Page 2 of Cage of Starlight
But they don’t lead him away from the mines and toward the cramped mudbrick home Fedri shares with her husband. The men guide him, instead, closer to the wrought-iron gates.
A chill creeps outward from Tory’s stomach. “Yousaidhe was with Fedri.”
The tall miner at the lead looks steadily ahead, expression guilty. “She came out to be with him when we told her what happened.”
They planned this, then. Oh, he’s going to hurt them. He’ll let wild animals into their homes to gnaw their feet while they sleep.
“No. Let me out. I won’t do this.” It’s hisonlyrule. No work near the mines.
“Tory—”
“Tory nothing! I won’t do it.”
They continue walking, slow but steady, with Tory trapped at the center.
He turns to the tower of a man behind him. What’s his name?Eli. Eli with the six young daughters and a harried son left to corral the girls while their father is at work.
“Eli. Let me out.”
Someone to his left whispers, “Make a fuss and they’ll find us. You want that?”
“I wantout!”His heart roars in his ears, a whoosh that drowns even the earth-deep clank of man’s hunger meeting steadfast stone in the mines. To his left, too close in his peripheral vision, one of Vantaras’ navy-clad soldiers paces in front of the fence, a thick rifle resting on his shoulder.
Tory’s hands ache with remembered pain. It would be nice if he could be angry, but the tar-slick churning in his belly and the wayhis blood retreats from his numb lips is fear, plain and simple. He thought he left it behind twelve years ago. “I told you—youknow—”
Behind him is Eli of the many daughters. To his right is Carn, who lives in a small home with his elderly mother and whips up an excellent mushroom stew. When Tory healed old Mrs. Carn’s broken hip, he and Thatcher feasted on that stew all winter. The stocky woman with her nose pointed at the ground works the mines while her partner watches their young twins. He knows them all.
He hates them.
One rule. He had one rule.
“We tried, Tory!” It’s the hand-wringing miner at the front, a transfer from one of the many dried-up towns down south. “If we move him any farther, we’ll kill him. You’ll understand when you see him. Please. We got him out the employee entrance and a little ways into the woods. The trees should keep anyone from seeing. Please, he’ll die if you can’t help. Kelly’s a good man.”
It stings because it’s true.
Tory wants to bite his tongue all the way off and spit it at them. He wants to leap over Hulven’s walls and keep running until his feet fail him, because if he learned nothing else from cleaning up after clients in one of the pleasure houses as a boy, he learned this: people who knowingly violate your boundaries once will do it again.
Instead, he forces a tired smile and says, “All right.”
More fool him for believing the bargain he struck meant he’d be safe here.He let this place weaken him, let himself forget the laws he lived by.Only fools grow roots,his mom used to say.Getting comfortable is how you get caught.It was how she got caught.He’ll learn. Next time, he’ll get it right.
“Just get me to him fast,” he grits out, and he hates the way their shoulders slacken and their breaths come easy, hates how one of the men—Carn, probably, the big softy—sniffs back tears. Most of all, he hates that he wants to relax into the hand squeezing his arm.
“Stop crying,” he grumbles. “I already said I’d do it.”
This will be the last time.
*
Fedri kneels in a slurry of filth beside Kelly’s stretcher, stroking her husband’s face.
It’s easy to see why they didn’t move him farther. The canvas stretcher is a swamp of blood, its wooden handholds dripping. Kelly breathes in labored, erratic bursts, his belly a ruined mess. It’s a miracle he’s not dead.
The eerie feeling from the mines is just as bad here as it was closer to the gate. It’s an anticipatory feeling—an indrawn breath before a scream.
Tory hunches over Kelly and tries to ignore the towering iron fence. He’ll be fine, probably. The one blessing of the vines that make an impenetrable canopy of the trees and anything else they can crawl along is that no one can chop them down fast enough to keep the fence clear. The guards won’t see Tory unless they’re looking.
“Keep watch,” Tory tells the miners, and they scramble away.
