Free Blood and Betrayal by Lindsay Buroker Page A

day.
    •  •  •
    Amaranthe had expected a spacious cell, given the monstrous size of the aircraft—in her head, she had started calling it the
Behemoth
. Something stark, bleak, and black certainly, but roomy. Instead, Pike and his guards had taken her to an empty room with nothing but a surgeon’s operating table in the center and a bronze-and-iron crate on the floor, the sort of thing one might stick a dog in for traveling. A small dog.
    Without anything so friendly as a, “Welcome to your new home” or “Step in please, ma’am,” the guards had forced Amaranthe into the crate, their strength and numbers defeating her attempts to fight the entombing. The inside lacked windows, grates, or even pinholes for light. What if she ran out of air? Her body tensed at the thought. In the cramped blackness, with her knees to her chest and her back, shoulders, and feet smashed against the walls, she couldn’t do anything to release that tension, that fear. Relax, she ordered herself, and inhaled deep breaths, trying to find calm. It worked—sort of—but she found a new emotion too: disgust. The scent of lye soap clinging to the interior failed to hide the underlying odor of urine and feces. Pike must not be the sort to let his captives out for latrine breaks.
    With no room to turn around or switch positions, Amaranthe almost dislocated a few joints when she probed the door and seams to search for weaknesses. A few minutes convinced her that there were none. There wasn’t any noise either. If anyone remained in the room outside her crate, she couldn’t hear signs of it.
    After exploring her prison, there was little to do but sit and think. Especially about what would happen on that operating table. To distract herself, Amaranthe made a list of things she wanted to ask Pike. Perhaps it was overly optimistic, but she figured as long as she was in the enemy stronghold, she ought to gather what intelligence she could. And keep the conversation away from Sicarius.
    The idea of betraying him worried her as much as thoughts of Pike and that table. It had happened before, when that shaman, Tarok, had used the Science to delve into her mind. She’d been powerless to stop him. Sicarius had killed Tarok before he could spread any secrets, but Sicarius wasn’t here. If the information escaped through her lips, there’d be no one to silence Pike.
    She dropped her chin onto her chest. In the first few months she’d known Sicarius, before they’d developed a… friendship—yes, she felt confident in calling it that—Amaranthe had wondered if he might ponder the benefits of her death. With his dearest secret in her head, she represented a threat to him. Anyone who learned that Sespian was his son could use Sespian to strike at him. After a lifetime as an assassin, Sicarius had a long list of enemies who’d like to do just that. Amaranthe also represented a threat to the stability of the empire, or at least Sespian’s right to rule. Sicarius had to have thought of that from time to time, that if he got rid of her, this very scenario could never play out. But he hadn’t, and here she was. She could
not
betray him.
    When hours passed and nobody came to question her, Amaranthe drifted back to less useful thoughts, like what would happen on that table. Logically, she knew she had to keep her mind busy lest self-pity, defeat, and fear start to gnaw at her, and she knew also that being stuffed in that tiny crate was meant as some marinade to tenderize the meat before roasting it. But the discomfort of growing thirst, hunger, and muscle cramps from being unable to shift positions intruded upon her thoughts, making it difficult to send her mind elsewhere. Most of all, she noticed the silence, the utter lack of anyone with whom to talk. Sicarius would probably find the solitude restful, but Amaranthe
liked
being around people. A few days with no one to talk to and she’d be in the right state of mind to babble every secret to