“So, you are the warden who has kept my great-granddaughter from me,” Joelle had said.
Soren hadn’t engaged, knowing well the power of silence. She’d looked at him as if he were some captive animal before letting the door close on him, locking him back inside.
Joelle had not returned since that first meeting, and Soren counted the days that passed by way of meals delivered. He couldn’t even be sure the days were correct. Every demand to see Lore he gave the guards who delivered his food was rebuffed, and part of him wondered if she was even alive. Not knowing ate at him, stuck as he was in that cell by his own sense of honor.
At what felt like the two-week mark, perhaps a little more than that, the door to his basement cell opened sometime between his morning and evening meal. The strangeness had Soren rising to his feet, staring at where Joelle stood once again in the gas lamp–lit basement. The guards with her had their pistols drawn, barrels pointed at Soren. The magician with her this time was a young woman whose clarion crystal–tipped wand appeared made of bone and brass, her magic a soft violet as she called on the aether.
“Where is Lady Lore?” Soren demanded.
Joelle curled her hands over the top of her cane, the robes she wore not as elaborate as those meant for government. He wondered about her health, how months of war over secession might have whittled her down. She’d lost her son, her political power, and would have lost hervasilyetif she hadn’t had Daijal’s backing.
Soren knew she’d lose everything else left to her the moment Vanya knew he’d been taken by Joelle.
“Sleeping,” Joelle said, a lightness to her tone that put Soren on edge.
“I want to see her.”
“Oh, so untrusting for a warden.” Joelle smiled, eyes shadows in her face. “My people know to kill her if you so much as summon a flicker of starfire. You will be bound, and you will obey.”
As much as Soren didn’t want to, he knew he had no choice but to obey if Lore was to live. So he held his hands behind his back when ordered to by the guards, let them place metal shackles around his wrists, and prod him out of the cell with a muzzle pressed to his back, over his spine. Joelle stepped aside so he could exit. Soren found himself looking down at her, thevezirso much smaller than he was and yet the cause of so much terror and heartache.
“Good to see you know your place,” Joelle murmured.
Soren kept his expression as neutral as he could, refusing to give her the satisfaction of his emotional state. Joelle smirked at him before pointing with her cane, the silent gesture an order the guards immediately followed by shoving Soren forward.
The basement wasn’t large, from what he remembered when he’d been dragged down into the dark. What storage it was used for weren’t things people needed on a daily basis. The guards led him up a set of stairs into the round room of a star temple. Soren had only seen glimpses of it before when he’d arrived, still sluggish from the drugs in his system and not quite able to fully focus. But the statue of Callisto at the forefront was something he remembered, the eternal flame burning at her feet a flicker that caught his eye.
He was dragged away from the basement entrance, the metal door nothing as elaborate as the one that had closed up the royal crypts back in Calhames. A pair of handmaidens helped Joelle back up into the star temple, steadying her when the older woman’s cane slipped a bit. Soren could only wish she’d lose her balance and fall back down into the basement and break her neck.
Joelle waved off her handmaidens and crossed over to a closed and guarded door on the other side of the star temple. The pistol at his back prodded Soren forward, and he went docilely enough, knowing it wasn’t just his life on the line if he disobeyed.
And the life he was trying to protect was presented to him in that side room. Perhaps it had once been used as a place of private prayer, small and windowless as it was. Now, it served as a makeshift alchemist’s lab, a metal worktable positioned in the center of the room, Lore laid across it like a dead thing.
They’d stripped her of her gown, leaving her only in her chemise, with a thin blanket drawn up to her breasts. Her arms were on top of the blanket, pale and uncuffed, a catheter resting in the crook of her right elbow. A metal stand was positioned beside the table, holding a large glass vial containing an unknown substance that dripped steadily through the tubing into her vein. That drug was clear, while the one in the vial hanging next to it was a poisonous-looking violet.
Soren tensed, recognizing that shade for the quick-acting poison it was. He eyed that tubing and the poison that was clamped off just before the catheter in Lore’s left arm, a minuscule gap ready to be filled and poured into her veins.
A star priestess sat beside Lore, the woman’s fingers resting lightly on the clamp that kept the poison at bay. She said nothing, merely stared serenely at all of them. Soren kept his eyes on Lore, watching as her chest rose and fell, eyes closed, lashes dark against the pallor of her cheeks.
“What have you done to her?” Soren demanded.
“Ensured your compliance through her predicament,” Joelle said, stepping into the room.
Soren tried to follow her, but a hand fisted itself in his shirt, slamming him up against the side of the doorframe. He gritted his teeth against the pain that lanced down his arm, holding still as the muzzle of the pistol pressed against the side of his throat. He slid his gaze sideways, staring with unblinking eyes at the guard who was having none of it.
Joelle clicked her tongue at him. “You’ve a temper.”
Soren snorted, turning his head with a dismissive motion, doing his best to ignore the guard and the cold metal against his skin. “You tell me how you’d feel if it was someone you knew lying on a table like that.”
“I’d let them die if it meant I wouldn’t.” Joelle lifted her cane and waved the tip of it in his direction. “You, however, have a heart I would gladly replace with arionetka’s if theKlovodwere still around.”
The guard lifted the pistol and dragged Soren upright. Soren fought the urge to forcibly shove him off, knowing what it would cost him if he stepped out of line. He eyed the violet poison in the glass vial, needing to be sure.
“That’s bittershade, isn’t it?” he asked, thinking of the shrubs with their dangerously poisonous flowers that grew near the peaks of the Eastern Spine. It only bloomed the first few weeks of spring, after the snows melted. The leaves, petals, and pollen were deadly if it touched a person’s skin or was ingested or inhaled. Harvesting it took an airship and a warden with skill enough to survive the environment and wandering revenants.
Joelle’s lips quirked into a tiny smile. “You know your poisons.”
Soren raised an eyebrow as condescendingly as he could. “I’m a warden.”
