“Well, look, Amelia, I don’t have anything better to do. If you’d accept my company, I’d like to help you find out what’s happening with the monsters leaving the mines.”
Amelia smiled broadly at me. “That would be kind of you. I wanted to ask but I wasn’t sure how... ”
“Don’t mention it!” I said gallantly. “It will be a pleasure to me to accompany such a beautiful woman on such an important quest.” I spoke lightheartedly, but I was not joking. She turned her face away. I couldn’t be certain in the firelight, but I thought she did so to conceal a blush.
“So, you have never left Astros before now?” I asked.
Amelia shifted her position where she sat, stretching her legs out and reclining in the heat of the fire, as I was doing. “Not really,” she replied. “My parents used to go out into the villages sometimes to help people, but back when they were alive, I was still too young to help.”
She wasn’t looking at me. Her gaze was thoughtful, fixed on the glowing fire. From her words, her parents had been dead a long time. I wanted to know what had happened, but I wanted to be careful around this subject. Having recently lost my foster-father, I knew how much this topic could hurt.
“I’m sorry, Amelia. You lost your parents when you were very young? What happened to them? You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.”
“I’ve never really spoken of it,” she said quietly, “but I believe it would help.”
I nodded and looked into her eyes. “I’m listening.”
“My parents were killed during one of their trips to the villages. They were there teaching some of the villagers new farming techniques when a band of slavers showed up, looking for captives.”
At the mention of slavers, my knuckles tightened around the stick I’d been fiddling with, and I snapped it in half with a sharp noise. Slavery had always been an accepted practice in the Kingdom, and though it was something of a gray area in the law, both the Arcanists and the King’s guards turned a conspicuously blind eye to it. In theory, the mines were worked by prisoners—criminals from the cities or bandits captured in raids who were transported by trollmen to the mines. In reality, the bands of trollmen were little better than bandits themselves, making raids on isolated villages and homesteads with impunity, looking for Elemental Sensitives and strong laborers to transport to the mines. Countless times I had seen the pain that this practice had brought to families and villages, and all to keep the supply of Beast Cores flowing to the Arcanists of Astros, the power behind the King. The injustice of it made me furious.
Amelia was staring at me, and I realized I had sat up and was clenching my jaw and my fists.
“Sorry,” I said, taking a breath and deliberately relaxing. “I’m not the biggest fan of slavers either. Please, go on.”
Amelia nodded slowly, then turned back to stare into the fire again. “I can understand that. My parents tried to stop the slavers from taking some of the younger children. The slavers were testing for anyone with Elemental Sensitivity and taking them away. When my parents tried to interfere, they were clubbed to death, then the slavers left with a caravan of folk they’d been collecting in the area.”
Amelia broke off. I looked at her. She didn’t seem to be crying, just sitting in silence.
I shifted round to be beside her, put my arm around her shoulders, and let her lean her slender weight against me. I stayed silent as I put my other arm around her. Still, she didn’t cry, but she melted into me, clearly taking comfort in the closeness of our bodies.
Her voice was calm and steady when she carried on. “When it happened, I was staying with Jacob and Fiona, friends of my parents. I always stayed with them when my parents went away to help people in the local farmlands. When a few days had gone by after they were supposed to return, Jacob and Fiona sent someone to investigate. They found out from the villagers what had happened.”
Amelia paused again.
“You don’t have to continue if you don’t want to,” I said.
“Not at all. It was all a long time ago. I just feel a bit helpless when I tell this story. Jacob and Fiona enquired with the authorities in our district of the city and were simply told that there was nothing that could be done about it.”
I scoffed. “Nothing they wanted to do about it.”
“Exactly. They told us if we wanted any more information, we would have to file a report with some department on the other side of the city and wait for a response. Of course, we did that, but we never heard anything again. Jacob brought my parents’ bodies back from the village, and we had a small funeral after that. That was 15 years ago now.”
A sudden anger swept through me at the endless injustice, and a desire to do something about it flared up in my heart. “I will find a way to help you get justice for your parents,” I said fervently.
“I’m afraid they could have been killed by any one of the slavers who roam the lands,” Amelia said. Her voice was resigned, but she smiled sadly at me. “I wouldn’t be able to tell you which slaver killed them, or where he could be found.”
Amelia’s gaze was on me, the fire glinting on her face. Her expression had been sad a moment ago, but now it was fierce. “But if we can do something to stop this hideous trade, that would do justice to my parents’ memory. They always tried to help poor people, less fortunate than they were themselves. To see how many of the poor folk of the Kingdom get torn away from their homes and forced to work in the
