“It’s not just me you’re making wait, River,” she chided him.“And all because you’re worried about being rude.”
He shrugged.“Tell Saros, then, why you’ll be late for your lesson with Jorah.”
Ione narrowed her eyes at him.At last her shoulders slumped with a sigh.“I can’t stay, then,” she said to Lina, mournful.“It was lovely seeing you.Iwillbe back.”She turned – or River tugged at her – and motioned with her free hand at the soup.“Don’t eat this, Lina, this good man will prepare something else for everyone.My gods, I wouldn’t even feed this to Saros’s dog.”
Cynthia snorted, disbelieving, and Ione responded with a toothy grin.
“Oh, fine, I might,” she granted her.“It could make the warden very ill.”
And then she laughed, covering her mouth with the backs of her fingers like a princess.
Thinking about it now, Lina buried her face in both hands, groaning.
She had, with difficulty, kept everyone in Caelos at arm’s length.Even Ami, who was apparently intent on befriending her, knew only the barest minimum of Lina’s cover story.She was nobody and very pleased to keep it that way.
Nobodies did not become involved with the gentry.
“Ooh.”Ami bumped her shoulder into Lina’s.“Are you thinking about her?”
Lina groaned louder.“No.”
Ami shrieked, delighted, and Lina rubbed the heat from her cheeks and mustered a weak smile.
“Maybe I am.”Then she pointed at Ami in mock accusation.“But not as much asyou’rethinking about Mikau.”
That earned her another shrill laugh.“Stop,” Ami whined.“Oh, if you weren’t so busy with Lady Ione that day, you’d know what I mean.Just – how confident Mikau was, how considerate…” She traced the line of her injury, her eyes clouding.“I know about herbs, mundane healing… but watching Mikau work was just…”
Lina listened, glad for the attention to be drawn away from herself, glad for Ami’s happiness; glad, even when another wave of magic frosted over her skin, for the ward.
For now, at least, they were safe.
Lina craned her neck, gazing skyward as Ami chattered.If she squinted, she could just about see it, the featherlight traces of magic, translucent, six-sided tiles blooming one by one high above them.Unable to help herself, Lina reached, pretending she was stretching, until she felt the icy twinge of hydromancy on her fingertips.Just a hint, a whisper of electric power undulating in response to her touch.
Same as yesterday, as the day before.She couldn’t trust it, couldn’t leave it alone; she’d already walked the perimeter of Oseidos twice, feeling for it, asking it the same thing over and over.
Could it withstand Castor?Archpriest Rigel?
Sowelan?
The sun had risen fully by now, its heat bearing down on the shoulders of her borrowed dress.Lina expected it, sometimes, to feel heavy.Evil.But sitting on the pier with her friend, eating sandwiches and gossiping, Lina felt nothing but warmth and softness and love.
It confused her.Sowelan’s light wasn’t meant to comfort and coddle.
It was meant to purify.
In time, her old duties returned to her.As a handmaid in Caelos, she had savoured the comfort of aching muscles, the deathlike sleep after a long day of chores.Working her body meant her mind could rest.She had little time to think of Castor’s last words to her if she was elbow-deep in soapy water or running after kids.
Now that she and hers had settled into their new lives, the priests of Oseidos announced that they were to start earning their keep.This suited Lina, especially when she and Ami were assigned to the same team of launderers.
That did not suit Ami, who was used to working in the gardens.“Why don’t they get hydromancers to do this?”she groused, wringing out a robe and slapping it against a sun-warmed stone bench.
Lina wiped the sweat from her forehead, the midday sun and the steam rising up from the shallow washing pool outside the acolytes’ building wearing on her.A hydromancer did, in fact, heat the water for them, but the rest was up to Lina, Ami, and their team.
“They’re in charge of teaching the kids magic,” she murmured, fishing through the soapy, near-scalding water for the cotton sash from a priest’s formal robes.She held the fabric to her eyes, ensuring that none of the silver needlework needed touching up, and squeezed the excess water from it.
“Oh, aye,” Ami said sarcastically.She shifted in her seat on the flagstones beside the pool, stretching out her leg and massaging it.“Raising the next generation of little warriors.”
Lina winced but said nothing as she carried the sash to the clothesline they’d tied between the beams of a wooden pergola sweeping over the pool.Unfortunately her vision of a tranquil, peace-loving people was more than a little naïve: the hydromancers who fought for Menon’s cause were just as vicious as Castor and his crew.
