Rora sat in the same place she always sat, back slouched against the wall so it didn’t press the bruise on her shoulder, with her arms and her chains wrapped around herself, and looking anywhere but at the shining not-wall down at the other end of the cellar. Even a glance would send the witch into fits, and she’d got so damned tired of his fits.
Most of the time that she wasn’t sleeping—and she spent more time sleeping than any person should, but even moving around made her head spin and her mouth yawn—she tried hard as she could to listen through the cellar door. The world was out beyond it, and she could always hear footsteps and voices, but never the words, not until they were standing right outside the door. Still, trying to hear was better’n anything else she had to do.
It got so bad, sometimes, that she’d start counting how many times the witch’d try to talk to her before he either went to sleep or drove himself into a fit. Highest she’d gotten so far was three sets of five times, and he’d capped that one off by pounding his whole body against the not-wall and screaming at her to Look at me, please, God, please just look at me. That’d been damn near the most exciting day she’d had since waking up.
“It’s quiet,” the witch said, and she could hear his wide-eyed look. He was right, though—she couldn’t hear any steps across their ceiling, couldn’t hear any muffled voices. It was like the whole world’d gone dead above them, and that was a thought that was as frightening as all the hells. If everyone else was dead, that meant no one to bring her just enough food to keep her from starving, no one to have awful little conversations with between slop-bucket cleanings, no one to someday, maybe, unlock her chains from the wall and let her go walking out the cellar door, too . . . Rora didn’t spend much time thinking about her own death, but she could say for sure that wasting away under the ground with only a damned witch for company wasn’t how she wanted to go.
Rora counted her breaths. Five, and then five times five, both hands ticking off the fives until she ran out of numbers and it twisted her head to think how to count more. And still it was death-quiet.
“Rora,” Anddyr whispered, his voice cracking around her name, and she almost looked at him—she might’ve, even, if the loudest hell hadn’t come crashing down right at that moment.
It sounded like an army was running over their heads, feet pounding on the ground, and dirt rained down around Rora. There was shouting, loud enough she probably could’ve heard the words if there’d been any, but it was just the kinds of sounds you made to make yourself feel braver and your enemies feel scareder. There were metal sounds, too, like weapons hitting; and solid thumps like bodies hitting the ground hard. Rora wrapped her arms tighter around herself. Usually she hated the chains, but now with the way they wrapped tight around her, too, they made her feel small, and small felt like the safest thing to be now.
The witch was crying, his blubbering a lot softer’n whatever was happening above—but when the above-sounds stopped almost as sudden as they’d started, the witch’s crying felt like having knives jabbed into her ears.
Rora counted her breaths again. If she listened real hard, she thought maybe she could hear soft voices beyond the door. It was hard to tell around Anddyr’s crying, and around the way she could hear her own blood racing like a wildfire. Five and five and five and five . . .
She knew the next sound well as she knew anything. The slow scraping sound of a body being dragged.
Being dragged closer.
Since she’d been a kid, since she’d first pushed a knife through a man’s heart, Rora’d usually been the kind of person to run toward danger, as long as it wasn’t a stupid fight that’d get her killed for no reason. Most times when she faced a fight, it was—sometimes straight-cut, sometimes roundabout, but almost always true—to keep her and Aro safe. She could go charging at danger if she knew it meant keeping her brother safe.
But with a body being dragged over her head, and closer to the cellar door, Rora sure as shit didn’t want to run toward it, but she wasn’t about to run from it either, even if she could. All she felt was froze up, like the ground’d swallowed her halfway, or like she couldn’t get enough air even to think. All she could do was stare up at the slow-dragging line the body was making over her head.
The door swung open, thumping against the ground and showing Rora a little piece of the night sky above. Then the opening was full of bodies spilling down the ladder, boneless and tumbling and covered in blood—
But the bodies landed on their feet, and their grins shone through blood-covered faces, and under all the blood she could recognize some of those faces. It was the pack, and once she could hear anything besides her blood in her ears, she realized their low voices were tight with held-back cheers, like they were just a few seconds away from breaking into some kind of celebration.
Two carried a body between them, trussed up good and tight, and a big hunk of the robe it wore dragged along the ground. It looked like a black robe at first, but as they hauled the body past Rora, down to the far end of the cellar where Anddyr’d made a never-dying little light to keep them from going madder, Rora could see the robe was the same dark blue as the one Anddyr had been wearing when she’d first met him.
Whitedog Pack had trapped itself another witch.
And like two witches in one room wasn’t too many already, Aro was the next one to come down the ladder.
His face was glowing, same way it did when someone told him he’d done right, like he was just a dog who needed a pat on the head to keep happy. There wasn’t any blood on him, but he was grinning just as wide as the fists and knives who had red spattered everywhere. His face fell a little, when his eyes flicked over to Rora, but they flicked quickly away and he pushed the smile back on his face. No one else probably knew him well enough to see it wasn’t the same smile it’d just been. He hurried after the witch carriers, to help, sure, but probably also just to put Rora behind him, where he wouldn’t have to see her. That was fine by Rora. She kept telling herself that as she stared at his back.
