Soul of Smoke (24 page)

Feet scuffed on the stone floor. Rhys looked up. Ashem watched them inscrutably as he trudged through the main cavern on his way to relieve Griffith from his watch. Rhys sighed. He didn’t want to move. “It’s late, Kai. You should sleep.”

Kai smiled. “
We
should sleep. You’re looking kind of sickly.”

“I am not sickly.”

Kai snorted. “Okay. You’re big and strong and impressive.” She yawned.

Reluctantly, Rhys stood and pulled her to her feet. He didn’t want to let go of her hand, nor did he look forward to another night of pain and sleeplessness—he couldn’t bring himself to take Ashem’s drug again, no matter how much his eyes felt like sand.

She tugged his hand. “Come on.”

They entered the sleeping room. Deryn’s gentle snores greeted them from one corner and Juli sighed heavily and rolled around in the blankets she was supposed to share with Kai. Ashem had flatly refused to let them sleep in the library after swearing to Juli. Apparently he didn’t trust her not to try and escape again.

Ffion sat up sleepily in her blankets. “Griffith?”

Rhys was about to answer a negative when Griffith ambled in. If Griff noticed Rhys and Kai’s linked hands, he didn’t comment. Rhys realized abruptly that Ffion and Griffith hadn’t been alone together in a week.

“Griff,” he whispered.

“Mm?” Griffith rumbled.

“Take the room. You and Ffion.”

Griffith’s smile was white in the dark, but his words, as always, were quiet. “If you’re sure...?”

“I am.”

Griffith went and knelt by the blankets he shared with Ffion, whispering to her.

“Thank you, Rhys,” Ffion said, standing. They gathered a few of the extra blankets from their pile and went through the archway.

“That was nice of you,” Kai murmured.

“They should have time to be alone.”

“So...you’re sleeping out here?”

Rhys nodded. He had wanted to give Ffion and Griffith privacy, but it wouldn’t hurt that sleeping here was closer to Kai. It might be enough.

Kai picked up the folded clothes next to her pillow. “Well, I guess I’m going to shower and change, since we worked out. I’ll be quick so you can, too.”

“All right.”

She lingered, as if she didn’t want this—their first non-awkward conversation—to end. Finally, she laughed a little. “Okay. Well. Night.”

Rhys watched her go. He needed to get back to his old room and retrieve a change of clothes before Ffion and Griffith started doing anything compromising. “Goodnight, George.”

Tomorrow, everything would change.

Chapter Twenty-Five

Strange Coldness

Cadoc wished for death, but it didn’t come. He gritted his teeth against a moan as feeling came back into his shattered right hand. Even after days of torture, he’d felt nothing like it; the wrongness of bones splintered into flesh, healing where they shouldn’t. His fingers and the top half of his palm were a swollen, twisted mass, though his thumb was still intact. Where skin was visible through the dried blood, it was purple and black. In some places, bones were visible. He pressed his face into the dusty stone floor and screamed.

He could hear movement and voices above, but no one came for him. Finally, the agony from his hand, torture and days without food or sleep got the better of him. He blacked out.

He flickered in and out of consciousness, awakening once to realize that the normal scuff and rumble that signified the occupation of the cave above had stopped. It was silent for a long time, then the voices were back. The horrible, cold
slap
of the ladder hitting the stone floor of his prison jerked him awake. His tongue was parched and swollen, his vision blurred.

“Just kill me,” he rasped, more a plea than a command. Unbidden, tears leaked from his eyes.
I
won’t tell.
I
won’t tell.
I
won’t tell.
He’d chanted the words so often in the past days they’d almost become meaningless.

“Cadoc?”

A feminine voice, but soft, nothing like Izel’s sultry growl. It plucked at the back of his brain. He opened his eyes. A ball of golden fire hovered at her shoulder, throwing her features into shadow. Cadoc turned away from the bright light.

“
Bachgen gwael
,” she murmured, placing a cool, dry hand on his forehead.
Poor boy.
“What have they done to you?”

Cadoc shuddered at the kind touch, blinking until the shadows on her face formed themselves into features.

“Deryn?”
Ancients
,
please
,
no more illusions.

Her hand froze. He coughed, and she smoothed back his hair. “No, not Deryn.”

The coughing stopped, and he blinked away the tears. She was older than Deryn, more dignified. Her features were soft instead of sharp and her long, auburn hair was streaked with gray. The clothes she wore—a simple, belted tunic and high boots—were of expensive fabric, but cut in a way humans hadn’t worn for over a thousand years. Besides, Deryn couldn’t make fire. Not like...

He jerked away from her, horrified. “Mair!” But it couldn’t be. She was dead. It was nothing but an illusion, after all. He croaked a laugh.

She withdrew a little, her eyes full of pain. “Why do you laugh?”

