“Believe in this place. Believe you’re one of us. Believe there’s good here.”
I squint at him. Roiven nods sharply and continues.
“Maybe in the end, you’ll still side with them. I’m just asking you to keep an open mind, Cai. Try believing it and see if it feels true.”
I shrug, and Roiven nods again, and leads the way to the ladder. I peer past him as he climbs down. There are ten or fifteen feet of shadow, and then the ladder emerges back into bright daylight at the base of the shaft. When Roiven reaches the bottom, I quickly follow.
The ladder lets me out into a small cave, like a pocket in the stone. There’s a ceiling above me, of course, the ground of the place we just came from, and a wall behind—but in front of us the sky is open, not covered. The dead, lifeless mountain stretches upsteeply to my right as far as the eye can see. To my left, a rugged, natural-looking wall of stone and boulders rises only three or four feet past my head. I already miss the plants.
Avreen sits in one of the notches of that wall. She leans back to see what the noise is, then scowls when she sees me there.
“What happened?” she asks Roiven.
“We’re going to the village.”
“You—” Avreen squawks like a titan bird. She straightens, and her gaze shifts from Roiven to me, and then back to Roiven. “Can we talk,” she says to him, through gritted teeth.
Roiven sighs, then nods.
“Wait here. Don’t move,” the Witch King tells me.
Avreen drags him fifteen feet away, down the open corridor. I slide forward and peek into the nook where she’d been sitting.
And there it is: the ocean. My stomach knots as the familiar feeling of revulsion floods me. It’s only twenty or so feet below where I am now. If I peer nearly straight down I can see the shore below us, a black rock beach like the rest of the Wild Seas.
Suddenly I understand. With the natural-looking wall in front of me, we aren’t visible from the ocean. I’m willing to wager none of their village is, or the courtyards we just walked through. From the sea, this just looks like a barren mountain, but there are people and plants hidden carefully behind the stone ridges.
A chill strokes down my spine. This isn’t possible on the flatter stone isles or the narrow ocean spines, but how many of the bigger sea-rocks and mountains are hiding witches? They’ve found a way to disappear from the Empire’s ships without needing a barrier enchantment like we use in the Empire. It's a technique that we could never use against them. They fly. And this village? I bet it can only be seen from above, on a dragon’s back.
I know it isn’t how they’ve always lived. We’ve found plenty of villages and buildings in the past. The castle on the Bluff, and even the one on Amkrieg, used to be theirs.
Has the War-Father already figured this out, if he knows where the Gray Tower is, or would he praise me if I told him? My heart feels uncomfortably heavy at that thought. I know what he’d do with the information, if he doesn’t already have it. And Ishouldbe fine with that. But something in me has changed.
If we were wrong about how the witches form bonds, what else are we wrong about?
“...Becauseyoudon’t have time,” I hear Avreen hiss, her voice quiet. I lean back from my view of the ocean, but carefully don’t look their way. I don’t want them to know I can hear.
“...Too important. We need every advantage we can get,” Roiven answers, his voice a low rumble.
“...Better to kill her than risk…”
“It hasn’t come to that yet. Take it up with the others if you don’t like it,” Roiven says.
“You’relyingto the others!”
Roiven shakes his head and calls to me. “Cai. Come on.”
I turn toward them, trying to keep the look on my face pleasant, like they weren’t just discussing killing me. Was freeing his magic a mistake? The enchantment still won’t let him attack me, but Sava and Avreen don’t have that problem.
As soon as I start walking toward him, he turns and takes off down the path. Avreen eyes me as I approach and pass her.
“I’m not fooled, knight,” she hisses under her breath. I shrug.
“I’m not trying to fool you.”
Who are theothershe’s lying to?
We walk through the sloping corridor. Every now and then I catch a glimpse of the ocean through a crack in the stones. The path curves as we navigate the mountain. And then, after only a few minutes of walking, the path ends and a ravine opens up at our feet, stretching left and right. Another ladder leads down into it.
