House of Gods, page 27
“I would hear your speculation,” Keres said.
“Apologies, Domina,” she said with a head bow, “but if you want my best work, then we would need to retreat to the academy so that I might make better assessment of what we are working with.”
“Basically, leave her be,” Kerrigan said, striding between them. She touched Cleora’s shoulder and was surprised to find her shaking. “She is a scholar, and she has to do things her own way.”
“How will we know if we can rely on her assessment?” Keres argued.
“Do you have any idea what is wrong with her magic?” Cleora shot back. Then cringed at her own audacity.
Keres smiled. “I do not.”
“Then, allow me to do my work. She is the first actual spiritcaster I have had in all my years at the academy. I would not risk her, and I have grown quite fond of her,” Cleora admitted softly.
“So have I,” Keres said with a sad smile. “Ah. Our other guests have arrived.”
“Other guests?” Cleora asked in confusion.
Constantine and Danae strode through the doorway. Constantine had his back up, as if he expected at any moment to be slaughtered by his oppressor. Danae was still in servant clothing, trying to seem as unremarkable as possible.
“Good. You’re here,” Kerrigan said. “Now, we can go.”
“Excuse me?” Constantine asked.
Keres rose to her full height and strode toward the general. She tilted her head slightly and smiled before holding her hand out. He looked like he wanted to swat it away, but reluctantly put his in hers.
“Hello, Kurios.”
He stiffened at that name. “General only now, Domina.”
“If he walks like a king, talks like a king, and acts like a king, then no demotion by any force can make him anything but what he is,” Keres informed him.
To Kerrigan’s surprise, his cheeks heated, and he straightened even further at the assessment. As if her mother’s understanding of him made a difference.
“Thank you, Domina,” he said with a tilt of his head. “Now, will you explain what this is about?”
“The only people who know this information are in this room,” Keres said. “And I would like to keep it that way.” Constantine nodded, though he clearly had no idea what she was going to say. “Kerrigan is my daughter and heir.”
Constantine opened his mouth and then promptly closed it. His eyes swept to Kerrigan’s.
“It’s true,” she admitted.
“But you don’t have magic,” he sputtered.
“That is false,” Keres continued. “Her powers have been damaged in some way. We are going to take her out of the city to repair them. Cleora is a professor at the Emperor’s Academy and has graciously agreed to help us with the matter.”
“Isn’t she … Daijan? Doesn’t that fix it?”
Kerrigan raised her hand up, and no magic came to her fingertips. “Doma can’t gain powers from other Doma.”
Constantine looked sick. “You really are Doma.”
“And you were going to sell me to the senators.”
He coughed violently, looking at Keres with alarm. “Well, I never intended …”
Keres waved him off. “I don’t need an explanation. Thank you for taking care of her.”
“She didn’t make it easy.”
Fordham snorted. Kerrigan just grinned.
Keres laughed. “I suspect not. Any daughter of mine must have a strong will to survive in this world.”
“Sorry to ask, but what is it that you wanted of me?”
Keres touched a finger to her lips. “Not me. But her.” She pointed to Danae, whose eyes widened in alarm.
“You’re going to hate this,” Kerrigan said.
Fordham looked to the ceiling. “Would it be you otherwise?”
Constantine just turned uncertainly between them all. “What? What is it?”
“It’s Danae.”
He stilled. “No.”
“She needs a teacher.” Kerrigan gestured to Cleora, who was standing quietly out of the way. “I have a teacher.”
“The Doma will …” He trailed off, as if realizing one was standing in their midst. “You promised.”
“Let her decide,” Kerrigan argued.
Danae stiffened as everyone turned to her. “I … what?”
Keres stepped forward then. Constantine made to block her path, but there was nothing he could do against the daughter of the emperor. Nothing any of them could do. Kerrigan had put Danae into Keres’s path, knowing full well that she and her father had both wanted to remain as anonymous as possible. That they had sacrificed everything for that anonymity. But it wasn’t going to last forever, and unless she was trained, they would lose everything.
Her mother tipped Danae’s face up to meet hers. Their eyes touched, and Keres’s eyes went gray and almost colorless to match Danae’s. The girl gasped in surprise at whatever was being shown to the Doma. The same way her mother had seen what the Red Masks had done to her. The same way she’d discovered Fordham’s powers.
Keres broke the connection and stepped back. A furrow formed between her eyebrows. “Oh, child …”
“You can’t have her,” Constantine roared. “I don’t care who you are!”
A tear tracked down Danae’s cheek. “She was so beautiful.”
“She was,” Keres said, ignoring Constantine’s outburst.
He muscled between them. “She’s just a girl,” he said, his voice turning to pleading.
Keres tilted her head. “I don’t know what you think I would do with her.”
“What your lot did with all the truthtellers of my people.”
“I did nothing to them.”
“No, but your father did enough,” he snapped.
Keres acknowledged this. “I am not my father. I have no interest in taking her as my own. I will not make her Daijan. Kerrigan has argued that she needs to be trained, and I agree. Cleora will train her.”
Cleora’s eyes rounded. “Train … a truthteller? I don’t know the first thing about truthtelling.”
