Page 67 of Queen Demon
She turned to him, her brow furrowed, apparently honestly taken aback by the question. It was such a funny reaction, Kai laughed. Though something in the tone of it made Dahin and Ramad look up, startled. Kai said, “What, do we not talk about that, we foresworn Saredi demons who take our mortal bodies by force? At least my first was an expositor.” He lifted his brows. “Oh, this one isn’t your first either, is it.”
She bared her teeth and said, “It was just someone on the road. Injured, dying. I admit it. Are you happy now?”
“I’m delighted,” Kai told her honestly. “We’re hypocrites together.”
Offended, she countered, “What is your friend Dahin trying to do?”
Kai shrugged. “Ask him. I have no idea.”
She watched him for a moment and then smiled, that thin-lipped arrogant smile he couldn’t remember seeing on Arn-Nefa’s face. Though maybe he had just been too young and naive to notice it then. She said, “I want to prove myself to this Arike Prince-heir Bashat. He seems interested in what I can do.”
If she was hoping for a reaction, Kai didn’t give her one. It was a very bad idea, but Kai was beginning to think if Bashat was going to ask for trouble like this, maybe he should just get what he wanted. “Good luck with that,” he told her. He pushed to his feet and called to Dahin and Ramad, “Let’s go.”
The Past: the Trap
The truth of Nibet is that the Enalin tried negotiation. They ceded it to the Hierarchs in return for peace, much the way our Arike cities were invaded by soft words and lying offers of self-governance. What happened next is sometimes attributed to a misunderstanding in the terms the Hierarchs offered, a mistranslation, but that is just one of the many myths that surround this time. The Enalin thought the Hierarchs wanted Nibet for its beauty. The Hierarchs wanted Nibet to make a show of what would happen to those who thwarted their desires.
—Letter from Bashasa bar Calis, in the Old Palace Prince-heirs’ Archive at Benais-arik
As the sun rose into a cloudy gray sky, Tahren went to rejoin the patrol, and Kai and Ziede went to the supply train camp to consult with the other Witches. Wrapped in a long gray jacket that Kai was fairly sure belonged to Tahren, Ziede said glumly, “We had a library at the Mountain Cloisters that—” She cut herself off. “Well, never mind that now.”
Kai didn’t need to ask what had happened to the library when the Hierarchs had taken the Khalin Islands.
They spent the long morning with Amabel and their family, sharing a breakfast of lentil porridge, then working to make a list of cantrips that would best affect demons. Kai described the ones that had almost worked on him, and how he had defendedhimself. Mother Hiraga and the others tried to identify the precise cantrips.
There were three they were sure of, and Kai practiced them carefully. It was helpful, though of those here, only Amabel, Ibel, and Baram actually had the power to make cantrips like these work. And of that group, only Amabel was fast and strong enough that Kai would even consider sending them into battle against a demon.
Sitting on a battered grass mat outside the tent, Kai watched Ziede and the others sign rapidly in Witchspeak and scratch notes on fragments of scavenged paper. Raihar and the two older rescued mortals hadn’t emerged from their tent, and Arkat, the hostage who was nearly catatonic, was still being cared for by the Physicians. Cimeri had come out to sit with the other Witches, and become absorbed in the task. Her and Raihar’s children were playing a game with Kreat a little distance away, something involving a diagram sketched in the dirt and pebbles, which Kreat was apparently playing in a way that made them laugh. They hadn’t let them mix with the other refugee children in the supply train yet, as they were still getting used to their new surroundings. When the drovers over at the next camp dropped a tool they were using on a bent wheel, the two children scattered, ending up hiding behind Ziede in a huddle.
While Cimeri comforted them, Kai made little stacks of his welcome tokens and worried. He couldn’t see how this was going to work. Watching the preparations going on among the soldiers and the officers, he felt the whole encampment was shifting into the mental space they had occupied in the Summer Halls—that the plan was hopeless but they were going to do it anyway, because the consequences of not doing it were worse.
He didn’t think the luck they had had in the Summer Halls was going to repeat itself. Worse, he didn’t think Bashasa thought so either.
“Fourth Prince!”
Kai swept his tokens back into his coat pocket and looked up as Cerala approached. She crouched beside him and said in a low voice, “There’s a dustwitch in the field outside the paddock gate. It’s the young one that we let go before.”
Kai caught Ziede’s eye and told Cerala, “We’ll go. Can you send for Tahren?”
It was Hawkmoth, stalking back and forth in the field about fifty paces from the paddock perimeter, wringing her hands.
Kai leaned on the half gate that still stretched across the opening in the crumbling wall, propping his chin in his hand. “Well, what do we think this is?”
Soldiers and a few vanguarders gathered along the wall, watchful and wary, and the whole encampment had been alerted in case this was a distraction for an attack. Arms folded, Tahren watched the young dustwitch critically. “It could be a trap, obviously. But she looks… distressed.”
Kai snorted. “You were going to say ‘deranged.’”
“I was not,” Tahren corrected.
“I’ll say it, she looks deranged.” Ziede frowned. “Did that naive child strike you as able to lie with her body like this?”
Kai agreed that she hadn’t. Hawkmoth had struck him as someone who was thought of as disposable, someone the Doyen would send off on a task and not care overmuch if they didn’t come back.
“As much as I distrust these people,” Amabel said, reluctance heavy in their voice. “I don’t think this is a trap.”
“No, probably not,” Kai conceded. “I’ll go see. Alone,” he added, as Amabel reached for the gate latch.
Tahren lifted a doubtful brow. “That’s unnecessary. They’ve attacked you once already when they came to supposedly talk.”