“Once, shame on you. Twice, shame on me. Thrice, I’m an idiot. I’m an idiot anyway, but I’m not falling for this again. I don’t understand the choice of illusion. Lady Warbringer—”

She bared her teeth and hissed, “Don’t you
dare
speak that name in my hearing, Cadoc ap Brychan. Not when I’m here to set you free.”

Cadoc laughed again. He felt dangerously close to insane.

“Enough!”

The tone was so familiar, Cadoc’s mouth snapped shut automatically.

She flipped long hair back behind one shoulder and gave him a stern glare. “Do you remember the last time I saw you?”

“I remember the last time I saw Mair.”

“Don’t be impertinent. The last time I saw you, I smacked you good with a wooden spoon for eating all my blueberries.”

Cadoc blinked. “I...you were going to bake a tart.” And no one else had known. He and Rhys had snuck into the kitchen while the others were all out training.

She nodded. “And my
son
was supposed to be your lookout, was he not? It seems he takes no better care of you now than he did when you were younger.”

It was why they’d never told anyone. Rhys had been ashamed that he’d left Cadoc behind to take the punishment alone, and Cadoc hadn’t been particularly keen on everyone knowing he’d been walloped by his best friend’s mother.

All humor left him. If this really was Mair, there was nothing funny about it. “Owain makes war and hunts your children because of you, and you don’t even have the decency to be dead like the Council said. Ancients, first Uwan, now this. Maybe I’m the one who’s dead.”

Mair’s face tightened. “The Council lies.
They
banished me when Ayen died.
They
wouldn’t let me come home. They sent assassins to kill me, so I hid. I’ve been hiding. Watching. Waiting.” For a moment, her face paled. “The night the heartswearing broke, I was in so much pain I hardly knew what was happening. I couldn’t help Ayen when Owain attacked.” Her gaze went distant.

Cadoc had hardly known, either. Ashem had burst into their room, overturning Griffith’s bed when he didn’t get up fast enough. Cadoc had killed for the first time that night. Later he’d held Rhys back with bloody hands as Ayen’s dying scream pierced their brains. He’d still been holding Rhys as the power of the mantle washed over him, and his friend had gone from boy to king.

“Cadoc?”

His head gave a hard throb, and he took an unsteady breath. A strange, dizzy coldness had washed over him at the thought of Rhys, and he couldn’t seem to shake it.

“Cadoc?
Bach?
How badly are you hurt?”

When he didn’t answer, Mair, if it really was her, reached into her pocket and pulled out a water bottle. Light from the fire glittered off the translucent scales that spiraled over the back of her left hand. They shone iridescent in the dim light, at once all colors and none.

She took a small vial from a different pocket and dumped it in the water bottle. “Drink. It will take away your pain for an hour or so. You’ll need to be able to fly.”

Cadoc didn’t resist when she lifted his head and put the bottle to his lips. Glorious, cool wetness hit his tongue, and he drank, relishing the feeling of the water as it slid down his throat. Whatever painkiller Mair had put in, its effect was instantaneous, like fire in his veins. He drank the bottle dry, then rose unsteadily. She hadn’t noticed his hand, and he cradled it against his body to hide it from her.

“Put these on.” She handed him a bundle of clothes then went to the ladder and looked up, speaking to whomever was above.

He hesitated. It could still be Owain, still be a trick.

But it could also be his only chance.

Using his good hand, Cadoc eased the shirt over his head, grateful for the painkiller as some of his deeper cuts broke open and bled. He got his torn, bloodied pants off all right, but it took some work to get the new ones on one-handed. Finally, he managed. “I’m ready.” He wondered if his voice would ever sound normal again.

Mair nodded her approval. “Let’s go.” She indicated the rope ladder. Cadoc limped over. He put his good hand on the rung level with his face, then stood there, numb.

“Go on,” Mair urged.

Cadoc let go of the ladder and turned to her, pulling his right hand out of the hoodie pocket. Mair glanced down and gasped. “Oh,
bach
.”

“Do you have a way to take off these sundering chains?” Cadoc asked through gritted teeth. They’d embedded in the skin in places.

Wide eyes never leaving his mangled hand, she nodded. “We got a key off one of the guards.”

Shaking, she reached over his maimed fingers and pressed an intricately carved piece of quartz into an indentation in the cuff. It clicked open. With a sickened look on her face, Mair reached down into her boot and pulled out a small knife.

Cadoc’s stomach turned at the sight of the knife. “How did you find me? How did you even know to look?”

“Let’s just say I have a friend you might not expect.” Mair held out the blade.

Wordlessly, Cadoc took it. He hesitated, licked his lips, and then sliced the skin that had healed over the fine chains, peeling them out, grateful for the numbing effects of the painkiller. He held up his left hand, and Mair unlocked that cuff, the chains sliding off easily. She secreted both binders into a pocket.

“You go first,” she said. “I’ll hold the ladder steady. It will be easier that way.”

