“You do just fine.” She smiled at him and kept her voice gentle. He would be easy to break.
The third man spoke to the boy in Islander. She heard him use the word “play.” He understood, then, that she was toying with them. She pulled her knife off her belt, walked over to him, and grabbed him by his hair. It was coarse and greasy and smelled of sweat and dirt. It hadn’t been washed in days. She pulled his head back and placed the knife against his grime-encrusted cheek.
“I told you that you will speak in Nye or never speak again,” she said. “Would you like me to cut out your tongue from the inside of your mouth or through your throat?”
“Lady! Please!” the boy cried.
The first man snapped something at the boy. The curtness and the directness in his tone made it sound like a name.
“I am speaking to you, old man,” she said.
“You expect me to apologize to you, bitch?” he asked, his voice hoarse from the pressure of her knife.
“What I said was that you are to speak Nye. I don’t care if you apologize to me or not. My ego isn’t fragile, but I prefer you to speak in a language I understand. If you can’t follow that direction, you won’t speak at all. Is that clear?”
“When you make threats,” the man said, “you should follow through on them.”
“You’re right,” she said. She took the knife away from his neck. It left a small cut. She wiped the blood off on his shirt and shoved the knife back into the hilt. “Excuse me for a moment.”
She opened the door, called her father in Fey, and asked him to send Burden into the room. She heard him yell for Burden, then heard Burden’s affirmative response. She left the door open, then turned to face the prisoners. The third man watched her, chin up, blood dribbling down his neck. The first man looked more relaxed, and the boy’s eyes were wet.
When Burden came in, he closed the door.
“Take him out of here,” she said in Fey, pointing to the third man. She walked over to his chair. In Nye she said, “The Warders want to use you to find out what makes Islanders work. They need you alive for that and wouldn’t be too happy if I killed you—even accidentally. So they will remove your tongue—you won’t need it, anyway—and then they can start work on you.”
“It’s a bluff,” the man said.
“She never bluffs,” Burden said. He came up behind and untied the rope that held the man to the chair, lifting him easily by one armpit. “Say good-bye to your friends, because you won’t be able to speak to them after this.”
“Ort, say you will. Please!” the boy said in his poor Nye.
“Sorry,” Jewel said softly. “But he was right. A woman should always make good on her threats. That way she is taken seriously.”
The first man was watching her without fear, as if he was studying her. He had a different kind of intelligence from his friend. The older man—Ort?—had more bravado than courage. But this man had strength.
She returned her attention to Ort. “Get him out of here,” she said to Burden in Nye. Then she added in Fey, “Have the Healers put a silence spell on him—and keep him away from Caseo.”
“My pleasure,” Burden said in the same language. He pushed Ort ahead of him and ordered him forward in Nye. When they left the room, Jewel closed the door behind them.
“Now,” she said. “We’ll begin again. I prefer to speak in Nye. While you are here, you will speak only Fey or Nye, even between yourselves. And you will answer our questions.”
“No know Fey,” the boy said, his voice breathless.
“And you barely know Nye,” Jewel responded with a smile. “That’s all right. You’ll learn.”
“So you don’t speak Islander,” the first man said.
“I don’t care for the language. It is too harsh,” she said. She ran a hand on this man’s cheek, getting her fingers—still stained with Ort’s blood—close enough to his nostrils that he could smell the rusty-iron odor. “And what is your name?”
The muscles in his face stiffened. She could feel the movement under her fingertips. “Does it matter?” he asked. “You’re going to kill me anyway.”
She smiled, slid her hand down, and chucked his chin before moving away. He had stubble there, like the men of Nye. “If we were going to kill you,” she said, “we would have done it before bringing you in here.”
“You would—a—have die Ort,” the boy said.
“No,” she said, keeping her tone reasonable. “If he doesn’t cooperate with me, I will simply make him wish he had died. And, unfortunately, now he won’t even be able to say so.”
She took Ort’s chair, shook the ropes off it, and swung it around so that she could sit, facing them. “I would like to know your name,” she said again to the first man.
“It’s not important.”
She leaned her head back, just a little. “Well, then, you’ll need to explain this to me. In Oudoun they believe that true names should be hidden, that someone who knows a true name has power over the person whose name it is. Yet the Nyeians never said the Islanders believed that. Is this because they felt we didn’t need to know? Or do you think they wanted to give us an advantage?”
The boy looked confused. Either she was speaking too quickly for him, or this wasn’t a custom. He looked at the man, then back at her.
“Are you afraid of me?” she asked him.
His Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed. “Yes, ma’am.”
Something like anger flickered over the man’s face, but it disappeared so quickly she wasn’t able to identify it. “Let the boy be,” he said. “He shouldn’t have come with us.”
“Then why did he?” she asked, willing to let them take her where they would.
“Asked,” the boy said. “And—”
“He has never fought before. He was a last-minute choice. He should be home with his family.” Two spots of color appeared on the man’s cheek. She liked his courage.
“You should have thought of that before you allowed him along,” Jewel said.
