“Execution at sunset,” she whispered to herself after what felt like hours but could only have been a few minutes because, miraculously, Anees had remained quiet, too.
“They made up their minds quickly about you.” Anees twirled a strand of black, dust-crusted hair between her fingers.
“Do I even want to know if that’s good or bad?” Lory didn’t care that she came across like she couldn’t give a shit.
“Good for you because it will be a quick execution without extended torture. Bad because you’ll be dead in”—she glanced at the pyramid rising in the distance as if she could read the time there—“two hours.”
“How do you know that?”
Anees shook her head, fingers running over the length of her skirt in the practiced motion of a lady smoothing a silk dress. “The guards talk.” Her gaze strayed this way and that as if to avoid meeting Lory’s.
“They talk toyou?”
“Obviously not.” Anees snorted. “But I do have ears, and I do listen—occasionally.”
Lory didn’t ask.
“They said that there wasn’t any point in trying to get you to speak. Better to shut you up forever instead.” Anees shrugged while bile rose in Lory’s throat.
“Shut me up,” Lory repeated to herself in a murmur.
“I have no idea what you saw or heard that they don’t want you to know, but if they prefer not to torture you, it’s probably important.”
The Almelyte, whatever that was, but she hadn’t even known until they questioned her.Theyhad given her information about something she wasn’t supposed to have ever known existed.
“Probably.” Resting her head against the iron bars, Lory closed her eyes, relishing the breeze blowing through the cell.
“What is it they brought you in for? Stealing?” Anees mirrored Lory’s posture, leaning against the bars from the other side. “Did you steal anything noteworthy?”
“I wish I knew. They said something about an Alme—I can’t even remember the full name of the thing.”
Anees was silent for a moment as she pondered. “Alme—? Is that some sort of gemstone or even a magical artifact?”
Almelyte… It did sound like the name of a gemstone, but something told Lory Anees’s guess was probably a lot better than hers, only—“Magic is forbidden, Anees. The king is known to have magic wielders tortured and killed.” As if on a cue, a scream echoed from beyond the wall, where the city lay at the foot of the hill the palace was built upon.
“More reason to kill you for just knowing about something magical, isn’t it?” The excitement in Anees’s voice didn’t match the dire subject of their conversation.
“If I had any clue what that thing was, I sure as Eroth’s Veil wouldn’t be tellingyou. No offense,” Lory added when Anees huffed her upset. “I don’t usually go around telling other people’s secrets.”
Not that she had many secrets to tell. Lory’s life was as simple as it was lonely, despite the other street rats she occasionally hung out with.
With a sigh, she glanced at the merciless sun, how it dipped toward the horizon. Sunset—not enough time to say her prayers to Eroth and the Guardians for a swift passing, but more than enough time to allow panic to flood her veins like lifeblood and knock out all rational thoughts. Lory supposed that was what facing one’s timely end would do to a person.
“They also said you stole whatever it was you stole right off Lord Ycken’s back. Is that true? Because if it is, you’d be the first Dunaii lowlife I've met who has stolen from one of King Ulder’s close circle.”
Slowly, Lory rolled her head from side to side. The air was cooling down with the decline of the sun, and breathing seemed easier, despite the metaphorical avalanche of sand sitting on her chest.
“You know a lot for someone locked up in the brig,” she noted without looking at Anees. “Or is that perhaps the reason you are in here?”
Anees’s uncomfortable shifting was enough of an answer for Lory to scramble to her feet and put some distance between her and the fence separating the two—just in case.
She made it all of three steps before the same guards as before strode over, unlocked her cell, and dragged her across the yard into an archway carried by limestone columns with palm trees providing a modicum of shade where the sun did her best to break her path into even the remotest of corners.
Lory didn’t have the strength to carry her own weight, her mouth parched and her stomach hollow, but she kept putting one foot in front of the other as they shoved her along, each of them hoisting her up by an arm. At the end of the archway, a narrow, wooden door guarded by two men in beige and black blocked their path.
“Last one for today,” the man holding her right arm announced, apparently a cue for the guards, who stepped aside, to let them pass.
As they dragged her into another courtyard, the distinct smell of iron and salt hit Lory’s nose, and when she scanned the square space holding a butcher’s block and gallows on a wooden pedestal, she spotted the source of it.
