Black as diamond, p.19
Black as Diamond, page 19
Inside the guardhouse, the four of them settled on long benches that lined the sides of the room. They were left to stew only a short while before the door reopened, and through the air sliced a voice Wren never expected to hear again.
“Wren.”
He couldn’t look up from her slippered feet as she stopped before him. A knife could cut the tension.
“Look at me when I speak to you, Perseno Ingoscu.” Urusy spoke with a flat characteristic firmness.
Wren lifted his head and saw the scarred mirror to his own face.
Having graduated in the decade since the dropwort incident, Urusy wore a healer’s changeant. Silver threaded an eglantine at her neck. Slightly older than himself, she possessed a jade khetry eye and smooth umber hair. She was flanked on either side by the healers Geldi Zamfiru and Vair da-Len Ahndat. Masters of persons and poisons respectively.
“Sorry.”
Urusy massaged her temple. The splash of a faded violet scar spidered down her neck. “I don’t want your apologies. As master of the guild, I need to know why you’re here.”
Every second word would be an apology if he could manage it. He’d drop to his knees if he had to.
He twisted his fingers together and struggled for a smile. It came out a self-deprecating grimace.
“Mastery suits you.”
“Wren. You have brought an assassin into my place of work seeking sanctuary, how can you expect me to be fine with that?”
“I, um, we need the antidote for oleander,” he pleaded as Asaru’s pain lanced his own belly. The other man trembled, his face pale from fever. “That’s all, then we’ll leave. I swear.”
Frowning, Urusy dragged mismatched eyes to Rishé. “Pipsi vuan’tios, daj ferol danae.” Good to see you, Cousin. “How’s the Screen?”
Rishé shrugged. “Resigned. I found something better.”
As the cousins contemplated each other, Geldi stepped forward. Her cane clipped the floor and her brace whirred. Above a well-lined brown face, gray-threaded braids tumbled elegantly down her slanted shoulders as she appraised them.
“Do you vouch for him, Fralino Trifan?” Geldi turned the brunt of her icy silver eyes on Rishé—no journeyer had ever been able to withstand the full force of that unrelenting stare.
Flinching, Rishé nodded.
“And what else?” Urusy folded her arms, revealing black dahlias stitched into the undersides—mourning flowers. For the king. Wren’s stomach churned. “I can’t trust him on words alone.”
She shouldn’t trust him at all. But Wren glanced sidelong at Rishé, who jutted her chin toward the master healers with a look in her eye.
“A . . . living sample of Black Diamond?” he tried.
Palenisa dropped her face into her hands, and even Asaru flashed him a strange look.
Why did I say that? Wren needed to shut his mouth immediately. “Just one night, and I can get you a living sample for the repository.”
The guild stored all kinds of sicknesses in a repository locked deep under the compound. Access was granted only to the guild master herself and a select few healers and journeyers. Wren hadn’t been so fortunate, but everyone knew it existed. It was the guild’s pride, and its most dangerous joy. A curse would be an incredible boon to that archive of ailments.
Luckily for him, a glint brightened Ahndat’s thick-rimmed glasses. The quiet man placed a placating hand on Urusy’s shoulder, whispering in her ear. The corners of her lips lowered, and she glanced upward.
“You’re a fool.”
“I know.”
“This doesn’t mean you have a place here anymore.”
“I know,” he said miserably.
“On both your heads, then. Make sure no one sees him.” Urusy pointed to Asaru before sweeping from the room in a fan of gold-warped green.
Ahndat inclined his head and followed. Before she left, Geldi tapped the bronze head of her aid, observing the four of them a swollen moment. “It’s not you, Wren,” she said. “She has better things to deal with than a mess you refuse to confront.”
Wren’s face burned with shame. “How did she . . .”
“Because she stayed. Now, try not to get into the poisons again.” She patted his arm and clicked her cane down the hall.
When she was gone, Palenisa spun to him. “You never said you studied poisons.”
He stared. His scar felt hot and tight and sore.
