“Have you ways to leave the city unnoticed?” asked Tris. The youth nodded. “Then alert everyone you can,” Tris continued. “Let Tharios manage without her prathmuni!”
The pair traded a look, then turned their backs on Tris and raced down the alley without a word. Tris hadn’t expected thanks. “Shurri Firesword guard you all,” she murmured. They would need the goddess’s protection. Tharios was a big city, and there were many prathmuni. Not all of them would escape by dawn. Perhaps some wouldn’t even try to flee, though she hoped they would have better sense.
She walked back to Ferouze’s, warning every prathmun she glimpsed.
In Yali’s chamber, Ferouze was nodding off as the little girl slept on the bed. “Thank you,” Tris said, pressing a five-bik piece into the old woman’s hand. “You were good to stay with her.”
“Like Keth would have given me a choice,” Ferouze grumbled, stuffing the coin into her sash. “So what’s going on? He came racing in here like the Hounds of War were at his heels. He took that dog of yours away with him.”
If I tell her, all of Khapik will know by dawn, Tris realized. Ferouze was a notorious gossip. She shrugged. “I don’t know. I found Little Bear waiting for me outside.”
“Dhaski,” muttered Ferouze as she let herself out. “All mysteries and no explanations.”
Tris sat on the bed and bent to unlace her shoes. The room started to spin. Her fingers were suddenly too weak to hold on to the laces. In controlling her earthquake, she had burned up the last of her borrowed strength. It was time, and past, to pay for it.
She lay back, before she collapsed in a heap. I hope they think to look here for me, she thought before a tide of unconsciousness swamped her.
When she woke, five days later, she was in Jumshida’s house. Niko sat by her bed, reading. He didn’t even wait for Tris to clean up. Instead he proceeded to relieve his feelings about girls who tapped the power of the earth, looking after children who weren’t their own, and searching for dangerous madmen, as they avoided wise elders who would see the folly they committed and bring them to their senses. When he showed no signs of calming down, Tris went behind a screen to change clothes. Someone, she hoped Jumshida, had dressed her in a nightgown. Tris replaced it with a shift, a single petticoat and a pale grey muslin gown that fitted more loosely than it had before she’d gone to Khapik.
“Are you even listening?” demanded Niko.
“Not really,” she replied wearily. “Either I’m adult enough to have a medallion and a student and make my own stupid choices, or I’m not. It’s not like I did it for party entertainment, Niko.”
He sighed. “No, I know you didn’t. I suppose I feel guilty because I should have helped you more, instead of letting conference politics sap my strength.”
Tris looked around the edge of the screen at him as she did up her sash. “Help me with what? I didn’t help find him, I walked bang into the man, Niko! Is he dead yet?”
Niko’s large, dark eyes filled with distress as he watched her. “Do you care so little, Tris? He paid in blood, yesterday.”
“I feel sorrier for the prathmuni,” she retorted. “There was a slaughter, wasn’t there?” She had dreamed it, seeing knots of prathmuni disappear under the stones and clubs of outraged citizens.
“Sadly, yes,” Niko admitted. “Twenty-nine prathmuni dead, four of them children. The Keepers finally decreed martial law and ordered the arurim to get the city under control.”
Tris paused, her sash half-tied. She emerged from behind the screen, frowning. “Twenty-nine?” she repeated. She had expected far more.
“I was shocked, too,” admitted Niko. “But that’s all that were found. Tharios’s prathmuni have vanished. The Assembly is fighting about who will do their work.”
Tris grinned. They had listened to her, then. They had escaped.
Niko tugged at his moustache. “I find it interesting that they left at almost the same time the Ghost was captured. Do you think they were warned?”
Tris ignored so foolish a question. Niko was too clever not to realize she had warned the prathmuni. “Where’s Glaki?” she asked. She wished everyone had escaped, but if prathmuni were like most people, some must have insisted that no one would blame their entire class for the acts of one man. At least the number of dead was far smaller than it could have been. “How’s