Humans, certainly.
The men pause in their labors long enough to offer us deep bows before continuing their work, groaning and huffing.
“This is where he shot me,” I murmur, more to myself.
Annika’s eyebrows spike. “You remember something?”
“No. But I remember being here that night. I found an arrow right over here.” I wander to the spot. “Or over there.” The landscape all looks the same: rose bushes and cedar hedges, veering off in numerous directions.
“Yes, I believe it was this side. You were running from the guards. Boaz shot you down on the south side, right around here.” She waves a dismissive hand at a spot on the stone. “He fired true. He always does. It was utter chaos. They left your body there while they chased down the rest of the insurgents, with plans to retrieve you later. They assumed you wouldn’t get up and run away.” Annika reaches out to touch a bud on a rosebush. It unfurls beneath her fingertip, opening into a magnificent yellow bloom, the petals countless.
It takes everything in me to keep my jaw from hanging. “How did you … are you a caster?”
“No. I’m elven,” she responds evenly, adding, “as much as Ybaris refuses to accept that we are the same.”
Elven have affinities to the elements too? Does that mean—
“Yours is to water.” She taps the smooth black cuff around my left wrist. “You can’t feel it because of these.”
I eye the matching brackets with a new, albeit bewildered, understanding. Zander said they would keep me “in check” if I got any ideas. I didn’t understand what that meant, but Annika is saying they quell my ability to use my affinity.
But I wasn’t wearing them that first night, and I didn’t feel any different. Then again, I was in a state of shock. Would I know what to do?
“My mother wanted to cuff you when you arrived, but my father insisted it would be a show of bad faith.” Annika’s lips purse. “I don’t know that it would have made a difference to the outcome of the night, but at least you wouldn’t have been able to turn a water fountain into a weapon.” She looks pointedly at the center of the garden where the pile of rubble has been cleared.
“I did that?”
“You maimed a dozen guards doing that.” Her blue eyes cut to me before reaching for another bloom. The yellow rose that unfurls beneath her touch is larger than the first.
Yes, I get it. Princess Romeria was evil. Annika wants to make sure I receive a full and thorough list of my crimes, seeing as I can’t recall them.
“To think you could have harnessed that river for your escape, and yet you did not. Instead, you saved me, allowing yourself to be captured.”
“Should I have left you down there to die?”
She sniffs. “It would have made far more sense.”
Boaz warned Zander about the water that night, and then Zander sliced open my hand with the dagger. Is this affinity what he was talking about? I study the pale line running the length of my palm. “What can I do?”
“Besides make water fountains explode? I’m not permitted to tell you that.”
I sigh heavily, my frustration swelling. I nod to the roses. “Fine. What can you do then?”
“Very little. Our affinities aren’t as strong as those of our Ybarisan cousins. Cheap parlor tricks, mostly. Coax flowers into blooming and hedges into growing.” Her blue eyes flash to a climbing rose vine. I watch with fascination as a tendril uncoils from the lattice and lashes out like a whip, cutting through the air, its thorns searching for a victim.
My narrowed gaze flips to her to find a small smile curling her lips. Suddenly the cut on my hand from the leafy archway doesn’t seem like an accident. What was it? A test to see if I would suspect her?
“Compared to what you can do, it is nothing,” she says, adding abruptly, “I think I’ve filled your head with enough for one day.”
“Already?” But I still have so many questions—about these casters, about the fates, and the nymphaeum. Where even is it?
She must see the crestfallen look on my face, with the knowledge that I’m going back to my prison. “The king has informed me that I will be responsible for taking you on escorts around the grounds going forward. So, perhaps I can provide you more information on another day.”
My heart skips a beat. I know there is likely some ulterior motive to all these considerations as of late—some way that I am being used that I am unaware of—but I will happily accept any benefits. “Tomorrow?”
She sighs heavily. “We’ll see what Zander wants.”
It’s nearly midnight when I settle onto the floor beside the door, my legs crossed at my ankles, the bowl of fruit in my lap that Corrin delivered with my regular meal this evening. I’m still riding the high from today’s stroll through the grounds with Annika, and the hope that the long days of being locked within these walls might soon come to an end.