17: Stop By For Tea

I explain it to her after we’re out of the building, safely running rooftops back to our new hideout. Whatever she’s stolen is long and bulky, wrapped in thick padding, and she moves as though it’s made of glass.

“So you beat up an overseer?” she asks at last. “And dropped another one off your rope?”

“I did.” It’s not far to our hideout, but Gaxna is taking a long detour to see if we’re being followed.

“Floods. I thought your fighting skills would be useful in case we saw a guard, but… slopping hell Theia, the hits we could pull off if we didn’t have to worry about overseers?”

“Whoa, whoa.” I slow on the long wall we’re walking. “I don’t know if I could do it again.”

What I don’t say is that I’m not sure I want to. Inside I know there’s still guilt I iced for hurting the overseer who climbed after me. They are not bad men, just trained to be blindly faithful. A weakness I used to my advantage.

“Still, flooding hell. And you think the Seilam Deul are behind it now?”

“I’m not sure,” I say, speech punctuated by jumps as we cross a series of shanty poles. “But they’re the only source of money that makes sense. And why else would they buy up trade goods and refuse to sell their own, unless they were trying to make trade look weak?”

“Makes sense.”

I leap the last pole, wait for her to cross a long canopy. “I still don’t know if it was them, or Arayim, or Nerimes that actually killed my dad, but everything tonight confirms I’m on the right track. Though what the Deul want out of a marriage to the Chosen, I don’t know. It’s not like they can start preaching craftology or something. Even Nerimes wouldn’t go that far.”

Though he has publicly ordered my death without giving a good reason why. So maybe he would.

Gaxna shrugs. “Who knows why they do anything. Flooding weird. Wait till you see this thing.” She waves the long object she’s got wrapped in cloth.

“Well, it’s too much money for them not to have some reason.” I slide down a glazed tile roof after her. “Do you know they weren’t even trading thirty years ago, and now they’re the richest traders in the world? Maybe politics are next.”

“What about the loyalist thing?” she asks at the bottom. “Did you figure that out from the overseer too?”

“No, I—” I don’t know why, but I didn’t tell her about meeting Dashan. Thought she wouldn’t understand. But I’m slop with words, so there’s no lying about it now. “One of my friends was with them. He told me.”

“Your friend was hunting you with a pack of overseers? Doesn’t sound like much of a friend.”

“He came to find me. And to help.”

She passes me the package, then climbs up a boarding house wall. “And left an overseer for you when you got down?”

I pass the package back—it’s heavy—then climb. “Dashan didn’t do that. He would have drawn them off. They probably just sent one back or refused to let one go just in case.”

“Or he helped them set up the trap.”

I frown. “What’s your problem? Can’t you just believe me when I say he’s a friend and I trust him?”

She sets her jaw. “I don’t trust anyone from the temple.”

“You trust me.”

Gaxna doesn’t say anything, running along a rooftop instead. I follow her in silence back to the hideout.

It’s a relief when the rundown building comes into view. I’m exhausted, and all I want is my little pallet in the corner of our walled-off room. Maybe a share a cloveleaf with Gaxna or some of the fruit we have left from yesterday’s market run, then pull the blinds and sleep. Just like the tower had started to feel like home, this place has too. We both have our little rituals around waking up and making food and going to sleep, and I realize that some of the sadness I felt in thinking about going back to the temple with Dashan was that I’d have to leave this, have to leave our little world. I want to expose the traditionalists, and I want to claim my place in the temple again, but part of me wants to stay here too. Make my living stealing things and spend the rest of the time training or doing exactly what we feel like. If the traditionalists weren’t evil and the overseers weren’t trying to kill me, it would be wonderful.

And if a frog could fly, it wouldn’t bump its ass when it hopped.

I climb down first. Gaxna hands me the package, then climbs after. The room is dark, and I’ve pretty much decided to go straight to bed when Gaxna freezes halfway in the window.

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I turn. “What?”

No answer. Gaxna’s still as a stone.

“She’s frozen,” another voice says from inside the room. A woman’s voice.

I spin, and in the back corner a shade gets pulled from an oil lantern, revealing a thin woman in a long dress. A theracant.

Gaxna makes a muffled sound. I tense, searching the room for a weapon.

“Calm yourself, Aletheia. I mean you no harm.”

Her knowing my name does nothing to calm me. A broom. I seize it from the corner and stamp the bristles off to make an improvised staff.

“Who are you?” I ask. “What are you doing here?”

The woman raises an eyebrow, unruffled by my broomstick. “Why not ask your friend here?”

Gaxna’s head suddenly comes unfroze, and she swivels to glare at the woman. “Witch.”

Something unreadable passes across the woman’s face. “I remember a time when you knew me by a different name.”

Gaxna spits. “When I lost my eye?”

The woman flinches. “We could have fixed that. Could have healed you. But you ran.”

“Fixed me,” Gaxna scoffs. “You did enough.”

