Maybe we should stop the cage and climb out, Sardelle suggested. But what would that do? She would have to crawl up the steep, slick shaft, and she had a feeling those people would still be waiting there when she arrived.
Yes.
Yes, we should stop it, or yes, they’ll be waiting?
They’ve been there a while.
Sardelle remembered Jaxi’s earlier warning.
Because of me. She didn’t make it a question.
Yes.
Sardelle made sure Jaxi wasn’t glowing as the cage traveled the final meters. If she had to, she could fight her way out, shielding herself from bullets and blades the same way she had against falling rocks, but she didn’t want to warn anyone of her powers by emerging with a glowing sword. Although thanks to that book, they probably already knew what to expect. And even if she fought her way past everyone, what then? Magical talents or not, she wouldn’t be able to navigate that pass in the winter, not without a ship. She wasn’t about to call down that shaman for a ride.
It’s a possibility.
She shuddered—or maybe shivered, thanks to being wet and feeling the icy drafts coming down from above. No. It’s not.
Maybe she could figure out how to fly Ridge’s dragon contraption. Powering it wouldn’t be a problem, but the rest? She had been daunted by the simple tram machine.
“Let’s just see what’s waiting for us,” she muttered.
She might have sensed fifty people, but when they came into sight, it seemed like a thousand torches out there surrounding the tram cage. After the ride up in the darkness, Sardelle squinted at the light. It didn’t keep her from seeing all the rifles aimed at her. Even miners were armed, albeit with pickaxes. Fear hung in the air. Fear of her? Gods, she had been helping them all month. How could they forget about that? How could they think she was an enemy now?
Through the cage bars, she spotted General Nax at the back of the crowd—he also had a rifle aimed in her direction. Ridge stood next to him. He had a rifle, but the butt rested on the ground. Only his frown was aimed at her. Somehow that was worse than all of the weapons.
Sardelle blinked back tears. A sorceress striding out to fight shouldn’t be weeping.
I can send the cage back down if you want.
It’s flooded by now, I’m sure.
Not all the levels…
Sardelle shook her head. With all of those men, Nax could guard this exit indefinitely, and she couldn’t stay down there forever.
She was tired after her ordeal below, but she threw her remaining strength into a shield around her body, then pushed open the gate door. The men tensed, their fingers tight on their triggers, but nobody fired.
Of course not. The general wants to know where the rest of the crystals are first.
Hopelessly mired under the new lake, I hope. Sardelle held her arms out and let the soulblade dangle in her grip. Unthreateningly.
She met Ridge’s eyes. He didn’t look away, but he did mask his expression. She could have probed a little and figured out what he was thinking… but she had a feeling she didn’t want to know.
“Take her sword,” General Nax said.
Her hand tightened on the hilt. Fight now or fight later? If she fought now, she risked hurting a lot of people. She ought to be able to escape whatever cell they locked her in and find Jaxi later. At night, when most people would be sleeping.
Sighing, she turned the soulblade, extending it hilt first toward one of the twitchy privates who crept forward. Once she was unarmed, two other soldiers walked up, grabbed her by the backs of her arms, and steered her toward a building she knew held cells. She looked up at the sky, at stars so big and bright they seemed touchable, and hoped she hadn’t made the wrong choice.
She almost tripped at a sight below the stairs—while she had been down in the tunnels, one of the wall towers had been obliterated. Now that she was out of the crowd, she could see rubble in the courtyard, too, dark rocks against the stark snow drifts. So, she had missed the first real battle. How had it gone? Had Ridge and the others driven off the Cofah? Brought down their ship?
You found a soulblade, came a hungry and unwelcome thought in her head.
Sardelle’s shoulders slumped. The shaman. He, at least, was still alive.
Now I see why you’ve been here, what you wanted. Brilliant.
Thank you, Sardelle responded though she knew it was more Jaxi’s existence he found brilliant than anything she had done.