“But you know the ways of the spirit, and isn’t it just an extension of spiritcasting?”
“I … I …” Cleora sputtered, suddenly put off in her own subject. “We’ve never had one before. We were never permitted to study them.”
“I am giving you permission.”
Cleora straightened then, as if seeing Danae for the first time. A new subject. A new research project. A new pupil. “I wouldn’t be able to publish any of my findings if you want to keep her from He Who Reigns.”
“Agreed,” Keres said immediately before Constantine could balk.
“But I would do it regardless.”
“Do you want this, Day?” Constantine pleaded. “Is this your choice?”
Danae looked up at her father before meeting the eyes of Cleora, Keres, and then Kerrigan in turn. Kerrigan shot her a reassuring smile. She’d broken a promise to keep this secret, but she had to believe it was worth it.
Finally, Danae agreed, “Yes, I want this.”
“Then, it’s settled. Danae will go with us to Rhithymna to work at the academy. Kerrigan, Fordham, and I will stay at my cousin’s home nearby so that we can be accessible to your findings.”
Kerrigan looked around at the room of people she had learned to trust in this horrible world. No one was perfectly satisfied by the answer to their problem. How could they be with so much up in the air and the potential for disaster? But it was a step in the right direction. A way for Kerrigan to finally find a way home. Not to mention … get to know her mother. A possibility she had never considered.
37
The Light
CLOVER
Clover draped the sheet across her bare breasts. Hadrian slept soundly on one side of the bed. His chest rising and falling with ease. A lock of blue hair falling out of his face and revealing one of his severely pointed ears. Darby lay on the other side. She was still in a white chemise that made her midnight skin almost glow. Her knees were tucked up to her chest, and she had one hand reaching out for Clover, as if already aware that she’d left the sanctuary of their embrace.
She plucked a loch cigarette from a side table, fumbling for a match in the darkness. It would have been easier to ask Hadrian to use his magic, but she didn’t dare wake him. She found the small box and struck it. The fire burned bright and hot before igniting the paper wrapper.
Sweet relief came to her instantly at the taste of the illicit drug. Her chronic illness had been getting … worse. The debilitating pain hitting more and more often.
It didn’t help that Dozan Rook was gone. And with him his cadre of exceptional magic users. Amond, a loch user himself, had been able to heal her pain more than anyone else ever had when she got bad like this. Now, she just had the cigarettes. The dwindling quantity cigarettes at that.
She didn’t know what she’d do exactly if it ran out of loch.
Clover left the cigarette dangling from her lips as she shuffled out of bed. She tugged on a black silk romper that Darby wore around the house. Clover was a half-foot taller than her, so her ass hung out the bottom. But she didn’t care around the workshop.
Thea had long gone home. The tinkers were silent. She struck another match and lit a lantern to stare down at the row of shiny and metallic amulets.
Despite her misgivings, Thea had convinced her to ramp up their production. Ramp up … everything. Clover had agreed because what else could she do? The streets were empty. The people terrified of the Red Masks’ next move. A curfew had been implemented. Soldiers patrolled, beating half-Fae and humans alike for no reason. Work was harder to find since there was an explicit list of employment allowed for half-breeds and lesser folk. People were disappearing with no explanation. And there was no one to go up against them. Not with their dragons and magic and the little orbs they all carried around with them to keep others in place.
Clover shuddered. She put the cigarette out in a tray on the table.
No, her work was here. Buried in this shop, where no one knew that the RFA movement was still in existence. Where the Red Masks couldn’t reach them. And she could tinker, just as her father had.
The necklace around her neck was cold in its place. She hated every moment that she took it off to give to the masons who were trying to replicate it. Not that anyone had gotten it to do a damn thing.
Only Clover.
Beyond that jump they’d made in the tournament, she’d just gotten it to light up, but not do anything.
She pulled the necklace off from around her neck and felt the glow begin at once. It was like the sound of her mother’s singing and the touch of her father’s hand on her cheek and the happiness of a home before it was shattered, all wrapped up into one perfect light. A memory that she scarcely remembered having.
A smile came to her face.
She had been happy once.
A child with a mother and father and a life.
The Red Masks had taken that from her for this amulet. And here she was, doing the work all over again. Trying to have a fighting chance against the bastards when their time came to fight back.
“Neat trick,” a voice said from the opposite door.
Clover jerked up at the sound. Not Hadrian. Not Darby. No one else was here.
But she recognized the girl from her nightmares.
She put the beautiful, pale face and white-blonde hair to a name that made her shiver with disgust and terror. “Isa.”
“Ah, you’ve heard of me,” the assassin said, leaning against the doorframe.
“What are you doing here?” Clover demanded.
“Following up on a lead.” She gestured to Clover. “And look where it led me.”
Clover gritted her teeth. Isa had magic. She was a deadly assassin. She’d almost killed Kerrigan. And she was the Father’s right hand. There was no world in which she came out ahead of this. Not as a human with nothing but an amulet that didn’t work. Not when her two loves were in a room behind her, so jumping away, if she could even get it to work, was out of the question. She’d die before leaving them behind.