There were enough people in the cellar now to almost fill all the free space there was, and still more heads crowded at the door opening, peering down like owls. The crowd left a half circle of space around Rora, and a bigger one near the not-wall, where Aro and the two witch carriers stood. Rora couldn’t see much through the forest of legs between her spot and the not-wall, but she heard Aro’s muttering and Anddyr’s surprised gasp and the cheering that finally broke out of the pack. Some of ’em even started chanting her brother’s name, but mostly it was just celebrating the good work they’d all done. Through the legs, she could see her brother grinning again as hands slapped his back, and behind him, behind the not-wall, she saw a flash of Anddyr kneeling down next to the blue-covered body that was now on his side of the not-wall.
“Wouldn’t get too used to this much company,” said a voice to Rora’s side, and she didn’t like how much it made her jump, how unsettling it was that someone’d managed to sneak up on her so good. She could blame it on the crowd and the noise they were making, or maybe her distraction with her brother, or—when she turned to face the voice—it could just boil down to Tare being good enough at sneaking that it didn’t matter how good you were at not getting sneaked on.
Tare was leaning against the wall next to Rora, not more’n a few handspans away, arms crossed, one shoulder pressed to the mucky stone, one ankle hooked behind the other. Anyone who didn’t know her that well would probably think she was relaxed, that the smile on her face was just any regular smile. But Rora saw tension in every line of her, saw the way her pointed canines showed more than any other teeth—it was a smile that was more snarl, same as it was every time she looked at Rora. She wasn’t looking at Rora, was staring off over the heads of the pack, but Rora could feel her attention like an arrow pressed to her forehead.
Tare went on, “The novelty of a new prisoner’ll wear off quick enough, and then you’ll be stuck down here all on your own again.”
Rora tried to hide her hard swallow, to hide how much fear those words sent skittering down her back. “Seems like I’ll be less alone by one more person, even after you all leave.” She tried to make it sound light, like she didn’t care either way, but her voice came out raspy and croaky, same it did every time she tried to talk now. Some of it was from when Tare’d nearly killed her, but some of it was just from Rora only talking when Tare came to mock her.
“I’m sure witches make great company,” Tare said, snorting.
Rora looked away, back through the forest of legs, catching a glimpse of a face that was a less beat-up version of her own. “Doesn’t seem like you’ve had a problem keeping company with one.”
“Some betrayals are easier’n others to forgive.”
“What’s honor to a thief, hey?”
Like Tare’d said, the pack was starting to lose interest. The cellar stank—Rora knew that better’n anyone—and there was nothing to look at besides a few pathetic prisoners, nothing to do besides mock those prisoners, and two of ’em were stuck behind a not-wall while the other one was already being mocked. Wasn’t much there to hold the pack’s attention, and so they were starting to drift up the ladder, back into the dark air. Aro was with them, and he glanced at Rora again as he passed by, looked away just as quick as he had before. The smile stayed on his face this time, and he was up the ladder and gone before Rora could tell how forced the smile was.
The ones who were left, who were drifting slower back up to the real world, Rora could hear them talking over how great the night’d gone. How they were so happy the black-robes’d been dumb enough to fall for their plan, how easy it’d been to lure ’em in, how they’d died simple as anyone—“Seems like following the Twins don’t do much good, yeah?”—how Aro’d disabled the witch like it wasn’t even hard, and how Tare’d tried to get answers out of one of the black-robes before putting a dagger through his eye and into his brain.
“Sounds like a good plan you’ve all got,” Rora said, looking at the not-wall, where, now that the cellar had cleared out some, she could get a better look at the two witches. Anddyr’d untied the new one and was probing over his body, likely checking for damage.
“It works well enough.”
“Did Joros give it to you himself,” Rora asked, “or is he still wanting you to think it was your own idea?”
She was looking away from Tare, and so she didn’t see the older woman’s reaction—but she could imagine Tare going even more tense, like a bowstring ready to snap. “It was Harin came up with the idea.”
“Harin?” The name sounded familiar, which was a rare enough thing with how little of the pack was left from Rora’s days in it. “She the one with the big teeth who was always underfoot?”
“No, that was Kera,” Tare said distractedly. When Rora sneaked a look up at her, Tare was staring off at nothing, her upper lip pulled down between her teeth. “Harin’s good. Harin’s solid.”
“Might want to see who she’s been hanging around, then. Joros’s got a twisty way with words, Tare. He’s good at giving you ideas without you knowing it.”
Tare’s eyes snapped down to Rora, and the snarl went back on her mouth. “I don’t need advice from you. I don’t have any reason to trust a traitor.” She pushed away from the wall, went to join the last few people hanging back before leaving the cellar. Halfway up the ladder, Tare paused, looked back at her. “You shouldn’t’ve come back,” she said. “You should’ve just kept on running.”
It wasn’t the first time Tare’d said that to her, but it didn’t hurt any less, the more often she said it. Put a dull ache in Rora’s chest. She slumped back against the wall, closed her eyes to the woman and the witches and the world. “I’ve done enough running,” she said. Let the smart people decide what it meant if she didn’t run or fight, if she just stayed put while the world rushed on around her. Wasn’t anything different she could do anyway. “But you should find out what Joros wants witches for.” She didn’t open her eyes, but the cellar door slamming shut was answer enough.
And then it wasn’t too long after that when the new witch woke up and started screaming, and Rora pressed her head against her knees. Way she looked at it, at least things couldn’t get too much worse than they were now.