What did you think they were going to do with the intelligence you fed them?”
The tears fell down Elliot’s cheeks now, and they made Tristan’s throat tight. He couldn’t afford to get so emotional, but it was hard to look at the face of the person who had doomed them.
“I didn’t see her,” Sev piped in hoarsely from his place on the ground. “There was no girl with us, no hostage. Maybe they were lying.”
Elliot squeezed his eyes shut, his face crumpling.
Tristan raked a hand through his hair. With a nod, he ordered two guards to escort Elliot away for further questioning.
Low murmurs broke out as he left, and the other apprentices exchanged stricken looks. Nyk stared at Elliot’s retreating back, his expression bleak. Tristan ignored everyone’s reactions and drew a deep breath, squaring his shoulders. He tried to channel his father, his sense of unflappable confidence and infinite capability.
Instead he felt like a child marching around in his father’s oversize Riding boots.
He turned back to Sev. “How many?” he asked. They needed to devise a defense strategy, but to do that, Tristan needed more information.
Sev swallowed, blinking slowly. The brief burst of energy the rockwine had given him was already fading away. “Near four hundred, I think. We had two hundred in my regiment, and we met with a second group last night. But those village attacks . . . they must have come from another group of soldiers, traveling somewhere else on the mountain. There’s no way our party could have gotten there in time. So there could be more . . .”
Tristan closed his eyes, nodding, as if merely confirming the number of guests at a dinner party. At least four hundred armed soldiers, coming here? When all their best fighters were gone?
He opened his eyes again. “How do we know you aren’t a part of the diversion?” he asked, considering the boy before him. Elliot’s betrayal had shaken him, and he did not want any more nasty surprises. “You’re a soldier, aren’t you? And you betrayed them. Why should we trust you?”
Sev stared dully at him, but made no answer. Tristan tried to think of what his father would do.
“Get Morra,” he said, twisting to address a guard behind him.
“Already here,” came Morra’s gruff voice as she moved her way to the front of the crowd. The guards made room for her, and she paused before Sev, propping both hands on her crutch as she considered him.
Tristan’s father trusted Morra implicitly. He said she had an uncanny ability to tell truth from lies, a knack for sniffing out information. Tristan had heard Beryk and the others whisper the term “shadowmage,” but of course his father didn’t hold with superstitions. There was no proof or written record that shadowmages were real, but Tristan knew the stories. If even half of them were true, he had no doubt that Morra was one of them.
It made a chill run down his spine. Tristan was honest by nature—possibly to a fault, given the trouble it had gotten him in with his father—but Morra still made him a bit uneasy. It was the secretiveness of her magic that bothered him, not the magic itself. Shadow magic could be used to sniff out lies, but it did so in a deceitful way—snooping and sneaking around. If people were just truthful, there would be no need for such magic—or for people to keep the fact that they had that magic a secret.
Or maybe Tristan was fooling himself. His fear of fire was something he hid from others, and maybe the threat of exposure was what made him dislike the idea of shadow magic.
Still, he couldn’t deny that it came in handy.
“Who have we here . . . ?” Morra murmured, expression thoughtful. “Friend or foe?”
“Friend,” Sev said. His face was clammy with sweat, but he sat up straighter as he continued. “And I was sent by another friend, Ilithya Shadowheart.”
Pheronia was not fit to rule, and the council manipulated her every move. I had to step in.
- CHAPTER 36 -
VERONYKA
VERONYKA TOOK AN UNCONSCIOUS step forward.
She’d been in a daze since she recognized the soldier they’d dragged in, filthy and bloody but unmistakable. The boy who had saved her life outside her cottage, and in turn, whose life she had saved from Val’s wrath. By convincing her sister to stay her hand, Veronyka had allowed this boy to deliver his message and warn them of the impending attack. Her head spun.