scared?” she said.
Cousin Denarius had not raised a dormouse.
“No,” said Cadis. Her voice was loud. Anything above a whisper was like a scream. But Iren didn’t wince. She didn’t seem herself scared. She simply took the information in and considered it, like a thresher parsing through chaff.
After another interminable silence, she said, “Are you interested in being friends?”
Cadis had never met someone as peculiar as Iren. Back home, Jesper had become her friend after he flicked her ear really hard and she hit him in the face with a rotten peach.
“Okay,” said Cadis.
Iren nodded, but didn’t seem happier to know it.
“Have you had a friend before?” she asked.
Cadis nodded. “Yes.”
“Good,” said Iren. “Then you’ll know what to do.”
That seemed to conclude the subject as Iren settled herself into Cadis’s pillow and closed her eyes.
Cadis stared at the peculiar girl from Corent. She seemed like an entirely different creature. After a while Iren broke the silence, when she whispered, “You can put that knife away. We’re friends.”
Cadis didn’t know how she had known, but she tucked the knife back under her mattress. For a long time she couldn’t sleep with a stranger in her bed.
Eventually, she woke up with her friend curled up next to her.
And ever since, Cadis had been steering their relationship—reminding Iren when it might be appropriate to apologize, or seeking out her company when she buried herself too long in the archives.
She hadn’t known quite the magnitude of the task she had accepted all those nights ago—to be friends with Iren.
As Cadis watched Iren outwit the king’s spy, run her down, kill her, and immediately loot the body, she considered—for the first time since that night so long ago—that it had all been a calculated shadow play. That she had been used in the way that a puppeteer uses. Perhaps she had done it to avoid suspicion. That all those years of friendship were no different than a terra-cotta mask, a costume Iren could put on to seem the happy child, the docile princess, the queen with kitten teeth.
Maybe Cadis was as naive as they believed.
They rode in silence after that. Iren seemed as content as an engorged mantis, while Cadis wondered if Iren even noticed that Cadis was no longer putting forth the effort to speak with her.
With every mile, at every stop to rest, Cadis felt a mounting agitation that perhaps that night Iren would steal upon her in the darkness and kill her in her sleep.
A full half day later Iren slowed her horse to come alongside Cadis and said, “I can tell you’re mad at me, because you’ve spoken very little, and haven’t sung anything either.”
“I’m not mad,” said Cadis. She refused to be read like a broadside.
“I can also tell you’re mad because your tone is . . . curt. You’re not usually curt.”
“I’m not curt,” said Cadis.
“You’re also being contrary.”
“How else would I disagree with you?”
“You usually avoid confrontation. You charm the situation. You’re not charming, so you must be mad.”
“You want me to charm you?”
Iren paused. She looked at the passing countryside. “Yes,” she said finally.
“Ha! I’d have an easier go of it with a rootsnake.”
Cadis laughed to herself, but it was the sort of laugh that betrayed—even more—that she was uncomfortable.
When Cadis looked at Iren a few moments later, she perceived in her silence, in the slight bend of her shoulders, in the way she squinted straight ahead at her horse’s mane, that she was nearly ready to burst into tears.
Cadis sighed. “Oh, come on. I didn’t mean that you’re a rootsnake.”
It had the opposite effect. Iren’s eye glimmered. She would hold them back, but barely.
The road to Findain was beautiful this time of year.
The birds had no sense of wars or betrayal.
Iren tightened her composure once again and said, “Do you think I would harm my friend?”
“I spoke out of anger. You were right. I was angry. I don’t think you’re a rootsnake.”
“I don’t mind that you called me a rootsnake,” said Iren. She spurred her horse back into a canter. “I mind that your dagger’s unclasped.”
The Findish playwright Jesiré Jesperdotter—for whom Jesper had been named—would have described the journey thus:
They rode and rode and rode and rode
Across the dale and under hill
The wheel of days and nights unslowed
Through keep and cloister, farm and mill
From Meridan to Findain’s shore
A queen returned as ne’er before
Riding at her heels a store
Of rumors, rebels, raids, and war.
And so they arrived at the land gate of Findain’s capital city, squeezed between the