“You wash. I’ll dry,” the sentinel said at her side.
Elide peeked out from behind the curtain of her hair. Asterin’s black-and-gold eyes glittered.
“Th-thank you,” she made herself stammer.
The amusement in those immortal eyes grew. Not a good sign.
But Elide continued her work, passing the witch the pots and plates.
“An interesting task, for a lord’s daughter,” Asterin observed, quietly enough that no one else in the bustling kitchen could hear.
“I’m happy to help.”
“That chain says otherwise.”
Elide didn’t falter with the washing; didn’t let the pot in her hands slip an inch. Five minutes, and then she could murmur some explanation and run.
“No one else in this place is chained up like a slave. What makes you so dangerous, Elide Lochan?”
Elide gave a little shrug. An interrogation—that’s what this was. Manon had called her a spy. It seemed her sentinel had decided to assess what level of threat she posed.
“You know, men have always hated and feared our kind,” Asterin went on. “It’s rare for them to catch us, to kill us, but when they do … Oh, they delight in such horrible things. In the Wastes, they’ve made machines to break us apart. The fools never realized that all they needed to do to torture our kind, to make us beg”—she glanced down at Elide’s legs—“was to chain us. Keep us tied to the earth.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
Two of the fowl-pluckers had hooked their hair behind their ears in a futile attempt to overhear them. But Asterin knew how to keep her voice low.
“You’re, what—fifteen? Sixteen?”
“Eighteen.”
“Small for your age.” Asterin gave her a look that made Elide wonder if she could see through the homespun dress to the bandage she used to flatten her full breasts into an unnoticeable chest. “You must have been eight or nine when magic fell.”
Elide scrubbed at the pot. She’d finish it and go. Talking about magic around these people, so many of them eager to sell any bit of information to the dread-lords who ruled this place … It would earn her a trip to the gallows.
“The witchlings who were your age at the time,” the sentinel went on, “never even had a chance to fly. The power doesn’t set in until their first bleeding. At least now they have the wyverns. But it’s not the same, is it?”
“I wouldn’t know.”
Asterin leaned in close, an iron skillet in her long, deadly hands. “But your uncle does, doesn’t he?”
Elide made herself smaller and bought herself a few more seconds of time as she pretended to consider. “I don’t understand.”
“You’ve never heard the wind calling your name, Elide Lochan? Never felt it tug at you? You’ve never listened to it and yearned to fly toward the horizon, to foreign lands?”
She’d spent most of her life locked in a tower, but there had been nights, wild storms …
Elide managed to get the last bit of burnt food off the pot and rinsed it, handing it to the witch before wiping her hands on her apron. “No, Lady. I don’t see why I would.”
Even if she did want to flee—wanted to run to the other end of the world and wash her hands of these people forever. But it had nothing to do with the whispering wind.
Asterin’s black eyes seemed to devour her whole. “You would hear that wind, girl,” she said with expert quiet, “because anyone with Ironteeth blood does. I’m surprised your mother never told you. It’s passed on through the maternal line.”
Witch-blood. Ironteeth blood. In her veins—in her mother’s lineage.
It wasn’t possible. Her blood flowed red; she had no iron teeth or nails. Her mother had been the same. If there was ancestry, it was so old that it had been forgotten, but …
“My mother died when I was a child,” she said, turning away and nodding her farewell to the head cook. “She never told me anything.”
“Pity,” Asterin said.
The servants all gawked at Elide as she limped out, their questioning eyes telling her enough: they hadn’t heard. A small relief, then.
Gods—oh, gods. Witch-blood.
Elide took the stairs up, each movement sending shooting pains through her leg. Was that why Vernon had kept her chained? To keep her from flying off if she ever showed a lick of power? Was that why the windows in that tower in Perranth had been barred?
No—no. She was human. Fully human.
But at the very moment these witches had gathered, when she’d heard those rumors about the demons who wanted to … to … breed, Vernon had brought her here. And had become very, very close with Duke Perrington.
