Page 85 of Untempered
It occurred to me that she didn’t once attempt to speak tome.
So when I heard Ylva say, “You’ve got quite a problem out there,” I paid attention. There was nothing else for me to do, anyway.
“I do.”
“You know this plague is magical, right?”
I watched as Audrey’s fingers hesitated over her knight. “I don’t know much about it.”
Ylva’s smile kicked up a little. “Shame you’re on this side of the battle lines. I’d have a bow in your hands in a moment if we were at home.”
There was enough regret in that statement that I went to stand beside Audrey. Ylva could escape whenever she damned well wanted, but she wasn’t murdering the person I was bloodsworn to protect on her way out. At least not in my presence. And with Thomas settled in the camp and preparing to face the approaching winter, that meant she wasn’t murdering this woman at all.
“At ease,” Ylva said, not glancing at me. “She can take me.” And this was followed up by a leer that gave me secondhand discomfort for Audrey, who surely knew she was being mocked.
“I understand those thoughts must irritate you,” Audrey said, shifting her knight defensively. “But the only place I want to take you, Ylva, is to the orchards with a good horse and some supplies, so you can go and cut throats in peace.”
It was Ylva’s turn to still, and I watched as the fine silver chains in her ears shivered, giving away her tiny movement. “You know how to woo a Worg, my lady.”
“Sit down, Chay,” Audrey said, and the utter disinterest in her words made the boy inside me shrink. Rather than follow her command, I wandered to the window, folding my arms over my chest as though I held that boy to my chest. I didn’t block the sunlight falling over Audrey, but I did take what I needed, turning my face into the warmth, and I breathed.
I didn’t need to exist in the shadows. And no one would make me.
“What’s a Worg?”
Ylva looked at her, eyes wide. “Seriously?”
“What I don’t know could, and does, fill hundreds of books,” Audrey said with a shrug, and her shawl slipped just a little, hugging her strong arm. “Enlighten me, while we’re both stuck.”
“You aren’t stuck,” Ylva said with a snort. “You could doanything.You’ve the money and the power.”
I remembered someone accusing Kadan of the same. He’d laughed at the lie, but Audrey didn’t. “I can do a lot,” she said, straight-faced. “I don’t know how. What’s a Worg?”
Ylva glanced at me, unsettled, but I just met her look blank-faced, so she turned back to Audrey. I didn’t know how to take the comment, either. I remembered the day in the orchard. She’d burned, then. I’d seen glimpses of it, but that fire was hidden.
I was glad. It consumed what it touched.
“Why do you put up with it?”
“Put up with what?”
“This.” Ylva flicked her fingers in a movement that was both contained and aggressive.
Audrey sat back, her eyes still on the chessboard. I resisted the urge to explain that Ylva meant her situation at large as the prisoner made a swift move that sacrificed one of her pawns and put Audrey’s knight in another dire situation. I didn’t like the symbolism of that.
“I don’t know how to shift the power,” Audrey responded. “Not properly. I could drop some matches on the city, but they’d rebuild it on the bones of the innocent. I could throw my father’s wealth to the wind, but he’d just seize it at sword point. I could leave, but he’d just adopt.”
Ylva picked up her queen and tipped it at a jaunty angle. “Have you considered, and I’m just throwing this out there, mind, but have you considered sticking a knife in his eye?”
I couldn’t help but glance toward the door. I’d been in La’Angi too long. It was making me jumpy.
“How’d that work for you?” Audrey asked sweetly.
Ylva dismissed that with a flick of her fingers. “It wasn’t me, it was my cousin. If it’d been me, he’d be dead.”
Audrey didn’t laugh at her bravado. I suspected my gently reared lady didn’t see the offer of a shared joke in Ylva’s eyes. I smiled to make the prisoner feel better, but she didn’t seem to notice.
“And without my father, what changes?” Audrey asked her.
