The Rogue Guardian

Chapter 15: To Know and to Trust

"Could you please take this to Mistress Verene?" Nemia held out her tightly furled note to the girl without meeting her eyes. She'd learned it was better this way, not to pin them down.

"Y-yes, I can-- I will." The servant switched the pile of clean linens she was carrying to her other arm to take the paper, her fingers trembling slightly. Nemia did her best not to notice.

"Thank you."

"Is that all, my lady?"

She must have been new, or just forgotten the proper way to address a Guardian during the terror of actually being approached by one. Nemia certainly wasn't going to correct her. She wanted this encounter over as quickly as the other girl did. "Also--" she unrolled the coded note from Morie's room. "Do you know what this is?"

She looked at it for a long moment. "A... a schedule, my lady?" She didn't comment Nemia's hand covering most of the writing.

"A schedule?" She echoed.

"I think." Her voice was uncertain, tinged with nervousness. "Everyone who works in the castle has one."

"Oh. Thank you." She nodded an awkward dismissal and continued down the hall. The note for Mistress Verene made excuses for her to come an hour late to her afternoon lessons. One hour for her to figure out this thing she'd found in Morie's room-- a schedule, if this girl was right. She could have been. The numbers on the chart-- 530, 800, 1000-- could have been times with some punctuation left out, though it was strange... almost as if the person who'd written it had wanted it to be confusing. And the really strange thing was where she might have expected a listing of serving duties, there were lines of coded sentences. Whoever had been in Morie's room since her disappearance probably wasn't a simple servant, and that meant there was no simple way to find them.

But luckily, Nemia had her own sources.

One hour to get in and out of the dungeons-- she thought she could manage.

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The murmur of guards talking while on duty drifted through the maze of cells as she picked her way through in silence. They didn't notice her passing by in the shadows, a slender shadow, a trick of the light. Even Xalva didn't see her until she stood right before the thick black bars of his cell, dark eyes peering into the darker twilight he'd been trapped in for days.

Their eyes met for a long, wary moment, neither saying anything, until he slowly pushed himself to his feet, the chain clasped around his ankle wrapped around one hand to keep it from betraying his movement with a single sound. He limped forward stiffly. There was a bandage around his right leg, a horrible mess of blood that had not quite dried in the dampness of the dungeons. They had not been gentle, but then again, she doubted he'd expected them to be.

"On time, as usual," he said, his voice barely a whisper though his eyes were bright.

"I'm not here to get you out." It was hard to decide if she felt guilty or not. Emotions had been hard lately-- both to have and to decipher.

"I know." He smiled grimly.

Of course he knew. As many teachers as she'd had in her years of training, Nemia had always known she was mostly the product of Xalva's easy smile and casual cruelty. They could predict each other, back and forth, neither winning nor losing, just an endless round of testing each other.

"That won't stop you from trying to make me."

"Of course," he said. "And in the end it won't make a difference. But there's always hope, is there not?"

She knew that was supposed to be a joke, not because of any change in his expression but because Xalva had never believed there was always hope. Still, she answered, "Always." Because she'd like to believe that.