“He didn’t,” Rishé answered for him. She led Palenisa from the Overlook to Acorn House, the smaller of the guild’s two compounds, which housed the sleeping quarters, the tearoom, and Eírtat’s sacred pool.
Wren watched them a moment before guiding Asaru in the opposite direction, to Feather House, home to the training and reading rooms. As well as the room of herbs—and of poisons.
Feather House lived up to its name, slathered top to bottom in a vast plethora of feathers, long and thin and shining and dull, all in variegated shades. None, though, quite matched the spotted wings that sprouted from the back of the man beside him.
“A bit on the nose,” Asaru muttered.
“I guess it is.”
The rooms of herbs smelled like his mother’s garden tenfold. It was twice as large as Nastradona, overflowing with an assortment of healers’ implements. Fruiting plants spilled across tables, hung in bundles from the rafters, and burst in tight bouquets from every visible cabinet. Carmine milkweed preened in the sun beside pearling blossoms holding iris-sized green pearls.
“Overstuffed” was one word to describe Ahndat’s abode. Many others came to mind, but Wren had no right to speak them. So he set Asaru on one of the cots behind the partition that split the room, and cleared a space on the mixing bench.
Behind him, the watchful form of Ahndat trailed his every move. Beside the master of poisons sat a jar—of water dropwort. Its mere presence sent a tremor through him. A reminder.
“Your ability to fuck things up should be studied in the Hanging Gardens.” The man’s accent, slippery as the canals that wound through his home province of Emeris, was clipped and pronounced. “An assassin, Wren? What were you thinking?”
“I wasn’t. Thinking, that is.” He cringed, mixing a potion of water, pale opium, and—after Ahndat pressed a rolled pack of it to his back—gold-frilled kingsbane.
“Clearly.”
“But, um, I’ve . . . I’ve been working on something . . .”
As Ahndat hummed encouragement, he inhaled, gathering his nerve. “I’ve been trying to distill an antidote. For dropwort poisoning, I mean.” Though ten years too late.
He tipped the potion into Asaru’s mouth. As the man drank, Wren layered a poultice over the wound and wrapped it in fresh silk. The man twitched in pain, stomach tensing and tail stiff, but remained silent. Wren smoothed the last of the bandages in place—impossibly tender—and waited with bated breath.
Ahndat waved lazily. “Oh, no matter—I developed a temporary philter a year ago.”
A year ago.
Wren had wasted moons fruitlessly testing the limits of his incomplete skills as a healer, hungering desperately for a primer all the while. He brought backlash upon himself for an answer that had been found a year ago.
He wiped his hot eyes.
That is fine. It is fine. Everything is so fucking fine.
That just meant there was only one route left for him. A pitiful, lonely path back to the guild. Cure the curse. Convince Urusy of the depth of his commitment to atonement. Find a place, once more, among their ranks. It was all he could hope for—a reckless hope—so he gathered the tatters of himself and ventured a question.
“Master Vair . . . What do you know of Weavers?”
The room grew cold.
“That you shouldn’t bother. As far as anyone knows, all who’ve attempted to find the so-called ritual died or disappeared,” Ahndat said. He glanced over the rim of his glasses, freezing Wren in place. “Pathetic creatures senselessly seeking power.”
He smiled thinly before leaving.
“I have heard being a Weaver is a lonely existence,” Asaru said after a lingering silence. “Why do you ask?”
“Academic curiosity,” Wren said quietly as he sought permission to take his hand. When they touched, the brand sparked his already scrambled brain.
With pumice, he gently scraped Asaru’s palms onto a glass slide. Rather than flesh, the curse came away as though he’d flaked black diamond to a deadly point.
“You are lying.”
He pursed his lips, staring at the living curse. It was in a constant state of change, from solid to liquid to something in between. Sublimation, condensation, freezing. Disturbing, frankly.
“I just want to help.” He pressed his thumb to the center of Asaru’s palm. It was smooth, unblemished stone. “Help you.”
