Bone Palace, The - Amanda Downum Page 0,76
I’m being a fool, and a termagant besides? If you won’t do that for me I don’t know who will.” Her arms snapped open. “You’re my friend, Vedra. You can say whatever you want to me.
“And don’t think,” she said, softer now, “that I don’t know your place, or that I’ve taken it from you.”
Savedra swallowed half a dozen responses, along with a lump in her throat. “If I can tell you not to be a fool, then I’ll do that now.” She closed the distance between them, till the hem of her coat whipped Ashlin’s legs. “I have always known how it had to be with me and Nikos. The only thing I didn’t expect was to care for the woman he married.”
Ashlin’s smile was wry and lopsided. “I’m glad you do, since we’re alone on a tower.” Her smile twisted and fell away, and she waved the bad joke aside. “I wish you could have had it, though. The throne, the prince. Children.” Her hand clenched on her belt buckle till her knuckles blanched. “My father could have married off my brother instead of me, if this is the best I can do at bearing heirs.”
Savedra caught the princess’s hand and eased it away before she could bruise her fingers on metal. “I’m sorry you’re unhappy, but there’s no sense in recriminations.”
Their fingers twined, cold and grimy, and Ashlin squeezed tight. “It’s not that I’m unhappy.” Her breath hitched, unraveling on the wind. “It’s that—”
Whatever she might have said was lost as black wings passed close enough to ruffle their hair and a raven alit on the merlon opposite them. Talons scraped rock as it regarded them with one dark, mirror-bright eye.
“Lady of Ravens,” Ashlin breathed. For all Savedra knew, it was. The bird on the tower was certainly large enough; she hadn’t realized ravens grew so big. Another bird wheeled overhead, its shadow staining the stones.
“Maybe we should go down,” Savedra said, straining to keep her voice calm. “The last thing I want is bird shit in my hair.”
“Good idea.” She steered Savedra down the steps first, her hand on her sword until she tugged the trapdoor shut behind them. The hollow thunk chased them down the staircase.
They found Iancu and Cahal in the library, past the bedroom at the end of the hall. They stood in the center of the room, surveying the disarray around them.
Books spilled off shelves and tables, lay open on the floor. A lamp had fallen, shards scattered across the once fine carpet. The hearth still overflowed with ashes and a few scraps of withered paper. It was the first true disarray Savedra had seen, the first sign that the inhabitants hadn’t simply vanished amid their daily tasks.
“There’s more than one set of footprints,” Cahal said, not glancing up from the span of floor he was studying. “It took me a moment to catch it through the dust. They’re nearly the same size.”
A woman or a small man. A woman and a small man.
You don’t know, she told herself. You can’t be sure it was Varis. But it was too late for that—wrong or not, she was sure. What had he done here, and why?
Savedra knelt by the hearth and picked delicately through the ashes, trying to find a clue as to what had been burned. The scraps were too old, though, too faded and filthy to be legible. Most crumbled when her fingers brushed them.
“What’s missing here?” she asked Iancu, but he wasn’t standing beside her anymore. She turned to find him examining the opposite wall, running his hands over a stretch of wall between two decorative panels.
“Here,” he murmured. His fingers paused, pressed, and something clicked. One of the panels swung outward with a creak and a silver flurry of shredded cobwebs.
Savedra closed her mouth before any more dust flew in. “Oh.”
“Clever,” Ashlin said. She shot a sideways glance at Savedra. “Do we have those?”
“The palace has spyholes, but no passages that I know of.” She took a step forward, even as the depth of the blackness in the opening prickled her nape. The opening was set high on the wall; an awkward step without a stool. The air that breathed from the black mouth was cool and stale, but a pleasant relief from the stirred dust and ash of the library. “Maybe Nikos will add some.” That careless we would have given the princess away to anyone paying attention, but it warmed her all the same.
Iancu lit the lamp