Page 4 of The Catacomb King
Then Josie said to me, “Hey, Persephone, were you on your way to the house? You don’t have to worry about coming over today.”
Great. First we were talking about my unwashed body, and now we were talking about my shitty job. I wasn’t ashamed of my job, but I would’ve preferred it not to be the first thing we brought up in front of college-boy Calix.
My heart fluttered a little with anxiety, though. If I wasn’t working today, I wouldn’t get paid.
But then Josie added, “I’ll just come to your place later,” and I knew she meant, (a), she would check on my mom, and (b),she’d bring the little bag of coins her father always tossed me at the end of a day’s work. I relaxed a hair. Still, I was suspicious. What did she mean, I didn’t have to work today? Why?
She smiled at me and Calix. “The rest of us are going to breakfast at the tavern. Want to come?”
She knew I would say no. I couldn’t afford it. I refused to look at Calix.Hecould go, if he wanted.
“No, I’ll catch up with you guys later,” Calix said.
“Okay,” Josie said agreeably. (She was always so damned pleasant!) She went off with the other girls, all of whom cast sultry looks at Calix over their shoulder. I put my nose in the air. I didn’t care. Anyone could look at Calix however they wanted, andhecould look at anyone howeverhewanted. It was no business of mine.
I was the one he looked at, though.
I ignored him. I was still simmering.
“Just us, then,” he said.
“Observant of you,” I bit out.
But I had never been able to stay mad at Calix for long. When he flashed me an amused grin and started walking, I huffed and fell in beside him. Soon we were walking side-by-side through the village as if he’d never left. My chest eased. And my mind started thrumming. Because I had a question to ask him, and I hadn’t figured out how to ask it. I’d thought he would be gone for another two months; I was supposed to have more time. (And no, it wasn’tWill you marry me, though that one had occurred to me, too.)
It was so impossible notto look at him. Even with my face set straight ahead, my gaze fixed on the desiccated brown horizon where it met the blue sky, my peripheral vision couldn’t help but seek out Calix’s shining hair. The flat plane of his jawline. The smooth movement of his hips. I wanted him so badly. I always had.
He started telling me about Corcagia. Thank the gods; otherwise I was going to say something stupid.
I had never been to Corcagia, even though I had wanted to apply to the engineering college during the same cycle that Calix had applied to be a diplomat. Even Josie had wanted to apply; she had wanted to go to the nursing college. But her parents had put her off. They wanted her to get married instead. And in my case, obviously, there was my mom.
So instead of the three of us living in the capitol right now, studying in beautiful libraries and eating buttery meat-filled pastries and not dying of thirst, it was just Calix there, and me and Josie here.
It was a beautiful city, he said, like nothing I could ever imagine (thanks), a thousand times bigger and more solid than our teensy little village of mud-brick huts and thatched roofs. Every day, Calix witnessed all kinds of people conducting all kinds of business, even people from the mainland. The waterfront market sold cloth woven from threads of pure gold. The fishmonger sold fish the size of human beings hung up by their mouths to drain. The harbor was full of boats at all hours. The bridges were delicate as filigree. The streets were paved with cobblestones that looked silver in the rain.
He told me about school, too. His favorite professors. His school’s partnership with the war college.
“Do they have a partnership with the engineering college, too?”
“Sure do,” he said, oblivious to my bitterness. I bit my tongue and knocked into him with my shoulder in an effort to get the hell over myself. He knocked into me in return, automatic. Good old Calix.
“Tell me about your special project,” I said. “Your ‘capstone’.”
“It’s a secret.”
I laughed. “Who do you think I’m going to tell?”
“I’m serious. It’s a special assignment from the college president. He’s a member of Corcagia’s Body.”
The Body was Corcagia’s governing entity, its twelve members appointed by the ruling families of our island country of Iernia. (One of those ruling families was the Stammerers, a.k.a. my employers, a.k.a. Josie’s parents.)
“Are you kidding?” I said. “The Body gives you your final exam? Don’t they have anything better to do?”
“It’s not a final exam. It’s a capstone.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah.”
“And the capstone isn’t assignedbythe Body. The college president just happens to be a member of —”