The boy glanced back and forth between them. “Can hurt it? To tell names?” he said to the man.
The man sighed. “No, I suppose not. Everyone knows anyway.”
By that she assumed he meant everyone outside. When the three weren’t among the dead, or part of the returning wounded, the others would guess that they were among the prisoners. Rugar had been very firm with the Fey force. Allow some Islanders to return. Let them know that the Fey had captured both poison and prisoners. That might turn the tide a bit.
“The more you help us, the kinder we will be,” Jewel said.
“We heard—” the boy said, deliberately avoiding the man’s eyes “—the Fey—” and he used the Fey name for themselves, an odd choice, she thought “—not kind.”
“That’s true,” she said. “We aren’t in battle. No one should be. But we’re not in battle now. You are prisoners, and you need to figure out a way to keep yourselves alive.”
“What do you plan for us?” the man asked.
She saw no harm in telling him that. He would never escape, and if he was allowed to go free, any stories she told would make the Fey even more frightening—one of Rugar’s goals. “We plan to discover what makes you different from the Nye. We can do that verbally, or we can let some of our experts figure that out their own way.”
“Cultural differences?” the man asked.
“And physical,” she said.
The boy didn’t understand the exchange. He probably didn’t know the words. But the man knew the words and the subtext. All the color had left his face.
“He’s a boy,” the man said.
She nodded. “Useful. Too bad we didn’t capture any of your women.”
“Women?” He seemed stunned at the idea.
“If you’re different, they have to be different too,” she said.
“Different?” he asked.
“From us.” Her words were soft, and for a moment he looked perplexed. Only at that time did s
he notice the similarity between their races: when he frowned, his eyebrows rose like wings. And she nearly gasped from the wonder of it. What if they were all related on some level, as fish were related, as cats were related? That the Fey were not a different kind of creature, but a superior version of the same creature, something that all Islanders could aspire to. It would explain their poison water: somehow they had reached a Fey-like plateau without realizing it, and the effect on the real Fey was devastating.
“We’re different,” he said. “We’re not aggressive.”
“You do quite well,” she said, thinking of all the dead and wounded she had seen that morning.
“No,” he said. “That’s not what I mean. You people have this odd desire to take over everything. We’re content to live on our Isle without interference. Why don’t you just leave us alone?”
And in his words she heard another voice: All that death for something we would have given you. She shook off the memory as something to save until later. “We are not a commercial people. It’s better to own something than to pay for it, don’t you think?”
“You can’t own everything,” the man said. “You can’t own me no matter what you do to me. Even if you control my body, my thoughts will remain mine.”
She stared at him, wondering if his naïveté was genuine. Then she remembered that they had had no contact with the Fey before this year, and knew nothing of Doppelgängers. “Then you should have no problem in giving me your name,” she said.
He leaned back in his chair, a smile touching his face. The ropes were cutting into his clothes, making an oily crease on the filthy fabric. He didn’t seem to notice. “Adrian,” he said. “And my son, Luke.”
So in trade he gave her three pieces of information, the connection being the most useful. The boy was staring at him, confusion even more evident. Adrian was right: the boy should have stayed home.
“Your son isn’t fluent in Nye,” she said.
“We didn’t think he would need it.” The “we” surprised her. A woman back home, perhaps, who helped him with decisions? Solanda had said that women did not do such things in Islander society. Another man, then? The older one?
“So he is not your only son.”
Adrian started. The question had caught him by surprise.
Her smile grew. “The oldest son learns the trade. The younger sons till the fields. Is that how it goes?”
“No,” he said. “The oldest son inherits.”
“And what becomes of the younger sons?” The favored son, she guessed, from the warmth evident between them.
“Whatever they choose.”
“You send them into the world with nothing and hope they will survive?”
Adrian shrugged. “I did.”
She crossed her legs, letting her right ankle rest on her left knee. “So you do have ownership,” she said. “And you struggle to maintain the size of the land. We do not. We all inherit, so the land must increase, or we would have an ever-diminishing holding.”
“Also—girls?” the boy asked.
She nodded. “And younger sons.”
He flushed. Adrian glanced at him, and she saw tenderness in the look. She wondered how she had missed it before. “What are you going to do with us?” he asked.
“My people need information from you,” she said. “We will get it anyway we can. I am sorry to torture your father, but we have no choice.”
At that he smiled. “Ort is not my father. He is an old man with more passion than sense.”
“He’s not as dumb as all that,” she said. “His knowledge of colloquial Nye is better than any I have heard here. He should be at home as well, helping to negotiate a peace.”
“No one has negotiated a peace,” Adrian said.
“No one has offered.” Jewel put her hands on her calf.
“Is that what you wanted us here for? So that we could go back with word that you want peace?”
She shook her head. “You’re not going back. We can’t let you out of here.”
“What—place this is?” the boy asked. “No sky.”
“Or sun or rain or weather.” She leaned forward just a bit, feeling closer to the boy than she wanted to. “This is where we live until we win.”
Adrian laughed. “The Fey have never been in retreat before. What makes you so sure you will win?”
