The information she collects goes to a half-sister named Clea who runs a potion shop near Litten Street.
It is tiring. Compartmentalizing Clea from Tynan, Tynan from Wilhelm from the diplomats she has fucked. There is an embarrassing moment at a fund-raiser when Tynan’s father sees her. She knows instantly that despite her best efforts, rumors have reached him. Sandren’s influential circles are small and Tynan’s father is in all of them. He crosses the room calmly and whispers three sentences into her ear. “You look lovely tonight. Amazing what jewelry can do. Stay away from my son.”
Tynan never mentions the incident. He remains loyal, funding her cottage off the books.
A graduation present.
As the cottage begins to form, blueprints to foundation to framework, Sena realizes it is more than a building. Not only is it a delightful way to exact her pound of flesh from Tynan’s father, but it is also her first real stab at independence—sort of. It is definitely her first act of outright defiance against the Sisterhood.
She is supposed to stay in Sandren, seduce men and gather information. That’s what the Sisterhood is paying her for. But she builds her cottage in the countryside, well away from the city state.
A gleaming padparadscha comes in a nondescript envelope every month to her box on Goorin Street. The stipend allows for plenty of luxuries when combined with Tynan’s allowance. She meets him on weekends, risking death out of spite.
For those that marry in the name of the Witchocracy, Sena suspects the lines sometimes blur, but for field agents such as her, pårn5— the duty—is rigorously enforced.
When Tynan and she stay at Sandren’s posh hotels she tries to revel in it, but anger leaves her empty. For a while, at college, sex had very nearly slipped from being a political tool to a pastime. Now, with Megan’s influence enveloping her again, all of that is gone.
She is back. Deeper than ever. An Ascendant of the Seventh House. Apart from that there is the undeniable sense of family she attaches to the organization. She buries it. She ridicules it internally as an affectation but the feelings persist, a vague sense of belonging. Unable to verbalize such a grotesquery, Sena sums it as crassly as she can in her journal, “They still have a use.”
She moves out of Sandren even before her cottage is complete and begins skipping social functions, fading from Sandrenese galas, shrugging her duties to focus on her project. Megan’s letters become persistent. The cottage secret slips.
“The Highlands of Tue? Within eyeshot of the Porch of Sth? Are you mad?”
Sena doesn’t argue. Megan is right.
She still remembers her first journey below the Walls of Tue, looking up at the grim dark circle perched on the brink of cliff and sky; she had seen something in the air, transparent ommatophorous images, like light trapped in ancient glass.
Sena won’t admit that the monument frightens her. In the end, it doesn’t matter. Her goal, her search, wins out. The Stones are linked to something abstruse and awful, something that can protect her if she actually finds the Csrym T.
Much different than the modernists in Sandren, Sena sees herself as a believer in sweet black secrets, rich as chocolate cake, visceral and bloody with cosmic truths learned and lost on the tides of other civilizations. In the cities, in the gleaming dirty bustle and rush, Sena thinks, we are on the edge of something . . . not the future. Something so old it only feels new . . .
Sena keeps working for the Sisterhood even after her cottage is finished. She fudges on her hours. And then, after nearly two years, everything pays off.
“New electroplate angel on my altarpiece,” Bishop Wilhelm murmurs. Sena says nothing as they pass a pharmacopolist. “God-jarring marvel pales in comparison to you.”
The bishop is smoldering. He swings himself around her like a censer. Cologne and wealth pour off him like smoke.
Lines of sight intersticed by momentary objects and rushing people allow others to glimpse their eastward passage along the Avenue of Lights. They catch snippets of Sena. The fleeting blond tantrum in the wind. The gem-blue eyes italicized in mascara. The movement of her hips caroms sunlight, sets the black jewel fastened in her navel flashing. It is a chronotropic spell. Some of her gawkers collide with city things, remembering their places in the street on impact.
Sena slices east between the buildings with purpose.