He met her words with an amused grunt. “Ervin gave you a knock, too.”
She took in their surroundings. Three others huddled at the back of the cramped room. There were no windows, the sole light source a small lamp and whatever brightness filtered through the door above a short set of stairs. She squinted upward. So, they were in some sort of basement.
Calya refocused on her fellow cellmates. Two were women of Radiant Isles descent. Vresha, she guessed, one of the southern regions, given how the lamp’s meager glow deepened their golden-brown skin and dark hair, the metallic lines etched into their almond-shaped earrings winking in the light.
The last member was a white man with dark red hair and a beard that hadn’t seen shears in a while. He wore a long gray coat with the initials for Grae University embroidered on the right breast, though the stitching had seen better days.
The same could be said of the whole group, all of them looking as worn as Calya felt. But that was the extent of their similarities. Her eyes lingered more on the differences. One in particular.
Though they were all bound, the others were restrained by manacles rather than simple rope. While the Grae U man was the only one in official attire, the rest had a mix of robust, practical clothing and just a general… air about them that gave the impression of mages, even though none wore robes or anything identifying.
She looked at the man who’d woken her, her mind slogging back through their conversation thus far.
“Matt—Matthias. You’re the one who wrote to the Sentinels. That was your office I found down in the cave.”
“Are you with the Sentinels?” the older Vreshan woman asked, hope in her voice. “Are they coming?”
“Yes,” Calya said with more conviction than she felt. “I came with a Sentinel, and word has been sent back to the Valley and to Rhell.”
“Galwynd?” Matthias asked, apprehension pinching the corners of his eyes.
“Gone. He made a deal with?—”
“That spineless fucker,” the Grae U man snarled, the lilt of his accent and short vowels rendering the rest of his ire too hard for Calya’s still magic-addled brain to follow.
“I met two other mages,” she said instead. “Treen and Aylton. They were Coalition?”
More nods and angry muttering came in answer.
“Where are they? Why are you—” Calya scrubbed her hands over her eyes. “What—Just, what. Why, how, all of it.”
The mages exchanged hesitant glances.
Calya shook her bound hands for emphasis. “Since we’re all down here, I’d say we’re well enough on the same side. I found your secret journals,” she said, nodding at Matthias. “You were gathering evidence. Why didn’t you tell the Sentinels the truth?”
“We didn’t know, not at first,” the younger Vreshan woman said. “Sylveren sent us to do bioremediation work after Avenor’s failed project was discovered. We thought it was toxic overflow cleanup.”
“So, the garden beds of poison dirt I saw outside were…?”
“Not a choice,” Matthias said, voice hard. “The Coalition didn’t give us one. I did send word when we started to suspect something was off, but Song got suspicious and started screening our mail. Had to be careful after that.”
“Some of us fell sick. Then we knew,” the Grae U man said with a bitter laugh. “They threatened to withhold what few remedies we had if we didn’t cooperate.”
“More like obey,” the older Vreshan woman said.
“We’ve friends still here. Somewhere,” the Grae U man said. “Can’t leave them. And the work… it almost… well, worked.”
“Making a poison?” Calya thought back to the dirt in the beds. The exhausted look on Eunny’s face as she prepared to ride back to the Landing’s neighboring village. “I think you succeeded.”
“A cure,” he snapped. “Before our defenses broke. You’re not a mage, so what are you doing here?”
Gods, there were so many reasons she was here, but this wasn’t the time or place to get into them with a magic elitist. She had a headache as it was already without trying to condense her life story for strangers.
“I’m here to stop Brint fucking Avenor,” she said. “The what and the why together. Working on the how.”
Matthias huffed with a grim laugh. “On that, we’re all aligned.”
“They’re already clearing this place out. Why?”