“You,” she said, and believed the calmness in her own voice.
“Me?” The smile on his lips didn’t meet his eyes. “I am no one. Just a man who joined a fighting force last summer to defend his homeland.”
“And has some degree of expertise because he came on this important raid,” she said.
He shook his head. “We’re not a fighting people. I am the first man in the history of my family to face battle. I was in the raid because I was convenient, not because of my skill.”
Probably true, but not really relevant. What was important was the fact that the three of them had used the poison and probably understood how it was derived. The added side benefit, as Caseo had pointed out, was that the Warders could learn the effects of the poison on the Islanders themselves.
She sighed and leaned back. “You could save yourself some anguish,” she said. “You could tell us how your poison works.”
“I think you’ve seen how it works,” he said dryly.
Vividly. And it frightened her. But she wouldn’t let him know that. “I want to know what makes it work.”
He laughed. “Then don’t ask me. I throw the stuff. I don’t make it.”
“It’s made?” she asked. One of Caseo’s theories had been that the poison was from a stream or a lake somewhere.
“I believe so,” he said. “But I don’t know. I am not in the upper echelons of Rocaanism.”
She frowned. “What was the poison used for before?”
“The water? It is used in our religious ceremonies. The holy water is passed through the congregation, and they dip their fingers into it and use it to clean off the tiny ritual swords that members always carry.”
“Did you have a sword?” she asked.
He shot a quick glance at his son. The boy was looking at his hands. “I am not a believer,” Adrian said.
“Your religion, then, it is not political or required? It is a choice?” That was new to her. She had never encountered that before.
He shrugged. “No one says anything if that’s what you mean. I feel it’s not right to mouth platitudes if I do not believe them.”
But his son believed. She could tell from his attitude. The boy couldn’t speak Nye, but he did understand it—when he wasn’t feeling a pressure to respond. She spoke half a dozen languages like that. If she didn’t concentrate on them, she understood them. But the moment she was required to perform, she couldn’t. She would have to remember that about him and warn the others.
“Did you have a ritual sword, Luke?”
At the sound of his name, the boy’s head jerked up. His eyes were shiny with fear. “They—it—not anymore,” he said.
“Someone took it.”
He nodded.
She swallowed, wanting to run from the room, to warn her people not to touch the sword’s blade. But they had probably figured that out. Fortunately, the ritual symbol for the religion was easily recognizable as a weapon. “What’s the purpose of cleaning the little sword?” she asked.
“The Elders say the Roca did that to his own sword before he died,” Adrian said.
Jewel smiled. “For a nonbeliever, you are very knowledgeable.”
“We are all raised in the Church,” Adrian said.
“So what do they do to make your water holy?” she asked.
Adrian shook his head. “I don’t know.”
Jewel sat up. “You don’t know? Or you won’t tell me?”
“I don’t know,” he said. His tone was sullen.
She turned to the boy. “Do you?”
He glanced at her, and then at his father. Adrian nodded, as if in encouragement. “I
—I—” the boy stammered. “Ah, no.”
“But you were all raised in the Church.”
“That doesn’t mean we understand everything about it. Religion needs to be somewhat mysterious to work,” Adrian said.
The hair rose on the back of her forehead. The Mysteries. Perhaps they disguised them in different ways. “Yet you know how to use this poison.”
“As a religious item? Of course. We didn’t learn about its other properties until you folks came on the scene—at least, none of us outside the upper echelons of Rocaanism knew.”
She didn’t move, didn’t allow her expression to change. If they didn’t know about that particular property, how had they discovered it? She had to talk with her father. They needed more knowledgeable Islanders. “What does this poison do to you?” she asked.
“Nothing,” Adrian said.
“It—” The boy said a word in Islander, then flushed. His eyes were bright with fear.
“What did he say?” she asked Adrian, her tone harsh.
“It purifies.” Adrian’s voice was soft. He didn’t look at his son, but Jewel could feel his concern. She had frightened both of them with her treatment of Ort. They were afraid she would do something to Luke as well.
“Purifies,” she said softly. “And how does purification make you different?”
“It makes us acceptable to God,” Adrian said.
The words sent a shiver through her. “And the Fey, then, can’t be purified?” she asked. “We are unacceptable to your gods?”
“That—Danites—they say.” The boy spoke almost eagerly, as if in giving her that information, she would forgive him for slipping into his native tongue.
She suppressed a sigh. So. Not only were they fighting a powerful poison, they were also fighting a superstition. It was a good thing her father had sent Doppelgängers to the Tabernacle. Perhaps they would find an entrance into the Islanders’ Mysteries. She couldn’t understand it all, not in this conversation. So she switched the subject. “Who is your commander?”
“On this mission?” Adrian asked.
She nodded.
“Theron. He was picked by the King.”
“So the King directs the battles?” She had trouble believing that. The man she had met was inexperienced and frightened. He didn’t seem capable of leading a force like this. But, then, Islanders had not seemed capable of defeating the Fey.
Sacrifice: The First Book of the Fey (The Fey Series) Page 33