Daughters of Ruin - K. D. Castner Page 0,62

aisle.

Cadis couldn’t understand why she had felt so betrayed by Jesper’s silence when it made perfect sense in the moment. Perhaps she simply wanted her friend to back her position. Or, if she was willing to admit, perhaps she wanted even more than that from Jesper.

“Have you got a house or something?” said Iren as she wiped Cousin Denarius’s chin with his own sleeve.

“We’re in it,” said Cadis. “The rest of the castle is the Archon Basilica.”

“Isn’t he still the archon?” said Iren. She used his sleeve to wave hello to Cadis with his limp hand. Cadis laughed at the image of the man as marionette and felt worse for laughing.

“Why didn’t he tell me?” said Cadis.

“He’s collapsed,” said Iren. For her the diagnosis was enough.

“No, I mean Jesper. Why wouldn’t he tell me?”

“What could he say? You couldn’t come back. You would eat yourself alive out of a sense of duty to your people.”

“You make it sound like a bad thing.”

Iren didn’t say anything. Of course she thought devotion to a sense of duty was nonsense. Cadis knew that already. “What would you do,” asked Cadis, “if you were me?”

Iren sat back and thought about the question as she removed a ring from Cousin Denarius’s finger and looked at it in the light. “I’d declare your cousin dead of mind and push the masters to instate you as the rightful archana immediately.”

“Why?”

“For them to bow in ceremony before the people.”

“How would that help?”

“It would enrage the Terzis. They would seek to consolidate power, and so they would need to reach out to their closest allies. A few days of watching would tell you everyone who is in their pocket.”

Spying again. It seemed Iren had learned as much from Hiram the spymaster as from Hiram the magister. “If I continue to make enemies of the Terzis, won’t they continue to oppose everything?”

“Certainly,” said Iren. She put Cousin Denarius’s ring in her pocket and looked for another. “Hypatia will hate you forever. But Jesper, you could have him if you wanted.”

“Really?”

Cadis knew she had jumped too quickly. Iren grinned. “He has already bedded Arcadie Kallis. That much is clear. If you turn his head, he might turn hers, and you would have both guilds in line.”

Cadis’s vision swirled with Iren’s too-cynical love triangle of eros and intrigue. She couldn’t tell how much was even true and how much was the fancy of a bookish plotter. Had she really seen some feelings in the eyes of Jesper, or did she move him like a pawn? Was it all so easy and heartless as that?

“You’re wondering why you would seduce Jesper if he’s placed so low in the caravaneers.”

That was not what Cadis was thinking, but she nodded anyway.

“Because the last thing I would do,” said Iren, palming the last ring from the old man’s hand, “is kill Hypatia Terzi.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Suki

Suki woke up cold and dry-mouthed, with a stiff ache in her shoulder and the image of a crosshatched roof above her. She had never been here before (wherever here was) never slept under a hay (reed?) roof (not even at her father’s hunting lodge—which had been built out of carved bituin trees—when she was a toddler). She had no idea how long she had slept under the thatched roof (when it rained, did the water just drip through?).

Everything felt oddly distant (the roof, the pain, the taste of water ever having touched her mouth). She had been shifted out of time and space (and she knew the return would be sudden (she could feel it like a wave looming over her (it was panic (it would hit her soon (as soon as she blinked (it would smash into her (panic that she was too stiff to move (and afraid (and maybe she didn’t even want to (because an entire room of soldiers (or Declan could be hovering an inch away from her cheek like a spider with his mandibles extending out to feed on the flesh of her face))))))))))).

Suki darted up and back until she hit a wall and set fresh fiery pain through her shoulder (and screamed (but no one responded (so she must have been alone))). She sat for a while, panting. She was in a hovel of some kind (the bed was a cot (as hard as limestone)) and the floor was packed dirt. Helio’s stable was bigger than the entire room (which had only a ragged old chair (wicker!), a clay basin (which she wouldn’t use even if