Page 164 of A Liar's Twisted Tongue

“I talk to her all the time. Luc,” he leans forward, “I know her. Something’s different, and I’m not sure if it has to do with me.” After taking another sip, he says, “I think she thinks I’m weak.”

“Show her your snakes again,” I offer. I have not even seen his snakes. In fact, she’s the only one who has that isn’t dead.

Azaire tugs at his beanie and frowns. “Normally I feel… I don’t know… free when I’m with her. It’s okay that it feels different now, things change, and no matter what happens I’m gonna love her, I know that. Even when I feel like this…”

“How do you feel?”

His eyes wander around my room. This is his thinking face. “Incapable. But–but I don’t blame her for that.”

“Zaire, you are the most capable person I know. If Wendy thinks you’re weak, that only means she has more to learn of you.” No one who’s been through the things he has and can spin it into something that serves him is weak.

“I don’t know what she’s thinking right now. I guess that’s part of the problem. I mean, she knows what I’m feeling, all the time, and I guess I just wish I had a little bit of that.” He takes a sip and laughs to himself. “And she’d gladly give up that power, and I’m sitting here wishing I had it, just for her.”

I lean down, plucking the bottle from his hands and taking my sip. Azaire has never held alcohol well; it amplifies his doubt.

“I want to go back to yesterday,” Azaire mumbles. “Everything changed today.”

“You said she fought another corenth?”

“A kappa,” he says. “She washed the blood in our bathroom.” He laughs dryly and drags a hand over his face again.

She’s becoming quite the fighter—first a pernipe, then a kappa. No one would expect that from an Eunoia. Though, no one would expect a Nepenthe to be so soft-natured either, and Azaire is sitting across from me.

I sit on the floor and lean against my bed. Then I take another sip of vesi for good measure.

“Corenth or not, killing is never easy.” He knows that. We both do. “For Wendy, she feels it all. It’s different from you and me. She’s processing, and whatever she said that made you feel weak or incapable, it could be her not wanting you to have to kill.”

He stares at me for a long while. Then he says, “Can I have more vesi?” He takes a sip. “You sound more like me than you.”

“Hope so,” I shrug. I could use him rubbing off on me further.

The room slips away from me in an instant, plummeting me into the hallway of the academy. Azaire’s still with me, but this version of him wields a sword. We fight in a blur, and in the end I stand over a fatta scorpion, its heart in my hand and blood on my sword. The other is turned to stone.

The corenths are going to get past the last of the wards protecting the school’s walls, and Azaire and I are going to kill two of them.

This could be my only chance to find out why they are here. To find out whether or not Desdemona is involved.

My room comes back to me like pieces of a puzzle being put in their rightful place, and Azaire looks at me. “What was it?” he asks, knowing when I go in and out of my visions.

“There’s something we have to do tonight.”

* * *

I’ve compiled a collection of different swords on my bed. I run my hands over the blade of my heifa before moving over to the merai knife. “Which do you want?” I ask Azaire.

“I don’t know about this,” he says, despite him honing a sword on a scrap of leather. “It’s a fatta scorpion, those things are like, borderline mythical.”

“Exactly!” I exclaim, and say again, “exactly.” The fatta scorpion is from Iris, the same land the Arcanes are from. If they got from Iris to here, there is a reason, and that reason could involve the Arcanes.

The moonaro.

Desdemona.

The prospect of an answer, if I can slip into its subconscious.

“That’s why we do it together, like always,” I say, pouring honing oil on my sharpening stone. “If you’re going to use that old thing, at least let me sharpen it.” I already know he’ll be taking the merai knife—which suits him. That’s what he held in the vision. I’m only waiting for him to choose it for himself.

He stops honing his sword. “You know the consequences.”

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