Page 70 of Bosse
Chapter 16
For the rest of theday, Alifair hung around the kitchen to avoid Eriko’s attention. The hours passed too slowly for her anxious nerves.
She’d spent yesterday in quiet panic as Krol had walked out with his Lammogo. She’d expected to be called in front of Eriko at any minute, but that hadn’t happened. Krol’s right-hand man left the castle at midday for a reason she only learned about now.
While they all were preparing food for the guards or cleaning up, Linota had asked the kitchen help around her if anyone knew when Eriko would return. She was naturally nervous, but the prospect of being interrogated over her possible involvement with Bosse’s escape had to rattle her even more every minute.
Servants started speculating about Eriko’s whereabouts.
Hessie shut them all down, saying, “He had to take men to close off the tunnel. It’s none o’ your business what he does. Get back to work.”
Thankfully, that had delayed his interrogation schedule, but Alifair still had to come up with a solid alibi for where she was the night of Bosse’s escape and practice her answers. Maybe she could use a simple spell to confuse him.
That might backfire on her, like when she had tried to get out of trouble at fifteen.
She threw herself into helping everyone in the kitchen, glad when another guard killed a deer and delivered it to Hessie dressed and ready to be skinned.
Nothing would put a smile on that woman’s face, but fresh game kept her content for a while.
Where could Rez be?
Alifair punched down the bread dough that had risen. The harder the punch, the finer the crumble.
She’d like to punch a certain lion shifter instead of preparing tasty bread for him and his gang of guards. She shook off the unproductive thoughts and folded the dough into itself while mentally running through the list of places she had not searched for Rez.
She still came up with only one possibility, and that was upstairs in Krol’s private area. Getting caught there would mean immediate consequences, but no worse than being fingered for her part in Bosse’s escape.
She couldn’t keep waiting around.
The woman with the blue headscarf had to be going up there through that locked door.
Alifair had seen no other servant moving around on her own and unbothered by guards. Someone had to be feeding Rez. Krol didn’t like to lose any of his captives to starvation when he lived to watch their pain and death. Killing Rez would be a wasted value. It made more sense that he might trade her for a shifter or some other benefit. If so, wouldn’t he want to keep her healthy?
Yet one question stomped on her hope daily.
Was Rez even here?
She had to be. Alifair saw this castle in a dream after falling asleep during a trance she induced for speed and efficiency, where she asked how to find Rez. She’d waited until she could replicate the dream a second time before informing her clan. The second dream showed her a shape she took to be the country with the castle. She’d looked at locations of countries until her eyes were bloodshot from trying to match that shape, then realized it had to be Slovakia. At that point, she narrowed down this castle by using the internet searches, which showed it as abandoned.
All of that matched what she’d seen in her dream.
The stand-in leaders who managed the clan while Rez was gone declared Alifair should stay in Europe and hunt for Rez. She had the best chance of finding their leader.
That’s how she’d ended up hiking and camping near the castle like some lost tourist.
Literally, she made herself a sitting duck for Krol’s men to snatch. She’d hoped that part had been correct, worrying she might get captured by someone else.
The first night in the castle, she fell into an exhausted sleep and dreamed of Rez sitting alone in a room walled in stone.
She’d awakened, ready to find Rez and get out of there just like she had awakened after prior informative dreams. Frustrated by week two, she worked harder to narrow the scope of her dream, asking for better details.
That’s when she began to see Bosse and Rez.
