Evvy kicked and caught him on the thigh. She twisted her head and savagely bit one of the soldiers who held her. He cuffed her so hard she saw light flashes inside her head. The man she’d kicked grabbed her legs and tied them.
“Who else is with you?” he demanded.
She fell back on Chammuri to tell him what his mother ate for breakfast. He lifted her and dumped her over his armored shoulder. When she screamed, he pinched her leg hard and said in tiyon, “Silence, or you’ll wish you were as dead as my mother.”
Evvy called to the canyon rocks. They began to fall. Men shrieked as they were battered by the stony rain.
“Well,” someone out of her view said, “this is where she got to. You will talk eventually, Evumeimei Dingzai, but in a more comfortable setting.” A hand thrust a bottle of something smelly under her nose. Evvy tried to turn her face away, but the bottle was too close. Fog traveled up her nose and into her brain.
When she awoke, a man was bending over her. She yanked away only to discover she could not move from the neck down. They had taken her clothes and tied her to a table. Her legs were raised on a board above her hips and tied at the ankles so her bare toes pointed back toward her head. She couldn’t move her feet.
Her mouth was dry. She wanted to scream; she wanted to weep, but she would give these snot-suckers neither of those things.
The soldier who leaned over her wore the tan tunic and breeches of a regular foot soldier in the Yanjingyi army. “Here’s water.” He supported her head as he put a cup to her lips. Evvy drank the liquid greedily. “If you want my advice, girl, you’ll answer any questions you’re asked. Otherwise they’ll torture you. Nobody is hard enough to take that.”
“Why do you baby her?” Another soldier sat on a chair by Evvy’s feet. He stood. Like the other man, he wore the tan uniform. This one had an untidy mustache and carried a leather strap in one hand. “She’s going to get the full treatment sooner or later.” He drew back his arm and slapped the soles of Evvy’s feet with the strap, hard.
The pain shot through her like fire. She gasped, then bit her lip.
“Please, take my advice,” the soldier next to her head whispered. “Tell him what he wants to know.” He looked at the other man. “She’s just a girl! Ask your questions — you don’t have to hit her!”
“You’re an idiot, Musheng. Why are we here if we don’t teach them respect for the emperor? She came to this country to carry information against him and fight for his enemies, didn’t you, Evumeimei Dingzai?” He struck Evvy’s feet with his strap again. She screamed and tried to imagine a stone where she could keep her secrets. She had done so before. Another blow, or two, might make her blurt out something important, like where the others had gone, or the thing that Rosethorn carried. That was the problem with being quick with her tongue. Sometimes she spoke before she thought. She couldn’t do that now.
The soldier Musheng took Evvy’s hand and clasped it tightly. “Dawei, she could be your daughter!” He looked at Evvy. “Please, child. You came here with three companions, Briar, Rosethorn, and a dangerous slave, Parahan. Tell us where they are. We’ll have a mage see to your feet —”
“Let them heal like my arm had to heal when the northerners poured boiling oil on it!” snapped Dawei. He drew the strap lightly across Evvy’s burning, bleeding feet, making her flinch.
“A mage will tend your wounds,” Musheng said with a glare at Dawei. “But my captain won’t allow it unless you tell us what we need to know. These people abandoned you here when they knew trouble was coming, didn’t they? You don’t owe them anything.”
Evvy didn’t listen. She had the stone in her mind. Inside it she hid her cats, and her friends and where they went: Rosethorn and the thing she carried, Briar and the soldiers moving the villagers to safety, Dokyi and his lonely journey to Garmashing. Souda vanished inside the stone as well. Maybe these zernamuses didn’t already know she had come to Gyongxe with two hundred soldiers. Finally she blinked at Musheng. “What people?”
Dawei snorted. “That’s what you get for your kindness! Insolence! A Zhanzhi gutter rat lies to you about information she knows perfectly well you already have!” He slapped the strap harder over the soles of Evvy’s feet twice, grinning at her screams. “Tell him the names of your companions, and apologize!”
“I don’t know their names anymore,” she said.
Musheng sighed. “Why don’t you know their names, Evumeimei?”
“They told us she was a mage student,” Dawei said. “She did some magic.”
“Forgetting things is a high degree of magic for a student,” Musheng said. “I think you’re lying to us. Girl, you don’t help yourself this way.”
Evvy didn’t answer. Now she was trying to think her feet to stone. She had done it before. Someone — she couldn’t remember who — had told her to imagine herself as stone, though he’d woken her just as she had it worked out. That part she remembered.
Dawei lashed her again. She lost the feeling of stone. Pain washed up her legs in bloodred waves.
“Tell the emperor you have me,” she whispered. She remembered the emperor. “He likes me. He gave me a cinnabar cat.”
“Who do you think sent us in search of you and your friends?” Musheng wiped her face with a cold cloth. “Where are they, Evumeimei?”