“Curses cannot truly be broken.” Asaru glanced out the window as the sun completed its daily journey. “Powerful—volatile. They are branded onto khetry, bound to a cursed object with its creator’s blood.”
Bound.
Backlash was something of a curse, then. Irreparable, as far as he knew.
“I—”
Black fingers caught his collar and brought him close.
“Why do you have . . . these? All these . . . flowers.” Asaru yawned in a husky, poppy haze. His eyes were glazed and unfocused.
“Tattoos, stitching . . . It’s part of Norvatti culture . . .” he whispered, unsure what the heaviness of his tongue meant. He was on fire, turning to ash. “Sacred modification of the body . . .”
He trailed off at the sound of a light snore. Asaru was already asleep, lashes fluttering, lips parted. Suffused orange light softened the curve of his cheek. Wren dropped his head onto the edge of the cot and sighed. Then he hurried from the room. If he ignored the way his brand burned, that was no one’s business but his own.
Twilight crept a crooked purple finger across the guild compound as crying gyrfalcons broke the intermittent chirping of crickets.
In the Hanging Gardens, Wren was shocked back to wakefulness as the irrigation hissed to life. As the name suggested, lush foliage fell from bars lining the glass-domed ceiling. On either side of him, the lit walking paths intersected thin waterways on which hybridized plants floated by.
He hunched over a desk illuminated under the chill of a lamp powered, to his mild awe, by khetry-infused crystals of ice. Verillium, as one of the other journeyers had called it when he asked, was a new invention from Anticarta’s Court of Spares. Blinking blearily, Wren rubbed bloodshot eyes. Above him, a holographic screen scrolled through a list of glowing plants, same as at every other desk in the gardens.
He squinted at his empty hands.
Where is the slide? In the microscope, he remembered. What was I doing again?
He surveyed the desk covered in plant cuttings, medical swatches, the efforts of his labor, and various flasks of muddy tisanes. Right. He was failing to find a natural way to break the curse, on the slim hope that the speculative text he’d read about curses living off the blood of their creators held some strain of truth.
It was an aimless quest. Again: Curses couldn’t be broken, much less by natural methods.
In the back of his mind, Wren had tried to convince himself Black Diamond was a sufficiently advanced programmed spell, knotted threads that a skilled lulaik could untangle. But a curse was a curse—what had he expected?
On his shoulders, stress had taken root. Dragging a hand through his half tail, Wren shoved the microscope aside with a groan. This used to be a common sight for him: working into the lean hours of morning by candlelight, sometimes with Rishé by his side.
He couldn’t remember the last time he’d had a good night’s sleep in his life.
A light clicked, and the gardens darkened further as the last of the journeyers turned in for the night. Their footsteps faded, and he was alone. It was time. Wren had to snatch every chance he was given by the reins.
He pulled out the primer and flipped to the sketch of Rhenei’s theoretical spellwork, theories in which he was placing his entire faith. The steady drip of the irrigation system filled the quiet. Wren took a breath, then lifted his gift—the bone shaped like a needle. He pressed it to the page, charged, and let the khetrical energy flow. Blood welled bright and cheery red, pouring out of him and into the needle.
His blood, his hopes, his resolve.
This was it—this was how he would fix everything.
Rishé
Unlike the ceiling of her room at the Silk Screen, this one was ivory like the hair of wraiths. The flaking paint resembled unknowable constellations mapped out in meaningless lines.
Stars never held a strong place in her heart. Rishé thumbed her pendant, pressing a nail into the ridges. That place was reserved for the sea.
She stretched the tiredness from her limbs as she fully woke from her rest. The base of her spine ached from the stiff bedstraw. Furnishing was not one of the guild’s prioritized expenses. At least Erazill had the sense to provide his workers with Mauriidan silk and fox-feathered beds. Or maybe he just wanted to give the Screen’s patrons a comfort while they took their bodily indulgences. Butterflies were delicate creatures, after all.
She turned on her side and found her roommate prostrate on the ground.
