Rhy went to the balcony doors and threw open the curtains, intending to shower the room in the Isle’s red light. Instead, he was met with a wall of darkness. His eyes went wide, anger dissolving into shock.
“What’s happened to the river?”
IV
Lila rinsed the blood from her hands, amazed that she had any left. Her body was a patchwork of pain—funny, how it still found ways to surprise her—and under that, a hollowness she knew from hungry days and freezing nights.
She stared down into the bowl, her focus sliding.
Tieren had seen to her calf, where Ojka’s knife had gone in; her ribs, where she’d hit the roof; her arm, where she’d drawn blood after blood after blood. And when he was done, he’d touched his fingers to her chin and tipped it up, his gaze a weight, solid but strangely welcome.
“Still in one piece?” he’d asked, and she remembered her ruined eye.
“More or less.”
The room had swayed a little, then, and Tieren had steadied her.
“You need to rest,” he’d said.
She’d knocked his hand away. “Sleep is for the rich and the bored,” she’d said. “I am neither, and I know my limits.”
“You might have known them before you came here,” he lectured, “before you took up magic. But power has its own boundaries.”
She’d brushed him off, though in truth she was tired in a way she’d rarely known, a tired that went down far past skin and muscle and even bone, dragged its fingers through her mind until everything rippled and blurred. A tired that made it hard to breathe, hard to think, hard to be.
Tieren had sighed and turned to go as she dug the stone shard of Astrid’s cheek from her coat pocket. “I guess I’ve answered the question.”
“When it comes to you and questions, Miss Bard,” said the priest without looking back, “I think we’ve only just begun.”
Another drop of blood hit the water, clouding the basin, and Lila thought of the mirror in the black market at Sasenroche, the way it had nicked her fingers, taken blood in trade for a future that could be hers. On one side, the promise, on the other, the means. How tempting it had been, to turn the mirror over. Not because she wanted what she’d seen, but simply because there was power in the knowing.
Blood swirled in the bowl between her hands, twisting into almost-shapes before dissolving into a pinkish mist.
Someone cleared their throat, and Lila looked up.
She’d nearly forgotten the boy standing by the door. Hastra. He’d led her here, given her a silver cup of tea—which sat abandoned on the table—filled the basin, then taken up his place by the door to wait.
“Are they afraid I’ll steal something, or run away?” she’d asked when it was clear he’d been assigned to mind her.
He’d flushed, and after a moment said bashfully, “Bit of both, I think.”
She’d nearly laughed. “Am I a prisoner?” she’d asked, and he’d looked at her with those wide earnest eyes and said, in an English softened by his smooth Arnesian accent, “We are all prisoners, Miss Bard. At least for tonight.”
Now he fidgeted, looking toward her, then away, then back again, eyes snagging now on the reddening pool, now on her shattered eye. She’d never met a boy who wore so much on his face. “Something you want to ask me?”
Hastra blinked, cleared his throat. At last, he seemed to find the nerve. “Is it true, what they say about you?”
“What is it they say?” she asked, rinsing the final cut.
The boy swallowed. “That you’re the third Antari.” It gave her a shiver to hear the words. “The one from the other London.”
“No idea,” she said, wiping her arm with a rag.
“I do hope you’re like him,” the boy pressed on.
“Why’s that?”
His cheeks flushed. “I just think Master Kell shouldn’t be alone. You know, the only one.”
“Last time I checked,” said Lila, “you have another in the prison. Maybe we could start bleeding him instead.” She wrung the rag, red drops falling to the bowl.
Hastra flushed. “I only meant …” He pursed his lips, looking for the words, or perhaps the way to say them in her tongue. “I’m glad that he has you.”
“Who says he does?” But the words had no bite. Lila was too tired for games. The ache in her body was dull but persistent, and she felt bled dry in more ways than one. She stifled a yawn.
“Even Antari need sleep,” said Hastra gently.
She waved the words away. “You sound like Tieren.”
His face lit up as if it were praise.
“Master Tieren is wise.”
“Master Tieren is a nag,” she shot back, her gaze drifting again to the reflection in the clouded pool.
Two eyes stared up, one ordinary, the other fractured. One brown, the other just a starburst of broken light. She held her gaze—something she’d never been keen to do—and found that, strangely, it was easier now. As if this reflection were somehow closer to the truth.
Lila had always thought of secrets like gold coins. They could be hoarded, or put to use, but once you spent them, or lost them, it was a beast to get your hands on more.
Because of that, she’d always guarded her secrets, prized them above any take.
The fences back in Grey London hadn’t known she was a street rat.
The street patrols hadn’t known she was a girl.