that she would recognize him now.
“Farrendel? Are you awake? Are you all right?” Melantha’s voice echoed down the passageway. “Farrendel?”
She had taken to calling out to him every hour or so. Occasionally he would respond. Most of the time he did not.
Farrendel clenched his fists and ground his teeth. “I am alive, if that is what you are asking.”
The longer he was here, the more torture he endured, he began to understand how it was possible to hate a sibling.
Melantha had to be working with the trolls. Even though they had used her to recapture him, they had not used her since. They had not threatened to torture her and had not tortured him with her screams. If she had been spared, it could only mean that she was working with them or had somehow bargained for her safety at his expense.
Something rattled, then clanked down the hall. Two sets of boots tromped closer across the stone.
His eyes snapped open, even as he let a hard, savage strength flow into his muscles. With a swift thought, he slammed an iron door on the heart bond, locking away Essie’s chatter and cutting her off from what was to come.
The door to Farrendel’s cell opened, and King Charvod marched inside, his carved, antler crown resting on his forehead. His short-cropped white hair gleamed in the torchlight while his gray skin was the same color as the stones behind him. His dark blue eyes burned.
Prince Rharreth shut the door behind him and leaned against the wall. Ever the observer. He never participated in the torture himself, but he never stopped it either.
The troll king halted next to Farrendel, his boots inches from Farrendel’s ribs as he loomed over him as if trying to make him feel small and vulnerable.
It would not work. Such feelings had died days ago.
Farrendel bared his teeth and glared. What he would not give for a sword in his hand and magic crackling over his fingertips.
King Charvod slammed his boot into Farrendel’s ribs. “It has been five whole days. Why has your brother not attacked yet? What is he waiting for?”
Pain flared along Farrendel’s ribs, but not enough to even draw a moan from him. A kick was hardly considered pain at this point.
Of course, King Charvod would expect Weylind to have attacked by now. A quick rally of the army. An attempt at a swift rescue. A repeat of last time, down to its deadly end and a fallen elven king.
But King Charvod had revealed his hand too soon, and now he no longer had spies in either Escarland or Tarenhiel to tell him what was happening. As Jalissa, and not Melantha, had been the sister sent to Escarland, King Charvod had no way to know how much Essie’s family had embraced Farrendel, nor how willing Essie’s brother Averett was to go to war to help Tarenhiel.
Farrendel might have worried about the delay, but he had the heart bond. He had felt the way Essie had gone from grief to determination to chattering hope. Surely she would not seem so lively, so hopeful, if the alliance between their brothers was not going well.
No, this delay was not something for him to fret over. It meant Weylind was wisely waiting for Averett to gather Escarland’s army so that together they could assault Kostaria. Would the combined forces be enough to carry them all the way to Gror Grar itself?
“Answer me!” King Charvod knelt and rested a hand on the stone floor, though he did not yet unleash his magic. “If you don’t, I will break you.”
Farrendel stared back. Then, of all things, he laughed.
Not a laugh of happiness or joy. He had forgotten how to do that kind of laugh decades ago. No, this was a laugh of hatred and wry contempt, filled with knowing what the troll king did not.
He could not break what was already broken.
That was something no one truly understood. Not even Essie had realized the truth.
Farrendel had not broken from the torture the last time he had been captured. Back then, just as he did now, he had the hope of rescue. He had clung to it with all the innocence of a boy whose father had never failed him.
He had hardened when his father had died in his arms. In those cracks, something else seeped inside to replace the innocence. Anger. Bitterness. Hatred.
He had broken the night he had killed the troll king in this very fortress. How many others besides Weylind realized