The wraith looked to have been awake awhile. The broad planes of her back shifted beneath her haltered shirt. Many tiny braids were splayed loosely over the wide flare of her hips. Rishé’s fingers twitched as she imagined how it would feel to braid. To touch. Would the tight tiny coils be soft? Or would she have to comb through them till they relaxed under her caress?
She reminded herself that she was not there to ogle women.
Tousling her own short locks, she watched Palenisa tilt her head back, revealing a long stretch of neck. Light glinted off the silver dots flanking the bridge of her nose. Palenisa mumbled a prayer in Inachie and bent once more before a rudimentary carving of the Pillars of the Gods, those monolithic obsidian suvaunoors of the wraithian religion.
Rishé scoffed at the sight. That would not do.
As if sensing her stare, Palenisa frowned over her shoulder. Their gazes met as if magnetized. Wintry eyes narrowed.
“What?”
“I heard you were excommunicated.” Rishé licked the cracked scar that split her bottom lip. As they traveled, she had deduced this was Sister Gleissa, the former Sister Gleissa. She wasn’t particularly awestruck. Frankly, Rishé found herself rather suspicious of the wraith, despite whatever “promise” had been made to Wren. Not for his sake—but for her own curiosity. No other reason, of course. “Why keep acting like some faithful sister when there’s no one left to impress?”
“I’m a fucking Aspect,” Palenisa snapped, sitting up quickly. The sunburst and crossed-circle suvaugrams on the backs of her clenched hands tightened, betraying a restrained strength. “Blessed by the Zodiac—it’s only right to show piety for all I’ve done. And lost.”
Rishé’s eyes fluttered to the ceiling in an aborted eye roll. Why was she surrounded by self-hating fools? One was more than enough. And he was already more than her growing sentimentality could handle.
“Find the good in the bad, rather than wallowing in that misery you seem to love so much. Piety won’t make the Crocodile Coterie take you back anyway.”
There was a slight hitch in Palenisa’s breath as though she’d been shot by a lance of carelessly cruel words. But they weren’t careless or cruel—they were an honest observation.
“I . . .” Am sorry.
Palenisa’s lips pursed to two thin brown lines. Their gazes snapped, cut by the strict slash of a scythe blazing sun bright. “When I need your opinion on the wreck of my life, I’ll ask,” she said flatly before turning back to her orisons. The air was electric with an awkward tension.
Discomfort pressed Rishé into the mattress, the sheets tangling around her legs as her mind straggled. Mild regret welled in her like molten stone, and then she sighed and turned onto her back. Boring, bland, familiar—the ceiling stared down as though she were a meaningless speck in the cosmic Sky Court.
That went splendidly. She’d had men, women, those who ascribed to neither, in her bed—but she could speak to none of them without planting her foot in her mouth. This was why she focused only on what truly mattered. Her necklace, its pendant, their mysteries.
Frowning, Rishé got up and dressed in her olive tunic. She tied off the end of a third short braid, buckled on a fourth belt, and slipped on the bracelet her father had made for her. Back when they were still a family. One that didn’t communicate through letters sent once a year, if that. Annoyed and disappointed, she gathered herself and left the wraith to her prayers and spirits.
She padded down the hall that spanned the length of Acorn House. Past the rest of the sleeping quarters and the tearoom smelling of breakfast—semolina, sausages, and burnt peppermint because not even healers knew how to make tea properly. Murmurs mingled with the faint call of firebirds that roosted above Eírtat’s sacred pool to cool their ever-burning bodies.
The pool door opened, and someone stepped through, white cloth obscuring their face.
“Pipsi dahsun,” Rishé signed as Urusy lowered the towel. Good morning.
Her cousin shut the screen door and leaned against it. Slick hair fell to her waist as Rishé’s once had. She was somewhat softer in the daylight, possessed of a domineering height and commanding cheekbones.
“Dahsun,” Urusy signed, raising a brow. There was a pause, and then—“I’m sorry for last night. We’re family, but I can’t put my students at risk. You understand?”
Lips quirking aside in a sheepish smile, Rishé shrugged.
“I hadn’t realized you two reconnected since.”