She prayed to Anneith with every step upward, prayed to the Lady of Wise Things that she was wrong, that the Third was wrong. It wasn’t until she reached the foot of the Wing Leader’s tower that Elide realized she had no idea where she was going.
She had nowhere to go at all. No one to run to.
The delivery wagons wouldn’t arrive for another few weeks. Vernon could hand her over whenever he wished. Why hadn’t he done so immediately? What was he waiting for? To see if the first of the experiments worked before offering her as a bargaining chip for more power?
If she was such a valuable commodity, she’d have to go farther than she’d suspected to escape Vernon. Not just to the Southern Continent, but beyond, to lands she’d never heard of. But with no money, how would she? No money—except for the bags of coins the Wing Leader left scattered around her room. She peered up the stairs stretching into the gloom. Maybe she could use the money to bribe someone—a guard, a lower-coven witch—to get her out. Immediately.
Her ankle barked in pain as she hurried up the staircase. She wouldn’t take an entire bag, but rather a few coins from each, so the Wing Leader wouldn’t notice.
Mercifully, the witch’s room was empty. And the various bags of coins had been left out with a carelessness only an immortal witch more interested in bloodshed could achieve.
Elide carefully set about stuffing coins into her pocket, the binding around her breasts, and her shoe so that they wouldn’t be discovered all at once, so they wouldn’t jingle.
“Are you out of your mind?”
Elide froze.
Asterin was leaning against the wall, her arms crossed.
The Third was smiling, each of those razor-sharp iron teeth glinting in the afternoon light.
“Bold, mad little thing,” the witch said, circling Elide. “Not as docile as you pretend, eh?”
Oh, gods.
“To steal from our Wing Leader …”
“Please,” Elide whispered. Begging—maybe that would work. “Please—I need to leave this place.”
“Why?” A glance at the pouch of money clenched in Elide’s hands.
“I heard what they’re doing with the Yellowlegs. My uncle—if I have … if I have your blood, I can’t let him use me like that.”
“Running away because of Vernon … At least now we know you’re not his spy, witchling.” The witch grinned, and it was almost as terrifying as one of Manon’s smiles.
That was why she’d ambushed her with the knowledge: to see where Elide would run to after.
“Don’t call me that,” Elide breathed.
“Is it so bad to be a witch?” Asterin spread her fingers, appreciating her iron nails in the dim light.
“I’m not a witch.”
“What are you, then?”
“Nothing—I’m nobody. I’m nothing.”
The witch clicked her tongue. “Everybody is something. Even the most common witch has her coven. But who has your back, Elide Lochan?”
“No one.” Only Anneith, and Elide sometimes thought even that could be her imagination.
“There is no such thing as a witch being alone.”
“I’m not a witch,” she said again. And once she got away, once she left this festering empire, she’d be no one at all.
“No, she’s certainly not a witch,” Manon snapped from the doorway, gold eyes cold. “Start talking. Now.”
Manon had endured a fairly shitty day, which was saying something, given her century of existence.
The Yellowlegs coven had been implanted in a subterranean chamber of the Keep, the room carved into the mountain rock itself. Manon had taken one sniff of that bed-lined room and walked right back out again. The Yellowlegs didn’t want her there, anyway, while they were cut open by men, while that bit of stone was sewn inside them. No, a Blackbeak had no place in a room where Yellowlegs were vulnerable, and she’d likely make them vicious and lethal as a result.
So she’d gone to training, where Sorrel had kicked her ass in hand-to-hand combat. Then there had been not one, not two, but three different fights to break apart between the various covens, including the Bluebloods, who were somehow excited about the Valg. They had gotten their noses broken by suggesting to a Blackbeak coven that it was their divine duty not just to go through with the implantation but also to go so far as to physically mate with the Valg.
Manon didn’t blame her Blackbeaks for shutting down the talk. But she’d had to dole out equal punishment between the two groups.