He Sold Me Into Slavery, I Returned as Queen novel · Chapter 5 of 24
Chapter 5: The Trader
The dungeon stairs were slick with damp, and Lysander took them two at a time with his hand locked around mine.
Four of his guards waited in the dark at the bottom, pressed flat against the wall.
The captain held up one fist for silence.
At the far end of the passage, a lantern had been turned low, and a man in a dark cloak stood in front of the last cell.
Under the cloak I saw a flash of Highmoor blue.
He had a hollow reed in his mouth, and he was aiming it through the bars.
I knew that reed.
The traders had used the same kind to blow wolfsbane dust into the faces of slaves who woke up angry.
"Now," Lysander said.
The guards hit him from three sides.
The reed snapped, the cloak ripped, and the young man went down on the stones with a guard's knee in his back.
He was no older than twenty, with a thin beard and wet, terrified eyes.
"I don't know anything!" he said. "I was told to leave a package!"
"With a reed?" the captain said.
The boy started to cry.
The cell door swung open under the lantern, and an old woman sat up on the cot inside it, coughing.
She was the trader.
Her gray hair had been hacked short, and an old scar split her chin.
Maud Quill sat next to her on the cot with a cup in one hand and her bag between her feet.
"She breathed some of it," Maud said, without looking up. "The king's order put me in the next cell at dusk, and I got the tonic into her the moment that dust hit. One breath more and she'd be dead, Solveig."
"Thank you," I said.
"Don't thank me, thank the king for believing a nonsense plan from his wife," Maud said. "Give me ten minutes with her lungs."
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