Lev grinned slightly to reveal crooked canines, and the scars stretched painfully tight. Shiny.
“Where are you from?” Safi asked. She already suspected the answer.
“Praga. In the Angelstatt.” The northern slum, exactly what Safi’d expected with that accent—though of course, Safi’s witchery stayed silent. No sense of truth or lie on the Hell-Bard’s words.
Safi cracked her jaw, fighting the urge to ask why she couldn’t read the Hell-Bards. It was possible they had no idea she was a Truthwitch. Yes, the commander called her Heretic, but perhaps only he knew exactly what she was.
Instead, Safi asked, “How did you become a Hell-Bard?”
“Same way as everyone else.”
“Which is?”
Lev didn’t answer. Instead, she made a sucking sound with her tongue, her pale green eyes running over Safi’s taut rope and stretched arms. Then up Safi’s face, like a Hell-Bard inspecting a heretic. Though what Lev saw, what she sensed, Safi couldn’t begin to guess.
“It was the noose or the chopping block,” Lev said at last. “And I chose the noose. More water?” She hefted up the bag, and at Safi’s headshake added, “Suit yourself.”
Safi observed absently as Lev hunkered nearby and began to inspect her weapons, crossbow first. Until her her magic surged uncomfortably to the surface.
Lies. Happening behind her.
It was startling, that sensation. That ripple down her exposed arms. It had been so long since anyone had lied in Safi’s presence—or that she’d been able to sense it—and it wasn’t so much that the words lilting off the empress’s tongue were false so much as the tone and drama behind them.
“You come from near the North Sea?” Vaness asked, her tone deceptively gentle and kind. “I also grew up near water. But not a cold sea like yours. A warm, sunny river.” Her tone shifted to a faraway sound that rubbed, yet again, against Safi’s witchery. “I was on my way back to that lake, with my family. Not by blood, but by Threads. By choice. We were almost there, you know. Perhaps a day or two more of sailing…”
A long pause, filled only with a katydid’s refrain and a sighing breeze. Then: “Did you destroy my ship?”
“No,” Zander blurted. Loud enough for Safi to hear. To feel him tensing with surprise. Vaness had lured him in with her sweetness.
“Liar,” the empress proceeded, no more sugar to lace her tone. Only iron. “You killed the people I love, and you will pay for it. I will bleed you dry, Hell-Bard from the North Sea. So I hope, for your sake, that you had nothing to do with it.”
The empress’s words sang with truth. A major chord of such purity, the intensity almost swallowed the promise’s meaning.
Which made Safi smile. Her second for the day. Because she would do the same if it turned out the Hell-Bards had been responsible for the explosion. Even if they hadn’t, she would still bleed dry the commander. The Chiseled Cheater who had ignited all this hell-fire and burned Safi’s life to the ground.
She would make him pay.
She would make him bleed.
ELEVEN
“Not now,” Vivia said to the eight thousandth servant to approach her since returning to the palace. She was sweaty, she was hungry, she was late. Yet the sun-seamed gardener didn’t seem to care as he scurried behind her through the royal gardens.
“But Your Highness, it’s the plums. The storm took down half the fruits before they were even ripe—”
“Do I look like I care about plums?” She did care about plums, but there was protocol to follow for these sorts of conversations. Besides, the King Regent’s inevitable displeasure at her tardiness was a lot more compelling than this gardener. So Vivia slanted her foulest Nihar glare and added, “Not. Now.”
The man took the hint, finally, and vanished into the shadows of said plum trees, which indeed looked worse for the wear. Then again, so did everything in Nubrevna.
Vivia had spent too long at the dam. Oh, it had taken her no time at all to sail her dugout over the northern Water-Bridge of Stefin-Ekart, and the ancient dam and its ancient splinter up the middle had quickly taken shape against the evening sky. Up Vivia had ridden the locks—up, up, until at last, she’d reached the waters abovestream. There, she’d dunked her toes into the icy river, stretching, feeling, reaching until she’d sensed every dribble of water that entered the witch-controlled funnels of the dam. But all was as it should have been. The crack was still only surface level on the stones.
So Vivia had returned to Lovats, and that was when she’d lost all her time, stuck amid the ships carrying Nubrevnans into the city. The sun was setting by the time Vivia sailed into the Northern Wharf, and it was almost gone entirely behind the Sirmayans before she reached the palace grounds atop Queen’s Hill, and finally, Vivia marched into a courtyard, surrounded on all sides by the royal living quarters.
The broken latch on the main door required three forceful shakes from a footman before he could get it open, and the hinges screamed like crows across the battlefield.
Into the entry hall, Vivia strode, where she ran—quite literally—into her father’s youngest page. Servant eight thousand and one.
“Your Highness,” the boy squeaked. “The King Regent is ready to see you.” His nose wiggled, leaving his whisker-like mustache to tremble—and finally clarifying why all the other pages called him Rat. Vivia had always assumed it was because his name, Rayet, had a similar ring.