Rebecka Evertrue's Arc

Chapter 48 of 66

The crack was sealed, but the traitor had spoken to more than one person. Rebecka watched the panicked man from across the chamber. He sat where the bear had put him, hands flat on his knees. He would not meet her eyes. Somewhere in the room, someone else knew what he had done, and that person could open a new seam the moment she slept. She crouched beside him. "Who else did you tell." "No one." "You told someone. You needed someone to watch when you were asleep. Who." His mouth worked. "I don't know their names. Two men. A woman with a burn on her wrist. I said my girl would eat if they helped me mark the wall." Three faces. Twenty-two people in the chamber. Rebecka could not shoot on a guess, and she could not leave three strangers loose against a sleeping child. She went to Katia at the ancestor's cabinet. The doors stood open. Bread, jars, folded cloth, glowing bottles. Katia was already pulling a small clay dish from the lower shelf. "Ninka can look at hands," Rebecka said. "She can't look into a lie." "Then don't ask her to." Katia set the dish down. "Ask the cat." The healer kitten sat on the top shelf, tail curled over its paws. Its markings pulsed faint blue in the crystal light. Katia lifted it down. "It purrs on the sick," Katia said. "It goes quiet on the hidden sick. Guilt is a sickness. Carry it through the room." Rebecka took the kitten in both hands. Its purr started at once, soft against her fingers. She walked the chamber. She stopped at each refugee and let the kitten sniff. Purr. Purr. Purr. An old woman. A boy with a bandaged foot. A mother holding twins. At the third man against the wall, the purr cut off. The kitten went still. The man looked at his boots. "Stand up," Rebecka said. He stood. She moved on. Two rows further, the kitten quieted again beside a lean man with a scabbed knuckle. Then once more, at a woman scratching a red welt on her inner wrist. Three. She had her three. The bear moved without being asked. It herded them into the front chamber, away from the sealed seam and away from Ninka. Lark set the protective ring across the arch behind them, a luminous disc of layered light that hummed when the woman with the burn tried to step back through. Rebecka did not kill them. She bound their wrists with cord from the chest and set Marcus at the arch with two arrows nocked. "Sleep in shifts," she told Katia. "I'll take the first." She sat with the kitten in her lap and watched the four bound figures breathe. The cave was tight again. But the woman on the coast road was still riding, and she knew the door, and she would arrive before dawn.