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Chapter 23

  IT TOOK ESOR AGES TO realize Ilare was conducting a new kind of mischief. He only spotted it when she started asking him questions with that expression—the one that she got when she was hiding bloodtoads. “What stellar correspondences are appropriate for quicksilver-dominant alchemy?” Ilare might ask with that look. Or she would ask something like, “Are there any substances mistakenly regarded as catalysts which are depleted by their use?”

  She drifted on so quickly from Esor’s answers that he forgot about them quickly too. At first. Yet these were questions to which Ilare surely must have known the answers. “Are you attempting to quiz me?” Esor asked finally on one sunny summer afternoon.

  Lounging sedately in off-the-shoulder robes by his office bookshelf, Ilare said, “Yes, and you’re doing marvelously.”

  “What game is this?”

  She licked her finger and turned a page in her book. “Well, you won’t be working for us forever. Already it has been more than a year into your contract. Soon, you shall take the last payment and face your life after the Kovenor.”

  Jarred, Esor said, “We must focus on your entry into the College of Ralen.”

  “You should apply as well.” She didn’t wait for him to list arguments. “I’ll see your tuition is paid. I can whine at my family until someone masculine contacts the dean for your admission. Dokàlvar or no, you are every bit as clever as I am. You would be a benefit to the College.”

  “But...” He straightened his cravat and stood taller. “I’ve always thought I would work for some business adjacent to the college. A professor’s assistant.” He couldn’t help but smile. “Would you really do that for me?”

  “Hexes, yes. You can do my homework there too, and I won’t need to find friendship when I’ve already brought the best with me.”

  “Ilare,” said Samej. “No.”

  His simple admonition was enough to resurrect an old argument that had happened another time, another place, when Esor wasn’t in the room.

  “I’m not flirting,” Ilare said, snapping her book shut to shoot a look at Samej. “I’m allowed to have friendships!”

  “There are expectations for a lady of your stature. The public is leery after the scandal surrounding Lady Vaseri.”

  “Then the public better not learn how many friendships I wantonly maintain with bucks,” she said. “Can you believe, Samej, I even enjoy your company sometimes?”

  A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  Esor loved their familiar bickering, but his smile faded. He took àstin’s journal off his desk and thumbed through a hundred pages exuding the scent of àstin’s skin. Esor wrote a few notes into his last entry as they squabbled.

  “I’ve been paid to educate you, Lady Ilare,” Esor said. He closed the journal and placed it gently upon the edge of the desk once more. “I would do your Great House no favors failing to focus on my side of the contract. Please do as your brothers have asked of you—and stop trying to get Samej and me into trouble. Please.”

  Even Ilare, made of sunlight, no longer seemed to shine. “This won’t last forever, will it?” she asked softly. “This time will end soon. You will move on. And—and I will move on from this, too. This is going to end.”

  Chills crawled down the ridges of Esor’s spine. A cloud had taken seat in front of Nam?’s shining eye in the sky, giving the shadows in the room soft edges, and his head throbbed.

  “We’ll both be free of this soon,” said Esor.

  Ilare gnawed at her knuckle. “Will we?”

  Wind blew and summer tilted toward that autumn feeling. They could not see the rats who skittered past on the balcony. They hid just under the lip of the doors, taking the same shadowy routes as the bloodtoads. The rats feasted upon the fattest waxwing caterpillars growing inside bodies of rats who had died before.

  ~

  A CARAVAN STOPPED ON the pass coming into rural ?elasdur. It was led by an elaborate wagon adorned in sculpted swoops and swirls, as ornate as the richest church in the Empire, and painted in the gaudy shades only Orkar produced. It rolled atop six wheels drawn by hareboar with capped tusks.

  The plague guardians inspected the inhabitants of the other carts first. They searched every driver and crate-slinger for rashes, fever, bloody eyes, the stale stench of Wasting. Such a task took time and left them all exposed to the elements on the pass. Lorkullen’s slitted eyes observed through clouds heavy with rain. The opening drizzle made the acrobats mutter with mutiny, threatening to run past the checkpoint entirely.

  Performers far outnumbered guardians, but Ildòrian’s military were also camping on the pass. Lord Mayor Corvin’s army had been creeping nearer the summit each week, as if waiting for a signal, and now stood a shout away from seizing anyone who tried to escape an inspection.

  The main carriage was last to be searched. Through the curtains, guardians shined their lanterns upon an odd collection of àlvar singers, dancing Men, and scruffy Halflings.

  “Present yourselves,” ordered a guardian.

  A dozen sets of legs slid out the sash, and a dozen voices grumbled complaints. “Kalexo guardians let us pass on our good word,” said a singer with a waspish waist and generous bosom. “Kusw? brought us tea when it took too long. And what do you do, ka?elasdur? Leave us to be drenched?”

  Her appeals summoned no sympathy, but her physique kept the restless eyes of the guardians busy. She shimmied to lower the neck of her robes. Her thigh peered out a slit.

  When Bonetaker and Hornbull slipped out from under the carriage, they escaped the pass unseen.

  The two invaders took flight down the road on foot, chased only by the billows of their cloaks. Their boots were swift on the packed mud that slid down into the valley. Steep routes turned into the terraced fields where dead grape vines coiled their gray fingers over fencing.

  Before morning Light lifted the weight of the sky, blowing the briny smell of low tide up the valley, the Warlord’s allies had reached the docks. They had found somewhere to rest. They were hiding only a few minutes’ walk from the Heart of Tephra.

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