“Jada?” I asked weakly.
“Yes.” Ariadne was being much rougher with the bread than necessary. Maybe she was pretending it was Jada’s face. “She’ll send for me before very long. She likes to parade me around. Apparently it’s good for morale. This room, it’s like a toy shelf. It’s where she puts me when she doesn’t want to play.”
“Play?”
Ariadne stared down at her hands, jaw muscles locked tight. “The good news is, she only keeps me with her for a few hours at a time. My lady gets bored easily. Also, Milo gets sick of seeing my, quote, stupid smug bitch face, unquote. Did you know that I have a face that can make an honest man puke from across a crowded room? Apparently such is the case.”
“Sod it.” I massaged my temples, trying to concentrate. “All right. Tell me everything that’s happened since the night of the revolution. I need to know whether Milo’s grip on power is secure, I need to know what he’s planning, I need to know how the gibbering bollocks Lynn ended up back on the Isle—”
“You should ask what I told him.”
“What?”
“You want to know what you missed? You’d better start by asking exactly how thoroughly I spilled my craven guts while you were otherwise occupied. Shall I spare you any suspense? I told him everything, Darren. The places where you’ve buried gold over the past five months? I gave him an exhaustively annotated map. The names of all your ships and their approximate positions? I told him everything I could think of and a whole lot more I had to guess. Your weaknesses? I gibbered out Gwyneth’s name before they even finished asking the question. Gwyneth’s weaknesses?”
She turned to me, her eyes glassy and fierce, but her lower lip trembling. “You would think that I could at least keep my fat mouth shut about Gwyn, wouldn’t you. And I did hold out for a while. Almost ten whole minutes. After that, I got extremely talkative. Here’s your bread.”
I took the bit of dry black crust and stared at it, feeling put-upon in that way you do when someone needs comfort and you haven’t got any to give. I took a stab anyway, mostly out of reflex. “It’s no shame to give up information under torture. Everyone has a breaking point.”
“Oh, no doubt. But I have a feeling that some people don’t break until after the torture begins. Whereas I, after a small amount of quality time with my lady Jada, started to spew facts like a geyser each time she cast a sharp look in my direction. Eat your damn bread, Darren. I’m not going to spoon-feed you.”
I fumbled it up to my mouth and gnawed at a corner experimentally. Rock hard. I snapped off a small bit and tucked it into a corner of my mouth to let it soften.
Ariadne sat by the cot, fingers knotted together, face twisted up like a wet dishrag. And I have never in my life known what to say to a crying woman, but I can recognize pure self-loathing when I see it.
“You can’t blame yourself,” I said, with the little energy I had left. “I mean it. It’s not your fault.”
She bit her hand hard before she answered.
“It’s not your fault,” she repeated, in a mocking sing-song. “In other words, you don’t expect me to act like a vaguely competent human being. Which, I suppose, proves that you’re an intelligent woman after all, because it turns out that I’m a useless collaborating cunt.”
I sighed. “Don’t call yourself—”
“Gwyneth is with Milo right now, Darren, and he knows everything about her that there is to know, and I did that. Go ahead and tell me that it’s not my fault. I’ll laugh in your stupid pirate face.”
A moment of silence.
“Lynn can take care of herself,” I said, mainly to see whether it would sound any more convincing if I said it out loud.
Ariadne snorted, with the utmost scorn. But she’d screamed herself dry. Now she sat on the little stool and curled into a ball, legs tucked underneath her.
“You still haven’t answered my question. How did Lynn end up on the Isle?”
“She surrendered.” That dead, defeated tone again. “Didn’t she tell you?”
“She mentioned it. She didn’t say—”
“Why she did it? What her strategy is? She doesn’t have one.”
I snorted. “Lynn? Lynn thinks that you’re never fully dressed without a five-year plan and accompanying budget. She’s got something up her sleeve. She’s more likely to show up for violence without her trousers and her left kidney than without a plan.”
Ariadne didn’t rise to this. Not even the faintest glimmer of a smile. “Well, she had her trousers when she showed up, and her kidneys, so far as I can tell, but she didn’t have anything else. She came to the Isle alone, and when they brought her to the throne room—”
“Wait. Alone?”
“—they brought her in and she told Milo that she didn’t have anything to offer him, but that she’d do whatever he asked as long as—”
“Alone?”
“Shut up. She came here alone, she begged Milo to feed you, she promised she would do whatever he asked as long as he fed you, and it was all very tragic and awful and pathetic and I got to stand there and watch the whole thing because, apparently, that’s what I do.”
Her voice seethed with self-hatred, and I barely knew what was going on, but again I said, “Ariadne, it’s not your fault.”
