Page 19 of By the Moonbeam and the Mist
I turned to find Dazmine striding past, a drink in her hand. I opened my mouth to make up an excuse, but her eyes lifted tosomething over my shoulder, and I turned to find Emelle, Wren in tow, pushing toward me.
By the time I glanced back, Dazmine had melted back into the crowd.
“Here.” Emelle offered me a glass, but I shook my head—even though the whole memory removal thing had probably caused my sense of fogginess and haze last year, I still didn’t want alcohol to cloud up my mind more than it already was.
Wren snatched the drink right out of her hand instead, but Emelle studied me with those big, brown, too-wary eyes. “Is everything okay, Rayna? I lost you right after the ceremony ended.”
“Oh yeah, I… I had to step away for a bit.” I thumbed my temples. “Headache.”
It wasn’t the whole truth, and God of the Cosmos knew guilt flooded through me when I said it, but it wasn’t a complete lie, either. Now that my adrenaline had faded, the painwascreeping back into my skull, winding its tight band around my head.
“You should ask Gil what his mom does to treat chronic head pain,” Wren supplied. “She’s a medic, remember?”
“Or Rayna could just go toourhouse’s medic,” Emelle said, that look in her eyes only growing as I avoided her gaze. “You know, like I’ve been suggesting for the past three months.”
“Yeah, well,” I muttered, “for the past three months, our house’s medic has been busy taking care of Jenia Leake.” It felt wrong to utter her name, as if the memory of her was supposed to be banished, too. But I didn’t think I’d be forgetting Jenia anytime soon. Not with Dazmine stomping around and Kimber as the representative Wild Whisperer on the Good Council and the truth about Fergus’s death suddenly swirling around in my head, round and round and round.
Killing that kid was all me.
If I’d had any doubts that Steeler and his group of pirates were part of the breaches and massacres happening to coastal villages around Eshol before, I had absolutely zero now. He, Coen Steeler, had murdered one of my fellow Wild Whisperers.
Which meant he could murder my friends, too.
I cranked another smile onto my face and gripped Emelle’s shoulder. Wren, I knew from experience, would probably swat me away like a mosquito if I tried to touch her, but I directed my words to her as well.
“I think I’m going to head to bed.”To add the newest pearl to my twisted little collection.“We’ve got a long day tomorrow.”
Indeed, tomorrow was when our second year at the Esholian Institute would officially begin. We’d have all the same classes, but we’d be expected to plunge deeper into our magic than ever before.
Wren drained her glass and held it up like a toast.
“As soon as you get your head to start feeling better,” she said wryly, “we’re going to work on getting you hammered.”
“Goodnight to you, too, Wren,” I said with a feeble half-laugh.
Emelle only pursed her lips, and I felt her watch me all the way to the staircase, where I begged myself not to stumble—or do anything else that might reveal what a mess I was—on the way up.
The silence of my cold, dark room hit me with relief. I was too drained to do anything besides collapse into bed, still in my dress, and pull the pearl from between my breasts.
As soon as I did so, a voice squeaked out, “Do you still remember?”
It was Willa, scampering across my pillow and sniffling against my hair.
“Yes,” I breathed. “I remember.”
As soon as Steeler had left me, I’d immediately run to the girls’ Whisperer house—but rather than barge inside, I’d found some of Willa’s cousins hanging out in the cracks of the foundations, taking advantage of the surplus of insects out and about. I’d told them to go find Willa herself, and when she’d scurried out to me five minutes later, breathless and asking what was wrong, I had poured it all out to her as fast as I could: Steeler, his speed and strength, the cut on his jaw, the pearl and the pill. I’d told her to relay it back to me in case I lost my memory of it.
Now, she nestled into the crook of my neck and said, “Weird.At least he’s a man of his word?”
I snorted. “I don’t care if he’s the most honest man alive.”Or the most beautiful, with all that tan skin and those stupid muscles.I swallowed against the dryness in my mouth. “He killed Fergus. And he force-fed me a drug against my will.”
A drug I still didn’t know anything about—whether it would make me act a certain way or think a certain way or simply kill me in my sleep.
“His people murdered innocent civilians a few months ago,” I went on to Willa, “and are trying to get in to do so again. I… I’ve got to tell the Good Council that I need help—that he’ll be here next week, in this very room, at dusk, and that I need help catching him.”
The realization that I couldn’t do it alone was almost a tougher pill to swallow than the one I just had. But even with Dyonisia’s cold-cut gaze, hidden intentions, and toxic politics, she and I agreed on one thing, at least: Steeler’s head belonged on a pike.
Before he finally grew bored of me and came for the people I loved.
