Page 12 of Daughter of the Ninth Line: Part Two

“Oh, your punishment?” Shay sat back casually, uncaring that her hands were scattering my paperwork. She knew I hated that shit. “Is that why you stepped into their disagreement in the first place? Were you punishing yourself when you had me looking into her history?” Shay glared at me. “Is it a punishment to look at her with moon eyes all the time, watch her wherever she walks, when she eats, when she trains? Don’t insult my intelligence, Vox. We’re past all this. Your secrets are safe with me, cousin. They always have been.” She dropped her voice low. “My loyalty has always been—and always will be—to you. Not our Line, or our Baron, or even my own family. To you.”

I looked around, because her words were dangerous at best, treasonous at worst, and these walls had ears.

There was no love lost between Shay and the men in my family. They’d tried to force her into a political marriage with someone truly fucking awful but incredibly influential, and it was only my insistence that she needed to come to Boellium with me that had saved her from being married and probably pregnant right now. Completely against her will.

In my family, the will of women wasn’t something to be considered. They were property, something to be bartered with, used, discarded. Not to me, though. Shay was worth a thousandof my brother. A million of my father. I would always protect her to the best of my abilities.

“I know, Shay,” I told her softly. “I don’t know what’s going on yet or what it is about her, but it’ssomethingand it’s tormenting me. It’s like a song you hear in your mind, but you just can’t quite remember the whole tune.”

Jaw tensing, she nodded. “Fine. But I’m getting you atalthat wards against psychic manipulation. She’s Ninth Line, after all.”

I snorted. “They have basic precognition, Shay, not mind control. Even then, there hasn’t been someone in their Line that could predict the future in nearly two hundred years. My thoughts are my own.” I slumped back. “Maybe it’s my dick being led astray. Maybe I just need to get laid. I’m sure Ephily would happily warm my bed. She’s been hinting at it for six months.”

“Probably. Want me to tell her that all her dreams have come true?” Shay’s voice was light as she slid from my desk, but something that looked like resentment flitted through her expression. A normal person might have missed it, but I’d been trained since I was a child to read micro-changes in body language.

“What?” I asked softly. She shook her head as she turned to leave, but I gripped her wrist. “Shay, after all that talk of honesty and trust, you don’t get to stomp out of here like the injured party. What is it?”

She sucked her teeth. “Ephily and I hooked up at one of the Line parties a few months ago.”

I blinked, a little shocked. Not that Shay had slept with a woman; I’d known she was gay since… forever. No, the real shock was that Ephily was her type. “Ephily from the Fifth Line,thatEphily? The one who offered to blow me on her first day?”

Scowling in my direction, she snapped, “Yes. There’s only one Ephily in this Goddess-forsaken shithole, Vox. It was onlyonce, and when she got out of my bed the following morning, she told me that she’d had fun, but I was the wrong Vylan.”

My lip curled in anger on my cousin’s behalf. “Shay…” She’d suffered so much by being the wrong Vylan. The wrong gender. The wrong branch of the family tree. The wrong orientation.

Shay shook her head. “Sometimes, I think perhaps the Twelfth Line has it right. A life of love and community, not this political backstabbing bullshit where everyone’s trying to climb over your corpse to the top. When you’re at the bottom and you can’t see the pinnacle for the clouds, you can just convince yourself that life on the ground is better. There’s something simple in it.”

She tugged lightly, and I let her arm go. “It won’t always be like this, Shay,” I promised.

The pity on her face made my chest feel tight. “Won’t it?” She strode toward my door, but paused at the threshold. “You should know that while I was in the library looking for information about Avalon Halhed, I wasn’t the only one.”

I stilled, my eyes snapping to hers. “Who?”

“Hayle Taeme.”

What the hell did Taeme want with a girl from the Ninth Line? He was no more likely to pursue her as anything more than a bedmate than I was; we were both manacled by our Line.

I thought about how he’d gotten in my face when I was carrying the girl to the infirmary, and while his words had been the normal goading bullshit, if I thought back on the moment, looked past my panic that the girl in my arms was maybe dying, he’d looked just as frantic. His eyes had drifted to her repeatedly, like he cared if she lived or died.

What the hell did that mean? Was she a spy?

So many fucking questions without answers.

Pulling out a sheet of the official First Line monogrammed paper, I wrote a brief account of the events of today formy father, from Eugene’s insubordination to my plans for his comeuppance. I only put a brief note about two conscripts from the Lower Lines being injured, as dismissive of them as I could make it, without not mentioning them altogether. I put in a little lament for my failure, in case anyone else snitched about how I’d carried the injured girl to the infirmary personally. A throwaway sentence about good optics to build better bonds with the Lower Lines, should I need them.

Anything but the truth I couldn’t face. There was something about Avalon Halhed that spoke to my soul. She was a weakness that I had to exorcise immediately for both of our sakes. There was one sure way to do that, and it would kill two birds with one hailstone.

“Elliott!” I yelled, and the most personable of the First Line conscripts appeared. He wasn’t from the Vylan line, merely a kid with big ambitions who’d volunteered so he could raise his station through the Dawn Army. He didn’t have a lot of magic, but enough to enhance some pretty impressive weaponry skills.

“Yes, sir?” he said.

“We’re going to have the first Upper Line party of the new conscript year. I want to have it tomorrow night. Make it happen.”

He grinned at me. Fucking kid hadn’t had the joy beaten out of him yet, but I found him kind of endearing, like a big, dumb dog who just wanted to please. “Yes, sir!”

A party would help two-fold. I could fuck away some of this tension that was riding my body and clouding my mind, and I could corner Hayle Taeme. He was overly interested in someone who should be an inconsequential conscript, and I wanted to know why.

Nine

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