And if Bex and Calin had followed?
Better to be free and on the run than sitting safely in a cell.
What’s the difference between a gamble and a good purchase? her father had quizzed her more than once. Retrospect.
Two soldiers stood a short distance beyond the cell, their heads bent together, their voices little more than murmurs. She looked past them to the stairs they’d brought her down. The bedroom had been on the third floor. She was somewhere beneath the first now. She’d counted the steps down, reached thirty before they hit the cells, guessed that meant they were housed in one of the pillars that made up the palace base, held the soner rast aloft over the Isle. She wondered if that meant she was underwater. She looked around. There were three other cells, but all were empty.
There was no cot, so Tes sat cross-legged on the cool stone floor. A pair of manacles hung around her wrists. They weren’t spelled to dampen magic. They didn’t need to be. The entire cell was warded. The air had a leaden weight that reminded her of that other London, the one without magic, but that had been an almost pleasant absence—this felt like a wet blanket dousing flames.
She could see the spellwork of the ward—it was an odd, confusing magic required to negate itself. The lines of power hung suspended in the air, shivering in place, and when she pulled Vares from her pocket and set him on the ground, he sat there, lifeless, his skull drooping forward, the many tiny filaments that wove between his bones gone dark. Tes rose, and perched his little body between the bars, to see how far the wards reached.
“Vares?” she whispered, her tone rising in question.
He didn’t move.
She left him on the ledge, and sank back to the ground, and waited.
Tes studied her right hand, where Bex’s knife had gone through. Ran her fingers along her palm, the back of her hand. Nothing but a thin silver scar, painless and smooth. She knew the same was true for the wound in her side. It no longer hurt to breathe.
Behind her eyes, Kell Maresh buckled to one knee.
You could fix him, said a voice in her head. It sounded an awful lot like Lila Bard’s. Tes let her hands fall back into her lap.
“Kers la?” said a voice.
She looked up in time to see one of the soldiers pluck Vares from between the bars.
“Don’t—” she said, feigning protest, but the guard was already retreating with the owl. One stride, that was all it took for Vares to come back to life, his little bone wings flapping in the soldier’s hand. That told Tes something. Only the cell itself was warded.
The soldier gave a small, delighted laugh. “Hey, Hel,” he said. “It moves.”
As if on cue, Vares gave another flutter, and clicked his beak.
Traitor, thought Tes.
“Let me see,” said the second, holding out his hand.
The first shook his head. “Nas, you’re always breaking things.”
“Come on, then.”
“You have to be gentle.…”
At least the soldiers were occupied.
“Look at its eyes,” said the first. “One blue, one black. Just like the prince.”
“Doesn’t have red feathers, though.”
“Well, it might have, once. You never know.”
Tes rolled her eyes, and slumped onto her back, staring up at the barred ceiling.
“Think,” she whispered to herself.
This was just another kind of puzzle. A problem to be solved. The entire prison wasn’t warded, only the cell, but unfortunately, the cell was where she was currently housed. Which made things tricky, but not impossible. She studied the lines of the ward that ran overhead, traced the lines of it down the bars.
Wards were a kind of paradox. After all, they muted magic, but at their core, they were still active spells. That meant, even when they blocked power from being used, they had to make an exception for their own. And if there was a source of working magic, she could take it apart.
Tes sat up.
She glanced at the soldiers, who were now sitting on a bench, Vares perched between them, their attention wholly on the occasional movements of the dead owl. Tes turned around, putting her back to them, her attention on the bars at the other side of the cell. She rose and approached the bars, got close enough to study the iron-colored threads that wound around the cell. Sure enough, unlike her magic, which was pinned in place, the power here was flowing.
Tes reached out her cuffed hands, and rested them against the bars, as if bored. But as her fingers met the steel, she hooked one of those iron threads, and pulled and— A spasm tore through her body, the air forced from her lungs as the world went white. The next thing she knew, she was lying on her back on the cell floor, ears ringing. Tes coughed, and curled in against the pain as she tried to breathe.