The Will of the Empress - By Tamora Pierce Page 0,54

on those hooks. I sent the maids out to shop and they aren't hack. Take over for me while I warm soup for that one." She jerked her head toward the table at the end of the room.

Daja sat there with her friend. Her face might as well have "don't ask" written on it in light, Tris thought, helping herself to an apron. Chime unwrapped herself from Tris's neck and glided down to the floor to curl up under the worktable. Onions had no charm for the glass dragon. As Tris tied the apron over her dress, she yanked a thread of breeze from the back door to carry the scent of the onions away before they reached her sensitive nose. She yanked a second, fatter thread of air from the front of the house past Daja so that she could eavesdrop on what she said to the bony man. Only when those bits of business were taken care of did she begin to cut up the peeled onions that awaited her attention.

"Zhegorz, why are you here?" Daja asked the man as he drank from a heavy mug. "I thought you'd still be in Kugisko —"

"Locked up," said the man — Zhegorz, Tris repeated to herself—when Daja fumbled her words. "I got out of the hospital. I told them I was cured. I acted cured. I can do that. They didn't have the kitchen witch look at me. She always knows the truth, see, and she would have told them. Maybe she smells it on me, I don't know, but I pretended to be like them for a whole week. The locked wing was crowded and there were more like me waiting so they asked me questions and gave me an argib and new clothes and let me out."

"That green robe you were wearing isn't new," Daja said as Wenoura set a pot of soup to heat on one of the small stoves. "That's the robe you wore when you helped me get the others out during the fire. It's still got scorch marks on it."

"I told them it was my lucky charm," Zhegorz replied. "It is my lucky charm. I wore it and even though I knew the governor saw me at the fire and I knew his torturers would come for me, I pretended to be like the outside people and fled Kugisko, and it worked. So the robe is lucky because the torturers didn't get me. I truly was better outside the city, in the grasslands, or they're grasslands when there's no now. But it's hard to eat grass and I'm no hunter, so I go back to the cities and towns and I leave those places when the voices get to be too much but I have to eat." He hung his head. "I made my way here alone with my, my..." He sighed, his bony shoulders slumped. "Madness."

Wenoura rolled her eyes at Tris, who had finished the onions and started on the parsnips. It was getting stuffy in the kitchen. The cook went to a set of shutters and opened them.

"But there are voices, don't you hear them?" asked Zhegorz suddenly.

Tris freed her string of breeze now that she was finished with the onions, letting it mingle with the larger one. The maids had returned, their voices blurring Daja's and Zhegorz's. One of them took over on chopping.

"Well, the maids are back," Daja told him. Tris removed her apron and hung it up, then went to wash her hands near where the pair sat so she could hear.

"No!" Zhegorz cried. "Voices everywhere in the cities and towns, voices in the air, talking of love and fighting and money and families and —"

Daja trapped his hands in hers, holding his eyes with her own. "Calm down," she told him sternly. "You're safe."

Tris dried her hands with a frown.

"But sometimes the voices and visions, though I haven't seen so many visions, sometimes they have secrets and if you let them slip, husbands and fathers and soldiers come for you with knives!" protested Zhegorz. He trembled from top to toe. "They hunt for you and they hurt you to see how you know their scheming, so nowhere is safe — even when it's just the blacksmith meeting his best friend's wife in a barn, they hurt you because they think you spy!"

Tris went over and closed the open window.

"It's hot in here!" Wenoura protested. "We need fresh air!"

Tris turned to look at Zhegorz. He had gone silent, white-faced