They taper off with her deepening breaths, and I finally allow myself to observe her—balled up, naked, and untamed, hair cast to the side like a spill of bubbly water.
I pluck a twig from the tangles, gaze catching on something just behind her ear. The faint tip of three fine lines.
My heart splats against my insides.
I push aside her hair and swallow. Trace those lines with the tip of my finger, feeling her tremble against me with each tender stroke …
She has gills.
I stopped hunting years ago. Thought I was the only one left—that Zyke and I were all alone.
I was wrong.
One leg hangs over the edge of the railing, the other tucked beneath me as I drag my utensils against each other.
Hard.
Squee.
I’m not even tempted to root through my pocket for the lump of caspun I keep close—just in case. The sound no longer makes me want to twist into a knot and scream, but rather pecks at my hardened shell. Like knuckles rapping against a door, checking if anyone’s home.
I’m not.
The sentries make their evening rounds, pacing the front gardens lit by flaming bowls of oil and lofty lamps that tower above the trees and shrubs. They’re easy to see from up here, balancing on the balustrade with my back against the wall, tucked amongst a fall of shadow on the edge of a sheer, unsurvivable drop.
My favorite spot.
It makes my blood rush. Makes me feelalive.
I’ve spent the past five nights sitting right here, studying the sentries’ mannerisms, their routines—their exorbitant smoking habits where big puffs of white twist with the wind.
I’ve spent the past five nights growing more and more restless, watching the moon bloat in teensy increments that count down the days I have to figure out how to climb out of that bowl.
My days have fallen into a too-familiar pattern: meal times, trial practice, sitting tucked in my guarded room with too much time to stew, watching Cainon come and go from my spot so-high above the rest.
All the makings of a cog I don’t want to oil and tend … butshatter.
I have no guilt for what I’m about to do.
Cainon will get what he’s promised—a woman by his side saying all the right things, smiling, waving, nodding ...
Lying.
But I tucked myself away for years, and I’m done living that life. There’s too much I need to see.
To ask.
Perhaps Madame Strings is across that bridge, sitting around a campfire like Vanth and Gun described—
There’s a subtle knock at my door.
I crane my neck to watch through the window as the door clicks open. Izel peeks through, looks left and right, then blows into the room like she’s made of air. “Mistress?”
I doubt she knows I’m watching as she checks my washroom, my dressing room, before finally collecting my tray, her humble expression folding when she lifts the cloche to see my uneaten meal lumped on the plate.
Was hard to muster much of an appetite after I cut through a piece of honey-glazed prawn and brought it to my lips only to find it sprinkled with the tiny black berries of a bane bush—enough to make me choke to death from a swollen airway.
It really put a damper on my evening.
