“What kind of proof do you need, human?”
“I’m not asking you for proof.”
She clicked her teeth, an elven sign of impatience. “Do what you want to me. It will be no less than the queen will do to you…or to the princess.” Venick’s gaze flicked down. The conjuror noticed. Her expression changed. She had the look of someone who’d just drawn a high hand. “Have you not heard? The Dark Queen has made special requests for her sister. Ellina is to be captured alive. She cannot be allowed to die too quickly, not after her betrayal. She will be made to pay. Would you like to hear how?”
“No.”
The elf told him anyway. She spoke, and as she spoke, her words became like needles, stitching Ellina’s fate into Venick’s skin. He listened. He forced himself to listen so that he could remember what he was doing, and why, and for whom.
When she finished, the conjuror’s chest was heaving. There was a wild gleam in her eye. Shewasyoung, Venick thought, but not so young as to mistake the dangers of baiting her captor.
When Venick was certain that he could speak calmly again, he said, “I can see that your mind is made. That is unfortunate. I didn’t want to have to do this the hard way.”
“I told you already. Torture me all you want. I have nothing—”
“I am not going to torture you.”
She shut her mouth.
“You are from the southern elflands,” Venick said.
“That is not hard to guess. All the Dark Queen’s conjurors are from the south.”
“Yet you were notraisedin the south. Judging by your accent, you grew up in the north. You call the northern elflands your home.”
The conjuror eyed him, not understanding this new line of questioning. “I speak as all elves speak. We have no accents.”
“You have the accent of an aristocrat.” This was true. The female spoke with a subtle lilt that Venick would never have recognized, if not for his recent stint in Evov. It was the way Ellina spoke, too—the voice of a highborn. “But the south has no aristocrats,” Venick continued. “They have no class system. That hierarchy only exists in the north. Even without your accent, I can see that your ear is pierced. Another northern tradition.”
The conjuror’s nose flared. “What does a human know of our traditions?”
“More than you might think. For instance, I know that your earrings—the double etching in the design, the placement at the top of your ear—meansassassin.”
She was smug again. “Well. That is what I—”
“Except that the literal translation isgravedigger.That’s clever. A play on words. Or,” he arched a brow, “a nod to the family business?”
The female had gone perfectly still. If she did not understand this direction of questioning before, she understood now. She hung frozen, employing too late the armor of silence. A more experienced soldier would have done that from the start, but she was naive. Talented, yes, and determined,yes, but inexperienced.
It was this fact, more than any of the others, that first made Venick wonder. Why would Farah send a young conjuror on such a high-stakes mission, risking capture and potential exposure? Was she merely a throwaway? That seemed unlikely. Farah didn’t have many conjurors at her disposal—twenty, maybe thirty total. If this elf had been chosen for the assignment, she must have advantages that outweighed her inexperience.
“I think that you are from Evov,” Venick said. “I think that your family still lives there. Maybe they own the burial grounds. Or maybe, given your highborn status, they run the palace crypts. Either way, I suspect they’ve been provided bodies for you to practice your corpse-bending. That’s why you were sent to kill me—because so far, you’re the only conjuror who has mastered the ability to control the dead without actually having to see the corpse you’re controlling.”
It would make sense. If her family had ties to the crypts, she would have extra resources to hone her abilities. And she would be motivated to hone them. It couldn’t be easy, having been born in the south but raised in the north. She would have to work doubly hard to overcome her northern upbringing, to show that she belonged in Farah’s army.
The conjuror looked slightly ill. “You cannot threaten me.”
“I am not threatening you. I’m threatening your family.”
“You do not know my family.”
“No? How hard would it be to scour all the crypts in Evov? How hard would it be to narrow those down to the ones who were owned by a family with southern origins and a dark-haired daughter?”
Venick was bluffing now. He would never make it back to Evov. He’d done that once, twice, three times already, and had been lucky every damn time to make it out again. But the female didn’t know that. Venick watched his words spread over her. Saw them settle and stick. When she spoke, her voice was a bare scrap. “Leave my family alone.”
“Happily. In exchange for a few answers.”
She seemed to struggle. She wanted to tell him no. Probably, she wanted to spit in his face, find a way to make him suffer as she was suffering. But he had her cornered, and they both knew it.
