked out through the high bars. The street behind me was ordinary. Morning light, people moving, the warmth of a Florlunia day that was almost — not yet, but almost — the warmth the column had shown me.
Nobody there who shouldn't be there. No shadow in a doorway that was too still.
I looked for a long time.
Then I turned away and sat down against the wooden side. Some things you carried better when you didn't look back. I'd told myself that before. I was less sure of it now.
No rescue came. I’d heard horses as we moved out of the town, and hope had soared within me, thinking it was them.
It wasn’t.
When I looked out, it was merely more horses with more soldiers, all wearing deep green cloaks.
I lay down, put my head on my pack, and closed my eyes. I was going to hang for the killing of those men and the murder of the merchant.
I needed to get free. I knew I could get free, but I wasn’t happy about the number of soldiers or using that amount of magic.
I lay there, rocking back and forth slightly as the wagon rolled.
What the fuck was I going to do? Escape. I needed to escape. I’d wait until nightfall. I’d need to take the risk and use my magic.
I didn’t know how much time passed, but the wagon rolled to a gentle stop. I heard voices, but not ones I knew. I heard a lot of scrambling, and then the door swung open.
She was older than I was, with dark hair, scraped back into a tight bun. It made her look older than her years. Light-blue eyes, a nose slightly too big for her face, and small, pinched lips.
She was slight of frame, and her skirts were heavy, embroidered blue velvet.
She watched me assess her in one glance, and her eyebrow lifted as I met the stare of the Verei Kahn.
My magic pulsed inside me. My hand moved toward my sternum. I stopped it.
She watched my hand stop, and something in her expression settled into certainty.
I looked at her. At her dark clothing, her trained attention, her quiet confidence. At the institution she represented and everything it meant. Declaration, classification, ownership.
Everything I'd been running from since before I understood what I was running from.
"We've been looking for someone," she said. "For some time." A pause. "Someone with considerable undeclared power who has been in the north. Near Iskaeld."
We watched each other.
“What do you know about that?” she asked me, her tone light and conversational, content with the knowledge that she held all the power here.
“I know only fools try to go to Iskaeld in winter.”
She smiled. “Then the tip I got must be correct, and you must be the fool I’m looking for, Amarya.”
I swallowed hard. She knew my name. “Tip?” I asked, hearing the tremor in my voice. “What tip?”
Had Vorn told her? No. Vorn was dead. There was only one reason there was no mercenary here to save me from imprisonment.
She saw my look of understanding at who had betrayed me, and she smiled, but it didn’t reach her eyes.
She turned to the stern-looking soldier. “I won’t be needing you. She’ll come with me.” She turned to look at me, her hand rising and making a come-here motion. “Come, come, don’t dally.”
The urge to back into the wagon and close the door in her face was strong.
“Amarya, I won’t ask again.”
Slowly, I got out of the wagon and walked toward her. I saw the carriage and the four guards on horseback. Two in front, two in the rear, a driver seated in the front of the carriage in the same blue uniform.
The Verei Kahn symbol on the carriage door was overkill in my opinion, but no one was asking for my opinion.
“Come.” She turned, and with a flick of her wrist, the carriage door opened.
The ease with which she displayed her power nauseated me.
At the carriage step, I hesitated.
“Come, Amarya, you have a lot to tell me.”
I really didn’t.
I looked behind me, at the soldiers who’d just been robbed of their prisoner. To the prison wagon, the door was still open, but the contents were now gone.
I looked up and saw it.
Blue sky.
The whole sky was blue. It was so big. So… empty. I couldn’t catch my breath.
It was so blue. Not a cloud in sight. It was mesmerizing.
“Amarya, stop gawking. You’ve seen the sky before. Come! Time is wasting, and you’ve already wasted enough of my time. Come, girl.”
I looked at her, and slowly, I got into the carriage. The door swung shut of its own accord, and I heard the soft snick of the lock, louder than any cell I’d ever been in.
The driver cracked his whip, and the carriage began to move.
“Now,” she said, giving me a small smile. “Tell me everything.”
Everything? I had nothing to tell her.
“I have nothing to tell you,” I told her. “Except I should never have come south. I should never have taken the trail. I should never have looked up.”
She frowned. Then a look of understanding crossed her face, and she reached over to pat my knee.
“You’re in Florlunia now, and we’re going to the capital, to the Verei Kahn Institution in Lyfelona, where you will be tested to be Chosen. It’s okay, my girl. Winter is over.”
I stared at her. So many things were wrong with her statement. But one thing was true.
Winter was over, and spring was stirring.
To be Continued in Book 2 of
The Season’s Tapestry,
Spring Stirring.