“Nevertheless. I have heard that the servants are…discontented with many of my recent changes. I want you to question Livila. Ask her for the gossip among her fellows. How do those elves view their new queen? Do they fear me? Are they loyal? I want her to give names of potential rebels, too.”
“She does not know anything.”
Farah must have heard the defensiveness in Ellina’s tone. She lifted a brow.
“If you want information,” Ellina continued, “there are elves better suited to give it.”
“Oh?”
“Yes.” The moment seemed to appear before her, like sunlight on stone. “What about the servant from the kitchens? Ermese. He seemed to have more to tell.”
Farah gave her a strange look. “Ermese no longer works in the kitchens.”
“Oh.” Ellina pretended to misunderstand. “Of course. He was blinded.”
“No.” Farah was still giving her that look. “He was a spy. I thought you would have gathered that from the interrogation. Traitors such as him cannot be allowed to wander free.”
“So he is dead?”
“Not dead.”
Ellina’s pulse jumped. She waited.
“We did not want to hold him in the city,” Farah explained. “That would have been too public. He is being kept in a private room beneath the palace, under the library. To your point, that servant has given us as much information as he can. He is no more use to us. We will not be questioning him further.”
TWENTY-ONE
Venick crumpled the letter in one hand.
He was in the city’s library, in a chair that had once belonged to his father. Outside, the day was clean. The view from the window showed the ocean, with its waves and warships dotting the horizon. Closer inland, fishing boats crowded for a slice of the shore.
The library’s hearth—a wide, marble confection—was unlit. It was too hot for a fire, too bright a day to justify burning wood. Venick itched to light one anyway. He wanted flames. He wanted somewhere where he could watch Ellina’s letter burn.
Lira took the letter from his hand and smoothed it over the table. She had been the one to invite him here, which Venick had taken as a good sign until she’d handed over the letter and said, “Explain.”
He couldn’t accuse her of intercepting his messages, because the letter hadn’t technically been addressed to him. Written on the envelope in thin, looped cursive were the words,To the Commander of Irek’s Men.Really, that described his mother better than it described him.
Yet the message was clearly not meant for Lira.
“It’s written in code,” his mother had said.
“That’s not code, Mother. It’s elvish.”
“I do not speak elvish.”
Venick stifled a sigh. “I know.”
And so he’d been forced to translate while Lira grew cold, darkening to hear her son speak the language of the elves.You killed your father for them, and now you’ve become one of them.
“The letter is a lie,” Venick said now, leaning back in his seat. “The Dark Queen doesn’t want a treaty—it’s a distraction.” But a distraction from what?
There was only one answer.
Venick said, “She’s planning an attack.”
Lira was stony. “I thought elves couldn’t lie in elvish.”
“Only when they speak it.”