“Not my fault?” A horrible, pained laugh. “It’s exactly my fault, Darren, don’t you see? Latoya mutinied. She took your Banshee, and she took your crew. That’s why Lynn had to come after you on her own. And I’m sorry, Darren. Because Latoya did it for me. She turned on Lynn for me. And I have no idea why she believed that I could possibly, possibly be worth it.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Lynn
MILO HAD TAKEN over the bedroom that once belonged to Stribos. It was hung in red drapes, and the woodwork was mahogany, with ebony inlay. Pretentious and sleazy all at once. It would have been cheaper and easier to just hang a sign in the room that said I am a huge self-important wanker, and leave it at that. The effect would have been about the same.
When they brought me in, Milo was busy at his desk, writing. He didn’t look up at the creak of the opening door. The guards left silently. For some time, the only sound was his reed pen scratch-scratching over the paper. At last, he set down the pen, reached for a decanter, and poured himself a glass of wine.
“Take your clothes off,” he said.
Balls, I thought, and pulled off my shirt. Folded it. Set it on the ground. While I was still loosening the laces of my trousers, Milo leaned back in his chair, one finger upright. “Wait.”
I waited, stripped to the waist, while Milo took his time sipping his drink. It’s an old trick, making someone get naked before you question them, but even if you know it’s coming, there’s no real counter-play. You can blunt the force of it a bit by obeying the command to strip as soon as it’s given. That way, you give your interrogator one less excuse to bash you on the head, and you take away the satisfaction he’d get from watching you cringe and dither. That doesn’t make you any less naked, though.
Plus, it was cold. It’s always cold, in castles. I stared at my bare arms, watching the skin prickle and the goosebumps rise.
At last, Milo set down his wine-cup. “I gave some very specific instructions. You weren’t supposed to show up here empty-handed.”
“No,” I said. “I was supposed to pick up a gigantic sack of treasure and haul it to your door. It turned out that a bunch of heavily-armed pirates had other ideas about how I was going to spend my time.”
Now he turned around. He had bright blue eyes, Milo did, like little bits of the sky were stuck in his face.
“Explain,” he said. “Start from the beginning, the night you escaped the Keep. And Lynn—I’m not going to get bored, so try not to leave out any little details.”
I nodded, and launched into the story: how we smuggled the Torasan children out to the back dock, how Ariadne forced me into the escape boat, how we received Milo’s message the next morning with his ultimatum.
And then what came after: how Latoya and I had a serious difference of opinion, which led first to a lot of yelling and then to a certain amount of violence, as the crew picked their sides.
“Latoya got most of them,” I said, tiredly. “It turns out that when you’re trying to corral confused sailor-boys into your corner, it helps to be seven feet tall and have muscles like steel potatoes. But I did some shrieking and biting and managed to assemble a crew of eight or nine men. Enough to man the Sod Off.”
“The Sod Off?” Milo asked, interrupting for the first time.
“It’s a sloop. One of our smallest ships. Latoya took the Banshee. I haven’t figured out how to explain that to Darren yet. There will probably be some crying.”
“And then you just went your separate ways?”
“Not exactly. Both of us were trying to hit the treasure caches first.”
“Why did you go after the treasure?”
“I wanted to get enough money to pay the ransom, obviously. I don’t know what Latoya had in mind. Maybe she wants to hire mercenaries before she attacks the Isle? I cleaned out a few of the caches before Latoya could get there—the Sod Off is a speedy little beast—but Latoya caught up in the end. She took the gold I’d managed to gather. Held me upside down by my ankles, more or less, and smacked me until the coins came jangling out. And I guess I’d really pissed her off, because she took the Sod Off and the rest of my sailors, too. She let me have one of the Banshee’s rowboats, though. Because she’s all heart.”
I stopped to let out a long, jaw-cracking yawn. It had been a long two weeks and sleep had not been on the priority list.
“Anyway. When I lost the Sod Off and the money and the rest of my men, that left me without any choices. By then, you’d been starving Darren for ten days. I didn’t have time for anything clever, and I only had one thing to bargain with . . . so.” I gestured at myself. “So. It took me a few days to get here, but I made it. That’s all.”
He leaned back, studying me with those bright blue eyes, and said one word. “Again.”
I went through the whole thing again. When I was done, he told me to tell it again, which I did, and then a fourth time. Maybe he hoped it would wear me out, standing still and talking for so long. He should have known better. Anyone who’s ever been a servant in a great house knows how to stand motionless for hours on end without fainting. The trick is to keep your knees very, very slightly bent.
So I stood, and I talked, and I wondered. The children of castle servants start working when they’re five or six. What was Milo’s first job? Turning the spits in the kitchen, maybe, or carrying water to the harvesters, or picking up chips by the woodpile for tinder. If he was a pretty child, then maybe he served as drink-boy in the Great Hall, waiting at the lord’s elbow during meals with a pitcher of wine. However he had begun his career, it would have involved a lot of standing around.
I’d finished the fourth run-through of the story and was starting on the fifth when Milo gestured for me to stop. “You know what surprises me? I do believe that part of what you’re saying is the truth.”
I blew out a long, exhausted breath. “You can believe what you want, Milo. I’m too tired to lie.”
