fisherman.” It was a rare ability among animages, communicating with fish, but this man could get fish to swim directly into whatever nets or baskets he had set up. He spoke little and kept mostly to himself. “And the night of the attack, he was finishing the salt-trout rations for the return journey. No fish was served that night.”
The bondservant seemed surprised by Sev’s words, and the tremor in his hands lessened. Maybe he expected nothing good from a soldier. Sev remembered thinking the same thing, once.
Rolan’s face was inscrutable. He glanced down at a sheaf of papers he’d brought in with him, as if confirming Sev’s story against the details written there.
“Did you happen to catch his name, Sevro?”
“Alastor,” Sev said, and Rolan nodded. He gestured to the guard standing by the door, who helped the bondservant to his feet and led him back out the door they’d come through.
Before Sev could guess what would happen to Alastor, another knock sounded on the door, and the guard returned with a young woman. She was probably only a few years older than Sev’s eighteen, and despite having her hands bound like the old man before her, she held her chin high.
Sev studied her face, but he didn’t recognize her. Her expression was defiant, if a bit cowed by Rolan’s cool, indifferent stare.
“I’ve never seen her before, my lord.”
“She was stationed with the secondary forces and would have arrived around the time the poisoning took place,” Rolan said, glancing down at his papers once again. “We are assuming the poisoning was at the hands of Captain Belden’s bondservants, but I wish to be thorough. You never saw her near the cook fires or food stores?”
Sev shook his head. “No, sir.”
“Very well,” Rolan said, though his voice sounded more tired than relieved as he bent over his papers and waved the girl and the guard away. Sev tried to read over Rolan’s shoulder and thought he caught the words “return to” before the governor leaned back and Sev hastily withdrew his gaze.
The third bondservant was a plump woman who wept throughout the meeting, and the fourth was a burly man with an unkempt beard and forearms as thick as tree trunks. Neither had been involved, as far as Sev knew, and he did his best to recount where he last remembered seeing them or their assignments on the day’s duty rosters. It was a delicate balance—Sev knew more than the average soldier would, so he had to be vague in some instances and more specific in others.
He measured each word he spoke, hoping every time the door closed that it would be the last time—while secretly, desperately hoping that it wouldn’t be, that there would be just one more survivor….
Even that was selfish, though. In a perfect world, Kade wouldn’t be caught—he’d have run as far from the war and the empire as possible. In some ways that was easier…. Sev could imagine him living somewhere safe in Pyra, free from bondage, but the hard part was that he’d never know for sure. The hard part was imagining the other possibility if Kade didn’t turn up today, the far more likely possibility that Kade had died like so many others that night. That Sev would never see him again.
Rolan took notes, asking questions here and there, but it seemed that their full stories had already been recounted and recorded—likely by Officer Yara—and Sev was acting as confirmation for the details.
He wasn’t sure if he should be relieved that none of Trix’s true conspirators had been caught, or if this meant that they’d all likely been executed atop Pyrmont.
When the door opened for the fifth time, Sev’s heart plummeted.
This was someone he knew—and not the person he’d secretly been hoping for.
The man who shuffled into the room had steely gray hair and eyes to match. His skin was a deep, ruddy shade that came from a lifetime in the sun, and his thin body was wiry with age and decades of hard work. Sev recalled that he’d been a breeder of Stellan horses in the south but hadn’t been a registered animage and so owed fifteen years of back taxes. He’d probably be a bondservant until he died.
Sev remembered him; he’d been part of the hunting party—the worst duty for an animage, being forced to lure animals to the slaughter over and over again.
He’d also been a supporter of Trix. He’d helped to harvest the pyraflora—Trix’s poison of choice—while out on hunting trips,