Though centuries had passed since Rafaela married Alonso, she appeared only to have aged a decade at most. It was the way with sänglures. For those of the blood, as Rafaela was, their bodies aged normally only until their mid-twenties. For those of us who’d been rebirthed, we aged much more slowly until the equivalent of that same age, and then also stopped. After that, the passing years were visible mostly in the burdens of hard experiences.
“So,” Baz asked the woman, “are we to understand that you are not Rafaela?”
Her mouth started up again, and though it moved so fast she must have been explaining everything, once more, we heard only silence.
Again, she screamed—this time, it was a raspy, frustrated bellow.
“Sounds like she really isn’t,” I said. “But if she’s not Rafaela, then who the scorch is she?”
The woman was silently—though emphatically—answering. Her hands were a blur of pointed insistence.
My eyes widened. “Are you Mauldrene? The castle, are you somehow the castle?”
She stilled as if considering, but ultimately shook her head.
“Then who are you? Speak slowly. We’ll read your lips.”
She did so, and I followed every careful arch of her lips.
“Did you get that?” I asked Baz.
“Nope. I thought you were doing the lip-reading.”
“I was.”
“And?”
“And I apparently suck at lip-reading. I thought she said ‘something, something, me caught la-la.’”
As if caught by surprise, he rumbled a quiet laugh. “Let’s start with getting her out of this cage, and then out of Mauldrene’s guts. We can figure out the rest after that. My friends will help us too. They possess a varied skillset.”
“How fantastic.”
He frowned.
“Don’t look at me like that. They all hate me. Why should I bother liking them?”
“Maybe if you bothered being nice to them, they would learn to like you.”
I snorted. “Yeah, as if that’s likely.”
“Stranger things have happened than the Bazrians learning to like our enemy.”
I stared into his stormy ocean eyes a beat too long, and then hurried to break the contact. “Like finding my young dame stuck inside a cage in a possessed castle?”
“That definitely counts as strange.”
The woman slumped to the floor of her cell and plonked her head against the bars with a low thud. Then she did it again—thudddd.
“Don’t worry,” Baz told her. “We won’t abandon you. We’ll get you out of here.”
“Don’t promise her that.”
“Why not?”
“’Cause that’s no ordinary lock. Believe me, a thousand hours of trying won’t open it without the correctly attuned magic.”
A single brow arched menacingly. “That sounds like you’re talking from experience.”
