She looked down at her hands. Her augmented strength felt... wrong. She felt like herself again, no tingle in her veins. Had it been magic, or had it been the rush of the fight?
Magic’s absence brought both relief and a plummeting drop of defeat. The potion she’d made hadn’t been permanent after all. Why hadn’t it worked?
“Lu!”
Her own name jolted her to her bones until she recognized Ben’s voice. Not Milo. Not Vex. Just Ben.
She hurried around a corner to find Ben and Gunnar watching her.
“What is—”
But she couldn’t finish the question. At the far end of the straight stone hall, a man held a lantern. Every wound he had given her pulled a sob from her lips.
They were so close to freedom. Milo would not keep her here.
A mother with two children clinging to her; a father carrying a third. The prison’s hall filled with bodies young and old, people who might’ve been out shopping at a market when Argrid decided they looked like raiders. Whatever the hell that meant.
They were, all of them, Tuncian. That family each had the four-dot tattoo that honored Tuncay’s gods; those two women had the curly black hair and round faces of Tuncay.
“Families?”came Nate’s voice.“The hall you’re in should have ten cells, and you’re telling me they’re filled with kids?”
“Most of ’em,” Vex said. “A few elderly. Families.”
The raiders in Vex’s group were as stunned as he was. Some retched in the corner while others drove into a frenzy, sprinting down the hall on piercing war shrieks.
Vex’s stomach spasmed as prisoners crowded the hall, the musk of spices and plants stronger now.What the hell—
“Here!” one of Nate’s raiders called at a cell.
Vex pushed over to it. The raider lifted his lantern into the cell, revealing crates and barrels and a table spread with—Vex could hear Lu’s voice in his head—laboratory supplies.
Edda stepped into the room and stuck her hand into a barrel. She removed her hand, brown powder trickling between her fingers and perfuming the air with a hearty smokiness.
“Harmedeku,” Edda said.
The Emerdian raider grunted, but Vex recognized the word.
“A Tuncian spice.” Vex’s eye went to the other barrels, the different-colored powders, the crates with vials of plants. Tuncian spices and Grace Lorayan magic?
“Bell! You to the next hall yet?”
“Not yet, Nate.” No time to figure out what this meant. Vex shared a look with Edda and backed out of the cell.
A little girl tugged at her mother’s skirt as they shuffled by. “Are we forgiven?”
The mother gripped the girl’s shoulders. “We didn’t do anything that needed forgiving. You hear me? The defensors lied. Theylied.These people are here to free us, aren’t they?”
She looked at Vex for confirmation.
Vex nodded, dazed.
The mother tucked the girl into her side. “The defensors lied,” she repeated, softer, to herself. “Nothing we gotta atone for.”
But she didn’t look convinced. None of the prisoners did, and a few made the symbol of the Church against their chest. Some clung to books—Church scriptures. Hymnals.
Vex blanched. “You”—he pointed at the closest raiders—“get these people to Kari. The rest, keep going!”
He started to lead the way. His words were enough encouragement, and the group broke apart to obey—but Vex tripped and had to grab the bars of the cell across from him to keep from sprawling in the hallway.
