Ivory gasped playfully. “Now, that’s perfect.” She rested her head on Amma’s shoulder. “Such a pretty name. Just like you—so pretty.”
Amma’s stomach flipped over. She wasn’t uncomfortable with her own looks, but she was a realist—these women were inhumanly stunning, and especially after days on the road, Amma wasn’t exactly looking like she were ready for one of her parents’ banquets. “You think I’m pretty?” she scoffed with a bit more bite than she meant, but surely they were just being sarcastic.
“Of course,” said Asphodel with all the conviction in the realm. “Just deliciously beautiful.”
It was strange how believable that was, particularly thedeliciouspart.
Still with arms linked on either side of her, the women walked Amma out of the massive living space and into another long hall. This one had archways built along its sides in the natural stone. “Rapture says you’ll be with us for a few days. Maybe longer,” said Asphodel, brows shooting upward in anticipation. That was a conversation Amma had not heard. “We’ll show you around, so you feel at home.”
“Don’t wander off though,” said Ivory quickly with a giggle. “You’ll get lost on your own. Forever.”
Despite their frigid skin, Amma held onto the two a little tighter.
“Do you like books, Ammalie?” Ivory pulled her ever so gently, and all three of them crossed the hall to stand in an archway that led into a room brightened by twice as many candles. The walls were still made up of rock, but had been carved directly into to form shelves, running up into the darkness of the ceiling and filled with hundreds of leather spines.
“Whoa,” Amma breathed. There were two women inside, one of them sitting up, the other laying with her head in the first’s lap. Both were reading, but turned with that slow purposefulness of all the others to look directly at Amma. One of them inclined her head to sniff the air.
“I think she does,” said Asphodel, voice right beside her face. She chuckled darkly when Amma jerked at the frost that tickled her ear. “But she’s also covered in weapons.”
Amma supposed she was covered, as they said, with a dagger strapped to her thigh and a crossbow slung over her back, but they didn’t know she had very little idea how to use either one for protection beyond swinging them very hard, a fact she wouldn’t divulge.
Regardless, she was towed again to a different arch that led into a vast space, the walls inside adorned with weapons. Two women in tight breeches were crossing thin, needle-like swords, the sound sharp in the otherwise silent room. Their faces were intent on one another but that concentration was turned on Amma the moment they took up space in the entry. A third woman in a long gown was laying on a bench at the back, watching, and there was a man there as well, perhaps the first Amma had seen in the cave, lounging beside her.
Amma’s eyes darted around at the weapons, gleaming under the firelight that burned in a hearth at one end of the long room though it gave off no warmth. Mouth open, her heartbeat sped up at all that shining metal and potential danger.
“If you thinkthisis exciting, have we got something to show you,” said Ivory, and she tugged just a bit more intensely, pulling them away and back to the center of the hall. They passed a few other arches, and Amma noted each was filled with some sort of amusement, musical instruments in one, easels in another, even a massive loom and spinning wheel in a third filled with fabric and thread.
As they continued on, Amma found her voice. “How did you get all of this here?”
“It’s brought to us,” said Asphodel.
“On that river? In those little boats?”
“It’s not easy, I imagine.”
“This way,” Ivory cut in with another gentle if insistent redirection of where they were headed.
The archway she brought them to opened up into a smaller space, a table in its center, and five women gathered around it, leaning in.
“I should stab him in the heart, shouldn’t I?” one of them asked the others, and Amma’s chest tightened.
“Should you?” asked another. “With your dagger? In front of this entire crowd of people?”
“Well, it’s a mercy killing, isn’t it?” The original faltered as her eyes searched the other faces at the table and gestured to a ginger woman. “He’s lost his arm, and Marisha just turned him down.”
The one called Marisha’s eyes widened. “That doesn’t mean he wants to die. Wait, does it?” She turned sharply to the woman beside her, lips curling into a wicked smile. “Did I break his heart that badly?”
Amma’s brows knit, utterly confused. There was no armless man in the room, and in fact there was no dagger either, and the five of them hardly constituted a crowd.
The woman central to the others took a deep breath and lifted her hand, a set of dice bouncing across the table. “He does look exceedingly sad, but not fatally so. He is still bleeding out though.”
The table erupted into shouting, the women shuffling through small stacks of parchment and throwing dice at one another.
“What’s happening?” Amma asked quietly, surprised by the sudden shift in demeanors from the languidity she’d become used to.
“It’s a game,” said Ivory. “We sort of tell one another a story and take on the roles of the people in that story. The goal is to see who can survive the longest while doing the most good deeds—you know, the kinds that usually get you killed. It’s called Innkeepers and Imbeciles, and it’s great practice for reacclimating to the world.”
Amma watched as the argument at the table escalated.
