“Stand!”
It was the voice from her cell, speaking first in Imperial and then in Aydori.
Four sets of mage-flecked eyes turned to Danika. Who stood.
“If we behave, we’re treated well. If we don’t, we go back into the dark.” She hoped the rage that kept her lips back off her teeth couldn’t be heard. “It seems simple enough. We have more than merely ourselves to think of.” Then, sweeping her gaze around the circle, she breathed, Lull them.
Jesine stood first and gifted the guards with a tentative glance from under long, gold-tipped lashes. It was the kind of look that would have evoked protective instincts in a stone. It wasn’t sexual. It spoke to the best part of men, the part that wanted to protect, that wanted, sometimes in spite of themselves, to be a hero.
The other three stood at the same time. Stina wore her most placid expression. Annalyse looked young and frightened. Kirstin smiled, and Danika hoped she’d heard lull. She hated herself for thinking it, but the barely present Kirstin who traveled from Aydori to Karis had caused her less concern.
“Go with your guards!” Again in Imperial and then Aydori.
The guards broke into pairs, and pointed.
Danika breathed harmless at Mouth-breather and Hairy-knuckles and walked down the hall to her cell as gracefully as she could manage. She hadn’t been one of the season’s beauties, but Ryder had told her the first time they’d met that she walked like she was dancing.
Two new guards, Crooked-finger and Pocked-chin, arrived to take Danika back to the big room before she had time to get hungry or tired. She was almost certain they were the pair who’d escorted Stina to breakfast. It seemed the guards were working a variation of the way the soldiers had shifted in and out of the coaches.
Good. It wouldn’t be long before all twelve were convinced they were harmless. Guards who believed their prisoners were harmless grew careless. Their reaction time slowed.
In the big room, the debris of their meal and the two puddles of vomit had been cleared away. The room smelled of strong soap and held what looked like a Healer-mage’s examination table and a lectern with an inkwell and an open ledger. Standing between them was the woman who’d been waiting in the water room when they’d been brought up out of the dark. Danika guessed she was in her late thirties, early forties, light brown hair going gray and twisted up into a knot on the back of her head. Had they both been barefoot or both in shoes, Danika figured there’d have been no difference in their height. She was slightly stocky and wore a dark green bib apron over lighter green clothes so plain they had to be a uniform. Her hands and bare forearms looked strong. She wore a neutral expression like a shield, but it didn’t quite hide the resentment in the gaze that swept over Danika from head to foot and back again.
“On the table.”
It was the voice from the speakers. The voice who’d told them to rise and use the commode. It made sense. She’d spoken Aydori in the water room. Her accent had been twisted by Imperial and…Danika wasn’t sure, but she assumed Pyrahn. As the woman opened her mouth to repeat the instruction, Danika moved toward the table, having taken enough time to establish she moved because she chose to, not because she instinctively followed a superior’s command.
“Who,” she breathed, “are you?” The table was high enough, her feet dangled above the floor. She tensed as the woman pressed her hand against the swell of her belly, but there was no cruelty in the contact, only a familiar efficiency.
“How far along?” This close, she smelled of the same soap as the room.
“Who? Almost four months.” Closer to three.
The noncommittal noise could have been acceptance or disbelief. She crossed back to the lectern and dipped the pen and wrote a notation on the first page of the ledger. Her handwriting was also efficient, dark and blocky enough to see even from where Danika sat. “Any problems?”
“Who? Problems as a result of being kidnapped, exposed to an unknown and ancient artifact, dragged across three countries…” Danika touched the fading bruise on her face. “…beaten, and unlawfully confined, not to mention the emotional effect of not knowing what has happened to my husband, my family, and my country?” Pulled around by Danika’s words, the woman turned away from the ledger, brows drawn in, but before she could speak, Danika added, hands spread. “I don’t know.”
“You don’t know if you’re having problems?”
That tone Danika knew. The beautiful are stupid. The rich are useless. The powerful have no common sense. It was, in its own way, as uncaring as Leopald’s belief they were animals but more familiar and easy enough to work with. She smiled and answered with the same gentle reproach she’d have used on a young Pack member being too aggressive. “I don’t know if the baby is having problems. It’s all happening on the inside, isn’t it?”
Given their relative ages, the reproach both was and wasn’t patronizing. The woman took a deep annoyed breath before responding. “Any problems on the outside, then.”
“Beyond the obvious?” Danika glanced over at the guards. “No.”
“First child?”
“Do I have children in Aydori crying for their mother? No.”
“Yes or no. I don’t care about the rest.”
Danika inclined her head in a gracious, silent apology and hid a smile as the woman spun on a heel back to the ledger. She made another notation, the pen’s metal nib digging into the paper, then pulled a watch from her apron pocket. Cradling it in the cup of her palm, she gently flipped it open. She cared about the watch. That might be useful.
When she turned to note Danika’s pulse, Danika breathed, Who? at her a fourth time.
“My name is Adeline Curtin. I’m a midwife. You’ll be in my…care.”
The slight pause before the last word made Danika think she’d only just stopped herself from saying something else. Custody? Control?
“How do you come to speak Aydori.”
Adeline’s eyes narrowed. “Answer when spoken to.”
Danika inclined her head again.
Before she left the room, she sent another suggestion toward Leopald’s rathole that he speak to her. On the way back to her cell, she breathed Adeline Curtin, midwife onto the air that found its way under the doors, knowing Kirstin at least would hear it, and one more harmless at Crooked-finger and Pocked-chin.
She pulled the pillow off the bed and waited on the floor for Kirstin to return.
“She was born in Pyrahn. Came to the empire with her husband.” Kirstin’s voice drifted down the hall and in under Danika’s door. “She doesn’t want to be here.”
“Who does? She can’t be angry at Leopald, so she’s angry at us.”
“She’s angry at the world. If you push, she’ll attack.”
That sounded familiar. “She wants to be Alpha, but every time she’s challenged, she’s lost the fight.”
After a long moment, long enough Danika thought the other Air-mage might not answer at all, Kirstin said, “We know how to work with that.”
If Adeline learned Aydori in Pyrahn, she had to have been born into one of the trading families. Her accent was too rough for negotiations, so probably carting; either learning the language when the drivers practiced at home or traveling back and forth across the border on the wagons.
I don’t know you yet, Adeline Curtin, Danika thought, curled by the door listening for Stina’s return. But I will.