Dreams of Gods & Monsters (Daughter of Smoke & Bone #3) - Laini Taylor Page 0,92

used to scandalize her nursemaids by plotting her own yoraya. “You will be my first string,” she had once said, wickedly, to an aya who had dared to bathe her against her will.

The same words came into her head now. You will be my first string, she thought to the scarred and muscled back of the unknown magus before her. She reached out with her anima to perform the execution, and a horror washed through her, because she had meant it, just for a moment.

“Take care what desires you mold your life and reign to, princess,” the aya had said to her beside the bath that day. “Even if the yoraya were real, only someone with many enemies could ever hope to achieve it, and that isn’t what we are anymore. We have more important work to do than fight.”

Work, yes. The work that was the shape of their lives—and the thief of it. “Not that anyone thanks us,” Scarab had replied. She had been a small child then, and more intrigued by stories of warfare than the Stelians’ solemn duty.

“Because no one knows. We don’t do it for thanks, or for the rest of Eretz, though they benefit as well. We do it for our own survival, and because no one else can.”

She may have stuck her tongue out at her aya that day, but as she grew up, she had taken the words to heart. She had even, recently, declined a tempting invitation of enemyhood from the fool emperor Joram. She might have had a harp string of him, but instead she had only sent a basket of fruit, and now he was dead anyway—at this magus’s hand, if the stories were true—and… it was as it should be.

She didn’t want enemies. She didn’t want a yoraya, or war. At least, so Scarab tried to convince herself, though in truth—and in secret—there was a voice within her that called out for those things.

It filled her with dread, but it thrilled her, too, and her dark excitement was the most dreadful thing of all.

Scarab did not perform ez vash. Realizing she was trying to prove herself to Carnassial, she rebelled against the idea—it was he who must prove himself to her—and besides, she wished to see this magus’s face and touch his life, to know who he was before she killed him. It was no small thing to draw down sirithar. It was no good thing, but it was without doubt a great thing, and she would know how he had done it when all knowledge of magic in the so-called Empire of Seraphim was lost.

So instead of slashing the thread of his life, Scarab reached for it with her anima, and touched it.

And gasped.

It was a very small gasp, but it was enough to make him turn.

—Scarab. Carnassial’s sending was sheathed in urgency. Do it.

But she didn’t, because now she knew. She had touched his life and knew what he was before she even saw his face, and then she did see his face and so did Carnassial, and though he did not gasp, Scarab felt the ripples of his shock as they merged with her own.

The magus called Beast’s Bane, who drew down sirithar and so could not be permitted to live, and who was a bastard and a warrior and a father-slayer, was also, impossibly, Stelian. His eyes were fire—they were searching the empty air where Scarab stood unseen—and that was enough to know for a certainty, but she knew something more about him, which she pushed, fumblingly, toward Carnassial in the simplest of sendings—no sense or feeling, just words.

She sent it to the others, too, who were out in the caverns and passages trying to form an understanding of what was happening in this place. She sent it to Spectral and Reave, that is, but caught herself before releasing, so abruptly and inadequately, this news to Nightingale, to whom it would mean… very much.

Scarab waited, breath held, as the magus scanned the air where she stood. And though she knew he couldn’t see her, she read his certainty of her presence in the steadiness of his gaze, and his reaction was another surprise in a layering of surprises.

Confronted with the certainty of an invisible presence before him, he showed no alarm. His expression didn’t harden, but softened… and then—confounding Scarab to her core—he smiled. It was a smile of such pure pleasure and gladness, such breath-catching, unabashed happiness and light, that Scarab, who was a