Аманда Хокинг - Torn

“Where are they taking him?” I asked Elora as the guards gragged him away.

Loki’s head lulled back and forth, but he was still awake and alive.

“It’s none of your concern where they take him or what happens to him,” Elora hissed at me.

She cast a glance around the room, and the other guards dispersed to do their job. Duncan lingered around, waiting for me, and Tove stood a few feet back. Tove would never be intimidated by my mother, and I appreciated that about him.

“Someday, I will be Queen, and I should know what is done with prisoners,” I said, reaching for the sanest argument I had. She looked away from me and didn’t say anything for a moment. “Elora. Where did they take him?”

“Servant’s quarters, for now,” Elora told me.

She glanced over at Tove, and I had a feeling if he wasn’t here, this whole conversation would go much differently. Tove’s mother Aurora wanted to overthrow my mother, and Elora didn’t want Tove or Aurora to see any sign of weakness or unrest.

“Why? Won’t he just leave?” I asked.

“No, he can’t. I saw to it that if he tries to leave, he’ll collapse in agony,” Elora said. “We need to build a proper prison, but the Chancellor always vetoes it. So I’m left holding them myself.” She sighed and rubbed her temple again. “We’ll have a meeting to see what should be done with him.”

“What will be done with him?” I asked.

“You will attend the meeting to see what being a Queen entails, but you will not speak up in his defense.” Her eyes met mine, hard and glowing, and in my mind, she said, You cannot defend him. It will be an act of treason, and your minor defense of him now could get you exiled if Tove reports this to his mother.

She appeared even wearier than she had before. Her skin was normally porcelain smooth, but a few wrinkles had sprouted up around her eyes. She held one hand to her stomach for a moment, as if to catch her breath.

“I need to lie down,” Elora said, and she held out her arm. “Duncan, please escort me to my chambers.”

“Yes, Your Majesty.” Duncan hurried over to help her, but as he dashed past me, he shot me an apologetic smile.

I just shook my head. I don’t know what else he could’ve done. The Vittra had tried to kill me, Finn, Tove, my brother, pretty much every person I cared about, and Loki was one of them. I shouldn’t be defending him at all, but I didn’t think anything he’d done justified torture.

When Elora left, I took a deep breath and shook my head. I knew I’d gotten myself even deeper onto her shitlist, and that couldn’t be good for anything.

“That was good,” Tove said, and I’d almost forgotten he was there. I turned to see him grinning at me with an odd look of pride.

“What are you talking about?” I asked. “I made everything worse. Elora’s mad at me, so she’ll take it out on Loki. And I don’t even know why I care if she does. He’s here to kidnap or kill me or something horrible, and I futilely tried to rescue him.”

“No, that went really bad,” Tove agreed. “But I was talking about the door and the chandelier.”

“What?” I asked.

“When Elora was tormenting him, you made the door slam and the chandelier shake.” Tove gestured to both of them as if that would mean something to me.

“That was the wind or something.”

“No, you did that,” Tove assured me. “It was involuntary, but you did it. And that’s progress.”

“So any time I want to shut a door, I just have to get Elora to torture somebody,” I said. “Sounds easy enough.”

“Knowing your mother, it would be easy,” he grinned.

We went back to train more, but I was distracted and didn’t make anything move for the remainder of the day. After Tove had gone, I headed up to my room. I thought I’d check on Matt first, since the alarm going off had to freak him out, and Rhys was at school. I knocked on Matt’s door, and when he didn’t answer, I ventured inside, but he wasn’t there.

With the Vittra breaking in, I felt a little freaked about not knowing where Matt was. Before I decided on an all-out search of the premises, I went to my room to grab a sweater, and I found a note from Matt pinned to the door.

Gone over to Willa’s for lunch. Be back later. - Matt Great. I ripped the note down and went into my room. I could really use some time to talk to him, since everything felt like absolute chaos. But he’s hanging out with Willa, which I didn’t even understand. I can’t imagine what the two of them would be doing spending all that time together. They should be hating each other.

I flopped on my bed and fell asleep pretty quickly. I didn’t think I’d been that tired, but I guess my abilities took a lot out of me.

I’d gotten used to the defense meetings after the big Vittra break-in during my christening ceremony.

We met in the War Room in the South Wing. The walls were plastered with maps. Red and green patches speckled all of them, revealing other tribes of trolls.

A huge mahogany table sat at one end, with a drawing board behind it. Elora and Aurora, Tove’s mother, stood behind it. For some reason, they always led the defense meetings together. Aurora didn’t trust Elora to run the kingdom, but I don’t know how Elora tolerated Aurora taking any amount of control.

Chairs littered the rest of the room, most of them mismatched because they’d been pulled from other rooms to fill the space. Our mothers commanded the meetings, so Tove and I were always the first people in attendance. It worked to our advantage, and we hid in the back.

The usual twenty or so attendees were here: Garrett Strom, Willa’s father and my mother’s possible boyfriend; the Chancellor, a pasty, overweight man who stared at me in a way that made my skin crawl; Noah Kroner, Tove’s ever silent father; and a few other Markis, Marksinna, and trackers.

But the room started filling up more than normal. People I’d never seen before filtered into the room, including a lot more trackers. None of the trackers took a seat, because that would be impolite with limited seating. Duncan stood behind me, despite the fact that I told him to sit down three times.

Willa burst in a few minutes before the meeting was set to start, and she pushed her way through the crowded room. Her bracelets jangled as she stepped over a tracker, and she smiled brightly at me before flopping into the chair next to mine.

“Sorry, I’m late.” Willa readjusted her skirt, pulling it down so it hit her knees. She brushed her hair from her eyes and smiled at us. “Did I miss anything?”

“Nothing’s happened yet,” I said.

“There are a lot of people here, aren’t there?” Willa glanced around the room.

Her father looked at us, and she waved at him.

“Sure are,” I agreed.

The chair directly in front of me was empty, so Tove slid it back and forth with his abilities.

Crowds tended to overwhelm him. It was too much noise inside his head. When he drained his abilities by moving objects, it weakened his capacity to hear things, and it silenced the static.

“Is it really a big deal then?” Willa asked me and lowered her voice. “I heard you knew the Vittra that they caught.”

“I don’t know him.” I shifted in the chair. “I saw him when I was with the Vittra. It’s not a big deal.”

“Did you subdue him?” Willa asked, looking up at Duncan.

She was asking him directly, and not asking me if my tracker had done something. She was treating people with basic human dignity, and it freaked me out.

“Not exactly.” Duncan puffed up with pride, but he remembered I’d defended Loki. His expression shifted to shame, and he lowered his eyes. “I saw him knock another guard out, and I called for backup. That was all.”