“You did well,” the witch says.
I almost don’t hear her, not over the girl’s shouting. She’s annoyingly loud. If I could have lopped off her head, I would have.
I turn back to the witch. “I don’t need your praise. I need you to keep your promises. You have the girl. And now I want my brother.”
“Where’s the body?”
“What?”
“The man she was with.”
In order of priority, I would have thought this was extremely low.
“He killed several of Faos’s soldiers. Only Faos and Tark remained. You’ll have to send someone back to retrieve him.”
“Tell me about him.”
“I barely paid attention to him.”
“You’ll come to regret that.”
This she says low and beneath her breath, and it raises the hair on my arms.
She goes to a nearby cabinet and pours herself a shot of ozrum and drinks it down.
In all my dealings with the West, I’ve never seen her quitelike this. There is a burning energy of dismay hanging in the air. Like whatever plan she had is slipping through her fingers.
“Get me the slippers,” she finally says, her back still to me.
“The…what?”
“The slippers. On the girl. Get me the silver slippers and you’ll have your brother.”
“Must I do all your dirty work?”
She cuts me with a look.
I don’t need the flickering candlelight to understand the threat. I do like to breathe, after all.
“Fine,” I grumble.
The witch said I just had to get the girl here alive. She didn’t say anything about letting the girl keep her feet.
I’ll chop her legs off if I have to.
I know my way to the dungeon. I’ve descended this curving stairwell a dozen times.
I find one of the monkeys—Balor, third roost, always assigned to the dungeon but wants to be in first roost so he can fight—standing at the bottom of the stairwell.
Some of the rigidity in his shoulders lessens when I come into the light of the sconces. “Oh,” he says, “it’s just you.”
“Just me. The witch wants me to retrieve something from the girl. Can you unlock her cell?”
Balor nods and escorts me down the tunnel. Lucky for me, the girl has been assigned to the cell directly across from Gabriel.
“Gabriel,” I start, but he cuts me off with a look.
“Something is wrong with her,” he mouths to me.
