At last, she bowed her head. “Ask your questions,” she said in elvish, an offering of faith in a world where little faith was left.“I will answer.”
EIGHT
Ijust do not understand.”
Lin Lill paced the baron’s attic, her boots tapping across uneven floorboards. Behind her, Artis, Harmon, and Erol sat around the room’s single table, which had been dragged up from the library earlier that evening. The baron’s attic was not their first choice of meeting place, but it was the only location that was both large enough to fit all seven of them while also being secluded enough to ensure privacy.
“We had the ballroom secured,” Lin Lill continued. “Every entrance was under guard, with additional sentries stationed around the grounds. So tell me, where did that corpse come from?”
Lin Lill aimed this in Ellina’s direction, but Ellina was only half listening. She stood at the attic’s fourth-story window, squinting out across the dark lawns below. Stupid, to let Venick speak with that conjuror alone. Stupid, to send him into the prison without backup or assistance or a second set of eyes watching for nefarious movements. Ellina thought of the highlands, how Venick had pulled the same stunt in Parith, facing the Elder alone without an ounce of green glass to protect him. Venick had a way of finding trouble, of makingtrouble, and his conversation with the captured female would be no different. Ellina was sure of it.
“The guests were all searched before entry,” Lin Lill went on. “Once the room was secured, the guards were under strict orders to admit no latecomers. A conjuror would have never made it inside.”
“But the conjuror wasn’t inside.” Harmon spoke over the rim of an amber wine jug, which she had been nursing all evening. She looked frayed from the night’s events, her shoulders drawn inward, her elaborate hairstyle now a myriad of knots. “She was standing in the courtyard behind the window.”
“And the undead?”
“It was dressed to look like one of our soldiers, was it not?” Artis replied, rubbing at a scratch on the table. “It could have slipped in with everyone else.”
“A dead elf justslipped in?” Lin Lill rounded on Artis, apparently eager for somewhere to aim her frustration. “As if a costume could conceal the fact that the elf was not breathing.I suppose you also believe the guards failed to notice they were patting down a dead body? The guests failed to notice they were sitting beside one?”
Artis was unfazed. “How are we supposed to know what is possible? It is magic.”
“That is nonsense, and you know it.”
Lin Lill, Harmon, and Artis continued their argument. Erol set his chin in one hand and listened placidly. The only two missing members of their group were Branton, who was standing guard outside the estate’s prison, and Venick, who was busy making stupid choices.
Ellina had tried to overrule him. Had, up until the last moment, planned on forcing her way into the prison alongside him. She had followed Venick across the estate’s grounds to a block-shaped building at the back, fueled by indignation…and a lingering sense of hurt that made her want to be contrary. It was not until they met Branton at the guarded prison door that Venick finally set a hand to her shoulder, his expression pained. “Do you trust me?”
Somehow, those simple words had been enough to change her mind.
“Ellina,” Erol called from his spot across the room. “Why don’t you come sit? Let me take a look at those cuts.”
From smashing through the ballroom window, he meant. Ellina had shallow cuts all along her forearms and even a few around her face. They stung, but Ellina knew Erol was only offering because he could see her agitation and hoped to distract her from it. She gave him a small smile but did not leave her spot at the window.
“There mustbe traitors among us,” Lin Lill was insisting. “It is the only possible explanation.”
“It would take more than a few traitors to pull off tonight’s attack,” Artis said.
“So then there is an army of traitors.”
“You really think an army of traitors is working against us?”
“Yes.”
“No,” Harmon argued. “That doesn’t make sense. If there were insiders sympathetic to the Dark Queen’s cause, they wouldn’t try to kill Venick in the most crowded room in the city, with so many military members present. They would have orchestrated a nighttime assassination. Copied keys, secret passages, that kind of thing. If the corpse-bender chose to attack in a packed ballroom, it’s because she had no other option.”
Or because she needed the cover of a crowd, Ellina mused.
Her mind snagged on that thought. Ellina blinked. Turned away from the window. She stared at Harmon, her brain reaching, gripping this new rope of an idea, pulling it towards her.
Harmon caught her expression. “Ellina? What is it?”
But Ellina did not know what she was thinking, exactly. She only knew that this revelation felt like two puzzle pieces locking together, except that the pieces were flipped so that she could not see what their faces showed, only their grey backs.
A noise from below interrupted her thoughts—the sound they had been waiting for.
Boots on a ladder. The shift of the attic’s trapdoor, a hand appearing from the floor, swinging the square cutout up and out of the way. Venick’s head appeared first, then his torso, then the rest of him. “There’s been a change of plans,” he said.
