Chapter Three #2
The sun had risen fully by now, its heat bearing down on the shoulders of her borrowed dress. Lina expected it, sometimes, to feel heavy. Evil. But sitting on the pier with her friend, eating sandwiches and gossiping, Lina felt nothing but warmth and softness and love.
It confused her. Sowelan’s light wasn’t meant to comfort and coddle.
It was meant to purify.
In time, her old duties returned to her.
As a handmaid in Caelos, she had savoured the comfort of aching muscles, the deathlike sleep after a long day of chores.
Working her body meant her mind could rest. She had little time to think of Castor’s last words to her if she was elbow-deep in soapy water or running after kids.
Now that she and hers had settled into their new lives, the priests of Oseidos announced that they were to start earning their keep. This suited Lina, especially when she and Ami were assigned to the same team of launderers.
That did not suit Ami, who was used to working in the gardens. “Why don’t they get hydromancers to do this?” she groused, wringing out a robe and slapping it against a sun-warmed stone bench.
Lina wiped the sweat from her forehead, the midday sun and the steam rising up from the shallow washing pool outside the acolytes’ building wearing on her. A hydromancer did, in fact, heat the water for them, but the rest was up to Lina, Ami, and their team.
“They’re in charge of teaching the kids magic,” she murmured, fishing through the soapy, near-scalding water for the cotton sash from a priest’s formal robes. She held the fabric to her eyes, ensuring that none of the silver needlework needed touching up, and squeezed the excess water from it.
“Oh, aye,” Ami said sarcastically. She shifted in her seat on the flagstones beside the pool, stretching out her leg and massaging it. “Raising the next generation of little warriors.”
Lina winced but said nothing as she carried the sash to the clothesline they’d tied between the beams of a wooden pergola sweeping over the pool.
Unfortunately her vision of a tranquil, peace-loving people was more than a little na?ve: the hydromancers who fought for Menon’s cause were just as vicious as Castor and his crew.
A flash of white in the shadows sent Lina’s heart into her stomach, but it was only one of the albino peacocks that acted like they owned the place.
It flapped up onto a twisting wisteria branch, tailfeathers hanging like a fine lace curtain, and stared at Lina and the others through its pomegranate seed eyes.
Menon-blessed, the priests called them, although they weren’t much more than glorified decorations.
Ami clambered to her feet and limped towards the peacock, hand out, coaxing, only for it to hiss and dart away. Ami slumped. “I have only ever hoped to be loved by a peacock,” she lamented. “But the gods continue to deny me.”
“Because you complain so much,” called one of the other launderers, a friend of Ami’s from Caelos. “Get back to work and we’ll be done faster.”
“Oh, my apologies, Lady.” Ami lowered into a mock bow. “Of course, Lady, we mundane folk must earn our paper-thin cots.”
“It is like sleeping on a stretched-out newspaper,” another girl agreed.
“I’d rather sleep on the beach,” Ami said. “With the hermit crabs.”
The first girl sighed. “I liked you better when you were still coughing up black every morning.” She dodged when Ami hurled a sponge at her, although she wore a faint smile on her face. “Even hacking up a lung, you were quieter.”
Lina let them argue, her focus on the robes and dresses and blankets billowing in the afternoon breeze. She touched the corner of one, ran her palm against it. Considered.
Even the tiniest breath of pyromancy would have their work done in an instant. It would also have her killed.
Lina smiled ruefully and let the fabric fall.
It did make her sad, sometimes, living without magic. But if Sowelan had gifted it to be used as a weapon, then she would gladly go without.
“These here are dry,” she announced, pulling down a line of children’s clothes and folding them into a wicker basket. “I’ll bring them back to the acolytes’ building.”
Hydromancy reverberated throughout every inch of Oseidos.
By now Lina had studied it, learned as well as an outsider could the difference between a child’s play, loose and whimsical, the sensation of chasing a wave, and a priestess’s ceremonial stances, still and dignified like a deep, reflective pond.
As the days grew longer and brighter, Kai Mahina’s ward began to overpower it all, a gust of icy wind, the pressure of a ceaseless waterfall.
There was an unkindness to it. A desperation.
She shivered, pausing on the wooded path beside a statue of Menon draped with moonflower vines.
Unlike Sowelan’s altars, Menon’s arms reached out to Her devotees, a marble hand eye-level, palm up.
