Somewhere along the way, I had lost my makeshift hair tie, and now strands of my recalcitrant hair obscured my vision. I snapped my neck to the side, disguising a glance behind me with a gesture to get my hair out of my eyes.
Back there, the mousy Spring-chicken nibble was wrestling with belts and loops, strapping herself into some quaint contraption with trembling fingers. Arrays of runestones were woven into the leather of the strange device she was donning. A weapon, probably better at stopping me than their pithy little blades.
With her frantic, almost panicked gearing up, she might not entirely trust the Tonaltus trap they had put me in. Languidly, I returned my gaze to the Creeping-vines blood. His fear spiked. I let my eyes drift away and a sudden rush of relief followed. It was as if they feared me leaping at them, straight through the containment field. It might be worth a try, though only after I’d exhausted other options. It was an even more dangerous option than tearing the walls of this corridor apart with my Metzus and risking the whole fort collapsing on top of me.
I finished wrangling my hair, looked up at the Creeping-vines obstacle, and then let my eyes drift away from him, towards the spot on the wall he had touched to activate the containment field. “This trap of yours will not hold me,” I informed him of this simple truth. No emotion. No inflection. Not a hint of humanity in my voice, and I delighted in his horrified reaction.
Slightly behind and to the right of me, my Remorseful-morsel pet had been taking trembling, terrified steps away from me. Now he drew his blade and rushed the occupied Spring-chicken.
His target skittered back, and my Honey-blood snack only barely managed to stop her companion from jumping through the Tonaltus field and giving chase. “Piers, Honeybee, don’t. Valentina’s not going to hurt us. And you should not be fooled by Junicia’s naivety. It’s an act. She’s trying to lure us away from Valentina, separate us. They both are.”
The slight waver in her voice betrayed her uncertainty, but at least it seemed like my two pet snacks would not flee if I let them be. Interesting to know that part of the mouse-prey’s innocent demeanor was an act as well.
My Creeping-vines prey looked roughly at where I was staring at, apparently lost in thought. It was a terribly unconvincing act that did little to hide his fear. Then he shrugged. “You’re not really adopted, are you? That’s merely some falsified paperwork. Your dad smuggled you here from Ostea.”
Even terrified for his life, he still tried to interrogate me. Adorable. He didn’t even know he was looking right where I wanted him to look. Every Tonaltus field was a circle of runestones. All of them needed to first be pre-charged, and then activated one by one. The charging was slow work, so he must have done it in advance. My two pet Inquisitors seemed unaware he had prepared this here, so he had probably carved the runes and charged them when no one was around, ready to be activated when needed.
If I assumed right, then all I needed to do was locate one of the rune-carved stones and damage the runework. He’d activated the last rune right in front of me. I hadn’t been paying close attention then, so I only had a vague idea of where it was. But he did know, and me hinting in that direction had him looking right at it.
“You remained in Birnstead for months. What were you doing there?'' He continued his interrogation. His questions were inane, utterly pointless even. Did he truly think engaging me delayed the inevitable in any way? If anything, they bought me time while I studied his trap.
“Cooking, helping out with the kid, aiding the loggers, taught some magic fundamentals.” I turned around, summing up every useless thing I had done in that village while I studied Spring-chicken, who was still too busy wrestling with the contraption to participate in the interrogation. Some distracting glares from me might slow her down a little.
“Why Birnstead specifically? Why stay instead of roaming like you did before?”
Unnerving my Spring-chicken snack wasn’t my real intent though. My two pets, busy whispering hushed strategies at each other, were now in my line of sight. I needed something to damage those runes and disrupt the field, and my claws would not do. The carved stone itself was inside the field so I would not be able to reach it. And while I had foolishly left my blade behind, these two still had theirs.
“Helped them out during the winter flooding. Liked it there.” I kept spewing inane answers in a monotone drone as I stalked up to my two pets, hesitated for a moment, and then amended my answer. “An ahuizotl nest was there when I returned in summer. Did my job as a hunter. Reported to the Inquisition patrol in Rivenston and offered my help. They refused. Inquisitor Lowe, I think. Did you question him about me?”
Escaping this trap was trivial, barely worth my attention. I might just as well push this sham interrogation towards subjects that might have the Creeping-vines prey share more than he intended.
“Ravyn Falls. Early spring. You reported an incursion at the Little Brook monastery.”
As expected, the second I asked a question of my own, his questioning sped up. Clearly, I had touched on a subject he did not want to talk about. The pattern of his questions was strange as well. He was skipping past all of the subjects he had asked about when I had been in my cell. There were no more probing about my plans, my allies, my schemes. None at all.
I wrapped an arm around Elderberry-poison Irina’s waist, interrupting a probably riveting argument about trapped runes and ballistics. I clung to her side and pouted up at a petrified Remorseful-morsel Piers. “You’re not going to abandon me now, are you Piers?” I let a fanged grin split my lips apart. “Freezing in terror won’t make me stop noticing you, you know,” I teased. “Truly, I never understood why prey like you ever developed that kind of defense response. It really doesn’t work.”
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The morsel darted back, and so I squeezed Irina a little tighter and jammed my elbow into her hip to at least keep her in place. And to keep me in place. Him darting back was almost too much. I could eat them, but I needed them for more than just food, but oh…
I could eat them!
