Sooah and I glance at each other, unsure. Again, I smell nopoison in the water or magic in the air. The star goddess doesn’t seem entirely sound of mind, but I’m finally starting to believe she means us no harm.
“I think the water’s fine,” I tell Sooah.
She gestures toward the pool, as if asking me if I’d like to bathe first.
I shake my head. “I can wait. To give you privacy.”
The guard regards me carefully before moving toward the water’s edge. Sooah signs something, but her meaning is lost on me. My sister, Nuying, was the linguist. I’m sure she’d have no trouble conversing with Sooah, were she here today. She had a knack for picking up languages within mere weeks, if not days.
I keep my eyes lowered until the gentle sound of parting water reaches my ears. Even though she’s submerged to just below her shoulders, I can make out the frightening collection of scars upon her back from battles fought and won. Stab wounds, slices… burn marks. Just like mine.
Hers is not a classic beauty. Far from it, in fact, but I admire her all the same. Her body is lean and muscular—with a frame almost as large as Sonam’s, even—no doubt the result of many years of arduous training. Appearance wise, I initially thought Sooah gruff and intimidating. The type who’s quick to anger. Now that we’ve traveled with one another a while, I see how wrong I was. My more animal instincts can pick up on her calming presence—a soothing energy amidst all the chaos.
That is, of course, unless we’re in the heat of battle.
“I wish to ask you a question,” I say as she washes her hair with a provided bar of rice soap. “If you’ll permit it.”
She nods while patiently working up a lather.
“How did you come to be Sonam’s guard?”
Sooah treads through the water and reaches over the edge of the pool, dragging her finger over the steamy jade tiles to writeout her answer. Her script is wonky because she’s writing upside down, but it’s nonetheless legible.
I used to work in the pleasure district.
I blink at her, amazed. “As a woman of the night?”
A servant girl, she clarifies hastily.When my father sold me, the madame said I was too ugly to train as a courtesan.
I snort. “A blessing, then.”
Sooah takes no offense, her grin growing wider.Exactly.
“How long were you there?”
Until I was seven and ten.
I lean back on the wooden bench, ignoring the heavy drops of sweat streaking down my forehead and cheeks. “Let me guess. You met the captain when he came for a night of pleasure? How scandalous.”
Sooah shakes her head.No. He came to investigate a murder.
“Oh?” I sit a little straighter, intrigued. Of all the things she could have said, that wasn’t what I was expecting.
She’s run out of room to write, so I unfortunately have to wait for the tiles to fog up again. If Kelai hadn’t hurried us away, we might have thought to bring something to write on. Perhaps we could have borrowed a few pages out of Sonam’s hunting log.
The morning it happened, I mouthed off, Sooah explains. So the madame cut off my tongue as an example.
I bristle. “Were they the ones I saw in the Court of Temptation?”
She nods.Surprised you never asked.
I shrug my shoulders. “Your business is your own.”
Sooah smiles even wider.I rather like you, demon.
A cackle rises out of me. What a strange thing to hear. “What happened after she took your tongue? Were you the one who murdered her?”
No, though everyone thought so. I would have hung if Captain Sonam hadn’t shown up. Helped me prove I was elsewhere at the timeof the madame’s disappearance. Bedridden in the hospital as a result of her maiming. It couldn’t have been me.
