Chapter 5
CHAPTER
It was just like it had been three months ago, only now Dyonisia sat in that glittering, throne-like chair without an audience behind her.
“Ahh, Rayna. Come here, child.”
She motioned for me with one long, angular fingernail. Behind me, Lexington bowed his way out, and I found myself completely alone with the founder of this island and the head of the Good Council in this arched space beneath the Testing Center’s dome.
I shuffled forward, barely daring to breathe. Her eyes—frosty blue and filled with nothing but a depthless void—tracked the path of my movement toward her, like a serpent eyeing a wandering mouse.
A glass of acai wine sat beside her on a limestone side table, along with a neat burgundy package wrapped in ribbons and bows.
Dyonisia smiled when I came to a halt in front of her.
“Sit.”
I glanced down, trying not to let shock flare in my eyes. Sit? There was nothing to sit on, besides the arm of her makeshift throne or…
My body seemed to melt to the floor at her feet—sickeningly obedient under that watchful gaze—until she was towering over me.
Apparently satisfied, Dyonisia said, “Kitterfol has informed me that you have not caught any sign of our enemy since our last talk?”
Her voice sounded like the wall of ice I’d built around myself, except shattered: jagged and sharp enough to slice.
“I have recently succeeded in making initial contact,” I said, choosing each word from the tangle of my thoughts ever so carefully.
“Oh? Is that so?”
Something flickered across Dyonisia’s regal face. Shock? Pleasure? Pride? I didn’t know. Only knew that I was glad Lexington had left the room, glad I couldn’t feel his slimy presence in my mind to pick up on the little half-lies I was about to weave through the truth.
“Yes, ma’am. I—I opened up my mind and lured him in with…” I dipped my head, as if embarrassed. “—promiscuous mental images.”
False. I’d just tried to help a fellow Esholian. But I obviously couldn’t tell Dyonisia how much I abhorred her practice of tossing her own people away like literal pieces of garbage.
Dyonisia’s tone became crisper. “When?”
“He wouldn’t agree to a specific time or place, but he said soon.”
Soon as in tomorrow night, when he’d leave a black pearl on my nightstand. But I couldn’t tell Dyonisia that either, couldn’t admit I’d been close enough to throttle him twelve separate times and slept through them all.
Dyonisia took a single sip of wine, smacked her lips delicately, and replaced the glass on that side table. Her sheet of midnight hair fell forward as she leaned even further over me.
“My sources tell me that you have been practicing some peculiar skills with your little tiger friend, child.”
Little tiger friend. Jagaros would have sunk his claws deep into her throat if he’d heard that insult. I didn’t dare correct her, though—not when I sensed danger hovering over each of her words. She knew. She knew I’d been meeting with Jagaros to practice with my mother’s knife.
I waited for a blow, either a sharp reprimand or possibly the sting of her hand on my cheek. But only lethal quiet bore down upon me.
“Where is your weapon now?” Dyonisia finished, tilting her head.
I blinked up at her. Cleared my throat and tried to keep the mask over my face. “I thought it might not be… appropriate to carry a knife around everywhere I go.” Especially considering the no-killing rules that Jenia had been accused of breaking—and banished for.
Dyonisia smiled, baring her wine-tinted teeth.
“Well, then, it’s a good thing I have just the gift for you, isn’t it?”
She turned and picked up the burgundy package beside her glass of wine. I hadn’t given it much thought upon first glance, but now I watched her slide off all those ribbons and bows and unfold the box beneath, then hand me the complicated strip of leather inside.
“It’s a thigh sheath,” Dyonisia said. “I had the best of my blacksmiths in Belliview tailor it especially for that knife of yours. So that when you do meet up with Coen Steeler—soon, as you said—your weapon of choice will already be on you. You will have to stop wearing those wretched pants, of course, and start wearing dresses like a proper Esholian lady. I will have some delivered to your room.”
So many alarms blared through me at those words.
The fact that Dyonisia had been spying on me, watching me so thoroughly that she somehow knew the exact shape and curve of my knife was one thing.
The idea that I wasn’t just her bait, that she truly expected me to fight a dangerous Mind Manipulator and potentially win—that was another.
I took the sheath and turned it over in my hands, feeling the cold nip of the buckles and the flexible pocket where my knife would go. There were also several other smaller pockets on either side of the main one, as if to host an array of shorter blades, too.
“I thought you wanted me to catch Steeler so that you could…” For some reason, the words lodged in my throat. “I didn’t think you’d want me to…”
“Oh, I don’t think you’d be able to kill a pirate, my dear.
” Dyonisia’s laugh sounded like teeth splintering in her throat.
“As I told you all those months ago, those pirates are becoming more and more powerful, breaking through the shield, planning more attacks on our seaside villages, murdering our innocents. But a well-aimed blow—perhaps to his undeserving brand—” And here, her fingers reached out and traced the brand etched into my own shoulder.
“…it might hinder his magic as well as his strength.”
I couldn’t help but jerk away from her touch. Had she really said…?
“You mean to tell me that our magic can be destroyed if our brands are maimed?” I asked, horror clamping down in my gut.
Dyonisia whisked up her wine glass and brought it slowly to her lips. After she’d had a long sip, she said, “The brand itself is like the doorway to your magic, child. Shut the door, and there’s no way for that magic to interact with the outside world.”
It took every ounce of restraint within me to not trace my own fingers over my brand, to feel the scarred ridges of that so-called doorway.
In my entire year of Wild Whispering, I’d never felt so much as a tingle from that circled star when I was talking to a plant or animal, but I supposed… supposed that it made sense, even so.
If I could catch Coen and stab him right on that spot…
“Can I ask you a question?”
Those words were tumbling out of my mouth before I could rethink them. Dyonisia raised a slender eyebrow briefly, but nodded.
“Is there ever a reason someone would have… two brands?”
Now her nostrils flared, as if scenting my fear.
I didn’t know which of the five types of magic she had, but I thought not Mind Manipulating, or else she wouldn’t drag Lexington around everywhere she went.
Still, though, I tried to keep images of Jenia Leake out of my head just in case. Tried and failed.
Dyonisia had gone very, very still.
“Why would you ask such a preposterous thing, child? The Branding is a sacred process between humans and the magic those faeries discarded here centuries ago. What reason would someone have to get a second one?”
Again, the words just tumbled out.
“Maybe to strengthen their magic,” I said, and for the briefest moment, met the ice in her gaze. My own wall of ice seemed to quiver.
Dyonisia leaned back, smiling with her teeth.
“And why would anyone want to do that?”
I could have sworn she purposefully shifted her hair, then, her curtain of midnight black that always covered her chest and shoulders. A sliver of me thought I knew what I’d see: multiple brands, a display of strengthened power, a warning to me to quit asking questions.
Yet her bare shoulder flashed, and I saw… nothing.
Not a single brand, not a single scar, not a single burn.
As if she didn’t have any of the five powers at all.