Page 2 of Rogue Elves of Ardani

She started. One of his eyes was missing. The one that remained was an alarming shade of incandescent chartreuse.

The eye turned narrowly in her direction and looked her up and down. She listened as the stream of his thoughts quickened, growing louder as he examined her for the first time. There was a spike of anger. Then the bubble of attraction that she often felt in men. Subsequent annoyance at himself for that attraction. Questions that she didn’t go deep enough to hear clearly.

Beneath it all, though, was a persistent sense of defeat. Almost boredom.

Nothing showed on his face. He had no expression whatsoever. Her fingers twitched on his wrist. She resisted the urge to break the contact and stop the stream of dark emotions seeping into her.

“How long has he been here?”

“A little more than a year, I think. It was a month after I got here, I remember. He was wild back then. Tried to escape every other week. Almost made it, once. He killed a guard.”

There was a stirring of impatience from the night elf. Suddenly, a scene appeared in his mind—a vivid imagining of him getting up from the table and stabbing her in the heart.

It was gone a split second later. Crow raised an eyebrow at him. Maybe he wasn’t quite as defeated as she’d thought.

She turned to Callias, who straightened and hurriedly stopped picking his nose. “What happened to his eye?” She had a bad feeling that it was a recent injury.

“The biting incident,” he said. “That was his punishment.”

Crow’s stomach lurched. She concentrated on keeping her own feelings from spilling into the elf’s mind and alerting him to her presence there.

“Is this a standard punishment for misbehavior here?” She wondered how trespassers pretending to be mages would be punished. Her empathic abilities came from her heritage, not from magery. She was half Ashara—a race of elves who lived in the distant deserts far to the east of Ardani, known for their innate ability to read and influence the minds of anyone they touched. It was something that she was careful to keep hidden, especially here.

“No,” Callias said, looking a little uneasy over the topic. “Just for him. Warden Alexei said he’ll cut out the other one someday, too. He says he’s keeping that one in his back pocket for now, to keep the night elf from acting out.”

There was a rush of despair so powerful that Crow gasped softly, jerking her hand away from the elf. The connection snapped and his feelings faded, but the ghosts of them remained, making her skin crawl. She frowned.

“Does he speak Ardanian?” she asked, surprised.

“Uh-huh. Really good, actually. But he doesn’t talk much.”

“No?”

“Because he’s got a smart mouth. They threatened to cut out his tongue too if he didn’t shut it, and he got quieter after that.”

With her back to the boy, Crow made a face. Someone here was overly fond of cutting off body parts. Something to keep in mind. “He’s not a fool, then.”

“Guess not.”

The elf’s gaze slid in her direction again, and this time she saw his lip curl slightly with contempt.

She sighed. “Did Felion leave any notes regarding what he was doing with this poor wretch?”

“On the table.”

She spotted a notebook on a table in the corner. She flipped through it.

“Ah. Hmm,” she muttered, nodding to herself as though she were actually reading any of it. When she’d thumbed through the book, she glanced at the elf. There was no reason not to try to put a stop to this before another mage came along and decided to continue Felion’s work.

“This Felion was a bit of a crackpot, wasn’t he?”

Callias frowned. “What do you mean?”

She waved to the notebook. “Well, most of this is nonsense. I can barely understand it. It almost looks like the work of someone going senile.” Probably a believable lie. The man had been quite old before he died, from what she’d heard.

Callias blinked. “He seemed all right to me.”

“I’ll have to take another look at the notes and see if any of his work is salvageable.”

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