Cadoc nodded, realizing it would be this way from now on. He’d lost a hand. He wasn’t a warrior; he definitely wasn’t a bard. He was a cripple.

It took him long minutes and a hard struggle to make his way up the unsteady ladder. Mair’s weight on the bottom helped, but he was seven inches taller and a few dozen pounds heavier than her. He panicked for a moment when, at the top of the ladder, three pairs of hands reached down to haul him out.

“Relax,” Mair said, climbing up in less than a quarter of the time it had taken Cadoc. “They’re with me.” She held out a hand and took something from a stocky, bowlegged Quetzal woman whose nose had been broken at least twice. “Penelope, was there trouble?”

A tall, beautiful Derkin woman with olive skin and soft eyes answered. “No. Everything went as planned.”

The other, a mousy, nondescript Elemental woman with a silver indicium on the back of her left hand, nodded.

Penelope grinned and swept her gaze down Cadoc’s body. “I bet you’re pretty when you haven’t been beaten to a pulp.”

He smiled, dry bottom lip cracking. “Pretty as a song.” Both smile and words were hollow. “And I’m grateful to you ladies for coming to my rescue. But I’m afraid I’ve got to fly. Owain...he knows where the cave is, or close enough. I’ve got to get to them before he does.”

Mair, who had been inspecting the object the Quetzal had handed her, slipped it into her pocket. “Yes, it’s urgent you get back to Rhys. I would come with you, but my hold on power is tenuous, for now. But when I heard Owain had you, I couldn’t let this chance pass.”

That strange coldness flooded him at the mention of Rhys’s name again. “I...”

Mair put a hand on his arm and glanced at the others. “Wait here. I’d like to talk to him alone.”

They nodded, and Mair led Cadoc through a tunnel to the outside. He put a hand over his eyes, blinking in the bright light, still reeling in disbelief. He was free. Mair was alive. It had to be a dream, an illusion. But when his eyes focused, he saw the bodies of two dead guards on either side of the cave.

“What happened to them?” Cadoc asked.

Mair smiled. “We did. Izel escaped, but we cut two from Owain’s number.”

Nausea roiled through his stomach at the thought of his torturer still alive. “I don’t have time to talk. I have to get to them.”

She grabbed his arm. “
Bach
—”

Cadoc shrugged her off. “Don’t call me that. I’m not a child.”

She shook her head, tendrils of long, auburn hair falling into her face. Age had made her no less beautiful. “I’m sorry, it’s how I still see you in my mind. All of you. But I wanted to ask about Aderyn.”

“What about her?”

Mair frowned. “Is she all right? Has she grown tall? A mother shouldn’t be away from her daughter so long.”

“You have two daughters, Queen Dowager.”

She sighed. “Seren was never truly mine. The Council took her from me the day she was born, flame the lot of them. I suspect you know her better than I ever did.”

Cadoc’s thoughts drifted to Seren. Impatient, he pulled them away. “Aderyn is well. She’s sarcastic and makes Rhys do all the cooking. You’d be proud.” The foggy cold washed over him again, and he shook his head to clear it.

Mair smiled. “I am proud. I have a message I need you to carry. Tell my children I’m alive. Tell them I can help. I won’t see Owain take the throne and the mantle from my flesh and blood.”

Cadoc nodded, his injured hand once again held close to his body. “I will. And I have to go. Rhys isn’t...” Dizziness. “They’ll need me.”

“Wait! He isn’t what? Is he injured?”

Cadoc shook his head. “When I left he was...there was a girl...” Why was he telling her this? He shouldn’t be talking.

Mair grabbed Cadoc’s arm again, her voice sharp. “He’s heartsworn?”

Cadoc couldn’t stop himself from answering. “He is, but she’s not. At least, she wasn’t. I have to go.” Ancients, he was so tired.

“She’s human?” Mair’s voice was flat. “He’ll force her. He’s just like his father.”

Cadoc frowned. “He doesn’t have a choice.”

She snorted. “What’s the girl’s name?”

Cadoc closed his eyes for a moment, his thoughts blurring. “Kai.”

“Kai.” Mair smiled. “Heartsworn to a human girl. Like father, like son.” She laughed a little, deep in her throat. “The Council will be thrilled. Now, go to him. Perhaps you’ll be in time to stop a tragedy.”

Cadoc nodded. “Thank you.”

“May the wind carry you well.” She put a hand on his shoulder, then walked back into the cave.

Cadoc called his fire. For a moment, nothing happened. Icy terror trickled down his spine. He inhaled, fighting for calm, and tried again.

Fire flared around him, and this time, he became the dragon. Holding his shattered right foreclaw off the ground, he opened his wings and threw himself into the air. He was exhausted enough to lie down and never move again, but rest would have to wait. He had to warn Rhys.

Ignoring another flash of numbing cold through his mind, Cadoc glanced back.

He was alone.