“Yes. A little.”
“And…what has become of him?”
“I do not know.” Livila kept her eyes on her task. The buttons clicked and shuffled. “No one knows.”
Ellina’s brows went up. “How can that be?”
“He disappeared. He cannot be found in the kitchens, nor the servants’ quarters, or even the city prisons. The rumor…” Livila glanced around, as if the walls might be listening. “The rumor is that he was banished to the whitelands.”
The whitelands. That icy cluster of northern islands where elves were sent in exile. Once a year in the dead of winter, the Shallow Sea froze just enough to create an ice-bridge, which allowed new exiles to be driven into those lands. The bridge lasted only a short time—a handful of days, a fortnight at most—before melting again, trapping exiles in that bitter world.
“I see,” Ellina said.
What she did not say was that winter had not yet come this year, and so Ermese could not have been sent to the whitelands.
She did not say that Queen Farah cared little about sparing elven lives, and had no reason to choose exile for a servant such as him.
Ellina did not say that Ermese was likely dead, and whatever information he possessed along with him.
NINETEEN
Venick watched the campfire with half-hooded eyes. He’d been sitting there for what might have been hours, listening to the fire eat the wood, drifting near sleep. It never got cold in the lowlands, not truly, but this night held a chill, the wind picking up the way it still did, sometimes, in his memory.
Dourin stepped into the firelight, scrutinizing Venick’s slumped posture, his half-undone boots. “Long day?”
“They’re all long days.”
“No luck with the highlander?”
“No luck with anything.”
Not his mother, not the council, not his redemption. And no, not the highland woman, who was currently holed up in a spare tent, stubbornly refusing to speak to anyone.
Dourin came to sit on the fire’s opposite side. The elf looked down at his hands. Into the flames. Out into the black nothingness of the forest. He intertwined his fingers. Broke them apart.
“It’s starting to hurt, watching you do that,” Venick said. “Say what you have to say.”
Dourin stilled. “We found a vial of poison hidden in one of the supply wagons.”
“Ah.”
“It is not ours, which means we have a would-be assassin in our midst. One of our new recruits, most likely. Whoever it is, they were smart enough to stash the poison where it could not be traced. We have no way of knowing who it belongs to.”
“Or who it was meant for.”
Dourin looked at Venick as if he was being particularly stupid. “It was meant for you.”
“Don’t sound so certain. Not everyone wants me dead.”
“The poison was amberwood.”
“And?”
“And, amberwood might make an elf sick, but it will kill a human.”
Venick leaned back on his elbows. He wasn’t surprised by the poison. Really, if there was a surprise to be had here, it was that no one had tried to kill him sooner. “I guess I’ll count myself lucky then, that I have you to dispose of all evils that would end me.”
“We did not dispose of it.”
