Maverick looked at me. “You told him we were sent to stop her?” Maverick nodded to himself. “Ah…” Then he turned and walked away. “This way,” he called back to us without otherwise explaining anything. He was going to leave the truth to me.
Great.
I hoped the prince wouldn’t ask, but as we rose to follow Maverick, Alvere looked at me. “What are you not telling me?”
I sighed. No use in denying it now. “Once weknewthe mistweaver was there, itbecameour mission to stop her,” I said.
That’s still not the truth, Auwei said, and I got the impression of her shaking her head, even though she’d never had a head.
I know! But… it’s close enough.
If you insist.
I do.
Still, I owed him more, so I went on. “Our original mission was to find out if you were planning war against us.”
His brow furrowed further. “So… wait… you were sent to find out if we were planning war? But you’d already invaded our lands.”
“Not me, not us here. We didn’t know anything about the war.”
“But other Elistans…” He shook his head. “You really didn’t know… and even the person who ordered you to go didn’t know.”
“Or they did know,” I said with a grimace as Maverick led us down a set of stairs into the basement of the west wing. “And they were setting us up to fail and be scapegoats.”
“That’s horrible. Your own people…?”
“Yeah, exactly. That’s why we trust you more than our own right now.”
He nodded. “I see.”
I was glad he’d taken the truth well. He could have been very upset with us, with me, but he actually seemed sympathetic. That was a load off my mind.
We reached the bottom of the stairs. The basement was quite dark. Early on in my time at Hedgewild, I had done a perfunctory exploration of the basements, but hadn’t stayed long. There was no natural light and the narrow corridors, with cold stone walls, weren’t the friendliest of places.
Maverick snapped his fingers and several torches lit themselves along the dark stretch.
The prince and I paused, looking down the eerily quiet hallway as torch light cast dancing shadows upon the gloomy walls.
Maverick led on and we followed, hushed to silence now. When we got to a heavy iron door, Maverick got out keys, but then tested the door, it was unlocked. I was curious about this until we entered and saw Amber and Jack within. They had a single lantern shedding light on the long room with barred cells along the far wall. With another snap of his fingers the lanterns were lit and the room grew brighter. I could clearly see the dungeons of Hedgewild now.
They weren’t dank and gross, like I’d heard from tales meant to scare children into following the law. The cells looked to be roughly ten feet by ten feet with stone walls on three sides and a wall of iron bars along the front. All the cells contained a cot for a bed and a built-in basin, which I guessed could be filled with water for washing, as well as a not-so-private privy in the far corner. Two of the cells looked used, though only one was occupied. By “used” there were rushes on the floor and the bed was made up and water in the basin.
“We just moved her over,” Jack said to Maverick. I didn’t quite understand this, but I did then notice that there was a small metal door in the stone wall between every other cell, specifically there was one between the occupied cell and the other “used” cell.
Amber — intuitive as usual — slipped back to whisper to the prince and me. “We move any prisoners from one cell to another every other day to safely clean the now empty cell.”
That made sense.
Maverick approached the bars, and I drew ahead a little to focus on what was to come. The woman inside looked… normal, a bit small of stature and plain of features with light brown hair and brown eyes. She sat neatly on the side of her bed in a long plain dress.
“You’ve finally come to question me?” she asked Maverick. “It will do you no good. I know nothing.”
“We’ll see about that,” Maverick said, cold and hard. “You were gifted great powers. That is indisputable. Who gave you those powers?”
“The mistweaver,” the woman said evenly. “I don’t even know her name. She offered me enough gold to live happily for the rest of my life if I did as she asked.”
“And what did she ask?”
