“It’s not a concern.”
If Baz wanted to delude himself into feeling all warm and fuzzy with me, he could go right ahead.
“I’m safe with her,” Baz assured his friends.
As one, Ed, Félix, and I stared at him. Our looks all conveyed a similar message: Have you lost your ever-loving mind? Of course you aren’t safe with her. She tried to kill you, remember?
“I am safe with her,” Baz said, drawing closer to his friends. “I’m sure of it now.” His eyes bore into theirs, passing on some secret message I didn’t catch. Too bad, because I would have liked to know why I wasn’t going to kill him.
Baz passed some more secret eye messages with his friends before lowering his voice. The guards could probably still hear since they were all sänglures, but maybe not.
“Stay on Terencia,” Baz said. “We need to find out what she knows.”
Félix looked from him to me. “It’s likely what she said was an act of desperation.”
Meaning, the elf believed the empress was a filthy liar.
“I’m not so sure,” Baz said, and hope twirled on tiptoes through my chest.
Immediately after, my chest constricted. Hadn’t I been down this road before? Heartbreak and Hope were no less vicious bitches now than when I’d first slammed awake in my underwater grave.
Félix flicked his head toward the open threshold that had been previously blocked by the portcullis. The four of us strode to its other side, farther away from earshot of soldiers and servants. When the three of them dipped their heads together to conspire, so did I. Ed stiffened. Félix only studied me with fresh curiosity. Gone was the disapproval—odd. What had all those eye-messages said?
“We can’t wait for Terencia,” Baz said.
My mouth jerked open to protest.
“She might never come back.”
My mouth opened again.
“That doesn’t mean we won’t follow through. If there’s a chance your brother is alive, I want to find out too.”
Why? It almost slipped from my lips, but I clamped them shut. Why didn’t matter. Results were all that did. Teo was all that was important.
“But there may be better ways of getting Mauldrene to cooperate, and I won’t waste our time. We still have to go back for the others.”
Ed’s face clouded over.
“You should have let me kill her,” I said.
Ed crossed her arms over her chest, her muscles twitching. A one-sided sneer emphasized that they hadn’t stopped me.
I’d failed. I’d acted impulsively and without a plan, and so I’d failed, when the Bazrians hated her enough that they might have just pretended they couldn’t stop me in time.
I harrumphed. “I should have killed her.”
Ed sighed a, Yep, you damn well should have.
Woman had a point. I sighed too.
“If they can’t get through,” Ed said, “what do you want us to do?”
Baz considered. “Get to the others. Check on Lev and Moncho.”
“And Crute and the kitchen hand?”
Storm clouds raced across Baz’s face. “I’ll pay for them to be buried in Galmeen. Off the island.”