The clothesbasket balanced against her hip, Lina breathed in the little details, the curve of Menon’s lips, the gauzy sweep of her koi-fin robes, inlaid with mother-of-pearl scales.
Her eyes trained on Menon’s, Lina laid her fingertips upon the Moon Goddess’s outstretched hand.
If this ward can’t protect me, she thought, hoped: will you?
“Thank you so much for your advice.”
That voice. Lina froze, feeling like prey as she searched for the source of it. There, a glimmer of porcelain skin and pink silk beyond the leafy boughs of a willow tree – Lady Ione, rounding on someone, her voice cross. “I was so very desperate for your opinion.”
Stupidly, Lina looked down at herself, as though she had anything better to wear than the faded shirtwaist dress she’d scrounged up from the donation bin. At least she’d taken out the sleeves enough to conceal her burns.
Another voice resounded, an unfriendly rumble of laughter, a watered-down Coralpool accent. “I’m only trying to help.”
The warden. Lina had eavesdropped on enough conversations between Castor and the high priests to know when to make herself scarce – but the way Ione stared across the garden at Kai, her face stony and guarded, had Lina crouching in the shadow beneath the statue of Menon.
Monitoring. Just in case Kai was anything like Castor had described his brothers.
The warden sauntered into the light, his posture easy.
“Some might consider it a privilege, in fact,” he said, reaching into the pocket of his waistcoat for a silver watch; he checked it and filed it away.
“The kind of training I received produced some real mean bastards, and you look like you couldn’t kill a fly.
You’re gonna have a hard time without a bit of help. ”
“My home doesn’t get flies,” Ione replied, clipped; she turned her back to him towards a deep blue koi pond. “I’m sorry to hear about yours. They are nasty.”
Without another word, she widened her footing and drew a stream of water out of the pond, fish glittering like gold coins suspended within as she snaked it around herself.
She smiled at them, poked a long-nailed finger into the stream; one of the fish nibbled at it.
And then Kai stepped back into her view and she soured, the water tremoring in response.
Her expression smoothed again. “You must be very bored.” She pivoted, the water twisting with her. “I thought Saros was keeping you busy?”
“The ward’ll be finished soon. And once it is, I hoped to extend my services to House Artem’s illustrious daughter.”
Ione tipped the water and koi back into the pond and slinked past him, frigid. “I don’t need your ward to protect my people, and I don’t need you to teach me. Don’t speak to me again.”
The air cooled, a veil of mist condensing around him, an attempt to control his irritation. Lina had seen it before in Castor, the moment of restraint before an explosion, something he could point to later, say, See, there, you’d pushed me too far.
But Kai surprised her. He loosed a breath, the mist fading. “Up to you. You do have such brilliant control of your supposed abilities.”
Ione halted. “And you,” she said flatly, not bothering to face him, “like your brother, are doing a brilliant job of endearing yourself to me.”
Lina’s stomach flipped, a heady mix of anxiety and admiration.
“Just a suggestion.” Kai flicked his wrist. In an instant, every ounce of water in the pond shot skyward; it froze in a single spike that pierced the tree canopies above, each facet glinting in the sunlight. “But together,” he finished, “we can become something truly powerful.”
He smiled when Ione whirled around, her fists clenched – but rather than be impressed, she just pointed at the ice and shouted, “You’ve just killed dozens of koi, you egotistical clown.”
Kai’s face fell, for the first time looking startled. He rubbed his nose and let the ice collapse into slush, murmuring, a tad sheepishly, “Well, it – it would’ve been a fast death.”
With a disgusted snarl, Ione spun on her heels and stormed up the path leading out of the garden, swatting a willow bough out of her way and causing each leaf to bristle with hoarfrost. Panicking as Ione neared, Lina pressed herself into the shadows of the cold marble statue and held her breath, but Ione, passing, froze another willow bough so violently that each leaf shattered.
A spray of frost grazed Lina’s cheek, making her gasp – and that was all it took for Ione to notice her hiding there.
“Oh – ” The hardness in her voice melted, lightened.
Ione glanced up at the statue of Menon, and then back down at Lina, her mouth blooming into a shy smile as she played with the sleeves of the sheer robe she wore over her pink sheath dress.
“I’ve disrupted your praying. I’m sorry to have startled you; I must look very angry, because I am.
” She rubbed her temples, taking a pacifying little breath. “Menon rest their souls.”
Lina swallowed, dizzied by the abrupt change in her. “The – the fish?”