Page 151 of A Vow of Blood and Tears

“Well, that’s another strange thing, isn’t it?” Visca smiled at Ellena. “I’d think a girl from the Cathedral would be sending these letters to Argent, but no, they’re addressed to a man in Port Coran to the south.”

Port Coran… a sprawling seaside city south of the Rift. It lay half in Foria, half in the Rivers of Veladar. It was where most of the goods came in from Serissa, and traders from Nordrin came down through the Rift to deal freely in that market.

It was also its own territory. It might be half settled in the Rivers, but even Wroth allowed it to maintain its sovereignty. In Coran, there was no care for one’s nation, only for trade and gold.

And information.

“I sent a trusted man down to Coran to have a look for himself. All of these girl’s letters were sent to a Forian man, by the name of Makariy Agripin. Sounds familiar, no?”

I closed my eyes. I remembered one Captain Agripin, one of Hakkon’s right-hand men. I also remembered tearing a leg from his body. Seemed he must have lived. A shame.

I looked down at Ellena, her eyes downcast now, cheeks and cloth soaked with tears.

“What could you gain from selling information to Foria?” I asked her, my voice quiet. “What could Hakkon give you that I could not? I would have released you from service with handfuls of gold, had you asked. I would have given it simply to get rid of you.”

She shook her head, sobbing through the gag.

“Agripin still had some of the previous letters,” Visca said grimly. “Detailing just how behind schedule Tristone was on repairing those fortifications, how the mines and quarries have gone abandoned for the last year. She sold them to Hakkon.”

“Does he live?” I asked, still watching Ellena quiver.

“Not any longer.”

“Good.”

The maid tried to pull away from Visca, and my commander tugged her arm up sharply. “I’ve got one of her letters. Go ahead and cross-compare, but after forcing her to write, I’m convinced of it.”

“Visca.”

My commander, my creator, gazed up at me, eyes so cold with fury they no longer looked vampiric, let alone human.

“Leave her here. I’ll question her.”

Ellena sucked in a snotty breath as Visca released her, dropping her bodily to the floor. The maid curled in on herself as my commander drew herself up, nodding to me. She withdrew a letter from her pocket and handed it to me.

“Make it hurt, my lad,” she said softly. “Those women, those children… even the damn pups. All of that suffering is onherhead.”

It was unlike Visca to editorialize when execution was at stake. She walked stiff-legged from the room, shoulders drawn up, fists clenched.

Ellena peeled the gag from her mouth with shaking fingers. “I never…” she whispered.

“Shut up.” I knelt, staring at her like I’d never seen her before. “And sit up when you speak to me.”

In a way, I hadn’t seen her before. I hadn’t paid any attention at all to the woman sent with Cirri. I supposed she was thought of as pretty, but the little I knew of her made her ugly in my eyes.

The Eldest Sister had probably sent her as a spy. Both Wyn and I had known the sour bat wouldn’t be able to resist having eyes in our house, and any knowledge the girl had sent on would have been useless to the Sisterhood. It was worth letting the old woman’s spy live, where we could keep an eye on her.

But to ally with Foria… that was unforgivable.

“When did you start sending letters?” I kept my tone low, soft, reasonable.

Ellena scrambled to obey, straightening her back, her shoulders and chest quaking with suppressed sobs. She gasped for breath between words, her voice strangled. “When we got here, my lord. I sent letters to Argent, to the Cathedral, but I never—”

“What did you send, in these letters to the Cathedral?”

Her face crumpled, and she made an effort to calm herself. It crumpled again almost immediately. She started with halting tentativeness, and the words quickly turned into a flood. “I told… Eldest Sister… about the keep. She wanted to know. I was supposed to tell her everything, what Cirri was doing, if she was… if she was getting on with you or if she might agree to send information back to the Sisters, but then shewasgetting on, and I told Eldest Sister that she wouldn’t agree to be a spy, she was too much in love with being the Lady—”

“Stop talking.” I considered as she slammed her mouth shut, wiping her nose on the back of her sleeve.

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