3. Katya
3
I wish I could say I’m rested and excited to go on this adventure, but that would be a lie. After a night spent tossing and turning while I picked apart every word, every look, every gesture from my meeting with Leodin, I am a wreck. My mind is working at half speed, yet I’m jittery with nerves, and my stomach is both sour and queasy and completely incapable of digesting anything more than a few bites of bread and a sip or two of tea.
Not exactly the best start to my trip.
I need to get myself into this travel dress Leodin scrounged up for me, but I’m quickly discovering that tightening a corset on your own is virtually impossible. I’m too damn stubborn to ask for help, though, so here I am standing in front of my full-length mirror, watching myself twist like a pretzel to reach these stupid laces. It’s a fairly hideous dress—the skirt is too short, and the color is akin to dung left to bake in the sun—but it’s nice to wear something other than white acolyte robes for a change .
There’s a light tap at my door that could only be Mama.
Thank the gods. “It’s open,” I shout.
A moment later, Mama pokes her head into the room. “Need some help?” she asks, eyes on my hands clutching the back of the corset so it doesn’t slip off.
“Yes, please.”
She steps into the room, shuts the door behind herself and crosses to me. “Turn around,” she says, but doesn’t wait for me to comply before taking me by the shoulders and forcing me back in front of the mirror. She grabs hold of the laces and pulls.
And there go my lungs.
“Too tight,” I manage to squeak out.
Mama chuckles. “It’s supposed to be tight. You’ve just been spoiled by those tunics and trousers you acolytes wear.” She tugs at the ties and the whole thing loosens enough that I can breathe again. “Better?” she asks, smiling at me in the mirror.
“Much, thank you.”
Mama finishes up with my corset and gives my shoulder a pat. “You have all your things packed?”
“Yep,” I say, bouncing nervously on the balls of my feet. “Leodin’s minions are packing up the carriage as we speak.”
Mama gives me a weak smile. “Behave yourself.” She tugs at the sleeve of my dress and tips her head toward the door. “Come with me. I have something for you.”
She leads me to her tiny bedroom—her and Leodin have never shared a room as far as I know—then closes and locks the door behind us. “Give me a hand,” she says, crossing to her simple oak wardrobe.
Give her a hand with what ?
When I don’t move, she twists around and waves at me to follow. “Come on. I need you to help me move this.”
Something about this feels off, but I scramble across the room anyway, and with Mama crouched below me, we push her wardrobe over just enough to reveal a tiny hole in the wood floor.
I think I’m beginning to grasp what’s going on here.
“This is between you and me. Nobody else is to know about this, not even your stepfather. Understand?”
“But we’re so close,” I reply, my voice dripping sarcasm.
Mama gives me a withering look, then hooks a finger through the hole and lifts the board from the floor. Setting it aside, she reaches elbow-deep into the opening and pulls out a metal box about the size of a book, with crusty orange rust forming along the edges. She fits the board back in place. The box pressed protectively against her chest, Mama pushes to her feet and crosses to her always meticulously made little bed. There, she takes a seat on the worn blue duvet. “Sit,” she says, patting the open space beside her.
I settle in next to her, curiosity overriding my nerves for the moment. She flips the lid on the box and reaches inside. I’m expecting her to pull out some money, maybe a small, spelled gem or two. Instead, she takes out a gold bracelet festooned with at least a dozen tiny purple sythra gems.
“You can’t be serious,” I say, eyeing the pretty purple stones. “This has to be worth a small fortune.”
“Hush.” She wraps the bracelet around my wrist, checking the length, then snatches up a tiny pair of needle-nose pliers from her nightstand and sets to work, removing gold links to make it fit my tiny wrist. “I don’t want to hear a single argument from you. You’re my only daughter, going to a dangerous place without me. It makes me feel better to know you’ll have some protection, alright?”
I nod. There’s no point in arguing, and if I’m being honest, it makes me feel a little better, too. I can’t access spectral magic the way my mother and other magi can, but I can use sythra gems already charged with magic, like any other fae. At least being half-human didn’t rob me of that ability.
“The cost of sythra has gone up a lot lately,” she says, “and with this being as last minute as it is, I wasn’t able to purchase any larger gems, so you’ll have to use multiple stones if you want to heal anything larger than a few cuts and bruises. Ah, there we go.” She drops the last golden link into her lap and holds the bracelet out as if inspecting it. “Give me your hand.” I extend my arm out to her, and she wraps the bracelet around my wrist and fits the clasp.
