Page 83 of A Tribute of Fire

“Do you have any birthmarks?” Io asked, interrupting my thoughts.

That was an odd question. “No. Do you?”

“I don’t,” she said with a sigh full of regret. “None of us do.”

Why did birthmarks matter? Maybe they were special in Ilion.

“What is your father’s profession?” Ahyana asked me.

I paused. I probably should have spent time coming up with a backstory. Demaratus had spoken to us about how important spies were in wars and that in order to move freely among the enemy, you had to have your lies all sorted. He’d said that sticking as close to the truth as possible would make that easier.

“My father was a magistrate.” That seemed like a good enough answer. “What about you?”

“Our father was a trader from Alodia.”

“Alodia?” I repeated, hurrying to swallow the food in my mouth as quickly as possible so that I could speak. “Where they have stone pyramids, the Great Library, and elephants?”

Demaratus had traveled to Alodia as a young man and had once tried to draw a picture in the dirt to show me what elephants looked like. I’d laughed so hard he’d erased the entire thing out of frustration. Even his description had sounded made-up. A creature with a snake on its face that it used like an arm, larger than a man, with massive ears and ivory swords attached to its mouth.

Zalira nodded. “Yes, but we’ve never been. Our father traveled from Alodia to Ilion to trade gold and papyrus, until he took one look at our Ilionian mother and fell in love.”

Ahyana sighed happily, as if this were a memory for her instead of something she’d been told. “They married right away and had Zalira a year later, me a year after that. My father settled down here and opened a shop near the docks. We were so happy.”

But then her face fell. “Our mother passed away from a fever when I was twelve. And two years later, our father followed her to the underworld.”

“Our mother’s brother was supposed to take custody of us, but he did not. He gave us to an orphanage and kept all our parents’ possessions. Our birthright,” Zalira said, sounding furious. A boom of thunder accompanied her anger. “And we had no recourse, no way to stop it from happening.”

“The orphanage was given two obols a day to care for us by the government, but we weren’t fed. That was when I met Kunguru. He started bringing us food and then money. I always told him to only take from the rich, but I don’t know if he listened.” Ahyana pet the top of her raven’s head and he closed his eyes. “He and his family took care of us. And then when I turned eighteen and we were going to be put out of the orphanage with no money, no prospects, nowhere to live, Zalira and I decided to race so that we could join the temple.”

“No one will ever be able to decide our fates again except for us,” her sister said. A bolt of lightning streaked across the sky, lighting the room so brightly that it was almost like daytime.

“My stepmother planned on marrying me off,” Io said. “To a disgusting man old enough to be my grandfather. She wanted me out ofthe way and said it was my duty to obey her.” It was the first time I’d heard her sound bitter. “But it had always been my dream to serve in the temple and I decided to do that instead.”

There was a mischievous look in her eyes and I remembered her telling me about how she had cheated to get her position. Did the other girls know?

“By cheating,” Ahyana added with a laugh, answering my question.

It seemed that Io really wasn’t the sort of person who could keep a secret. I would need to remember that.

“Suri made it on her own merit,” Io said. “She is one of the fastest and strongest people I know. There is no one better at finding lost items than her and you can’t ask for a better friend. But people here don’t always treat her kindly.”

“Why not?” I felt a bit guilty speaking about Suri as if she weren’t even in the room, but she didn’t seem to mind.

“She’s Sasanian.”

I glanced at Suri’s right wrist and saw the edges of the same tattoo that Mahtab, the hetaera who had helped me, bore. It wasn’t clear initially because Suri had wrapped lengths of cloth on her arms, covering them.

A Sasanian fashion?

“Why does anyone care?” I asked. “That war took place hundreds of years ago.”

The irony that I was the one to ask was not lost on me—I was hated for something that had happened even further back than that.

“Most don’t, but there are some that still do,” Io said.

Artemisia was probably one of the ones who cared.

“You came here all the way from Sasania?” I asked Suri, but she shook her head.

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