Rule of Wolves (King of Scars #2) - Leigh Bardugo Page 0,89
watch or some way of telling the time.
They had left Ravka two days before the wedding, the moment Tamar had received word from her spies that Queen Makhi’s airship had left the capital. Their transport was a Shu cargo vessel that had been intercepted by Ravkan forces months ago and redeployed with a new crew.
She’d thought they would go straight to the palace in Ahmrat Jen, but apparently, Tamar and the princess had other plans. They’d set down in the dark, her only clue to their location the heavy scent of roses in the air, and Mayu had sat in silence, watching Tamar and Ehri disembark, accompanied by several Grisha: Heartrenders, Squallers, Inferni. Ten soldiers of the Second Army. King Nikolai could not have liked giving them up. And for what? So that Princess Ehri could be well guarded on some sentimental trip through a botanical garden?
Sure enough, Ehri returned with her arms full of roses the bright orange of coral. Mayu kept her face blank, hiding her contempt. She knew Ehri was an emotional creature, but surely the princess didn’t think a few pretty flowers would sway Makhi’s ministers? If only Tamar and Ehri would tell her what they’d planned.
They didn’t trust her. Why should they? Queen Makhi, whom Mayu was supposed to serve above all others, had tried to kill Princess Ehri twice. Mayu herself had tried to kill Tamar’s king—even if it hadn’t actually been King Nikolai. She was here because they needed her testimony, but she wasn’t a part of this, not really.
Over the course of the journey, Mayu had listened to Tamar and Ehri talk and scheme, unwinding the different threads of their mission, then binding them up again, a bit cleaner, a bit tighter than they had been before. She knew she was only glimpsing a fraction of their plans, and she said little because she had little to say. She had never needed to take much interest in politics, and she wasn’t meant to eavesdrop on the conversations of her betters.
But everything had changed now, and if she was going to survive, if she was going to find a way to save her twin, she had to learn. It wasn’t easy. The way Ehri and Tamar spoke of the players in the Taban court made her feel like she was looking through a foggy lens focusing, then blurring, then focusing again, as it showed her a picture she’d never quite been able to see before.
“We will have no luck with Minister Yerwei,” Ehri said. “He’s the wiliest of Makhi’s advisers and her most valued confidant.”
“Was he close to your mother as well?” Tamar asked, though Mayu had the sense she already knew the answer to this question, that she was testing Princess Ehri.
“Oh yes. He was smart, very ambitious. He comes from a long line of doctors who serve the Taban queens.”
“Doctors,” said Tamar flatly.
Ehri nodded. “You’ve guessed rightly. Those same doctors who began the attempts to root out and harness Grisha power.” Ehri must have seen the way Tamar’s jaw set. “I know how it sounds and you’re not wrong, but it began innocently enough.”
“I find that hard to believe.”
Ehri spread her hands wide, the gesture graceful. She wore a green velvet traveling dress with a high neck and tiny buttons that ran all the way from her wrists to her elbow. The Grisha Healers and Genya Safin had done their job well. Her body was fully healed, her hair regrown. She would never be a great beauty like Makhi, but she had an easy elegance that made her look completely out of place in the hold of this airship, with its heaps of coiled rope and the crates of weapons Tamar’s crew had stockpiled. Mayu resisted the urge to stretch her legs, test the muscles in her arms. The king had been as good as his word and she’d had her strength restored. There wasn’t so much as a scar on her chest to mark the place where she’d tried to plunge the knife into her heart.
“They began with autopsies performed on the dead,” said Ehri. “Attempts to study the organs and brains of Grisha, to see if there were biological differences between them and ordinary people.”
“And when you couldn’t find any differences, you thought, why not take a closer look at the living?”
“You say ‘you’ as if these were my practices. I have played no part in my sister’s government.”
Tamar folded her arms. “Is that your idea of an excuse?