A soft laugh sounded in her thoughts as the soldiers led her into a cell-filled basement hallway. Better sleep with it under your pillow. As rare as they are anymore, I’ll be looking for it when we return.
Ugh. Not three minutes had passed, and she was already certain she had made the wrong decision. Jaxi was getting locked in some office or supply closet—where a powerful shaman would have no trouble finding the blade—and Sardelle was getting locked in a cell.
A heavy iron door thumped shut behind her, and a latch was thrown. Utter darkness filled the tiny room.
I think we need to break out tonight, Jaxi.
Sardelle expected an answer along the lines of, “That’s obvious,” but she didn’t get an answer at all.
Jaxi?
Silence.
She realized with an alarming start that she couldn’t feel Jaxi anymore, either. Not on the fort, not anywhere. Even when the soulblade had been buried in the mountain, she had sensed it. What had they done? Thrown Jaxi off a cliff?
Sardelle dropped her hands to her knees and told herself hyperventilating wouldn’t do her any good. The advice didn’t help.
Chapter 13
Sardelle needed to escape and find Jaxi—wherever the soulblade was—but she had to wait until some of those milling soldiers and miners went to their beds. Maybe the guard outside her door would grow less alert too. She paced in circles around the tiny cell. The carnage she had left down below had people buzzing around the courtyard, going up and down on the tram. And she sensed Ridge and the engineer working on the flier again. Er, wait. No, he wasn’t up there anymore. She swept across the fort with her senses—others she might not have been able to identify so readily, but she knew his aura well by now. She halted in the middle of her circle and faced the door.
He was on his way down here.
To see her? Her heart swelled with relief, but the emotion soon faltered. She didn’t know what he felt, what he wanted. Maybe the general knew they’d had a relationship and had decided to send Ridge to question her. And if, instead of strong-arming her, he gave her that quirky smile, she would tell him whatever he wanted. No, she would do that anyway. What did the crystals matter to her? What mattered was finding Jaxi. She would trade him whatever information he wanted if he gave her the soulblade’s location.
It took Ridge longer than she expected to come down the stairs and into her hallway of cells. There was an uncharacteristic anxiousness about him. Those pauses… was he stopping to listen? To glance back over his shoulder? The general hadn’t sent him at all, she realized. He was sneaking down. Did he know about the guard? What was he going to say to the man?
Soft murmurs started up outside the door. Sardelle leaned her ear against the cold iron, but she still couldn’t make out words.
A soft thunk sounded below her ear—a key turning in the lock. She stepped back.
“Sardelle?” Ridge whispered, pushing open the door a couple of inches.
“Yes.” Ridiculous that her heart was beating so loudly that he could probably hear it. His opinion of her shouldn’t matter so much. But it did. She could fight against everyone else in the fort, but she didn’t want to fight him.
“I thought you might have sneaked away already.” Ridge stepped inside, a lantern in hand.
The hallway outside was dark, and Sardelle didn’t see the guard. Ridge leaned his back against the wall, not coming close.
She tried not to let that distance sting. He was here at least.
“Not without Ja—my sword.”
/>
“Ah.” Did he sound hurt by her answer? Did her feelings toward him still matter?
“And,” Sardelle added, “I would not wish to leave you without… ” Knowing if he still cared? Knowing if he could possibly see past that which he feared in her?
Ridge sighed. “Saying goodbye?”
“No. I mean, I… don’t want to say goodbye.”
Sardelle shifted from foot to foot in the silence that followed. She didn’t regret saying the words, but… maybe she should have waited and let him talk first.
“You’re not saying anything,” she observed oh-so-helpfully.
“You can’t read my thoughts?”
“I… don’t. We aren’t like that. Very few ever were, except for those who went rogue and… quite literally ruined the world for the rest of us. There are rules that we swear by and hold dearly. Or did.”
After another long pause, Ridge asked, “How old are you?”
“Thirty-four.”
