Queen of Shadows (Throne of Glass #4)(64)

Elide’s blood chilled. She felt the eyes of everyone in the kitchen fix on her.

“As much as we appreciate it, Lady—”

“Are you rejecting my offer, mortal?” Elide didn’t dare to turn around. Beneath the soapy water, her pruny hands shook. She fisted them. Fear was useless; fear got you killed.

“N-no. Of course, Lady. We—and Elide—will be glad for the help.”

And that was that.

The clatter and chaos of the kitchen slowly resumed, but conversation remained hushed. They were all watching, waiting—either for Elide’s blood to spill on the gray stones, or to overhear anything juicy from the ever-smiling lips of Asterin Blackbeak.

She felt each step the witch took toward her—unhurried, but powerful.

“You wash. I’ll dry,” the sentinel said at her side.

Elide peeked out from behind the curtain of her hair. Asterin’s black-and-gold eyes glittered.

“Th-thank you,” she made herself stammer.

The amusement in those immortal eyes grew. Not a good sign.

But Elide continued her work, passing the witch the pots and plates.

“An interesting task, for a lord’s daughter,” Asterin observed, quietly enough that no one else in the bustling kitchen could hear.

“I’m happy to help.”

“That chain says otherwise.”

Elide didn’t falter with the washing; didn’t let the pot in her hands slip an inch. Five minutes, and then she could murmur some explanation and run.

“No one else in this place is chained up like a slave. What makes you so dangerous, Elide Lochan?”

Elide gave a little shrug. An interrogation—that’s what this was. Manon had called her a spy. It seemed her sentinel had decided to assess what level of threat she posed.

“You know, men have always hated and feared our kind,” Asterin went on. “It’s rare for them to catch us, to kill us, but when they do … Oh, they delight in such horrible things. In the Wastes, they’ve made machines to break us apart. The fools never realized that all they needed to do to torture our kind, to make us beg”—she glanced down at Elide’s legs—“was to chain us. Keep us tied to the earth.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

Two of the fowl-pluckers had hooked their hair behind their ears in a futile attempt to overhear them. But Asterin knew how to keep her voice low.

“You’re, what—fifteen? Sixteen?”

“Eighteen.”

“Small for your age.” Asterin gave her a look that made Elide wonder if she could see through the homespun dress to the bandage she used to flatten her full breasts into an unnoticeable chest. “You must have been eight or nine when magic fell.”

Elide scrubbed at the pot. She’d finish it and go. Talking about magic around these people, so many of them eager to sell any bit of information to the dread-lords who ruled this place … It would earn her a trip to the gallows.

“The witchlings who were your age at the time,” the sentinel went on, “never even had a chance to fly. The power doesn’t set in until their first bleeding. At least now they have the wyverns. But it’s not the same, is it?”

“I wouldn’t know.”

Asterin leaned in close, an iron skillet in her long, deadly hands. “But your uncle does, doesn’t he?”

Elide made herself smaller and bought herself a few more seconds of time as she pretended to consider. “I don’t understand.”

“You’ve never heard the wind calling your name, Elide Lochan? Never felt it tug at you? You’ve never listened to it and yearned to fly toward the horizon, to foreign lands?”

She’d spent most of her life locked in a tower, but there had been nights, wild storms …

Elide managed to get the last bit of burnt food off the pot and rinsed it, handing it to the witch before wiping her hands on her apron. “No, Lady. I don’t see why I would.”

Even if she did want to flee—wanted to run to the other end of the world and wash her hands of these people forever. But it had nothing to do with the whispering wind.

Asterin’s black eyes seemed to devour her whole. “You would hear that wind, girl,” she said with expert quiet, “because anyone with Ironteeth blood does. I’m surprised your mother never told you. It’s passed on through the maternal line.”

Witch-blood. Ironteeth blood. In her veins—in her mother’s lineage.

It wasn’t possible. Her blood flowed red; she had no iron teeth or nails. Her mother had been the same. If there was ancestry, it was so old that it had been forgotten, but …

“My mother died when I was a child,” she said, turning away and nodding her farewell to the head cook. “She never told me anything.”

“Pity,” Asterin said.

The servants all gawked at Elide as she limped out, their questioning eyes telling her enough: they hadn’t heard. A small relief, then.

Gods—oh, gods. Witch-blood.

Elide took the stairs up, each movement sending shooting pains through her leg. Was that why Vernon had kept her chained? To keep her from flying off if she ever showed a lick of power? Was that why the windows in that tower in Perranth had been barred?

No—no. She was human. Fully human.