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Chapter 1
Lila stretched on a private dock several kilometers from the Masson vineyard. Her brown curls and stiff back rested against the warped boards, and her bare toes skated across the surface of the swollen, frigid lake below. The overcast sky promised a Tuesday filled with damp and fog. A mid-December wind bit at her cheeks and ears and eyes, pawing at the skin underneath her sweater. Her boots and socks sat beside her in a pile. One scarred palm rested upon page twenty-five of a promising adventure novel.
Lila ignored the novel.
She couldn’t seem to care. Then again, she couldn’t care about much these days.
Soft footfalls padded across the opposite end of the dock, interrupting the grating call of the grackles nearby. Lila slid her hand toward her holster, cradled the tranq gun at her hip, and tilted her neck backward.
A dark-haired woman approached, early thirties, clad in thick lilac robes and a black fur coat, both reaching her ankles. The color was out of place amid the brown grass, foggy lake, and faded, one-room cottage a hundred meters away.
Lila turned her head back to the ink-filled sky.
“What? No hello?”
The woman sat next to her and removed her fur-lined boots before dipping a toe into the water. She hissed as it slipped below the surface. “You’re insane,” she muttered, pulling her foot back to the dock and drying it with a corner of her robe. “If I asked you to put on your boots, would you listen?”
Lila shrugged.
“Not speaking? Not even to an old woman?”
“You’re not old.” Lila cringed at her hoarse voice. Though her throat had healed since her fight with Senator La Roux, she hadn’t spoken to anyone since fleeing from New Bristol several weeks before.
There were consequences to everything.
Lila was quite tired of feeling the brunt of them.
“It’s not cold enough for fur,” Lila said.
“So? It’s tradition,” the oracle replied. “I’m glad you decided to speak. I prefer conversations to monologues.”
“How’d you find me?” Lila sat up. If the oracle had managed to track her, then perhaps she hadn’t hidden as well as she’d thought. The press and the Bullstow militia had spent the last few weeks searching for her. She’d rented the dilapidated cottage under an alias, paying cash after doctoring her face with rubber latex and makeup.
Back then, a month by the lake had seemed like ages. She’d thought it would be plenty of time for her father, the prime minister, to straighten out the charges and the warrant against her. She’d earned them for hacking into BullNet, but it didn’t seem as though he’d intervened at all. Chief Shaw, the head of the Bullstow militia, had not dropped the charges against her either. And that annoyed her, since both men had asked her to break into BullNet in the first place.
Perhaps she should have been more worried. Had things deteriorated so much that she could not even trust her own father?
Could she trust the oracle?
Lila scanned the dock, the worn cottage, and the tufts of knee-high brown weeds between them. She found no one waiting to arrest her, though. Beside her black Cruz sedan, she saw the oracle’s gray electric car.
Two dark shadows sat inside. She couldn’t make out their faces.
“I can always find you, Ms. Randolph. I do have a direct line to the gods. As I’ve told you before, you are important to us.” The oracle stared out over the choppy, muddy lake. “I will admit that it would have been nice if they’d shown me your location a bit sooner.”
Lila reached for her rolled-up socks.
She had to leave. The oracle might have been followed. She would have liked to spend one more night in a bed, even a lumpy one, but that would only postpone the inevitable. Her rent was due in the morning.
But Elizabeth Victoria Lemaire-Randolph—once prime of the Randolph family, once one of the richest heirs in all of Saxony, once chief to one of the largest private militias in the country—had no money to pay it. Her mother had raided her accounts and taken every credit, even pilfering from her secret account in Burgundy.
Lila wasn’t sure how the chairwoman had managed that. The little country had always been notoriously deaf to the whims of the Allied matrons and the Roman emperor.
Perhaps her mother had hired a hacker.
How ironic.
The oracle grasped her hand gently. “I know.”
Lila pulled away and tugged on her socks. “What do you know?”
Her stomach growled loudly, spoiling her annoyance. What a find time for her belly to weigh in. It had been growling a lot lately. As if she could just stumble into the cottage, open a few cupboards, and choose from the fare inside. Unfortunately, she’d only bought enough food for two weeks when she first hid out in the country, and she’d had to ration it after her credits disappeared.
The last of h
er food had run out three days ago.
“I know enough,” the oracle said.
“I’m guessing you had a vision.”
“Yes, thank the gods. You’re a hard person to find. I couldn’t risk sending him. I wasn’t sure if you’d come.”
“Him?”
Had Tristan come?
The oracle whistled sharply. The passenger door opened, and a man exited her car, dressed in a dark purple coat. Lila dimly remembered seeing him several months ago. His shoulders stretched so wide that he could barely fit in the small car, much less in his purplecoat and the gray uniform underneath, both indicative of the oracles’ militia. His arms and legs dwarfed several tree trunks near the cottage. Two guns rested on each hip, one not fit for tranqs. Purplecoats carried guns with bullets and, if the rumors were true, knives in their boots and poison in their rings. They were trained to kill, unapologetically keeping to the old ways.
This one seemed too beautiful to be deadly, but a warning had been written into every muscle.
A second man disembarked from the car’s back seat and closed the door gently, his head shaved close to the scalp. He wore no hat to stop the wind. A purple scarf wrapped around his neck, and his brown coat caught the wind, whipping it about his legs. His blood-red boots crunched across the weeds toward the dock.
The oracle had not called upon Tristan, then. She’d sent for his half-brother instead.
Lila slipped on her boots. “I have to go.”
“Tristan isn’t with us.”
“Tristan isn’t the problem. How do I know you didn’t bring Bullstow along?”
“You know me.”
“No, I don’t, and you didn’t answer the question.”
“You don’t trust me. I suspect I wouldn’t trust anyone if I were in your shoes, either.” The oracle cocked her head. “Chef Ana came to see me. She told me everything she knew.”
“I didn’t take her for a traitor.”
“A traitor? You disappeared. She was worried.”
“So worried that she hasn’t tried to get in touch with me?”
“What do you call this? A candygram?”
