My Captor Bites Back novel · Chapter 2 of 3

Chapter 2: Thirty Days

Elara spots a courier bird on the sill of her chamber, intercepts it before it can clear the window, reads an internal dispatch flagging her sister Nora's scholarship for review in thirty days if her cleared signal does not arrive, then lets the bird go with its leg empty so the order receives no signal at all, and a knock at the door brings Sorin's steward with a tray and a summons to the library at midnight.

The bird was on the sill before she had finished counting the locks on the door.

Three bolts. Two keyed from the outside. One bar she could lift from within, and that one was the lie, because lifting it would not open the door it would only tell whoever stood on the other side that she had tried.

She was not going to try.

Not yet.

The bird tapped the glass once, a sharp little sound like a thrown pebble, and Elara crossed the room before the second tap came. Her body moved before her mind caught up, and that was the training, twelve years of it, the part of her that would always be a hunter before it was anything else.

The window was tall and narrow, arched at the top, and the bird sat on the outer ledge with its head cocked, watching her through the glass with one bright black eye. It was a common grey courier, the kind the order bred for short-range work, and the leather band on its leg was the order's brown, plain and unmarked.

Except it was not unmarked.

The band carried a stamp, small and pressed into the leather, and Elara's fingers found the catch on the window before she had decided to open it.

The bird did not startle. It hopped once, sideways, and then it was in her hand, warm and quick and utterly unafraid, and she drew it inside and closed the window behind it with her other hand, and the room went quiet again.

She had crossed a warded hall without tripping a single alarm. She could take a bird off a sill.

The dispatch was rolled tight and fixed to the leg-band with black wax, and Elara worked it free while the bird sat patient in her palm, and the whole time she was aware of the door behind her, the three locks, the bar she could lift, and the fact that she was not alone in this room.

She was never alone in this room.

The message was short.

Four lines, in the order's cipher, the one she had learned when she was nine years old and had used every day since, and she read it twice before the words settled into something she could hold.

VOSS, E. STATUS UNCONFIRMED. CLEARED SIGNAL NOT RECEIVED. JUNIOR CANDIDATE VOSS, N. SCHOLARSHIP FLAGGED FOR REVIEW IN THIRTY DAYS. RECOMMENDATION PENDING.

Thirty days.

Elara read it a third time, and then she read it a fourth, and the fourth time she saw the second stamp, the one on the inside of the band, a cipher she did not recognize, and that was the thing she filed away first, because she had been taught to file what she did not understand before she felt what she did.

The feeling came anyway.

Nora.

The order had Nora's scholarship in its hand, and the hand was already closing, and Elara had thirty days to send a signal she did not want to send, a cleared status she could not honestly give, and if she did not, the order would take Nora's future and use it to own her the way it had owned Elara for twelve years of service.

Twelve years.

She had been nine years old when she learned the cipher. She had been nine years old when Fenn first told her she was special, that she had a gift, that the order would make her into something great. She had been nine years old and she had believed him.

Nora was nineteen now. Nineteen, and brilliant, and the only good thing Elara had ever managed to protect, and the order knew it.

Of course they knew it.

That was the whole point.

The bird stirred in her palm, and Elara looked down at it, and for a long moment she simply stood there, holding the warm weight of it, the message still open in her other hand.

She could send a signal.

She could tell the order she was alive, that the mission was proceeding, that everything was under control. She could buy Nora thirty more days, and thirty more after that, and keep buying them until the order decided she had outlived her usefulness.

Or she could send nothing.

And the order would not know if she was alive or dead or compromised, and they would wait, and while they waited they would not move against Nora, because Nora was the only leverage they had, and if they spent it before they knew Elara's status, they would be gambling with their own weapon.

Ambiguity was a weapon too.

Elara folded the dispatch once, twice, and then she crossed to the cold hearth and dropped it into the ash. She did not burn it. She did not need to. She had already memorized every line, and the paper was only evidence, and evidence was only useful if someone found it.

She worked the empty leg-band off the bird and set it on the sill, and then she carried the bird back to the window and opened it, and the night air came in, cold and clean and full of the smell of the forest.

She let the bird go.

It launched from her palm without hesitation, and she watched it climb into the violet dark until it was only a shape, and then it was nothing, and the order would receive no signal at all.

She started counting from tonight.

The knock came before she had closed the window.

It was soft, and it was not the door. It was the door's frame, a single knuckle against the wood, and then a voice, low and deferential, and Elara turned from the window with her hands empty and her face still.

'My lady.'

She did not answer.

'The lord has sent a tray. And a message.'

Elara crossed to the door and lifted the bar, because there was no point now in pretending she had not tried, and she opened it enough to see the steward standing in the hall, a silver tray in his hands, and on the tray a covered dish, a glass of dark wine, and a folded card.

The steward was a thin man, pale and careful, and he did not look at her directly. He held the tray out, and she took it, and the card was on top, cream paper, no seal.

'He requests your presence in the library at midnight,' the steward said.

Elara looked at the card. She did not touch it.

'Requests,' she said. 'Does he.'

The steward did not flinch. 'There is something, he says, you were born needing to see.'

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