“You could have said no.”
“Just like you said no to marrying Hallix? Not so fucking easy, is it? I mean, you’re not actually going through with that one, are you?”
“What I’m trying to do isleave town. But every time I set so much as a foot on the right road, someone drags me back here to partake in the latest shitshow. And now I can’t even…” Her throat closed up, tears spilling once more from her eyes. “…because my sister’s in the… and I can’t just…Fuck!”
“I’m not going to kill her,” Nalyx said. “I meant what I said yesterday. I don’t think you’re a demon. And if you’re not, then she’s not either.”
Gantalla shrugged helplessly. “If you don’t kill her, someone else will. Gods, I can’t just…” A harsh sob escaped her. “I can’t just leave her there. What am I supposed to do?”
Nalyx muttered a curse to himself, sitting down on the wall again. He stared out across the square, eyes fixed on the people milling about the cage. Long minutes passed before he spoke again. “Okay, what we do next is… we need to come up with a plan to rescue her.”
“How?” Gantalla scoffed at him. “She’s in a locked cage, surrounded by hundreds of people. And even if we did get her out of the cage, I can hardly just hide a green-skinned demon under my bed for the next month.”
“Yes, but… What if she wasn’t a demon?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, you’ve got that crystal thingy that makes you look human. I mean, it is the black necklace, right? Or is it some other magic thing that I’m missing?”
“Yes, it’s the obsidian gem. But I’ve only got the one. And it was enchanted by a witch on the other side of the gate. It’s not exactly the sort of thing you can buy from a street vendor.”
Nalyx sat quietly, but from the way his eyes were darting about, she could tell he was thinking deeply about something. “Okay, so maybe this sounds crazy, but hear me out. The chances of you being the first person to ever make it through the gate are pretty slim, am I right?”
Gantalla nodded, catching onto the obvious point he was making. Gods above, she should have thought of that earlier. “Yes! I mean no! I mean… The witch. She said her sister was already living in town. And she said there were people here who send messages back through the gate, to help the people there make it across.” She stopped suddenly, instantly horrified at her own words. “You’re not supposed to know that,” she said, far too late to undo the damage she’d just done. Spilling the secrets of the gate to a warrior? Flaming hell, how stupid was she?
“Yeah, I think we’re well past the point where we need to worry about how many secrets I know,” Nalyx said. “You’ve turned my entire world upside down in the past twenty-four hours, and I have no idea what to do with that, but I’m not about to start outing you all to the other warriors.”
“Fair enough.” Maybe it was foolish to trust him, but there wasn’t much else she could do anymore.
“So can you find this witch’s sister?”
“No,” Gantalla said, her brief moment of enthusiasm fading. “She’d be disguised as a human. I only know her name, but in a city this big, it could take weeks to track her down just from her name alone.”
“But there must be other people in town. Your people, I mean. So… maybe you can just track down someone who has a similar sort of necklace?”
“You want me to just wander around town looking for people wearing a black necklace?”
“Unless you have a better idea?”
Sadly, she didn’t. “But even if I can find a necklace for my sister, then what? She’s still locked in a cage.”
“Every lock has a key. And this particular key is currently in the possession of one Captain of the Guard.”
“Which helps us how, exactly?”
“Easy. I sneak into his room later tonight and steal it.”
“The rooms that conveniently don’t have locks on them,” Gantalla said.
“Exactly. Because no one would ever believe that someone would try to steal from one of the warriors.”
“What if he’s in his room at the time?”
“I’ll find some sort of distraction for him.”
Gantalla gave him a sceptical look. “That’s rather vague for a rescue plan.”
“Do you have a better idea?”
