Just as she began to get hungry, she heard the guards escorting the other women from their cells. Three of the other women…When Danika finally reached the big room where another meal had been laid out, Jesine wasn’t there.
They waited.
“They brought her back after she saw the midwife,” Kirstin murmured, “and I didn’t hear them take her away again.”
“She asked too many questions.” When they all turned to look at her, Stina shrugged. “She’s a Healer-mage in a room with a midwife. You know she’d have assumed they’d share information.”
Adeline, as they knew her, would have resented that assumption.
Kirstin shot a narrow-eyed glance at the guards. “Do we demand to know what happened to her?”
“We know what happened to her,” Danika answered. “She’s locked in her cell for asking too many questions.”
“Sent to her room without supper,” Stina added.
“Treating us like children,” Kirstin snarled. When Stina sent a bland look toward the guards and another toward Kirstin, Kirstin reluctantly smiled. “Fine. Like potentially dangerous children.”
“Danika? What do we do?”
“We eat,” Danika told Annalyse, pulling out a chair and sitting down. “We stay strong.” There was a tureen of chicken stew with potatoes, carrots…She wrinkled her nose…. and parsnips in the center of the table. Next to it, a large basket of rolls. “Annalyse, you serve.” When Annalyse frowned, she added, “I thought it might help steady you, if you had something to do.”
The frown deepened.
Putting the serving spoon into the tureen, Danika stirred it once then pointed the handle at the younger woman. Annalyse flushed and took it, stirring twice more before she began to serve. Danika wasn’t certain purifying water would have any effect on possible drugs in chicken stew, but Annalyse was a powerful Water-mage and it certainly couldn’t hurt.
Without Jesine, they were quieter than they’d been at the last meal.
“Kirstin, talk to Stina. Need distraction.”
As Kirstin held forth about how bored she was alone in her cell, Danika set up communication tests with Stina and Annalyse, kicking Annalyse once in the ankle when the younger woman nearly replied to a question no one watching would have heard asked.
Leopald didn’t make an appearance. That didn’t mean he wasn’t up there in his rathole, watching.
“Creepy stalker,” Kirstin muttered.
Danika leaned back in her chair, stretched as though she was working the kinks out of her neck and breathed at the wall. “Talk to me.”
On the way back to her cell, she breathed harmless at Gouge-in-boot and Crooked-front-tooth.
Although they’d just eaten, there was bread and cheese and barley water in the cell as well as a clean nightgown across the end of the bed. Danika glanced up at the lamp, still burning brightly, then lay by the door.
“Me?” Stina was speaking quietly, mouth pressed as instructed to the crack under her door, but it was still dangerous if those listening heard her.
“Stina, I hear you.” Kirstin’s voice rode the air currents. “Can you hear me?”
No answer.
“Stina, I hear you.” Danika took her turn. “Can you hear me?”
No answer.
Danika recited the first three verses of the ancient epic The Hunt, memorized and dreaded by every Aydori schoolchild and took comfort from knowing Annalyse was doing the same.
“Me?” If Stina had nearly breathed it, Annalyse hummed. Smart. Hide the word in singing done to keep up failing spirits.
Like Stina, both Air-mages could hear her but couldn’t make themselves heard.
“It’s not much, but it’s something.”
“It’s nothing much,” Kirstin snarled. “We should tell the guards to free us.”
“We can’t convince them to do anything they don’t want to do.”
“Berger didn’t want to die.” Before Danika could answer, before she knew what she was going to say, Kirstin added, “We have to escape!”
“We’ll only get one chance. I’ll listen to any plan that allows us all to survive the attempt!”
It was a higher-stakes version of an argument they’d had before. Being Alpha was as much about knowing when to be cautious as when to attack. Kirstin had never been good at either caution or compromise.
Singing, as it turned out, was also a way to stave off boredom. Danika had a nap. Grew hungry. Ate the bread and cheese and drank the barley water. Had another nap. Made plans. Threw those plans away. Made more plans.
The door at the end of the hall opened. The movement of the air changed.
“Annalyse?”
And just barely, over the sound of boots against tile, a joyful, “Yes.”
The lamp went out.
Heart pounding, Danika reminded herself that the same thing had happened last night. Although she had no idea if it was night. It was dark at least. She put on the nightgown, threw her pillow back down by the door, and waited for a howl that never came.
She hoped it was because he’d heard her and had been comforted, not because he’d been killed and skinned.
The next day began almost exactly the same way.
Different guards. Chipped-tooth and Dry-lips.
Jesine was there at breakfast. “I kept asking questions when told to be quiet. That’s what the voice in the room…”
“Cell,” Danika corrected quietly. “They’re cells.”
Jesine’s gold-flecked eyes narrowed thoughtfully and she nodded. “That’s what the voice in the cell said. I’m really hungry.”
While Jesine talked, a normal enough reaction given her taste of isolation, Danika told Stina to work at the wood of her cell door. They had no Metal-mage among them, but Stina had once brought a rosewood sideboard into bloom. If she could weaken the wood enough to break it free of the hinges, the latch, and the bolt, then she could open all the other cells.
It would be slow work at the level the nets allowed, but it was a start.
The guards had taken her to the shower first but brought her to any communal time in the large room last. Danika thought if she could figure out why, she might be able to put the information toward their escape plan.
This morning, she was returned to the room to find the breakfast debris gone and the other four women standing in a line facing the wall where Leopald had appeared, their guards behind them close enough to grab them, far enough away to use their batons if necessary.
As she was herded toward the line, she noticed the other two guards standing at the base of the wall on either side of a large pile of multicolored fabric. The room smelled of…coriander.
The moment she stopped in the place left for her—Mole-under-ear and Dry-lips in the place left for them—the sections of the wall folded back, the guards all snapped to attention, and Leopald smiled down at them, leaning forward in the high-backed chair. The pelt he’d rolled out was still there but had been rolled back. Although they could no longer convince themselves it was a carpet, that helped. A little.
“Just so you know…” He actually looked a little sheepish although Danika assumed the expression was as false as their compliance. “…the Soothsayer’s Voice objected to me taking Terlyn out of his room. He hasn’t left it for thirteen years, so you’ll have to excuse him if he’s a little shy.”
Terlyn? Danika turned her attention to the pile of fabric. It seemed to be undulating in response to Leopald’s voice.
“Now, what I want you all to do is, one at a time, go forward and touch his hand. If you can’t find his hand, any exposed skin will suffice, but do be brief. He’s precious to me. He doesn’t See very far ahead, so there are days when he’s almost coherent and you have no idea how much I appreciate that. You start.”