“How… ”
“This is… hard to believe—trust me, I had a hard time believing it myself when I woke up, but I basically… missed three hundred years.”
The single lantern didn’t provide a lot of light, and Ridge’s face—which had been carefully neutral through most of their conversation—didn’t change much, though his bottom lip did lower a few millimeters.
“I was here when the original attack came that collapsed this mountain,” Sardelle said. “It was actually… your ancestors, I suppose. They figured out a way to sap in beneath our community when nearly everyone was home for a big celebration, and… I’m not sure how it happened exactly or where they found such powerful explosives—your dynamite hadn’t been invented yet, so far as I know—but it was devastating.”
“My ancestors.” He sounded like he didn’t want to believe her.
Sardelle shrugged. “Well, maybe not yours specifically. Yours might have been off inventing flying machines somewhere.”
She watched him, hoping for a smile, but he was either too stunned or wasn’t believing anything she said.
“Ridge,” she said, then paused, half-expecting him to tell her not to call him by first name anymore. He didn’t. “The sword. It’s mine. I don’t mean in the I-found-it-so-I-have-the-strongest-claim-on-it way, but in the… we were bonded when I was sixteen and passed my exams. There’s a spirit inside… that of someone who was once a sorceress but who died young and placed her soul in the blade so she could continue to live on, in a manner of speaking. This happened over three—er, six hundred years ago, and Jaxi has been bonded with several handlers since then, but most recently with me.”
Somewhere during her speech, Ridge had leaned back against the wall, one hand propped on his hip. If he weren’t holding the lantern with the other, he probably would have propped that one up too. The stance said… I’m not buying this.
“I don’t need you to believe all that,” Sardelle said, “and it’s perfectly understandable if you don’t, but I just wanted you to know what Jaxi—the sword means to me. She’s all I have left of my family, my friends, my life.” Her voice broke, and she took a few breaths, struggling for equilibrium. The last few weeks had been busy enough to distract her from all she had lost—aside from a few nights in those awful barracks when she had allowed herself to weep silently—but that didn’t mean the emotions weren’t there, hovering beneath the surface.
Ridge stirred, lifting a hand toward her, but he let it drop again. Uncertain.
“I… sense that something’s been done,” Sardelle said when she could find a more normal tone again. “You don’t owe me anything, but if you could tell me where she—the sword—is, I would appreciate it.”
“Actually, I owe you… much. More than what I thought, I’m beginning to realize.”
Was that why he was here? Because he felt he owed her something?
Sardelle swallowed. It was better than not having him talking to her at all, and yet… she wished he had come simply because he cared.
“What’s a sherastu?” he asked.
“It’s a title. Mage advisor. We worked alongside the military and the clan leaders to defend Iskandia from the Cofah and other invaders.”
Ridge nodded to himself. “This afternoon, when that owl showed up again, distracting us so the airship could sneak in for attacks, no odd little blasts of wind hit it.”
So, she hadn’t been as circumspect as she had hoped with her attacks. “Sorry. I was busy down there. I didn’t know the fort was under attack.”
“Yes, when the general got the report on the devastation down there, his face turned so red, I thought he would pass out.”
“What happened down there wasn’t intentional,” Sardelle said. “I was just trying to get the sword. If I’d had more time, I could have been more careful. I wasn’t expecting… a water source.”
“Nax is certain you sabotaged the tunnels on purpose so we couldn’t pull out any more crystals.”
“I almost crushed and drowned myself in the process. I assure you it wasn’t intentional. Also… these crystals you value so much, they’re meaningless to me. They were our light fixtures.”
“I believe you. I—did you say light fixtures?” For the first time, a hint of Ridge’s humor shown through. Tickled by the concept, was he? Good.
“They hung on the ceilings. Honestly, if you gave me a few days to study, I could probably make them for you.”
