“You are in danger here. Leave before you are detected. The rest shall be attended to. He will live and you will know him when you meet again.”
Isaura looked down on the youth’s face and into his grey eyes. “I will know you when we meet again.”
His lids grew heavy and his eyes slowly closed. His breathing came more regularly and the rattles from his chest had all but vanished. She smiled, then exited the room, trailing in the wake of two guardsmen who, though one held the door to the inn for her, had forgotten her before the door had swung shut.
Across the hall from Will’s sickroom, Scrainwood’s assessment of the deal they’d made left Alexia uneasy, but anything she might say could break their agreement. In the shadow of the dead sullanciri, she turned her attention to the one remaining problem. “Now we have to figure out how to save Will.”
The Oriosan king nodded. “I have already sent summonses to mages from throughout the kingdom. I will not lose the Norrington!”
The door to Kerrigan’s room swung open and Will slumped against the casement. “Lose me?” His voice came raw, hoarse and wet. “How will you lose me?” The naked youth’s eyes rolled up in his head, and he fell back into a startled Dranae’s arms.
25
Kerrigan awoke with the rumble of his empty stomach. Still in darkness, with only the growling of his bowels to compete with the dripping of water, he found himself disoriented for a moment. As it slowly came back to him where he was—though he had no idea where there was or why he was there—he began to wonder how long he had slept. The hollowness in his middle suggested he’d missed a meal.
He frowned. He liked to eat, and did it often, so his missing a meal might have meant he’d been gone for two hours or four, or two days. He made a mental note that he didn’t know of any spell that would inform him of the time or date, and began to consider how he would go about creating one.
As he thought, he heaved himself up off the straw-strewn ground and tightened the blanket around him. He coughed a little, but it was from a scratchy dry throat, not the wet cough he’d had before. While he was young and healthy, he was also aware that such coughs usually lingered for several days, and he refused to believe he’d slept that long. He played a hand over his jaw and felt little patches of stubble, that suggested he was less than a day and a half out from his last shave.
That means they used magick to clear my lungs.
The realization pleased him for two reasons. The first was that it indicated his captors did not intend to destroy him immediately. Healing spells were not easy to cast and, aside from himself, he knew of no human capable of doing so. This meant the person he’d spoken with had to be one of the elder races: elves or urZrethi. Since neither of them was known for being overly homicidal, Kerrigan gained some confidence.
The latter half of his realization—that his captor had to be a member of an elder race—gave him heart that his captivity actually had purpose. Few urZrethi or elves were in service to Chytrine, so the chances of his being turned over to her were diminished. Exactly what would be expected from him, on the other hand, he had no clue.
A click sounded off to his right. He turned to look and discovered a rectangle of light outlining a doorway. One of the horizontal shafts widened as the door opened. He struggled to his feet and staggered forward, but waited well shy of the portal. He expected another test and listened for noises that might reveal a trap.
“Please, Adept Reese, enter.”
Kerrigan crept closer and felt cooler air moving from the prison into the lighted room. He had to push the door open more fully to accommodate his bulk, even when he twisted to the side, then he pressed it closed behind him. The door shut with a muffled click and Kerrigan hoped he would never be required to pass back through it again.
The chamber into which he entered felt smaller than the prison and was an absolute farrago of priceless treasures and filthy trash. Barely twelve feet wide, and perhaps eight high and twenty long, its interior dimensions were defined by the forward edges of deep shelves, which contained rows of books running floor to ceiling. In some places the books had been recessed and trinkets arranged on the shelves—varying from oddly shaped rocks and the mounted skeletons of birds and beasts to artifacts of an arcane and unknowable nature.
Unknowable without the use of magick.
A wagon wheel had been made into the chandelier and it hung above the long, narrow table that filled the center of the room. Thick candles guttered on the wheel, and companions dripped wax in thick icicles from the shelves. Chairs had been arranged at Kerrigan’s end of the table, and the opposite. A melange of crockery and silver had been set on the table and steam rose from some dishes that Kerrigan could not recognize by sight or scent.
He shared the room with two other occupants. The first was seated across from him, with the high-backed chair turned so the person sat looking diagonally off to Kerrigan’s right. He appeared to be slender, and wore a gorgeous crimson robe of silk that had been painstakingly embroidered with golden thread, depicting dragons scrolling through an intricate knotwork. Thick gold cord covered seams, finished the sleeves, and rimmed the opening in the hood. The hood itself came low on the person’s face, shadowing most of it, and revealing little more than a highly stylized mask that completely covered the person’s face. The figure even wore leather gloves and a bright gold scarf, which meant not an inch of its flesh was revealed.
By contrast, the other figure in the room was all but naked. It squatted in the corner, rump on the ground at its heels, knees poking up above its shoulders, which were hunched forward, with its hands pressed to the floor before its groin. Kerrigan recognized it immediately for an urZrethi, but its shaggy black mane covered its shoulders and its beard bled down into a thick mat of chest hair. That hair continued down over its belly and thickened over its loins. Kerrigan couldn’t tell if the urZrethi was wearing some sort of furred loincloth or not, and did not study it long enough to find out. Where hair did not cover it, malachite flesh showed through, though in the candlelight it took on a sickly color.
Kerrigan immediately amended his assessment. The urZrethi had to be male—at least, it looked more bulky and wider than any female urZrethi he’d ever seen. What surprised him was seeing it at all. While he did not know much about urZrethi males, he had been under the impression that they were never seen outside the mountains. While Meredo’s proximity to Bok-agul made it possible for Kerrigan to have been transported there, the young mage thought that unlikely.
His host waved his left hand casually. “I apologize for the poverty of our surroundings, and the paucity of the victuals, but my means for treating with a guest are lamentably strained.”
Kerrigan nodded politely, then held his dirty hands up. “I am hardly much of a guest.”
Without turning his head, Kerrigan’s host raised his left hand and beckoned. “Bok, his hands.”
The urZrethi hunched his shoulders further and narrowed his black eyes. He made a little chortling sound deep in his throat, managing to rob it of any melodic content at all, then scuttled forward. Bok extended his left hand up, reaching for a silver basin on a high shelf, but without rising from that crouch, the basin remained a good foot beyond his reach.
Then the urZrethi’s arm stretched. Just the forearm bones lengthened, thinning the limb somewhat. The fingers nimbly caught the lip of the basin and brought it down, though Bok had to raise his elbow at an awkward angle to swing the vessel into his right hand.