Water's Wrath (Air Awakens #4)(19)

“You’re disgusting,” Vhalla muttered caustically.

“You don’t get to say that.” The man’s eyes gleamed with dark pride. “You’re less than human. You’re nothing more than a tool. And it’s been a frustrating century and a half trying to hunt you down in the East.”

“Hunt me down?”

“The East has become quite good at hiding creatures like you; they don’t even speak of magic any longer. It’s been nearly twenty-six years since we got our hands on the last one. But we won’t mess up this time.” The major ran his hand up her thigh. “Not with you.”

Vhalla shivered as he left her, despite the residual heat of the desert still hanging in the air. She’d been hunting for connections, to see the bigger picture between seemingly unrelated events. But was she ready to see what was bubbling to the forefront of her mind as truth?

Why was everyone so ready to believe that no Windwalkers were being born when it made so much more sense that the East had simply perfected the art of hiding them? The laws following the Burning Times, the outlawing of all magic, the urge to forget, it was all to hide people like her.

She stilled, and the pain of her bindings was ignored for the briefest of moments. Vhalla suddenly had a thousand questions she wanted to ask her own father. How determined he was to go fight in the War of the Crystal Caverns, how outspoken he had been about sorcerers tampering with the crystals.

Vhalla remembered her mother instilling a fear of magic in Vhalla from a young age. A distaste for it that ran so deep Vhalla had never questioned or thought twice about it. She remembered the first time she’d fallen off the roof after climbing up fearlessly, unharmed. The argument of her parents she had overheard. She had never thought of it before, it seemed so normal. Her parents had been afraid for her wellbeing. They believed in fearing magic like the rest of the East; they’d never think their daughter was a sorcerer.

The shackles around her wrists suddenly felt heavy, and Vhalla blinked at them bleary eyed. What if it hadn’t been as normal as she thought? What if she had been hidden?

The thought echoed in her mind through the long ride the next day, sobering her to a withdrawn silence. The Knights made jokes about clipping the Windwalkers wings and how easy she’d been to break. Schnurr made it a ritual to impart knowledge of the twisted practices of the Knights of Jadar. He told her of the experiments conducted on Windwalkers with such detail that it soured her stomach and stilled its growling.

They never untied her from the saddle, never removed her cuffs. Someone could cut off her feet and Vhalla doubted she’d be able to tell. Her lower body had gone numb from the ropes long ago.

The Knights had the arrogance to think they were breaking her, but it couldn’t be further from the truth. Every waking hour, she plotted. She wiggled, tugged, and worked at her ropes. She watched as Schnurr checked his saddlebag every morning and night, leaving Vhalla no need to guess where the axe and key to her shackles were hidden. If she could remove her shackles, she would have her wind and her Bond with Aldrik—she could make them suffer.

But how to get the key?

Vhalla settled on biding her time. The only plan she could think of was trying to launch an attack during one of his brags—if she could get her ropes loose enough. But she suspected he kept the key in the same saddlebag as the axe, and he never let it go far from his side.

The smell of the Southern forest nearly overwhelmed her with nostalgia when they’d crossed into it from the Western Waste. They made headway into the mountains without roads and pushed onward and upward until dusk began to settle. The nights were already cooling, and it made a stark contrast with the heat of the desert.

A year had passed, Vhalla realized with the changing seasons, since she had met Aldrik and everything began. A year that felt like a lifetime.

“We’ll stay there tonight.” Major Schnurr pointed to a windmill fashioned of stone and wood.

It sat high on the edge of a small town. She suspected the cluster of homes to be the town of Mosant or one of its outskirts. If Vhalla and her captors had progressed as the crow flew from the Crossroads straight for the Crystal Caverns, it would put them right in Mosant’s path.

A generally noteworthy town, Vhalla stared at the houses down the mountainside from the windmill as they made their way toward it. If she screamed, would her voice carry far enough? Could she slip away in the night? Even if she could slip away, it didn’t solve the issue of the cuffs. Vhalla had a suspicion that a blacksmith couldn’t just break off magically enhanced shackles. If she drew attention to herself, the Knights would certainly overwhelm any villagers who came looking, forcing them to flee before more could follow.

That much was proven true as they arrived at the windmill. A tired-looking village woman came out to greet them, and Schnurr wasted no time putting his sword through her eye. Vhalla stared at the gaping hole the blade left behind in the woman’s face as the Knights untied their prisoner. War had taken its toll, and she was beginning to struggle to feel anything toward the death of innocents.

The windmill had one entrance up a short flight of stairs, a place horses couldn’t go. Schnurr decreed that she was too valuable to leave outside, so Vhalla was finally untied and carried inside. She tried to find her legs, to stand on her own, but after nearly a week of being stuck in a saddle, they were useless from stiffness and sores.

They threw her unceremoniously atop bags of grain. The dust sent her dry throat into a coughing fit. But when she could breathe again, Vhalla took solace in the smell of the wheat. It reminded her of home in the fall, when the barn was full; it gave her some measure of comfort in spite of her newly conflicting feelings about her upbringing.