gates in splendid formation without Hamanu asking questions Escrissar wouldn’t want to answer. Stealth would be required, and stealth took time.
They could have a fifteen-day week before disaster struck. Or much longer. Or less, if Escrissar proved inordinately efficient.
And if Telhami had sent Zvain tumbling before he’d had enough time to reveal the secrets of the Sun’s Fist to Escrissar, as Zvain swore she had, there was a chance the interrogator would blunder onto the salt flats unaware of their breadth and unprepared for their dangers.
If Zvain was telling the truth. In Pavek’s opinion, the boy still had ample reason to lie.
Contrary to Telhami’s expectations, the guardian had not swallowed Zvain. The boy had already spent five long days and longer nights in Telhami’s grove. Cut off from everything familiar, twice-betrayed by Elabon Escrissar—once when the interrogator deceived him into believing he’d doomed himself to a defiler’s life, and the second time, a consequence of the first, when his carefully memorized spell had failed to kindle a destructive blast of sorcery—Zvain had spilled tales of his life in House Escrissar as freely as a poorly woven basket leaked water whenever anyone checked to see if he was still alive.
“Everything watches me,” Zvain said to Pavek on the morning of his sixth day in the grove. A day when Pavek’s increasingly sharp sense of guilt and responsibility had driven him across the barrens to visit the boy at last. “The bugs and the birds, the trees and the stones. Everything. Even the water.” The boy’s red-rimmed eyes flickered nervously, seeming unable to rest on any one object within the grove. “It all watches me and listens.”
Zvain’s gaze settled then on him, steady and accusing. “Just like at Escrissar’s. No better. Worse, maybe.”
And Pavek couldn’t forget being faced with that look, clenched fists in the night.
But then the eyes filled, the pleading note returned to the boy’s hoarse voice. “How can I make them know I’m sorry, Pavek? Tell Kashi I’m sorry, that I didn’t mean it, any of it.” And the small fingers sought his own, which clenched back of their own accord. “Please make her believe? There’re dead things here, Pavek. I can see them at night and whenever I go to the trees’ edge.”
The hand trembled with what, he suspected, was very real, fear. Zvain had made himself a lair in the middle of the grove’s largest grassland, a small hollow some seven mansized strides across. He was noticeably thinner; the druids’ assertion that no one could starve in one of their groves apparently did not apply to a prisoner too frightened to pick a handful of berries from a bush with eyes. And when those fingers slipped his and Zvain wrapped his arms around Pavek as he had done so often in the Urik bolt-hole, Pavek found he couldn’t refuse to offer the comfort so obviously needed.
“It’s not my fault, Pavek, is it? I was looking for you when he found me. He locked me up, just like this, and then he gave me things—I tried to be careful Pavek, I thought he was a slaver, but he was worse, and then it was too late.” Zvain’s arms squeezed harder. “You’ve got to believe me. You’ve got to get me out of here.”
Pavek knelt to return Zvain’s embrace, and as the boyish arms wrapped around his neck and the boyish head burrowed into his neck, he found himself wondering why it was easier to hug and hold someone he didn’t trust than to comfort Akashia, whom he did. Even now, when tears were soaking his shirt and trickling down his ribs, why should he want to reassure the boy when he knew, both in his head and his heart, that Telhami was right? It was a tragedy when an innocent youth was corrupted, but that didn’t mean that the corruption should be spared its rightful end.
He, himself, had lived in corruption all his life without succumbing to it—or so both Oelus and Telhami said. Of course, no one had ever tempted him the way Escrissar had tempted Zvain, or abandoned him quite the way he had abandoned the boy. And Zvain was his weak point, the only opening a man like Escrissar needed.
He extracted himself from Zvain’s embrace.
“Please, Pavek? Please?” The whine was back; Zvain reattached himself around Pavek’s ribs. “Don’t leave me here. Take me with you. Make them forgive me—like you made them forgive Ruari after he busted the zarneeka stowaway.”