Free Traitor by Nicole Conway

bluntly.
    He grinned dangerously. “No, I suppose not. But you’re out of luck anyway. Broadfeather mobilized with the rest of his battalion a few days ago. They were sent to retake Barrowton.”
    That was not at all what I wanted to hear. Roland was fighting. And I wasn’t there to make sure he made it back alive. “Do you know when they might come back?”
    The soldiers glanced at one another again and exchanged a shrug. “Depends on if they can take the city quickly or not,” one of them guessed. “Barrowton was overrun. It’s a regular beehive of those silver-headed demons. I wouldn’t expect to see anyone come back for another month, at least.”
    I thanked them and went back to where Jace was waiting, tapping his foot impatiently. He met me with another serious but curious frown. “Well?”
    I saved my explanation until we had rounded a corner and put some distance between the infantrymen and ourselves. As I told him everything they had said, Jace’s expression darkened. I caught a glint of dark suspicion in his eyes as he glanced sideways at me.
    “That brother of yours, can he do any of the magical stuff you can?” he asked.
    I frowned back at him challengingly. “I don’t know. We’ve never really been close.”
    Jace had always been a difficult person for me to read. He didn’t say anything else about it as we made our way back to our section of the tower. But I wondered what he was thinking. I wondered why he wouldn’t tell me anything about himself. Surely a man his age, somewhere in his late thirties, had a family, even if he wasn’t married. He had to have parents, or siblings, or cousins.
    We’d used up all our breakfast time indulging my curiosity, so when we got back to the dragonriders’ level of the tower, we went straight to work. Our job was simple—painfully simple. We were moving crates of supplies off the pulley-operated elevator system that ran from the ground level to the top floor of the tower.
    I couldn’t help but be amazed; I’d never seen anything like it. A huge shaft went straight down the center of the tower, plunging into darkness, with several stops on a few floors along the way. A wooden platform suspended on thick ropes could be raised and lowered by operating a huge crank on the ground level. Jace said they had a team of draft horses hitched to it that operated the crank and moved the elevator up and down.
    “A lot better than carrying these crates up fifty stories,” he pointed out as we worked. Together, we were moving the crates from the platform onto two rickshaw carts that we were supposed to use to get them from the elevator to the storage rooms.
    I leaned over the edge to peek down into the dark shaft that plummeted straight down below us, marveling at how the ropes had all be strung together so that they were synchronized perfectly.
    “Why can’t we use this?” I asked. “You know, instead of walking up the stairs every time?”
    Jace grabbed the back of my tunic suddenly, jerking me back into the elevator. “First, because of stupid people like you who decide to lean over the edge and fall to their deaths. Quit that. Don’t you have any sense at all?” he growled as he got back to work loading the rickshaw. “Second, because the stairs serve as a deterrent to keep people from leaving the tower any more than necessary. It’s better to keep everyone in one place in case we’re needed on short notice.”
    Walking up all those stairs was definitely a good reason for me not to leave unless I absolutely had to. Doing it sober was bad enough. Trying to climb them after the members of my flight had coaxed me into drinking too much ale was absolute torture. I wasn’t eager to repeat that scenario anytime soon.
    It took eight trips and most of the day to move all the crates from the elevator to the storage room. We only stopped once for a quick bite of lunch. By the time we unloaded the last crate, my clothes and hair were soaked with sweat. Now I