“Gaxana,” the woman says, soft, stepping closer to her. “How long will you live like this?”

Fear and anger and I don’t know what all war on Gaxna’s face. I don’t need to know it all. I whip the staff between them, train the point on the witch’s throat. “Step back.”

“Please,” the woman says, looking pained. “I—”

“Step back.” I emphasize my point with a nudge of the staff, and she steps back, a moment of rage on her face before the icy cool returns.

“You will need to control that tongue of yours,” she says, adjusting her cuffs. “If you are ever to make it in the circles.”

“What?”

But Gaxna is shaking her head. “Don’t do it, Theia. Don’t listen to her. They have ways! They—”

She cuts off, eyes darting in a frozen face.

The woman takes a deep breath, and I keep my staff trained on her. I am exhausted and have no idea what kind of bloodborn she can summon, but I will fight her if I have to. Fight them all.

“Let us start again,” she says, and extends a hand. “I am Estrija, of the Sixth Circle of the Theracant’s Guild.”

“Unfreeze my friend,” I say. “And we will start again.”

She sighs and lets her hand drop. “Your friend is—not her right self, with us. And I am sorry for that. As I am sorry to have to control her like this. I would rather not. But it seems she has not gotten over her anger in the last few years, and you and I have things to discuss.”

Gaxna’s eyes bulge at this, but her mouth and body are still as stone. My skin crawls, seeing the witch’s power so plainly.

“What do you and I have to discuss?”

“A summons, for one thing,” Estrija says, sitting on one of the crates and arranging her skirts. “We sent one for you days ago, with no response.”

For me?

“I thought,”—I catch myself, get composed. “What business would I have with you? I am no theracant.”

Estrija smiles at this, a subtle and knowing smile. There is something so feminine in it, so familiar and yet strange, that I suddenly feel I have been raised entirely wrongly, that all my years in the temple have failed to teach me who I am. But being female like that has never felt right for me, just like the temple’s masculinity never fit either. I am something else, and I’ve always felt fine with that. Proud of it, even. But the way Estrija smiles puts all that in question.

“We have much to discuss, actually,” she says. “But in proper circumstances. I’ve come to deliver the summons we thought you might have missed, changing locations as you did. We’d like you to stop by for tea.”

Another chill runs through me. So they have been tracking us. They know where Gaxna is all the time. Or—Gaxana? I look at my friend—she’s still frozen in place, though I see a tear trailing down one cheek. What is her history with the witches?

“To talk about what?”

She smiles that smile again. “That is for you and the Ninth to discuss. Though I can reveal that we have something you’ll want.”

“What?”

She smooths a section of her sleeves, apparently considering. “A letter,” she says at last. “From your father.”

I’m so surprised I almost drop the staff. “What? How?”

She gives a satisfied smile, and I curse myself for not icing my surprise the second it popped up. “He knew forces were working against him in his last days, and that no one in the temple would be safe. So he asked us to deliver it to you.”

A letter from my father—Uje, every fiber in my body itches for that. But I’m not stupid. “What’s to say you didn’t just forge a letter, or don’t have one at all, and just want me to come in?”

“We cannot forge his handwriting, nor the seal of his Dais. We will show you at the gates, if you wish.”

There would be no way to fake my father’s script, or his seal. I know it too well. “So you want me to voluntarily surrender myself to you, after you attacked me with bloodborn in the streets, to give me a letter and have tea and talk about something too mysterious to mention here?”

“Yes.”

The decision is not difficult. “No.”

“Aletheia, be reasonable. You’re not safe here. Nor in much position to bargain.” She gestures at Gaxna.

I gesture back with my staff. “Nor are you. I could kill you well before anyone got here. Don’t test me. I’ve already killed an overseer tonight.”

She smiles again, only a trifle less certain than before. “You are not a killer. And if anything happened to me, your friend would never come out of her freeze. It gets quite uncomfortable after the first few minutes.”

It could be a bluff. It’s probably a bluff. Then I remember something. “Gaxna,” I say. “Your training. Your blind. Breathe.”

If Gaxna’s made the progress I think she has, and my theory that male and female magic are the same basic skills is true, she should be able to block Estrija’s control, just as I can block seers trying to read my thoughts.

Sweat beads on Gaxna’s brow, and Estrija’s eyebrows raise. The thief’s arm moves an inch, then two inches, and her face begins to break into a smile.

All the color drains from Estrija’s face, and she stands with much less poise than she sat. “Three days,” she says, stepping to the window. “You have three days to seek us out. Or we will come for you.”

She reaches the window, and I realize I have no idea how she got in. It’s not an easy climb. “And if I still refuse?”

She smiles, but her words are knives. “Then you will learn the price of disobedience.” She leans backward out the window and falls.

I gasp despite myself and run to the window. Below, two brawny men with the wide stares of bloodborn have caught her from a lower window and are pulling her in. Our eyes meet once more, and she nods to me, calm as glass.