So they were interrogating him after all.
Hell and damn.
“You say you have information for our queen,” Ellina went on.
“Yes.” Voice flat, because he knew how this would go. They would prod him for information, torture him when they became impatient. He would admit in elvish that he didn’t truly have a message for their queen, that he knew nothing about their war, and then they would kill him for trespassing as they should have done from the start. Or for lying. Or because they were elves, and he was human, and that was simply the way these things ended.
“And since I cannot trust anything you say in mainlander,” Ellina said, again studying his necklace, “I might teach you elvish in exchange for the truth. For proof that your information is valid.”
“Yes.”
“Do you speak elvish already?”
Venick hid his discomfort with a frown. “You know that I don’t.”
“I know nothing for certain.” The chain swayed gently in the light. “The elf who gave this to you. What was her name?”
“She was from the south. You wouldn’t know her.”
“Tell me anyway.”
Venick could lie. He would have, if only because saying that name was difficult, impossible, sometimes, and because he didn’t owe Ellina the truth. But he caught the shape of her mouth, the slow breaths, and some unknown instinct urged him to tell her. “Lorana,” he said, and this time it wasn’t pain that thinned his voice.
“Common name.”
“Yes.”
“I know many Loranas.”
“Know any who were killed by their own kind?”
Ellina was silent for a long moment. “We elves do not kill our own.”
“I hadn’t thought so either.”
“You are a liar, human.”
“Am I?”
She darkened. There was anger in her gaze now that she didn’t try to hide. No, shewantedhim seeing she was angry. Wanted him afraid for it, which he might have been if not for the ache in his foot, and his exhaustion, and the fact that he understood elves. He understood them better than humans, sometimes, and so he knew that her anger was meant to cover all the rest. Her uncertainty. Her worry. The train of her thoughts.
“I will teach you,” Ellina said.
Venick blinked. “What?”
“We are traveling to Tarrith-Mour. I will teach you elvish along the way.”
“I don’t—”
“You have until we reach that city to explain what you know in our language—inelvish—to prove that your information is true.”
Hope flared. Venick searched her face for some sign that she was joking, even though elves rarely did. She handed the necklace back and stood. “If you fail, human, you will die the way the bear did.”
THREE
The sun broke clear the next morning, the stars blinking out one by one. A liralin bird arrowed through the trees, calling out high and sweet. But Venick didn’t see the sun. He didn’t see the bird. He didn’t see the elves—six again—who hovered over him, or the grim lines on Ellina’s face. He didn’t see anything at all.
His condition had worsened. It should bother him that he could no longer feel his leg. That he couldn’t feel anything but the dull throb of his heart and the heat of fever, like wildfire on his skin. But Venick was not bothered. Not as Ellina argued with Raffan about leaving him there to die. Not as she forced him to stand and walk—That is it, just over this ridge—to the caverns on the other side. Not as one day turned into two, into three, intomany.
