The Lost Daughters by Leigh Grossman

Author:Leigh Grossman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: fantasy
Publisher: Wildside Press LLC
Published: 2018-09-17T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 14

Sperrin

The Mountain Road: Eleven days after the Loss

Ketya filled me in on what she’d heard from the giants, first in whispers while we still walked underneath the rocks, and the rest in bits and pieces while we practiced knifework and her father was out of earshot.

The giants had left her with more questions than answers, and some of those questions she addressed to me during our early-morning practice in the thornwood grove.

“Were any of the royal family doing something odd?” she asked me while I stood beside her, adjusting her knife-throwing stance. Apparently, growing up as the chancellor’s daughter had left her more innocent than most of her Empress’s Academy classmates.

“Probably half of them or so. But not with gods. With cooks, a surprising number of them. The Empress’s sisters and a couple of her ladies in waiting seemed to have a thing for cooks. And the usual royal spouse-swapping that you see in any palace. You’d be astonished at what people expect guards not to notice.”

Ketya reddened, and her next throw missed the target entirely, but she pressed on. “Nothing at all with gods?”

“I really don’t think so,” I said while Ketya walked to the edge of the clearing and recovered the errant knife. “The royal family were all potential kidnap targets, so we guarded them pretty closely. Talking to a god would need more privacy, I think. And how many of the Empress’s relatives would even have known how to contact a god, or which one might be sympathetic? And none of the royal family lived—you’d think a traitor would have made escape plans.”

“And you would have known if another guard had seen something?”

“I would have known. That’s not the sort of thing a guard hides from his or her superiors.”

“It just doesn’t make sense,” she said. “Maybe the giants were confused?”

“Fey are what they are, but they’re not stupid. Why lie when they planned to eat you anyway? I think the part about the messengers being sent out by the god must have been true. And the rest seems likely.”

“I wish I’d thought to ask which god had sent it.”

I put a supporting hand on her shoulder. “You did well. You’d never been in that situation before.”

“Does it get easier?”

“It never gets easy. You think more clearly when you’re not surprised. But you did well. We know more now than we did.”

“I guess. I feel like my father would have found a way to find out more.”

“He wasn’t there. You do the best you can.”

“I can do better,” she said, shaking my hand off so she could throw. This time she hit the target dead center with both knives.

Ketya recovered the blades in silence, and didn’t speak again until she had returned to my side. “My father would know what to make of this,” she said. “I just wish he was well enough to tell us.”

I looked to the other side of the clearing, where the chancellor slept curled in his bedroll, next to the pile of stones where we had eaten our dinner cold last night.

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