“If it were you, you wouldn’t have gotten me involved.”
“Would I be scared that you’d find out my secrets?” Arkady teased, his voice light and cocky with bred-in aristocratic confidence. “If you did, would you turn me in?”
“You wouldn’t risk me or Ellie in a plot like this,” Cash said. Whatever else they had been, might have been, would be in the future—Arkady wouldn’t have dragged him into this as a patsy. “If anything, you’d have sent us away.”
The sharp clap of Donna’s hands silenced the musicians midnote. They let their hands drop to their sides, instruments clutched loosely in torn fingers, and stood patiently. The echoes of music bounced off the high walls and arched ceiling as the dancers staggered—bloodied, winded, flushed—to a halt.
“A toast,” Donna said as she lifted a thin ivory goblet in one hand. The tusk was ground down thin enough that it glowed pink from the liquor within. “To my daughter, may she survive her birth and her first husband.”
A ragged round of applause quickly died away. Yana tilted her head with an expression of wry appreciation for her mother’s careless cruelty, one hand on Jerome’s forearm to shush his attempt to protest. Glasses were snatched from tables and trays—sometimes from hands—and raised in the air.
“Until the key to the pit is found,” Donna proclaimed, her voice rich and layered with her birth tongue’s accent. For effect. “Until the angel opens the gates. We will endure, thrive, and multiply. We walk in darkness so that, one day, our grandspawn shall walk in the fires of hell.”
At the edge of the dance floor, Kohary, elegant and alone in unadorned black, raised his glass.
“To the Prodigium,” he said, his voice cool, composed, and pitched to carry, “who will take us there.”
The silence was brittle and felt like it would be sharp when it broke. Donna stared at Kohary for a drawn-out moment and then smiled. It looked genuine, which was scary.
“To the Prodigium,” she acknowledged, “and all our children.”
It was a lot to toast. The cheer from the crowd was a little confused, uncertain exactly what they were meant to celebrate, but the burn of alcohol as it hit the back of their throats steadied them.
“To the Prodigium!”
“To the Abascals!”
“Sláinte!”
The cheers stuttered over each other. Next to Donna, the Worm pointedly downed his glass in silence. He snapped the stem of the glass when he finished and dropped the goblet to the ground to crush underfoot.
In the center of the hall, surrounded by a ring of empty space as the dancers stepped back, Yana picked up her skirts high enough to flash scarred knees and curtsied.
“To me,” she agreed, her voice chill and clear. “At long last, Mother.”
The two Abascal women stared at each other for a second. Then Donna turned and gestured to the musicians. They jerked to life under her attention and prepped their instruments, bruised fingers poised over aged keys on the piano and the violin tucked under a blistered chin.
“An instructional for the happy couple,” she said. “Play ‘The Auld Wife.’”
She gathered her skirts, all heavy gold shot through with ivory threads, and stepped up onto the stage with them. As the bow was scraped over the strings for the introductory skirl, she lifted the remnants of her dinner and licked the bony knuckle of the thing.
“For she loved her husband dearly,” she sang, with a pause as she wiped her mouth on her sleeve. “But another twice as well.”
Her voice was high and sweet, with a chorister’s purity to the notes as they soared. Whoever she’d plucked the talent from had been truly gifted, so no wonder she held it close. Yana pulled a quick, ugly face as she registered the song her mother had picked—an old Irish murder-ballad about an incompetent husband-killer—but then offered her hand to Jerome. He looked nervous but gulped and took it.
The assembled monsters jostled each other—teeth bared and elbows jabbed into ribs—as they pulled back to give the happy couple room to move through their paces. No one wanted to lose their position at or near the front of the mob.
“A beautiful couple,” Kohary’s low, rough voice remarked over Cash’s shoulder. “The Worm regrets he won’t be able to stay for the wedding.”
Arkady didn’t look away from his sister’s dance. Neither did Cash, even as the back of his neck crawled with nerves.
“A shame.”
“I’m sure he’ll be missed.”
“We were expecting great things from his wedding present,” Arkady said dryly. He finally turned, and despite a brief resistance, Cash turned with him. “How long do I have before the Prodigium sends you back?”
Kohary actually looked regretful before he schooled his face back into unreadable lines. “Not long,” he said. “Once the Worm is out of Abascal territory, he’ll rally the Prodigium Seats to act. I’ll have no choice.”
