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Stavros’s expression turns even stormier. He shoulders past me into the room.
I follow with my shaking hands balled tight at my sides.
He’s going to see the wound on her chest, the one she already bandaged. He’s going to wonder how that happened when I claimed I never saw my attacker yesterday, let alone had a chance to fight back.
And what if he sees some sign of the riven magic he’s tracked down before?
The survival instinct I apparently haven’t lost completely stops me from dropping to my knees and begging for mercy. I still wobble on my feet as Stavros stares down at Esmae’s limp form.
His head twitches. “That’s your knife.”
Of course he’d recognize it. He doesn’t seem concerned about anything else, not yet, but I guess that’s understandable.
The facts. I can simply state the facts—the ones that won’t get me executed.
At least not immediately.
I grip the back of the same chair I did when I was first talking to Esmae. “I came in to make sure she was okay, and she attacked me. It was her yesterday—it was her with Julita—she has a gift for conveying messages on the wind, and she managed to twist it into carrying weapons too. I—I didn’t want to kill her, but the way she came at me…”
The worst of the knotted feelings inside me surges to the fore, hitting me so hard my voice breaks. “I thought she was my friend.”
“Ivy.” Stavros catches my elbow. I find myself grasping his shirt sleeve as tightly as I’m clutching the chair, and not because of the tremor that resonates through the floor at that moment.
A raw laugh reverberates up my throat. “I should have known better. I don’t have friends. It doesn’t work.”
“This isn’t your fault. This isn’t—” Stavros looks down at Esmae again, his forehead furrowing. “She’spracticing scourge sorcery?”
Through the whirl of my emotions, something hardens inside me. She wasn’t—and I have to get a grip on myself.
I have to make sure that the man who’s actually responsible for this horror gets what he deserves.
My legs stiffen under me. I draw my spine straight against the turmoil inside me, the mess I don’t have time to sort through right now.
“Julita was right all along. Wendos is part of the conspiracy—he manipulated Esmae into thinking Julita was sabotaging her career chances. I think he was trying to lead me in the wrong direction too. We have to find him before he can hurt anyone else.”
Stavros blinks at me as if taken aback by my shift in demeanor. But only for a moment. He isn’t a celebrated general for nothing.
“Wendos,” he mutters. “Once a prick, always a prick, apparently. All right. Let’s get you out of here, call on the others, and we’ll pull together a plan.”
He spares Esmae one final glance. “The king can decide what he wants to do about her after we’ve dealt with the more urgent problems.”
He ushers me out of her bedroom, letting the door close and lock to hide her bloody body.
My gaze darts over my dress, catching on the flecks of blood that’ve marred the pale green fabric. I pull my cloak closer around me to hide them.
Stavros nods approvingly. “Good. Straight down to the archive room.”
I form a tight smile. “No time to waste.”
I hurry with him down the staircase at a similarly swift pace to my way up. As I reach for the sconce in the hall of tapestries, Stavros pulls out a silver trinket that matches Casimir’s, the one that’s tucked in my pocket.
We burst into the small archive room. Stavros walks straight to one of the shelves and retrieves a scroll that he unfurls on the desk.
It’s a blueprint of one level of the Domi—one of the dorm-level floors, based on the layout of the rooms drawn onto it.
There’s already a small mark on one of them. Stavros taps it. “That’s Wendos’s dorm. I’ll need to call for soldiers to be sent there, but I don’t know if he’s likely to linger anywhere obvious when he must realize his deception is coming unraveled.”
Yes, he’s probably heard about the attack on me and guessed who was behind it and why. And he’ll know Esmae failed.