I finger the gems, each stone emitting a buzz, like tiny beehives, that tickles my skin.
“One down. One to go.” She gives me a brief smile, then plucks another bracelet, this one platinum, from the box and gets to work on it. There’s a large red gem surrounded by two pink and two yellow stones. The pink ones are for protection—BORING—but the others are much more exciting. “Are these for what I think they’re for?” I ask, excited to try out some illusion and fire spells.
“No,” she answers dryly, as though she didn’t just destroy my dreams of fireballs and giant snakes chasing Leodin through the forest. “They are for emergencies only.”
“Awww.”
“Don’t you ‘aww’ me. I had to pay a magi from Dom Nymn a fortune for these.” She taps a yellow gem with a long fingernail. “I expect them to be returned to me when you get back. And this”—she points to the red gem, somehow reading my thoughts before they’re even fully formed—“is for survival only, not to light a hearth fire because you’re too lazy to search for matches.”
I fold my arms across my chest and pout. “You really enjoy ruining my fun, don’t you?”
She doesn’t even deign that worthy of a response, simply rolls her eyes.
I drop my hands back into my lap and sigh. “He’s lost his mind, right?” I say, finally giving voice to the thought that plagued me all night.
She shakes her head, eyes still on her work. “He’s not insane. He’s desperate. Our palace informants have all gone silent, so he’s going into this completely blind.” Her eyes flick up to mine, then back to her work. “He needs someone he can trust to watch and listen where he can’t. The problem is, any one of our people could be in the queen’s pocket, and we wouldn’t know it, but we can say with certainty you aren’t one of them. I just don’t like the idea of you being put in danger, especially when you’re so far away.”
“But I don’t know anything about espionage or politics,” I say. “Even if I manage to listen in on other’s conversations, I doubt I’d be able to tell what information is important and what isn’t.”
“You’ll do just fine.”
I give her a pointed look that says, “I’m not so sure.”
Mama sets down her tool and meets my eyes. “You’re young and a female, which means you won’t be viewed as a threat—males in power tend to assume young females have nothing better to do with their time than chase boys and buy pretty dresses.”
I raise a brow .
“It’s true,” she continues. “No one would expect you to have enough brains in your head to keep up an intelligent conversation, let alone be fluent in four languages.”
“Five,” I correct her.
“Five?” She wrinkles her nose as she does the math. “You know the provincial languages and ancient Cardemian. What am I missing?”
“ümbrian.”
She draws back in shock. “Who taught you that?”
I shrug. “Madam Nova. Who else?”
Mama presses her lips together in disapproval but doesn’t comment. She never really liked Madam Nova, the ancient magi who came over from Feridas to tutor me. I don’t know why. Mama picks up the bracelet and pliers and returns to twisting off links with a little more vigor than strictly necessary. “Anyway,” she begins, her voice rough. She clears her throat and continues. “What your stepfather won’t admit to either of us is that you’re brilliant, and if anyone in the dom can pull this off, it’s you.”
I don’t know how to react to the compliment. Luckily, I’m saved from having to respond by someone pounding on the door. “Magi Iona,” a frantic female voice says.
Mama leaps off the bed and rushes for the door, swinging it open. A young acolyte—her eyes bright red, face tear-stained—is standing on the other side. “What happened?” Mama asks.
“They need your help. Please hurry.”
She doesn’t ask any more questions, just tells the girl to lead the way. The acolyte sets off down the hall at breakneck speed, and Mama and I follow. The three of us crash through the double doors into the clinic where half a dozen magi and gods only know how many acolytes and patients cluster in the middle of the room—some are crying, some clutch their chests in disbelief while other’s shout at whoever is on the floor to, “Stop.”
“Please, stop.”
“Somebody help her.”
“Out of my way,” Mama says, as she shoves through the throng. She drops to her knees beside a pretty brunette I recognize as Sariah, a transfer from Dom Bac. It’s no wonder everyone is in such a state. Sariah tears at her throat and chest, fingernails digging into her skin as though trying to free whatever horror lies beneath. Purple sythra in hand, two magi search her for injuries to heal, while acolytes fight to pull her hands away from her chest. And all the while, Sariah continues to scream and scream and scream.
