A flash of white in the shadows sent Lina’s heart into her stomach, but it was only one of the albino peacocks that acted like they owned the place.It flapped up onto a twisting wisteria branch, tailfeathers hanging like a fine lace curtain, and stared at Lina and the others through its pomegranate seed eyes.Menon-blessed, the priests called them, although they weren’t much more than glorified decorations.
Ami clambered to her feet and limped towards the peacock, hand out, coaxing, only for it to hiss and dart away.Ami slumped.“I have only ever hoped to be loved by a peacock,” she lamented.“But the gods continue to deny me.”
“Because you complain so much,” called one of the other launderers, a friend of Ami’s from Caelos.“Get back to work and we’ll be done faster.”
“Oh, my apologies, Lady.”Ami lowered into a mock bow.“Of course, Lady, we mundane folk must earn our paper-thin cots.”
“Itislike sleeping on a stretched-out newspaper,” another girl agreed.
“I’d rather sleep on the beach,” Ami said.“With the hermit crabs.”
The first girl sighed.“I liked you better when you were still coughing up black every morning.”She dodged when Ami hurled a sponge at her, although she wore a faint smile on her face.“Even hacking up a lung, you were quieter.”
Lina let them argue, her focus on the robes and dresses and blankets billowing in the afternoon breeze.She touched the corner of one, ran her palm against it.Considered.
Even the tiniest breath of pyromancy would have their work done in an instant.It would also have her killed.
Lina smiled ruefully and let the fabric fall.
It did make her sad, sometimes, living without magic.But if Sowelan had gifted it to be used as a weapon, then she would gladly go without.
“These here are dry,” she announced, pulling down a line of children’s clothes and folding them into a wicker basket.“I’ll bring them back to the acolytes’ building.”
Hydromancy reverberated throughout every inch of Oseidos.By now Lina had studied it, learned as well as an outsider could the difference between a child’s play, loose and whimsical, the sensation of chasing a wave, and a priestess’s ceremonial stances, still and dignified like a deep, reflective pond.As the days grew longer and brighter, Kai Mahina’s ward began to overpower it all, a gust of icy wind, the pressure of a ceaseless waterfall.
There was an unkindness to it.A desperation.
She shivered, pausing on the wooded path beside a statue of Menon draped with moonflower vines.Unlike Sowelan’s altars, Menon’s arms reached out to Her devotees, a marble hand eye-level, palm up.The clothesbasket balanced against her hip, Lina breathed in the little details, the curve of Menon’s lips, the gauzy sweep of her koi-fin robes, inlaid with mother-of-pearl scales.
Her eyes trained on Menon’s, Lina laid her fingertips upon the Moon Goddess’s outstretched hand.
If this ward can’t protect me,she thought, hoped:will you?
“Thank yousomuch for your advice.”
That voice.Lina froze, feeling like prey as she searched for the source of it.There, a glimmer of porcelain skin and pink silk beyond the leafy boughs of a willow tree – Lady Ione, rounding on someone, her voice cross.“I was so very desperate for your opinion.”
Stupidly, Lina looked down at herself, as though she had anything better to wear than the faded shirtwaist dress she’d scrounged up from the donation bin.At least she’d taken out the sleeves enough to conceal her burns.
Another voice resounded, an unfriendly rumble of laughter, a watered-down Coralpool accent.“I’m only trying to help.”
The warden.Lina had eavesdropped on enough conversations between Castor and the high priests to know when to make herself scarce – but the way Ione stared across the garden at Kai, her face stony and guarded, had Lina crouching in the shadow beneath the statue of Menon.
Monitoring.Just in case Kai was anything like Castor had described his brothers.
The warden sauntered into the light, his posture easy.“Some might consider it a privilege, in fact,” he said, reaching into the pocket of his waistcoat for a silver watch; he checked it and filed it away.“The kind of training I received produced some real mean bastards, and you look like you couldn’t kill a fly.You’re gonna have a hard time without a bit of help.”
“My home doesn’t get flies,” Ione replied, clipped; she turned her back to him towards a deep blue koi pond.“I’m sorry to hear about yours.They are nasty.”
Without another word, she widened her footing and drew a stream of water out of the pond, fish glittering like gold coins suspended within as she snaked it around herself.She smiled at them, poked a long-nailed finger into the stream; one of the fish nibbled at it.And then Kai stepped back into her view and she soured, the water tremoring in response.
Her expression smoothed again.“You must be very bored.”She pivoted, the water twisting with her.“I thought Saros was keeping you busy?”
“The ward’ll be finished soon.And once it is, I hoped to extend my services to House Artem’s illustrious daughter.”
Ione tipped the water and koi back into the pond and slinked past him, frigid.“I don’t need your ward to protect my people, and I don’t need you to teach me.Don’t speak to me again.”
The air cooled, a veil of mist condensing around him, an attempt to control his irritation.Lina had seen it before in Castor, the moment of restraint before an explosion, something he could point to later, say,See, there, you’d pushed me too far.
