The Traitor Queen (The Traitor Spy Trilogy #3)(51)

“So we’ve been tricked,” the woman said. She didn’t sound surprised.

“Yes, as you suspected we would be,” the younger magician replied. “If you smoked this … this common garden weed, you’d get nothing but a headache.”

“Well, we knew getting hold of roet would not be easy.”

Roet? Cery felt something hot race through his veins. The Guild wants to grow roet?

“We’ll just have to keep trying,” the woman continued. “Skellin must be growing it somewhere – and growing a lot. Eventually someone will betray him, if we offer enough money.”

“All we need are a few seeds.”

“I wish that we didn’t need any.”

The voices were growing quieter. Cery put his eye to the spy hole again and watched them ascend the stairs, the magic light rising ahead of them. When all light disappeared abruptly, he guessed that the door above the stairs had been closed. He pulled away from the spy hole, closing its cover, and described what he’d heard to Anyi and Gol.

“What does the Guild want roet for?” Anyi asked, scowling at the door.

“Maybe it has potential as a cure,” Gol suggested.

“Maybe,” Cery echoed. “Maybe more than a few Guild magicians are addicted to it now, and they want to take control of their supply out of Skellin’s hands.”

“Perhaps they want to put Skellin out of business,” Gol said. “Then when they control all trade, stop growing it.”

Anyi turned to stare at him, horrified. “What about all the common people who are addicted to it? It would be … people would go mad!”

“The Guild has never stopped the underworld acquiring anything it wanted,” Cery reminded her.

His daughter did not look reassured. “It’s never going away, is it?” she said, her eyes wide with realisation. “We’re stuck with roet forever.”

“Probably,” Cery agreed.

Gol nodded. “But maybe if the Guild gets hold of some, and studies it, they’ll find a way to stop it being so addictive.”

Anyi still looked glum. “I guess, as an escape route, this is no better than fleeing into the University”

Cery looked at the door. “We don’t know if whatever is above that cellar is occupied by magicians all the time. It will probably be guarded by someone, if they get more seeds and try again, but that could be just a servant or two.”

“Skellin is more likely to follow us through there than into the University,” Gol added. “So it might be a good play to lay our trap.”

“Might be. But let’s not tell the Guild we know they’re trying to grow rot until we have to.”

“Bad memories?”

Sonea looked at Regin in surprise. Was it that obvious? Since the carriage had begun its slow ascent into the mountains she had been pushing aside dark and gloomy feelings. At first she’d dismissed it as weariness and worry, but then she would see some feature – a tree or rock – and feel sure she’d noticed it the last time she had travelled this road. But surely her mind was playing tricks on her. My memory can’t be that good.

Not sure how to answer Regin’s question, she shrugged. He nodded and looked away. She’d thought at first that their conversations had dwindled to silence because he was distracted by the view outside. Unlike her, he had never travelled this road before. Now she wondered if the silence was her fault. She hadn’t felt like talking for some time now.

Is that the place we stopped? A gap had opened in the trees, revealing fields and roads stretching into the distance, divided by rivers, roads and other human-made boundaries. The trees seemed small, however. Surely they would have grown taller in the last twenty years. But objects tend to be larger in our memories. Though … I thought that only applied to objects remembered from childhood, because we were smaller then.

“What is it?” Regin asked.

She realised she had been leaning forward, craning her neck to better see the outside. Leaning back in her seat, she shrugged.

“I thought I recognised something.” She shook her head. “A place we stopped, last time.”

“Did … something happen there?”

“Not really. Nobody said much during that journey.” She couldn’t help a smile. “Akkarin wouldn’t talk to me.” But I kept finding him looking at me. “He was angry with me.”

Regin’s eyebrows rose. “For what?”

“For making sure they sent me into exile with him.”

“Why would he be angry at that?”

“His plan – or so I thought at the time – was to get himself captured by Ichani and communicate the result to all magicians.”

Regin’s eyes widened slightly. “A brave decision.”

“Oh, very honourable,” she said drily. “Shock the Guild into realising the danger it faced while sacrificing the only person who could do anything about it.”

His eyebrows rose. “But he wasn’t. There was you.”

She shook her head. “I didn’t know enough. I didn’t even know how to make blood rings. We wouldn’t have beaten the Ichani if he hadn’t survived.” But that wasn’t why you followed him, she reminded herself. You did so because you couldn’t let Akkarin die. Love is selfish. “By forcing him to keep me alive, I forced him to keep himself alive.”