she has to be new because we have to be sure of her loyalties, and she has to be married. A woman whose husband is Talented would be the real gem.”
“So when you find this married woman, you’re going to kidnap her?” Vi asked. “Isn’t that a little risky?”
“Another person might have said immoral, but . . . well, a truly kidnapped woman wouldn’t cooperate. Ideally, we’d like to have the man on the premises. Just sticking a wedding ring on a woman’s hand isn’t going to cut it. The more permanent and steady the marriage appears, the better.”
“Why not have Vi do it?” Uly asked. “She doesn’t want to be stuck in classes with me and the other twelve-year-olds anyway.”
Ariel shook her head. “Believe me, I thought of her first, but she’s totally unsuited to the task.”
“You mean as a student or a wife?” Vi asked.
“Both. No offense, but I’ve known men who married the wrong woman, and they were all miserable. I’m sure we could ask some man to marry you, and we’d get lots of takers. You’re a beautiful woman and around beautiful women men tend to think with their—” she looked at Uly and cleared her throat—“irrational side. Even if we could bribe the right fool, and believe me, the Chantry would—they won’t put some man’s happiness ahead of the Chantry’s welfare—even then it wouldn’t happen. Vi isn’t trustworthy. She isn’t obedient. Nor is she intelligent enough—”
“You really are a bitch,” Vi said, but Sister Ariel ignored her.
“—and besides, she’d probably try to run away, which would destroy her usefulness to us and waste all our effort. So, like I said, totally unsuitable.”
Vi stared at her hatefully. She knew the whole discussion had just been a ploy to cut her down, tell her how unworthy she was, but the intelligence comment had cut deeper than anything. For all the times that she’d been complimented in her life—men did a lot of that when they were trying to get up your skirts—whether the compliments had been crass or poetic, they had always been about her body. She was smart, dammit.
Sister Ariel stared right back at her. Then she seemed to look deeper.
“Stop!” she said.
Vi stopped. “What?”
Sister Ariel nudged her horse awkwardly until after a few attempts she got it to move beside Vi. She reached out and grabbed Vi’s face in both of her hands.
“That son of a bitch,” Ariel said. “Don’t let anyone heal this, do you understand? He’s—wow—look at that. If anyone touches this with magic, there are weaves of fire that will be unleashed around all of the major blood vessels in your brain. And that looks suspiciously like . . . have you lost control of your body at any time you can remember?”
“What do you mean, like pissed myself?”
“You’d know what I mean if it had happened. I’m going to have to see if Sister Drissa Nile will come back. She’s the only one I’d let touch this.”
“Who’s that?” Uly asked.
“She’s a healer. The best with tiny weaves that I know. Has some little shop in Cenaria, last I heard.”
“You’re not going to tell me anything else about this weave that’s supposed to kill me?” Vi said.
“Not unless you tell me who set it.”
“You can go—”
“If you curse me one more time, you’ll regret it,” Sister Ariel said.
The last punishment had been bad enough and the satisfaction for cursing small enough that Vi choked back her words.
They had entered the copse of trees when Vi spotted something partly hidden under leaves off the side of the path, something like dark hair glowing in the dying sunlight.
Uly followed her gaze. “What’s that?”
“I think it’s a body,” Vi said. And then, as they left the path to take a closer look, her heart soared. It was indeed a body—a death that meant life for her. It was freedom and a new start. The dead man was Kylar.
45
Elene’s whole body was in pain. She’d been riding as hard as she could bear for six days, and she still hadn’t made it to Torras Bend. Her knees hurt, her back hurt, her thighs were in agony, and she still wasn’t gaining any time on Uly and Uly’s kidnapper. She knew that because she asked everyone she passed on the road if they’d seen a woman and child riding hard to the north. Most of them hadn’t, but those who had remembered. If anything, Elene had been falling behind. And it was all up to Elene now.