Flamecaster (Shattered Realms #1)(83)

Karn raised his glass again. “May the sun come again.”

“Where is my wassail?” she asked, eyeing his.

“You need to be careful, drinking wassail around here,” Karn said with a wink. His slow, deliberate speech said that he’d definitely been drinking, though he wasn’t stumble drunk.

“I’ll chance it.” When he didn’t respond she said, “What about something to eat?”

Karn furrowed his brow. “Are you hungry?”

“Nobody’s been down here all day,” Jenna said. “So, yes, I’m hungry.”

“Oh,” he said. “I’m sorry.” He seemed to think that handled it.

Jenna gritted her teeth. “Why are you here?”

“I need to ask you some questions,” he said, “now that you’re feeling better.”

Jenna’s empty stomach clenched. This was what she’d worried about, all along—that if she survived, she’d be put to the question. He’d brought nothing with him save a cup of wassail and the dagger, but there was a whole array of torture tools just outside her door.

“Look,” she said, “I’m not who you think I am.”

“Who do you think I think you are?” Karn said.

It took a while to hack through that word tangle. “You think I’m one of those Patriots, but I’m not. I worked in the mines and made a little coin on the side telling fortunes. Me and my da—we just tried to keep our heads down and stay out of trouble. Yet you came into my father’s tavern and you killed him.”

“It was an accident,” Karn said.

“Well, he’s just as dead as if you did it on purpose, isn’t he?” Jenna was having a hard time reining in her temper, partly because she was guilty and her father was innocent, yet he was the one who had died.

Karn waved this away. “Anyway, I’m not here about the Patriots.”

“You’re not?”

He shook his head. “I’m here about you.”

Fear lay like a stone in her belly. “Look, if you think you can get drunk, come down here and—”

He shook his head. “No,” he said flatly. “Tell me what you know about the symbol embedded in your neck.”

And that was how the truth she’d been beating away with both hands found a place to roost. “This is really about the magemark?”

“Yes,” Karn said. “It is.”

“Then you probably know more than I do,” she said, exploring it with her fingers. “You’ve seen it, I haven’t.”

“Were you born with it?”

“As far as I know. It’s—it’s like a birthmark. Or maybe a curse.”

“A curse?” Karn leaned forward, eyes narrowed. “What do you mean?”

Jenna didn’t know much, so she saw no reason not to spill it. “All I know is what I’ve been told,” she said. “My parents adopted me from an old woman who said she was my grandmother. She said they should hide the birthmark, because people would kill me because of it.”

“What people? And why?”

“She didn’t say.”

Karn scowled, like he was angry with her dead grandmother for not leaving clear directions. “Have you seen it anywhere else—the symbol, I mean? Or seen anyone else with a marking in the same place?”

“No,” Jenna said, “but I haven’t really been looking.”

“What was your grandmother’s name?”

“I don’t know.”

“Where was she from?”

“She never said, I guess, though my da said she sounded like a foreigner.”

Karn rolled his eyes. “Your parents adopted a baby and they didn’t ask a single swiving question?”

“They must’ve asked when my name day was, so they could celebrate when it came around,” Jenna said. When he kept shaking his head, she said, “Look, they’d waited a long time to have a baby. They were getting up in years. Maybe they figured beggars can’t be choosers. Or they might learn something they didn’t want to know.”

“Have you ever been to the Northern Islands? Or Carthis?”

Jenna shook her head. “I’m not even sure where that is.”

“Perhaps your family was from there? Or maybe they traveled there?”

“Why all these questions about places I’ve never been? Are you sure you have the right person?”

“Why is the Empress Celestine looking for you?” Karn snapped the question out, like it would catch her off guard.

Jenna felt like she was wading in deeper and deeper, with nothing to hang on to. “Who is Empress Celestine?”

“Empress Celestine is the empress in the East. She rules the Northern Islands and Carthis,” Karn said. “Or most of Carthis. So. What is her interest in you? And don’t tell me you don’t know, because I don’t believe you.”

“I don’t know what to say, then. I never heard of her, and I had no idea she was interested in me. If she’s the one looking, then why don’t you ask her?”

“That,” he said, wincing, “would not be a good idea.” He held up the dagger. “Where did you get this?”