Page 138 of By the Orchid and the Owl
Or, at least, I didn’tremembernoticing him in passing. That memory Kitterfol had let me glimpse… I couldn’t see how it was a lie.
“Coen Steeler.”
This came from Dyonisia, and I whipped my head back toward her.
“His name is Coen Steeler, and he is a dangerous lunatic who might have murdered you at any moment, you poor child. You are lucky to be alive.”
Coen Steeler. I repeated the name to myself, and felt the first flickers of rage at what he had done to my past self. The trauma he had inflicted upon me and then ripped away, so that any pain or fear or rage I felt seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere all at once.
The headache from before circled to my forehead, pressing in.
“Yes,” Dyonisia confirmed, unmoving as she stared at me. “He used you, abused you, and erased everything about that from your head before he left. But if he can get through the shield twice, he can get through the shield a third time.”
Distant shudders sent tremors up my feet. Wherever they were in the jungle, the fifth-years must have finally started their Final Tests. But nothing seemed like a greater test than the woman who sat before me, leaning ever so carefully forward.
“You are going to find him for me, child. You are going to lure him back in and capture him and hand him over—along with all his little pirate friends—and if you do that, I can promise you a front-row seat to all of their executions.”
I let her eyes bore into me.Stay cautious. Stay curious. Stay clever, Jagaros had said. I didn’t know how that fit into this moment, but it did, somehow. I was sure of it.
“What makes you think I’d be able to lure him back in—ma’am? If I was just his pet.”And why not assign Quinn the same task?I didn’t dare ask out loud.
Jagaros had advised me to lie about the bruises. To say they’d come from roughhousing withhim. That meant I was missing something, some crucial piece of the puzzle about these bruises on me. If only I’d had more time with Jagaros to ask what he knew about all of this.
Dyonisia stretched out a single finger until her nail grazed my cheek.
I fought an urge to slap her hand away.
“Predators can’t stay away from their prey, dear one. And you seem to have been his favorite meal. I am confident you will catch him for us.”
The words fell from my throat before I could stop myself.
“And if I don’t?”
Kitterfol sucked in a breath behind me—of glee or dread, I couldn’t tell. Mr. Gleekle’s face tightened with that signature fake smile of his.
Dyonisia fell back into her glass chair that sparkled so much like a throne.
“I don’t see why you would refuse to help your fellow Esholians, child. Breaches are happening more and more frequently around the island. Why, just in the past month, two of our coastal villages have been ransacked. Almost a hundred have died.” My mouth dropped open. When had all this happened? Without the Institute getting hold of such knowledge? Almost ahundreddead from pirate attacks in the last month? “And I am sure,” Dyonisia continued, “that you would not want such attacks to reach Alderwick. To reach Fabian or Don. Would you?”
She knew their names. My body snapped into rigid attention.
“No,” I whispered. “No, I would not want that.”
“Good. Now I have something to show you. Tessa?”
Dyonisia made a lazy motion behind her, and Ms. Pincette hurried forward with that jar, handing it over without a single shake of her hands. But I could tell by the ashy pallor of her face, by the way she refused to make eye contact, that all her usual strictness and bravado had leaked away in the face of this woman we all answered to.
“I don’t take disgraceful, treacherous behavior lightly,” Dyonisia said, slowly unscrewing the jar’s lid and dumping the spider onto the floor in front of her. I recognized the green-eyed thing, somehow, but didn’t know why, and that bothered me nearly as much as anything else. “This creature, for instance.” Dyonisia’s predatory gaze, it seemed, had pinned the spider to the spot. “My other spies tell me it was working against me. It warned the pirates of my presence and allowed them to escape.”
She shifted her attention up to me, and in the absence of her gaze, the spider made a break for it, scuttling off, screeching something that sounded like, “Top of the world!”
Dyonisia reached out with her high heel and crushed it into a smear of pus and guts.
Its legs were still twitching when I brought my gape up to her face.
Smiling, she said, “That’s what Coen Steeler’s execution will be like when we catch him, child. Quick. Painless. Merciful. But predators like those pirates like to play with their prey.” Her eyes focused on my neck, where I was sure a bruise had flowered based on the pulsing ache there. “And I would not want you to have to witness your fathers’ bodies, broken and mangled and wrecked like this spider’s, knowing their death was stretched out by the man who had you chained.”
The image of that bloomed in my mind, and a fear I’d never known before—cold and as icy as Dyonisia's eyes—began to wind through the bones of my body.
