Chapter 5 #3
Mirie, from the beginning, was different.
Quiet, calm, and shockingly grounded, considering that she was apparently the type of person who would uproot her life to go follow around some woman she’d never met.
No matter how I tried to chase her off, she always remained—always with a maybe tomorrow.
And soon enough, I stopped trying. Stopped wanting to.
I took another drink. I was now, well and truly, drunk.
“You know,” I said, “I think I’ve won.”
“Won what?”
“Us. This competition. You follow me around trying to make me a better chosen one. I drag you into a life in the criminal underworld.”
“I don’t believe this was ever a competition.”
“Bullshit. You are now definitely more sinful than I am holy.”
Again, that smug smirk, just at the corners of her eyes. “I don’t think that’s true, Kyrene,” she said, casting a pointed glance at Valentina, twirling to her favorite song.
Perhaps the alcohol was getting to me, because an unexpected lump of emotion tightened at the base of my throat.
Shiket was the Goddess of Justice. The goddess of warriors and maker of heroes.
And Mirie, from the start, was undeniably a hero.
She even looked the part, with the robes and the armor and the plume of short, thick, dark hair that made her profile resemble that of warriors who wore feathers atop their helmets.
She was an excellent fighter and had impeccable judgment.
In fact, the only poor judgment I’d ever seen her exhibit was her decision to follow me around, day after day, week after week, year after year.
And yet, shamefully, I was grateful for it.
I looked away, but not quickly enough. Mirie’s brow furrowed.
“What?”
“What?”
“Something happened earlier. Something that shook you.”
Nothing ever got past Mirie.
I hesitated, then leaned closer to her. “When Marko and I went after the mark—”
A cacophonous roar burst up from the corner of the room. We turned to see Marko thrusting his hands in the air victoriously while his opponents grumbled curses, throwing their cards to the table.
“Which one do you think is going to try to kill him later?” I mused.
A young woman, laughing, draped herself over Marko’s shoulder, and he kissed her to a wave of laughter.
“Her husband, maybe.” Mirie shot me a pointed glance. “That bother you?”
I scoffed. That wasn’t the kind of relationship Marko and I had. We were just two people who disliked empty beds and quiet loud enough to hear our own thoughts.
“I always dreamed he might take me away from all this one day,” I said flatly, and Mirie stifled a snort.
The song ended, and across the room, Valentina thanked the musician.
The lanky boy—Quin—leaned over her shoulder and said something that could not possibly have been funny enough to earn her sparkling giggle.
I watched all the little casual touches in their flirtation, and when he murmured in her ear and nodded to the back room, I started to stand.
Mirie stopped me. “Oh, please. She’s sixteen.”
I gave her a blank stare. I didn’t know what that was supposed to mean.
“He could be dragging her out back to murder her.”
“You know as well as I do that Valentina could kill that boy with one arm tied behind her back. You’ve got to let her live eventually.
” She nudged my arm. “Don’t you remember what it was like back then?
When you could have a dramatic, exciting flirtation that seemed like the greatest thing in the world? ”
I blinked away the memories. “It was a different world back then.”
“It was. But she’s growing up in this one, and that means the little joys are all the more important. She knows how to be safe. She has the tea. Let her have some consequence-free fun with a boy.”
I had a visceral, unexpected reaction to those words. Consequence-free.
A vivid memory of sharp pain, blood on my fingertips, and—
Gods fucking help me. I downed another gulp.
“She’s not prepared for this world,” I grumbled.
“She’s smart. Capable.”
“Naive.”
“Only because you work so hard to preserve that in her.”
I fought the urge to touch my chest. Mirie’s words hit their target precisely.
She was right, of course. The qualities in Val that I found most frustrating were exactly the ones I fought so hard to protect.
Mirie and I had been a young adult and a teenager, respectively, when the sun fell.
But Valentina barely remembered a time before darkness.
When I had first met her, I felt like I’d discovered one final remaining flower.
A relic from a past age, miraculously preserved.
I hated that this world would stamp that out of her, one day. I’d committed my fair share of reprehensible acts, but the idea of killing Valentina’s innocence seemed the most unforgivable of all.
I took another drink, a little desperately, chasing the quickly fading buzz.
“Listen, Mirie,” I said. “Tomorrow—”
“Kyrene.”
Valentina’s voice ripped through the room. My heart stopped. It was always so easy to tell when Val was angry. She still had that high, sharp warble, like a child.
I whipped around, already reaching for Zefiah.
But Valentina was alone. She was unhurt. She stood straight. And she looked only at me as she held up her hand, something gold glinting in her grasp:
A pendant of Shiket.
She asked, “How did they get this?”