But at the same time, I needed them alive. With the cold iron of Irina’s scabbard pressing into my sides, I trailed a claw up her sheathed blade and tapped the strap clasping the hilt. It was a subtle gesture, hidden from Creeping-vines-blood’s sight by my body, and the mousy snack’s sight by Irina’s. I hoped this was enough of a hint that I needed to borrow the sword.
I let go of Irina and turned back to my captor. “Supply delivery to the monastery.” I shook my head in a show of theatrics. “Two other hunter kids were in Ravyn Falls for an extermination request. We traded jobs, safer for them, no monastery for me. They did not return. Looked into it. Ash hounds. Petitioned for Inquisition support. I’m certain you have a report of what happened after. Or did you not ask those Inquisitors about me either?”
Repeating that suggestion was worth a try, even if he probably wouldn’t look into it. And if he did, then he would dismiss what he learned. If I couldn’t comprehend all those disgustingly compassionate and human things that little monster hunter me had done, then he most certainly wouldn’t.
“Why didn’t you—”
“No!” I snarled in mock anger and pasted a feral grin on my face. “We are done playing this game where you ask me subtle variations of the same question.”
He darted back, startled by my sudden outburst of anger after I had remained passive for several of his questions. Just a short exchange was enough to convince him I had shelved all emotion and returned to my natural, predatory state. He’d extrapolated from there. They always extrapolated. He had taken my inhuman calmness for fact, and so he wasn’t even prepared anymore for such an excessively emotional, if acted-out, response. Oh, toying with these little snacks was so incredibly fun.
Stepping up to him, capitalizing on this crack in his stoic demeanor, I tilted my head to the side and measured on an expression of cute innocence. “You’re not even allowed to ask the questions you want to ask, aren’t you? Your superiors have forbidden you.”
It was only a wild guess, but the anger and confusion suffusing his scent told me I probably wasn’t far off the mark. That was good, because his reinforcements weren’t far off either. I could faintly hear the din of them grouping up, ready to storm the dungeon. Or seal the exits. I was out of time.
Maybe the Creeping-vines predator could hear them too, because suddenly his voice dropped, sounding honest and vulnerable and pleading. “Where are your thralls?”
It was the kind of question he would have asked me before, yet subtly different anyway. That, more than anything, made me realize how close to the truth I’d gotten. He really was asking different questions than when I was stuck in my pit. It could be because this was the first time I was not a feral mess. I was lucid and coherent and he exploited that opening without hesitation. But wasn’t my lucidity at the heart of this, was it? There were factions in the Inquisition, things he couldn’t say or do with Irina present, new questions he could ask now that no one else was observing as he interrogated me.
Politics.
I raised my brows, looked up at him, and let out a fake, exasperated sigh. “Who is this Retivius?”
It finally made sense. The little exchange this man had had with Irina and Piers, I had ignored it in my anger, but now I could finally place it. My recollections from my time in captivity weren’t coherent, more instinct and impressions than actual memories. But given enough hints I could still salvage parts of my memory.
“Right. Right. Sorry. No talking about Retivius.”
“Twenty-five years since your dad managed to return from Ostea. I wonder, child, do you know the significance of that?”
“Do try and keep her alive. I am certain we can use her once you are done.”
I couldn’t put a face or name to those words. But the taint of Velvet-chains mischief associated with the memory made me assume it was probably one of those nobility types they’d shown me off to. That his statements were followed by Creeping-vines’ righteous fury, barely restrained behind propriety, remained lodged in my mind as well. The unknown Velvet-chains had deliberately spoken about secrets in my presence. And my Creeping-vines tormentor had been powerless to stop him at the time.
Hearing me ask about this mysterious Retivius, my Creeping-vines prey lifted his chin and studied me in silence. As still as his posture, so confused were his emotions. He could not hide it from me. Retivius. It was important, that name. I was not supposed to know it. Most curious of all, was that the Creeping-vines blood had reminded me of Retivius himself, by insinuating that Irina was working with or for this person.
I flipped towards Irina and repeated my question. “Who is Retivius, Irina?”
She boldly stepped up to me. “This isn’t the time, Valentina.”
Clever woman.
I pushed myself right up to her, and stared up into her face in a way I couldn’t replicate with Inquisitor Sung because of the Tonaltus field. The space between our two bodies once again hidden from sight I reached from the blade that she held out to me.
“Maybe you should tell me a bit more about a certain Hadrian person first, Miss Bryce?” Creeping-vines Sung asked. “He looks like a very interesting character to me.”
His honey-lathered question replaced the roiling anger within me with cold, hard, dread.
No! No no no! Not Uncle Hadrian.
They can’t have him.
They can’t!
“You better pray those runes ain’t trapped, Sweets,” Irina mouthed at me.
“She’s priming the ballistics!” Piers shouted, denying me the time to think about Uncle Hadrian, or what a trapped rune was supposed to be. The Spring-chicken had stopped fiddling with straps and had begun activating runes. We had to go. Now.
I pulled Irina’s blade from its scabbard, activated the enchantments, and dashed toward the edge of the Tonaltus field. The tip of the blade sliced through the runes on one of the stones holding up the field.
In the breath I waited for the magic to collapse, Irina and Piers rushed past me.
Inquisitor Sung ducked and ran.
With a tiny hum from the contraption the mousy Inquisitor had donned as my only warning, I dove for the other side of the corridor, through the still-collapsing containment field.
A gray blur of a rock whizzed past me, and the Tonaltus woven around the stone tore me apart in a spray of flesh and bone and tendon. Then the little stone cratered into the dungeon wall and the corridor ahead of me exploded in a blast of stone and dust.