He glanced back, his eyes widening at the sight of her outstretched hand. Shook his head. “Sticks.”
She had been beaten only once, when she'd escaped the first time, and that had been because Herron had been in residence and he had been so angry, he had grabbed a sword from one of his guards and hit her with the pommel.
That was when she'd had to stitch herself above her eye.
She'd been told her legs would be broken if she escaped again, but Herron hadn't been around the second time, and no one had had the nerve to do it, in case Herron had changed his mind.
He'd told the general in charge of the fortress she was being kept as an alliance-maker-in-waiting. To be married off to someone useful to the kingdom.
Herron even had a list of husbands under consideration.
The guards had decided some of them might object to a crippled bride and wouldn't take the risk of being blamed later.
Of course, that wasn't why she was locked up. Herron would never risk letting her free.
If she wouldn't help him—and she wouldn’t—he couldn’t allow her to go free to help anyone else.
Which meant she had to die.
She had no worries about being given in marriage in some grubby exchange for military support or trade routes.
Herron was sure she'd turn whoever her husband was against him and her aunt within weeks.
And he wasn't wrong.
In front of her, Luc slowed, and she noticed he was limping. She worried that he was flagging.
His feet were bare, and he stooped slightly in the chill air.
When she’d rescued him from the question room, she'd noticed his back was mottled with bruises and cuts, on skin that was latticed with long-healed scars.
It was impossible to see his injuries in the darkness now, but he was moving carefully, and his breath came in shallow inhalations.
He made a sudden sound, a shocked grunt, and she tensed as she came alongside him.
They had reached an archway.
It had no doors—it opened into another space that was bigger than the passageway they stood in.
There was a small amount of gloomy light filtering into the space, coming from a tiny window set high in the wall and overgrown, it looked like, by vines.
It took Ava a moment to find what Luc had obviously seen straight away.
A body.
Or rather, skeletal remains.
They lay on a stone bench which had a pallet on top, wrapped in clothing that was rotting in the damp, musty air. A long, thick chain attached to the wall beside the bench spilled onto the floor, and then back up to end in a bracelet around the skeleton's ankle.
Luc approached carefully, his gaze taking in the whole room.
He had exceptional eyesight she realized as he avoided a small table she hadn't seen herself. He moved as if he were aware of the location of everything in his environment.
“A woman,” he said, looking back at her.
She followed him slowly, careful not to touch anything as she made her way to his side and looked down at the almost clean bones.
She didn't realize she'd stopped breathing until he shook her, his voice soft but clear in her ear as he held her waist, forcing her head down toward her knees.
“You know her.” He crooned the words to her, as if she were a crying baby, and the way he did it told her he had done so a thousand times before.
Comforted babies.
Most likely, there were a lot of crying babies and children in Chosen camps.
She gasped in some air at last, and coughed, turning away from the sight.
“I think that is my mother.”
There was a long silence, and at last she turned back, saw his eyes had never left her. Shock was in his expression.
“You think, but you're not sure?”
She nodded, and finally steeled herself to approach the body again. “While I was imprisoned here, I was told both my parents had been killed crossing the mountains. But the cloak is familiar. Although . . .” It had originally been covered in black silk embroidery. She bent closer in the dim green light and saw where the thread had been unpicked from the complex design. There didn't appear to be a single stitch left.
“It is just the cloak that's familiar?”
She forced herself to look more carefully. The shoes . . . the shoes were her mother's favorite. Warm slippers for inside. She remembered those shoes, and the light blue stone ring on her mother's finger was where it had always been.
The skull still had hair attached, and it was the same golden brown hue as her own, though streaked through with white.
She thought . . . She thought they had died coming to save her. Herron would taunt her with that. Say they had tried but failed. That all hope was lost.
And all that time, had her mother been here?
The rage that rose up in her was so hot, so very white hot, that she had to close her eyes and swallow before she could speak again.
“Can you see how she died?” She looked over at Luc, but he was still watching her, not looking at her mother's remains.
She wondered what he had seen on her face.
He turned slowly from her at last to look, shook his head. “If she was murdered, the evidence is long gone. She may have died of illness, she wasn't necessarily killed.”
“If she died down here without help, I would still consider it murder.” She could not say more. Her throat closed up.
Ava had been here for nearly two years, and her mother had been down here from perhaps a few months after that. She had been told her parents had been captured and killed by bandits while crossing the mountains into Kassia, but perhaps her father had been killed, and Herron had her mother brought here.
The single biggest fear her mother had had her whole life, for Ava and herself, had come true. They had both been captured and imprisoned for their talents.
Her mother had been dead for a while. Ava didn't know how long it would take a body to look like her mother's did, but the fact remained she had been alive and right here while Ava was imprisoned above.
And then, she suddenly knew . . .
She felt Luc's hands grab her as her legs gave way beneath her.
This was why Herron stopped trying to get her to embroider for him. She had thought she had managed to outwit him. Instead, her mother had been down here, picking the threads from her cloak to embroider items for Herron in her place.
Perhaps with a threat to Ava's life as the incentive.
And when her mother had died, that's when the orders for Ava to sew for him had come again. And when it became clear she would never bend, the harsher treatment, the edging to murder, had begun.
“I'm all right.” She was still held up by Luc, his strength seemingly endless, and she struggled to get her feet back under her. “We need to go.”
They really did need to go, and yet he looked back at her calmly. “Is there something of your mother's that you want to take with you?”
She felt a sudden rush of tears at his thoughtful question. “This cloak was a gift from my grandmother to my mother.” She stared down at the clasp resting on her mother's breastbone. “But I will not disturb her body.”
Instead, she crouched beside the bench and carefully removed the ring from her mother's finger. It was the only piece of jewelry she could see.
“Now we need to go.” Luc's attention was focused down the passage.
“You can hear something?”