the hollows of her fragile skull, and shadows pooled there, giving her the uncanny aspect of a skull. She lay so still, lax and limp as death. Was she even breathing? I lowered my head to check, wary lest she bite me again.
Relieved to feel her breath, I studied her parted lips. Had she truly been drinking my blood? The intensity of her animal reaction had taken me by surprise. It had been like wrestling a spitting cat, all claws and fury. Those teeth she hid behind close-lipped smiles—they were sharp as any predator’s. A force of nature, Ambrose had once called her.
No, surely that attack had been a fluke. Wounded soldiers woke like that sometimes—like part of their brain thought they should still be fighting whatever took them down. It had to be that. Better to settle on that explanation than suffer this grinding worry that Lia had lost too much of herself. That she’d come back as something other than who she’d been.
Because if she had … what then?
“It’s not easy to know what to wish for,” Ambrose commented, walking beside me with apparent ease despite the rough going and his withered leg, seeming not to notice the raging storm. He used his tall staff as an aid, digging it into the mud and rocks, but also moving without any visible limp. I’d pretty much given up on wondering about it. “Thus the traditional caution,” he added cheerfully.
“What’s that?” I asked, though I was too wrung out to care. When Ambrose wanted to tell you something, he couldn’t be shaken from it.
“Be careful what you wish for,” he said, as if every schoolchild knew that one.
I pondered that for as long as my exhausted brain and battered heart would allow—which was about five steps—then shook my head. “Seems to me it’s better not to wish for anything at all.”
“A reasonable conclusion on the face of it, but a false correlation when you examine it more deeply. Not to mention cowardly.”
“Conrí is no coward,” Sondra called from behind us.
Ambrose glanced back at her and winced as if in pain. “Lady Sondra—I must caution you about using your new acquisition as a walking stick in that manner. The results could be most unpleasant.”
“You use yours like this,” she replied stubbornly.
“Yes, but I understand that mine is more than a simple staff and I know how to use it. Whatever you do, just don’t drop it.”
“Huh.” From her tone—and knowing Sondra—that information had only whetted her interest in the knobbed cane she’d grabbed as a makeshift weapon from the wizards’ horrific dungeon where we’d found Lia’s corpse. “Anyway, I must caution you about calling Conrí a coward when he risked his life infiltrating Yekpehr to rescue us. While you were noticeably absent, I might add.”
Ibolya halted abruptly enough that I nearly ran into her. Tipping her cowl back, she gave us all a strained smile. “Conrí, my lords and ladies, I must ask for silence if we wish to enter the palace unremarked.”
“No one can fail to observe Conrí,” Sondra pointed out. “One look and they’ll know who he is, and from there it won’t be hard to figure out who he’s carrying, even if they believed Her Highness was sequestered in some temple.”
“I can get us in unobserved,” Ibolya explained patiently, “but only if you’re silent. At least quieter than the storm.”
“You all heard her,” I told them. “Everyone be quiet, even the wizard.” Especially the wizard, I thought wryly to myself.
Ambrose made a soft snorting sound but subsided. Ibolya and Agatha led us out of the woods and into a maze of night-blooming flowers thrashing in the tumultuous wind like the raging sea behind us. Beside me, Ambrose bent his head to the onslaught of wind and rain, Sondra bringing up the rear. Kara had stayed with the Last Resort, hoping to shore up the damage enough to keep the yacht from sinking where it sat. That wasn’t all for Percy’s sensibilities, either. After the devastating Battle at Cradysica, we had pitifully few seaworthy vessels left on all of Calanthe. If the Last Resort could be saved, then that was a priority.
I’d also ordered Kara to close the harbors as soon as the sun rose and people were available to do it. We didn’t need anyone chasing us to Calanthe. Though if Lia had been right about the wizards sending that wave … One crisis at a time, I told myself grimly.
We ducked out of the punishing weather and