“Well, you’ll have to find some energy somehow. Get the rest of those clothes off.”
Fuck, bollocks, fuck. I loosened the laces of my trousers and drawers, let them fall, and stepped out of them. Milo turned back to his papers, looking over a long column of figures as though he found them much more interesting than a naked woman. “So. Even with Darren’s life on the line, you failed to bring me anything that I asked for.”
“I did my best,” I said, not bothering to hide my frustration. “Can we consider the circumstances? I was up against a pirate crew of fifty men, led by Latoya. Have you ever met Latoya? She can fold pewter plates into little toy ducks, using only two fingers, and occasionally her tongue. What was I supposed to do, grab a hammer and squash her flat?”
“I’m not asking for excuses. I’m asking why I should let Darren live if I’m not going to get any return on my investment.”
“Oh, please. You’re going to keep her alive for exactly the same reason that you didn’t kill her along with her brothers—because she’s worth more to you than a solid gold dolphin. She’s the damn pirate queen. Half of Kila reveres her; the other half is at least a little nervous about pissing her off. She’s a legend and a hero, and now, thanks to you, she’s also the oldest trueborn Torasan left alive. You’re not going to throw away an asset like that.”
“If you’re so sure of that, why did you come crawling to the Keep to beg me not to starve her to death?”
He thought he was so stinking clever. Maybe he even was, a bit. “Let me rephrase. You would be an idiot to kill her, but people act like idiots all the time. Consider me the voice of reason.”
“Is that what you are to Darren?”
“I’m a lot of things to Darren.”
“So I hear.” He flicked his eyes over me—and there was no interest or excitement in them, just cool calculation. “Get on the bed.”
There it was. I couldn’t say I was surprised, even if I’d hoped, however stupidly, that things wouldn’t go in this direction. If there was anything strange about the whole scenario, it was that Milo planned to do this to me, whom he didn’t hate, instead of Darren, whom he did. But then again, deeply as Milo despised Darren, he seemed to think of her as a sort of honorary man. Just another captured soldier. And in the deranged etiquette of war, one does not rape a fellow soldier. One rapes the soldier’s wife.
I sat on the edge of the bed and scooted backwards, keeping him in view. It was hard not to think about all the other women and boys, in their dozens and their hundreds, who must have sat on this bed, staring up at the dark-red draperies, as they waited for Stribos to finish his wine.
I stared up at the ceiling. Oaken beams.
“You have nothing to prove, you know,” I said. “I know that you can do this to me. Darren knows that she can’t protect me. You don’t have to go through with it, just to . . . to make a point.”
A soft click as he set down his goblet.
“Where are they now?” he asked. “The plate-folding giant and Darren’s band of merry misfits? Where did they go?”
“I don’t know.”
“Didn’t they talk about their plans?”
“Not in front of me. They’re not stupid.”
A minute of silence, during which I counted all the rafter-joists in the ceiling. Then Milo’s voice again. “I know you’re lying.”
“Have it your way,” I said tiredly. Truth be told, if the atmosphere had been a little less charged, I could have fallen asleep right there. I can handle a rowboat when I must, but it wears me out, and making the trip to Torasan Isle had just about flattened me.
“Lynn, don’t shut down.” His voice was softer, now—almost encouraging. “I don’t want to treat you like an enemy, but my men will insist on getting answers from you. The more you come clean, the more I can try to help you. If you hold back . . .”
“Let me save both of us some time,” I interrupted, rolling over onto my elbow. “This is the part of the conversation where you insist that I’m lying, and I insist that I’m not, and you make veiled threats to turn me over to your men for torture if I don’t come clean. And for the record, Milo—I am useless when it comes to dealing with pain. If your Freemen put me in thumbscrews or beat the soles of my feet, then I’ll confess to anything they suggest. I’ll confess that I murdered the last High Lord and took your mother’s virginity and had carnal relations with a badger. I’ll confess to any damn thing and I’ll keep going for hours and, when I’m finished, none of you will have any idea what to believe. Every little grain of truth is going to be drowned in the sludge of don’t-hurt-me-I’ll-say-anything. So, when you’re making decisions tonight, bear that in mind.”
Milo shook his head, smiling a vague smile that didn’t reach his blue-blue eyes.
“You’re t
oo dangerous for me to let you live, and too valuable for me to kill you,” he said. “So what am I going to do with you?”
I lay back down on the must-smelling mattress. In a way, I almost wished he’d get on with it. “You’re going to rape me, apparently.”
I wasn’t looking at him at that moment—so whatever the strange thing was that I noticed, it can’t have been something that I saw. Nor something that I heard, because he made no sound. Best I can describe, it was a sort of ripple in the air. A sudden tension, as if someone had plucked at an invisible bowstring.
Ever so casually, I rolled to face Milo. He was knocking back the dregs of his wine, but the tendons down his neck stood out from the skin, like drawn cables.
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