Mama grabs the girl’s bloody hand, presses a clear sythra into her palm and fists it closed. “Push it out,” she shouts, her words barely audible over the girl’s frantic screams. “Push the magic into the stone.”
But Sariah doesn’t seem to hear. Her eyes are so wide, so terror-stricken, the tears gushing toward her temples like tiny rivers. The scent of cooking flesh fills my nostrils. Her chest is smoking.
That’s when I realize what’s happened, and my hand flies to my mouth, stifling a gasp. Sariah must have dropped her stone while drawing spectral magic into her body, and without the stone to push the magic into, it’s burning her up from the inside. I rush to my mother’s side, not knowing what to do except help in any way I can.
“Mama.”
She throws out a hand, stopping me in my tracks. “Get back.”
“I want to—”
“Not now, Katya,” she shouts, waving me away like a pestering child.
The words hit me like a physical blow, and I stumble back, almost falling on my butt when my foot slips on an errant towel. Sariah’s screams turn to choking breaths, then whimpers.
“That’s it. That’s it. Good job, Sariah,” Mama tells the girl. “Alise, Dav, now,” she shouts at two magi still standing with the acolytes, watching. They scurry over, joining mama and the others already frantically working to heal the girl. Mama shouts more commands, telling them to do “more” and work “faster,” while continuing to praise Sariah.
Wheezing breaths, more coughing, then Sariah’s eyes flutter shut and her head slumps to the side.
For a split second, I think she’s dead, then Mama calls over a couple of the bigger male acolytes and says, “Take her to her room. She needs to rest and get a telegram to her mother at Dom Bac. She’ll want to see her.”
The males pick the girl up like a sack of flour between them and head for the clinic door.
The crowd begins to disperse, and Mama stands, wiping her blood-stained hands down her purple robe. She turns to me, her face drawn with exhaustion and perhaps just a little bit of guilt. “I’ll take you to your stepfather.”
By the time we make it to the fancy carriage and four waiting out front, the line for the clinic already zigzags across the lawn and into the street. It’s like this every day, all day. Fae from as far north as the Cregeis mountains here in Elterra to the southern tip of Ajir province make the trek to Dom Duje, looking to our magi to heal everything from broken bones to typhus. And they do.
For a small fee, of course.
Leodin gives Mama instructions for while he’s gone and she listens, her expression neutral. I don’t know the whole story of why they got married, but it definitely wasn’t a love match—not for Mama, at least. I do think Leodin loved her at one time, though I’m fairly certain that changed when I came into the picture.
Maxim leaps into my arms and squeezes me with every ounce of his seven-year-old strength. “Promise you’re coming back.”
“For you, peanut? Always.” He squeezes me again, then hops down and crashes into his father, his head plowing Leodin right in the gut. Leodin doubles over with an “oomph,” but he doesn’t chastise his son. Even Leodin’s hard veneer is no match for Max’s sweetness.
Mama gives me a quick hug, then draws back to study my face as though she needs to memorize every detail in case she never sees me again.
“It’s only a couple of weeks. I’ll be fine,” I tell her.
She opens her mouth as if to say something, then seeming to change her mind, clamps it shut and nods. Reaching into her pocket, Mama pulls out the bracelet she was working on before we got called into the clinic. “Give me your arm,” she says, her hand out .
I do as she asks, and she secures the platinum bracelet on my wrist above the gold one.
I mutter a quick “thank you” and pivot around to get into the carriage, but she stops me with a hand on my back. “I’m sorry,” she says. There’s no need for her to say what she’s sorry for.
I twist back around, a phony smile plastered on my face. “Don’t apologize. You saved Sariah’s life. That’s what’s important.”
She nods. “I know you were just trying to help—”
“I know. It’s fine.” It really isn’t fine. Not so much because my mother pushed me away, but because it just underscores how useless I am. Then, of course, I get angry with myself for even feeling that way because what kind of self-consumed, awful person harps on something so minor, when a girl almost died? My fragile ego is just going to have to get over it. So, I smile and give her another hug and promise to be safe, and if I’m blinking too much and having trouble speaking because my throat is swollen, she doesn’t seem to notice.