“How did you find us?”
“You think you’re so hidden?”
“Yes,” she ground out.
Isa shrugged, unconcerned. “Well, you’re not great at it. Not you. You didn’t leave. Smart. But others come and go. Workers and such.” Her eyes flicked to the amulets on the table. “Interesting.”
Clover swallowed. “There are others here. They’ll stop you.”
Isa laughed softly. “Oh, dear, you and I both know exactly who is here right now. No one is coming to your rescue. Not unless you’re harboring a particularly wanted criminal with curly red hair and freckles.”
Of course, it always came back to Kerrigan.
She wasn’t dead. Her heart soared with the news. If they were still looking for her, sending people out for her, then she was alive. Clover had known in some way that she couldn’t be dead, or her head would have been on a pike in front of the mountain, just like Helly’s. But she hadn’t known either. No word for months, and she didn’t know what to make of it. This was the first piece of hope she’d had … even if it came at the hands of an assassin.
“No, I didn’t think so,” Isa said when Clover said nothing.
Isa palmed one of the amulets. Clover took a step forward, but Isa held her hand up.
“This is an interesting contraption. This is what all those laborers are coming and going for?”
Clover remained silent.
Isa laughed and tossed it back on the table. The pieces rattled and shook. Clover tried not to grimace at the careful work coming apart.
“Are you here to kill me then?” Clover asked.
Isa tilted her head. “Why would I do that?”
“Because of who I’m associated with.”
“Ah. I see. I don’t think so.”
Clover shot her a skeptical look. “Why not? What do you want?”
“What if I said we should work together?” Isa asked to a disbelieving Clover.
She held the amulet tighter in her hand, prepared to use it however she needed to take down this girl. Anything to save her people.
38
The Assassin
ISA
“I’d say you’re insane,” Clover said.
Of course that was what she’d say. It would be so much easier just to kill the girl. So much easier.
She had spent years at the assassin’s school, preparing for just such missions. She’d infiltrated an underground organization set on taking down the Red Masks. They were building … well, she still wasn’t sure what exactly they were constructing. Some kind of medallion or necklace. Something dangerous, she was sure. All she had to do was steal them, kill everyone who knew about their existence, and she’d walk in as a hero to the Father.
She pursed her lips in irritation. But that wasn’t even what he wanted from her. He wanted Kerrigan Argon. He was as obsessed with the redhead as Isa had once been. Determined to kill the stupid girl before she could become a threat. Too late for that. Especially after the Father’s indulgence in her. He’d made her the martyr that she was, and he had to reap those consequences.
No, she’d known from the get-go that Kerrigan wasn’t here. He wouldn’t care about a few dissenters tinkering in a hidden facility. He’d only be satisfied with her. His little mentee and the one person whose absence could hurt his cause.
Isa was beginning to think that Kerrigan was well beyond their reach. If even her closest friends hadn’t known that she still lived, then she wasn’t working with any of them either. Clover wasn’t a good enough actor for that.
Which meant that Isa was wasting her time and should have already dropped out of her search of Kinkadia and moved to the thirteen tribes beyond the great city. Following those leads would be much more difficult, but she had an idea of where to start. That dark mountain on the horizon, where her lover boy called home.
Not that any of these thoughts had anything to do with Clover standing half-dressed and terrified in front of her. The little necklace still emitting a soft light that should have been impossible. She was human as far as Isa had gathered. She shouldn’t be able to wield even a flicker of light. And none of that was why she was here.
“Perhaps I am insane,” she finally conceded.
Clover huffed. Her hand shook slightly. “At least there’s one thing we can agree on. If you’re not here to kill us, why don’t you tell me what you’re doing here?”
“I’m looking for Kerrigan.”
Clover glared. “She’s far beyond your reach.”
“Officially,” Isa continued, as if Clover hadn’t spoken.
She couldn’t believe she was telling this human this much, but Valia … Valia had believed in a new future. Her sister had been stupid enough to get caught. She had been stupid enough to die rather than come to Isa. Isa didn’t believe in this petty rebellion, but she believed in Valia. And she wouldn’t forget her father’s casual destruction of the person she loved most in this world.
“What does that mean?”
“That powerful people are interested in her whereabouts.”
“And you aren’t?”
“Interested. Sure.” She strode around the table.
Clover stiffened. “Stop where you are.”
Isa didn’t listen. She was surprised when the girl had the backbone to move in front of her, blocking the other exit where Isa knew the two Fae slumbered.
She raised an eyebrow. “You don’t want to get in a fight with me.”
“No,” Clover agreed. “I want you to spit out what you’re doing here and get the hell out.”
Isa smirked. “Fine. The Red Masks aren’t invulnerable. There are lines they crossed that I don’t agree with.”
“You’re an assassin. What lines could they have possibly crossed that would offend you?”
“They killed my sister.”
Clover’s jaw dropped. “Oh.”
“Yes.” Her skin crawled at the admission. At the admission of any of this. She didn’t want them to know. She didn’t want their pity. She should have known if they had done it to others, they would do it to her. “Anyway, I believe you and I can work together to stop this.”
