Four
Lory didn’t fightwhen they pulled a black bag over her head and dragged her from the butcher’s block across the yard; she didn’t have the strength to, and when she tumbled over a threshold and almost landed flat on her face, she didn’t fight when someone picked her up and tossed her over a broad shoulder. The rest of the trip was a blur of drifting in and out of consciousness and the occasional whiff of leather and sage. When she was finally put down onto her feet, the sounds of the wind whistling its melancholy against the stone the city was made of and the murmur of people had long been drowned by the echoes of footsteps in hallways, and even thosefaded until only one pair of boots remained, near silent as it stepped back from wherever she’d been tossed on a cool stone floor.
“Take off the cloth,” a familiar male voice ordered, and it was sheer force of will that made Lory raise her hand to her head and pull, sucking in the cool, humid air of the small chamber she’d been dumped in.
“Good.” It was Falcrest, even more beautiful in the half-light provided by the torch in the bracket hooked into the gray stone wall. Face emotionless, he ran a hand over his tousled hair, leaving the other casually close to one of the two swords now sheathed at his hips—not swords: sabers—while his gray gaze remained on her like that of a bird of prey pinning its meal with a mere look. “Bathing room is across the hall, breakfast’s at the second ring of the bell. Be late and you’ll return straight to the butcher’s block.”
Turning on his heels, the man headed for the door made of blackened wood, his form near ghostlike in the flickering torchlight illuminating the small chamber. Lory braced herself on the edge of the cot set against the wall closest to her. “Wait?—”
The man stopped—spun toward her, brows raised and shooting her an annoyed glare. He obviously had other places to be—better places.
A knot formed in Lory’s throat—or dehydration finally took her voice, she was no longer sure—as he scanned her like she was a joke. “What could I possibly need to wait for? I’ve delivered you as General Ycken ordered. Whether you survive the night is your own problem.”
When he turned and prowled away this time, Lory didn’t stop him, and when the door shut with a near noiseless click, she settled back on the floor, resting her head against the cool surface until her heart stopped racing and her breath was no longer shaking. Only then did she dare take a good look around the room.
Smooth walls, the same plain gray as the floor and the ceiling. No window. One cot so narrow she might fall off if she dared lie on it sat against the wall just long enough to fit it, and across the room, a single chair was positioned in the corner next to the door, a stack of dark fabrics set upon it that Lory only guessed were meant for her to wear.
With a bone-deep sigh, she rolled to her feet, ignoring the aches all over her body, and stumbled to the door.
A bathing room. Lory had never had a bathing room in her life—or a room for that matter. Call it dehydration-induced delusion, but a spark of something like excitement sprang to life inside Lory’s chest. It might have had something to do with the fact that a bathing room was supposed to have water—and if there was one thing she craved more than knowing where exactly she’d ended up, it was a gallon of water.
Bracing herself against the wall, she picked up the clothes and carefully opened the door.
It swung open with a startling creak, making Lory fall back into the room and almost fall onto her ass. Hadn’t the door been nearly soundless when Falcrest opened and closed it earlier?
“Just a few more steps,” Lory whispered to herself as she stuck her nose across the threshold, assessing the torch-lit corridor outside.
A man in black clothing, just like Falcrest’s and Observant Eye’s, shot her a warning glance from where he was positioned in a small alcove a little farther down the corridor.
“Bathroom?” Lory asked with a voice that had been dragged over sandpaper, barely keeping upright as she took a careful step out of the room.
The man merely pointed at the door down the perhaps eight-foot-wide corridor, made of equally blackened wood and cut in the same tall rectangle as the door behind her.
As fast as her shaky legs could carry her, she crossed the hallway, focused on the promise of water beyond the door, and turned the black metal knob.
When Lory entered, at first she thought she was hallucinating because this wasn’t just a bathing room. This was a bathing hall with lines of showers on one side and a row of washbasins on the other. If Lory hadn’t snuck a glimpse of the bathing rooms in the better districts of the city, she wouldn’t have known what the metal contraptions on the wall were, but she’d seen water spray from them, and she’d also seen people step under them to clean themselves—not always the most sightly process, considering some of the people she’d accidentally witnessed.
Without a moment of hesitation, Lory staggered to the closest washbasin, dropping the bundle of clothes to the tiled floor as she turned on the faucet and watched the water sprinkle to life. Watched only for a heartbeat, because thenext, she was gulping down the cool liquid, her body singing with delight at the replenishment.
Lory stood for a solid minute, drinking her fill, not caring how she’d gotten here, only that she was, and that, for the first time in her existence, she didn’t need to worry how much she drank or that she had mere seconds to drink her fill. No one was keeping her from drinking all night, if she felt like it—except for her stomach. That churned with protest as she forced down one more gulp and another until a faint nausea settled in her belly and she needed to straighten to keep from throwing up the precious wet.
A small mirror above the washbasin showed her haggard appearance, the dirt-smeared face, the blood that wasn’t hers on her throat, the black and blue bruise on her temple. Her threadbare shirt hung like rags on her lean frame, and her black hair fell to the middle of her back in a tangle of dirt and things she preferred not to think about.
Not much better than Anees, she thought, stepping toward the shower at the far end of the room, the one that wouldn’t be the first place people saw if anyone stormed into the bathing room. There she stood, turning on the water again and staring almost hypnotized at the glistening drops plopping from just beneath the ceiling. This room wasn’t lit with torches but with something more elegant: a frame of soft light running around the tiled ceiling, providing enough brightness to see what she was doing, but not obnoxiously bright like the sun when it burst in through the broken boards in the shed Lory sometimes called her bedroom. It wasn’t fire either.
Before she could wonder what she was looking at, the water soaked her clothes, and the feel of it made her melt into a boneless heap on the floor where she sat, transfixed. Like rain but stronger, like dipping her hand into a bucket of water, but not as powerful. Lory didn’t know how long she stayed there, transfixed, her body shaking as, muscle by muscle, the petrification of the day left her. Only when she was shivering from cold rather than exhaustion did she turn off the water and step out of the shower, stripping out of her clothes to put on the plain black pants and a tunic two sizes too large for her, and tiptoed back to the room across the hall.
The guard in the alcove didn’t turn his head when she pulled open the door with the same loud creak as before and disappeared into what could have been a crypt for all that she cared. It had a bed, and there, sure as Eroth’s Veil, weren’t any Gargoyles in that room. She would get breakfast in the morning, and most of all, she hadn’t been executed.
She’d think about how to get out of there tomorrow, when she had a full belly and at least a hint of an idea of where she was. Without a window, she couldn’t tell where this building was located. For all she knew, she could be below ground on the palace premises—or somewhere out of the city in a remote location where prisoners too bad for execution are brought to be tortured slowly.
As for now, all she could do was collapse onto the cot and pull the thin, woolen blanket sitting at the foot end over her shivering form.
I’m alive, Evven,was the last thought on Lory’s mind as sleep took her into her first night in a real bed after her first shower.
And the dreams weren’t merciful.
A bangon the door woke Lory what could have been minutes later—or hours; it was impossible to tell without a window to allow her a glimpse at the sky. How she should know what time it was or if she’d already missed breakfast was something she hadn’t wasted a thought on when she’d crashed on the cot. Call it a lack of common sense; call it the effects of a truly bad day. It was the same thing that had prevented her from immediately searching for exits and getting out of there—not that she believed she’d stand a chance against the guard in the hallway, but maybe he would have let her wander past the same way he’d let her enter the bathing room.
