I shot my eyes to the side to a small door set into the wall. I had assumed it was no more than a cupboard or a closet.
Io motioned to me.
I hurried to the door and pulled it open. A girl was seated on a small wooden stool with blood trickling from her nose. She wore rumpled, filthy, clothes, and she was looking at me with what could only be described as comical irreverence.
"Many thanks, good lady," she said cheerfully as she ducked under the edge of the door frame. She started to survey the room, caught sight of Io, and gave a small bow. "Good sir," she said.
Then she turned to the man against the wall. "May I?" she asked Io, reaching into her pocket.
"By all means," Io said, stepping aside with a flourish of his hand.
Before I could even wonder what she was doing, she had plunged a dagger into Merrik's chest, pulled it out, and plunged it in again. And again and again and again, until blood coated the man's front and his eyes were vacant, his mouth hanging open in a silent scream.
The girl pulled a handkerchief from her pocket and began to wipe her face. When the cloth came back clean, she looked at Io curiously. "Ah," she said, leaning her head back. "Thank you for that as well."
He'd used his magic to shield her from the blood.
"I suppose I shouldn't have done that," she said, motioning to the now very dead man hanging against the wall as she used the cloth to clean her knife. "I'm sure you could have gotten some good information from that one. But well, my temper does sometimes get the best of me."
She hadn't looked even slightly ill-tempered through any of it, even as she killed him in such a blood-thirsty way.
She turned to the smaller man as she pocketed her blade. "That one deserves to be tortured slow and long and good, though. That one likes to hurt the little ones."
The man's eyes went wild, darting back and forth between the girl and Io.
"That ought to get you the same information you could've gotten from old Merrik there," she said, kicking at the man's limp foot where it lay against the wall. "He's just a go-between, and I'll wager you want the head of this particular snake."
I wanted to ask her how she knew any of this. I wanted to ask her a thousand questions, the first of which was, how did she manage to maintain her calm and not be in tears on the floor after apparently being beaten and sold into slavery to a disgusting old pervert? Instead, I asked her name.
"Rae," she said. "Though some called me Iris in another life." She reached out and shook my hand quickly as I wondered how anyone that young could have another life.
She turned back to Io. "I'll answer what questions I can if you'll help me with a tiny bit of a task."
"Of course.” He opened his mouth, presumably to ask those questions, but she cut him off.
"No, there are no other girls here. This is just some merchant prince's attempt to recapture his youth through flesh and fire. He does it every year and tries to make it nastier and nastier. I'm not even a girl, really. I'm nineteen years old, but that old twat thought he could pass me off as fourteen, as though he's not known me since I was near that young." She looked at the dead Merrik with disdain.
"Secondly, I don't know where the girls are kept. That's how I ended up in this mess myself, trying to earn a bit of coin by ferreting out information for...let's call them interested parties."
At Io's look, Rae added. "No, I cannot tell you who those interested parties are, but I'll pass it along to them that one such as you might be interested in working with one such as them."
She gave the remaining man, the one who'd purchased her, a sideways glance. "Lastly, that is Elias Addison. He's a financier of big, pretty ships out of Gold Harbor, and if he disappears, most will celebrate. His nephew, Kherial, will look for him only inasmuch as he will be needing a body to inherit. If you leave him, perhaps as the result of some tragic mangling accident in a godsgrass mill, you'll not find anyone who gives a damn."
She turned to me, finally. "And as a bonus, I'll tell you, good lady, that I am a seer, a sage, a diviner of the secrets of the ancients.Thatis how I know what questions you would ask, andthatis how I am not a sobbing mess on the stones. I knew you were coming."
Io chuckled at the whirlwind of words from the tiny...woman—nota girl, I reminded myself, though she looked no older than sixteen.
"And the task?" he asked her.
She pushed her hair back from her face. It was a tangled mess of light brown that could use a wash and a brush. When she had it held to the side, I saw a trickle of blood running down from some kind of spike driven through the middle of her ear.
Io held her head gently and inspected the spike. He swore under his breath as he realized the same thing I did. It was barbed on both ends and made from Mellitrium.
It was the old way of binding a mage—by driving a mellitrium spike through the ear, then forming a barb at the end so it could not be removed—at least not easily.
"I'll have to tear it free," he said with a wince.
"Go right ahead, big fellow. I couldn't manage to do it myself, on account of the pain, but I never cared much for the look of my ears. I already had more than a good portion trimmed away before I could even walk."
