Free Rebellion: Tainted Realm: Book 2 by Ian Irvine Page B

as well.”
    Though the chancellor despised Rix, he had the decency not to show it this time. “He’s a resourceful man. He could have escaped.”
    “You chopped his hand off!” she said furiously. “How’s he supposed to fight without a right hand?”
    “To escape a besieged city you need to avoid attention, not attract it.”
    After a lengthy pause, he continued as though her problems, her tragedies, were irrelevant. Which, to him, they were.
    “The enemy hold all of central Hightspall – the wealthy, fertile part. Now I’m limping like a three-legged hound to the fringes. But where am I to go, Tali, when the ice sheets are closing around the land from three sides? What am I to do?”
    This was the strangest aspect of their relationship. One minute he was the ruthless master and she the helpless victim; the next he was confiding in her and seeking her advice as though she were his one true friend.
    The chancellor was not, and could never be, her friend. He was a ruthless man who surrounded himself in surreal, twisted artworks, and with beautiful young women he never laid a finger on. He was not a kind man, or even a good one, but he had two virtues: he held to his word and he loved his country. He would do almost anything, sacrifice almost anyone, to save it, and if she wasn’t strong enough, if she didn’t fight him all the way, he would sacrifice her too.
    “Why ask me? Where are you running to, Chancellor, with your tail between your crooked little legs?”
    His smile was crooked, too. “I’ve been insulted by the best in the land. Do you think your second-rate jibes can scratch my corrugated hide?”
    Tali slumped. She was so weak that five minutes of verbal jousting was all she could manage.
    “Is all lost, then?” she said faintly.
    He took her hand, which was even more surprising. The chancellor was not given to touching.
    “Not yet, but it could soon be. I fear the worst, Tali, I’m not afraid to tell you. If you know anything that can help us, anything at all…”
    She had to distract him from that line of thought. “Do you have a plan? For the war, I mean?”
    “Rebuild my army and forge alliances, so when the time comes…”
    “For a bold stroke?”
    “Or a last desperate gamble. Possibly using you.”
    Tali froze. Did he know about the ebony pearl? She turned to the brazier, afraid that her eyes would give her away.
    “You gave me your word,” he went on.
    Not her pearl.
Worse
. He was referring to the promise he had forced out of her in his red palace in Caulderon. That one day he might ask her to do the impossible and sneak into Cython to rouse the Pale to rebellion.
    She did not consider the promise binding since it had been given under duress. But the blood oath she had sworn before escaping from Cython
was
binding, and it amounted to the same thing. With Cython depopulated because most of its troops had marched out to war, the vast numbers of Pale slaves there were a threat at the heart of Lyf’s empire.
    Sooner or later he would decide to deal with the threat, and that was where Tali’s blood oath came in. She had sworn to do whatever it took to save her people. But before she could hope to, she would have to overcome her darkest fear – a return to slavery.

CHAPTER 4
    The winter journey over the Crowbung Mountains, and the lower ranges beyond, took eight days of cold, exhaustion and pain. Tali saw nothing of the lands they were passing through, for the chancellor had taken pains to ensure that no spy could discover where she was.
    She was confined to a covered wagon all the hours of daylight, disguised by a glamour the chief magian had cast over her. All she knew, from glimpses of the setting sun, was that they were heading west, then south-west.
    Twice more she was taken to the healer’s tent at night so Madam Dibly could draw more blood. It was needed to heal valued people who had been bitten by shifters and thus turned to shifters themselves.
    Tali had been waiting for