Page 28 of Captive

“I could take you there,” she wrote. “To see Ardani.”

He snorted, put the notebook away again, and kept walking.

Novikke sighed and fell into step behind him. It had been worth a try.

At first, she’d thought the ruins were silent. But then she began to hear things. The rush of tree branches and vines in the wind. The occasional echoing chirp of birds from far away. Less cheerful sounds, like something scraping over the stone, as if someone else was there with them.

She saw no one, but it was impossible to tell what could be lurking in the ruin’s many shadows.

She forced her gaze away from the shadows on either side of them, and watched Aruna’s back as they crossed the square.

His shoulders shifted in a steady rhythm that she had memorized by then, after hours, days, of following behind him. Left. Right. Left. Right. Left.

Right.

Left.

Left.

Novikke swallowed, blinking slowly. The air felt thick and close. Her head swam, and her limbs felt heavy.

Maybe she could sense the magic energy here after all.

“Hm?” she heard Aruna intone wordlessly.

He’d stopped to look back at her questioningly. Novikke’s pace had slowed without her realizing it, and Aruna was thirty steps ahead of her now.

She stared at him. Her mind felt like it was working slower than usual.

It had to be the ruin. The place was tainted. It would be best to get out of it as soon as possible.

She thought about asking for the notebook to discuss, then decided she was making too much of a small thing. They’d be on their way soon enough. She shook her head and kept walking.

They passed through an archway in a wall between one section of the ruin and the next, and Novikke’s eyes widened. The ruin had been built on the edge of a cliff. The patchy stone floor stretched for another hundred paces, and then the ground opened up into a wide valley. She could see dark shapes of the trees below and hills farther off. The cloudless night sky had grown massive and open above them, dotted with bright stars and brighter moons.

When she turned her gaze to the right along the path of the valley, she was surprised to see a group of man-made structures in the distance.

And then she realized that she recognized the structures. Tall towers on the hill at one side, a grand palace lit with many tiny flames at the center, and a mass of shorter, close-together buildings near the Kokkino River, with a wall circling it all.

It was Valtos. The capital of Ardani. Her home city. And it was no more than a few miles away.

She’d had no idea they had come so close to it. She’d gotten so turned around when they were traveling that she hadn’t realized which direction they were heading.

She glanced up at Aruna’s back, incredulous. If he found the proximity of the city to be of interest, he didn’t show it.

From this distance, now that she knew which direction to go, she was sure she could make it there on her own if she managed to slip away from Aruna. She was less certain about what kinds of creatures or evil magic she might encounter on the way there, but that was a risk she was willing to take when freedom was so close. She could even see a road on the other side of the trees not far away.

Her heart raced. She’d already lost her hope of escaping and resigned herself to her fate until right then. She had let go of the bravery she’d worked up in her previous escape attempts, and now she was having to dig it up again from where she’d buried it, deep in the bottom of her soul.

And she was having to dig up her hatred of her captor, as well. With Ardani so close, she no longer needed him for protection. He was an obstacle again, and nothing more.

She looked up at him again, feeling sick. He was still walking ahead with his back to her, looking out at the valley, oblivious to everything she was thinking.

If she ran, he’d chase her. She’d have to fight him. You couldn’t hide from a Varai in the dark. There was no nonviolent way out.

She closed her eyes. He was taking her to be tortured and executed. Even if he could convince them to show her mercy, which she doubted, they would never let her go home. She’d be a prisoner forever.

She owed him nothing. A few small kindnesses didn’t make up for attacking and abducting her. They didn’t make up for lifetimes of evils.

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