Ridge’s response was somewhere between a snort, a cough, and maybe that was a laugh. “Well, that would be one more argument I could make for keeping you alive.” His comment sobered him though. He stepped forward, his face grim. “The Cofah are on the horizon again, or the general might already be down here with his… chosen interrogator. He thinks you’re too dangerous to keep alive. You need to… ” He glanced toward the hallway, perhaps making sure the guard hadn’t returned. “You need to not be here when he comes.”
“Did you come to leave the door open for me?”
“Do I… need to do that? That young man out there—” Ridge waved toward the hallway, “—he’ll be back soon, and he respects me. I would rather not have him think I’m a traitor. I just… wanted to make sure you knew and that you could find a way out on your own.” He gazed into her eyes. “Can you?”
“Yes. I was waiting for things to quiet down out there, and I was… hyperventilating a little because I couldn’t communicate—er, feel—my sword.” Sardelle studied his face. She wanted to ask him if telling her Jaxi’s location would make him a traitor in his people’s eyes—or in his own, which probably mattered more to him, no matter what he had said about the guard. But at the same time, she didn’t want to press him to go against his morals. She could find it on her own. Someone else would have the information and she could, despite what she had told Ridge, access it.
“It’s in an iron box in what used to be my office and is now Nax’s,” Ridge said.
Iron. Of course. It blocked the sensing of magic in a way miles of stone didn’t. Sardelle slumped against the wall. Jaxi was in an office fifty meters away, not at the bottom of some distant chasm. “I see your people haven’t forgotten all Referatu lore in the last three centuries.”
“Heriton studied up after he found that book.” Ridge wanted to say more—his thoughts burned at the front of his mind with such intensity that she got the gist without trying to read him. He wanted to elicit a promise from her that she wouldn’t hurt anyone on the way to retrieving her sword, but he didn’t want to have to ask. He wanted to trust her. He just wasn’t sure anymore.
Though that uncertainty stung, Sardelle chose to see it as a good sign. In time, maybe he would get used to the idea of her as a sorceress. Maybe…
She shook her head. She would worry about that later. For now, she had to escape and retrieve Jaxi before the mob dragged her out for a shooting.
“Thank you for the information,” Sardelle said. “I’ll be careful. Nobody will see me.”
Ridge exhaled slowly, surreptitiously
. “Good.”
Sardelle sensed someone walking into the building upstairs. “My guard is returning.”
Ridge glanced toward the hallway. “I’ll… try not to find it disturbing that you knew that before I did.” He sighed and looked back at her, holding her eyes for a moment.
Hoping for a kiss would be too much at this point, and yet…
“Want to rub my dragon?” Ridge asked.
Sardelle blinked. “What?”
He fished the wooden figurine out of his pocket.
“Oh.” She offered a sheepish shrug—that was not where her mind had gone—and stuck her hand out. Enh, why not?
Feeling silly, she rubbed the belly of the wooden dragon and handed it back to Ridge.
“Sir?” the guard asked from the hallway.
“Yes, I’m done.” Ridge pocketed his lucky charm. “Thank you, Private.”
The young man squinted into the cell, assessing Sardelle but not quite meeting her eyes. “You’re brave, sir.”
“Uh huh.” Ridge stepped into the hall.
“Is it going to be all right for me to be out here, sir?” the private whispered. “General Nax said the iron door was supposed to keep her from getting out, but I… I also heard—overheard—him tell someone I was expendable.”
Ridge snorted. “Nax is expendable. You’ll be fine, soldier. Now, shut the door, eh? We wouldn’t want her to escape.”
“Yes, sir. Of course.”
The door thumped shut, and if the men spoke further, Sardelle didn’t hear it. An iron door? They thought that would keep her in here? If they had lined the whole cell in iron, it would have kept her from sensing or communicating with the outside world, but it wouldn’t have done anything to nullify her actual power. Still, Sardelle couldn’t help but feel very alone again when the key thunked in the lock. Ridge had helped her, but she also had a feeling that had been a goodbye as well.
* * *
Ridge hadn’t taken more than three steps out of the confinement building when shouts started up on the wall.