Brave the Tempest (Cassandra Palmer #9) - Karen Chance Page 0,170

to say.”

I regarded her sleepily. “I wasn’t going to say anything. Except that it would be nice if you didn’t trash the audience hall. We haven’t even had a chance to use it yet.”

“What did I tell you?” Rico asked her.

Saffy put her hands up. “Hey, preaching to the choir, okay? This wasn’t my idea.”

“What wasn’t your idea?” I asked, and she rolled her eyes.

“Ask her,” she said, looking at Rhea.

“You okay?” I asked Rhea, and she nodded sharply.

No, in other words.

Great.

“Give us a minute?” I asked the other two.

“Come, you can help me clean up,” Rico told Saffy.

“All right, but I get the spray sink!”

“Not if you are going to shoot me with the little hose again.”

Saffy grinned. “Then you better catch me!”

She took off, using enhanced speed, with Rico on her heels. I drank cocoa, because it was good, and wondered why we didn’t have any chairs in here. The only one was the aforementioned throne, into which the consul had put all of her thwarted designer energy, and it was hideous.

“I don’t think she gets that chairs don’t actually have to be gilded,” I observed, before Rhea cut me off.

“I will leave tomorrow,” she told me in a rush, her face red. “I understand, and I—I will leave tomorrow.”

She started out, and I grabbed her arm.

It probably wasn’t a good sign that I almost missed.

“I’m really tired,” I said, stating the obvious. “And I have this thing I have to do tomorrow. Could you give me the condensed version?”

She just stared at me.

“Like, now?” I suggested.

“I—but you—but I—” She stopped and tried again. “But you saw—”

“Saw what?” I was trying for patience, but didn’t think I was doing so great. I yawned again; I couldn’t help it.

Rhea looked like she’d been slapped. Or maybe I was reading it wrong. I didn’t know.

But then she blurted out a torrent of words that I didn’t get half of, but that seemed to boil down to: the covens sprang a trap, but if she’d been able to shift like a proper acolyte, she could have gotten her and Saffy out of there before it got bad, but she couldn’t because she was trash, so they’d had to stay, and the covens hadn’t let them leave, and they’d kept goading and goading until Rhea snapped, because she was trash, so the two girls had fallen into their trap and almost gotten me killed or started a war, because she was trash.

Or something like that.

“And you were beating up poor Saffy because?” I asked.

“I—I wasn’t. I just—” She stopped herself before another tirade started, and swallowed. “If I can’t shift,” she said carefully, “I should at least improve my combat skills, so that I don’t get caught like that again.”

“Why not just learn to shift?” I asked, and immediately regretted it when Rhea burst into tears.

Well, shit, I thought.

She ran off through the door before I could say anything or even try to reassure her. After a second, I started to follow, because obviously, and almost ran into a very grumpy-looking Hilde coming in the door. She had an old blue silk bathrobe crossed over her ample bosom, some kind of frilly cap over her curls, and an absolute scowl on her face.

“Bed!” she proclaimed, with all the panache of a town crier announcing the birth of a king.

It had been right in my face, so I shied back a bit. “Wh-what?”

“Bed!”

“Are you . . . talking to me?” I actually looked behind me.

And then turned around to find myself almost nose to nose with a red-faced chief acolyte. “BED!”

“I don’t think that’s how you’re supposed to address your Pythia,” I told her.

“That is exactly how I am supposed to address her when she has once again exhausted herself to the point of falling on her face! You were supposed to be back hours ago! Do you think it helps the court to have our chief defender running herself ragged? What if there was an attack, hm? What if we needed your support? Could you do that now?”

“Well, I think—”

“No! No, you could not. So, again I say, go to bed!”

“But Rhea—”

“Can wait. That young lady has a lot to learn, and she will. Oh, yes, she will.”

The expression on Hilde’s face was . . . kind of frightening.

I was suddenly glad that Rhea had escaped.

“I needed to talk to you anyway,” I told her. “I agreed to do an errand tomorrow and—”

The next thing I knew, I was standing in my