It didn’t surprise her at all that Val had sacrificed himself for the woman he had sworn an oath to protect, but she understood it better seeing how much he would have admired her too.
Keely was a surprise though. She was clearly very loyal to Queen Alanna. Not soft and sweet—but beautiful, a warrior woman, strong and lean. Not Val’s usual type, but who knew what had happened between them?
At this point, none of it mattered; she could try and get her head around her brother’s love life later. After they had survived.
For now, she had to clear her head and think.
Which was nearly impossible with the image of Tristan, knuckles white as he gripped his new uniform, blazoned into her mind.
She wondered if he’d realized that his fingertips were bleeding where claws had split the skin. Or that his scales had covered his whole face except for his eyes.
Gods.
Was that going to be the last time she ever saw him? With that look on his face. The look of abject devastation that he thought he was hiding behind his clenched jaw. The claws.
Her whole body ached with grief and loss. Seeing Val hanging on the wall was the hardest thing she’d ever done, but a close second was calling out to Tristan and watching him shut down completely in front of her. He’d looked as if the world had ended.
Maybe it had. She wanted to crawl away. Allow the shattered parts of her heart to bleed out into the ground. But she couldn’t do it. Val needed her. Keely and Alanna needed her. And, even if she had been alone in this, she had already decided that she would never give up.
She rubbed her forehead, trying to ease the throbbing headache behind her eyes, and forced herself to concentrate. “I’m guessing you’ve considered going out the windows?”
Alanna rolled her eyes so quickly that she would have missed it if she hadn’t been looking directly at her. Ha. She liked the other woman more and more.
“There’s no way out,” the queen explained. “We’re at least thirty feet above the ground, assuming you can get the bars off the window in the first place. The doors are just as difficult. There has to be someone outside prepared to open the bolts.”
“So, all we need is for someone to open the door?”
“The guards never will. Not even if they thought we were on fire.”
“We just have to sit here and wait for Grendel and Ballanor?” Nim asked, and then immediately regretted the question when Alanna’s already pale face became even more blanched. Gods. How many hours had the woman spent doing exactly that?
“I, um… I don’t know if it helps,” Alanna suggested uncertainly, “but I have some opium sleeping powder…. Maybe once Grendel and Ballanor are here, we could convince them to take it somehow? It’s bitter, but I don’t think they’d taste it in a glass of wine.”
Nim sat down heavily on the side of the bed, her arm hanging at an uncomfortable angle in the air where she was joined to Keely. She wished that the two men would come in and happily drink a glass of wine offered to them by their captives. But she knew that life didn’t work like that.
And she could tell by Alanna’s face that she knew it too.
“I also have embroidery scissors and a small piece of razor.”
“How big?”
“Maybe as long as my nail?”
Nim shook her head. That wouldn’t be any use against the swords and daggers carried by Ballanor and Grendel.
If Val or Tristan were there, they would use the chain between her and Keely as a weapon. But she and Keely didn’t have the skill. Or the strength. They would only end up hurting themselves.
Her talents lay elsewhere. Her talents… herbs, medicines, chemicals….
“Wait, did you say it’s a powder?”
“Yes. I have it in a packet.”
Thank the gods, maybe they had a chance after all. “We could burn it. That would slow them down. But we’d have to be careful not to breathe it ourselves.”
Alanna looked down at her, a thoughtful, considering look on her face. “We can burn it in my room. If we close the door and build up the smoke, while we cover our faces with scarves and hide in Ballanor’s room, we’d be away from the worst of it.”
“Wouldn’t it be easier to burn it in Ballanor’s room and hide in yours?” Keely asked and then grimaced and shook her head, answering her own question. “No, then we’ll still be trapped in here.”
