Page 8 of By the Moonbeam and the Mist
“It should have been you,” she said.
Now it was me who stumbled back. “What?”
“It should have been you,” Dazmine repeated without flinching, crossing her arms. “I don’t know what happened when those pirates everyone is talking about breached the shield, but Idoknow that Fergus and Jenia were trying to get me in on a plan to…” Her eyes darted behind my shoulder for a moment, as if to make sure the hallway behind me was clear, “to pull some kind of prank onyou. I refused, and then—then suddenly Jeniacomes back completely deranged and mutilated, Fergus doesn’t come back at all, and you’re just… completely fine?”
I took another step back. Not because this was the most Dazmine had ever talked to me, even as a suitemate… not even because she’d just admitted something horrible—that Jenia and Fergus had been planning to… to embarrass or hurt me in some way. No, I took that step back because I suddenly remembered what Quinn herself had told Dyonisia in the Testing Center three months ago:There was a prank. I was just going into the jungle to play a little prank with my friends.
Did that mean Quinn had been in on it, too—whatever it was that Dazmine herself had denied joining? Wasthatwhy Quinn had been interrogated right before me, because she’d been involved in an altercation withme?
“I know Jenia had her quirks, and sometimes she took things too far.” Dazmine’s throat bobbed. A single tear broke through the corner of her eye and marked a lazy path down her cheek. “But you did something to her, Rayna. You did something to both her and Fergus.”
She took three steps forward then, until she was hovering right in front of my face and I could see that single tear wobbling on her jawline up close.
“And I’m going to find out what.”
She brushed past me, not quite jostling my shoulder but whipping me with the flared edges of her braids.
“Well, that was awkward.”
I jumped at the voice, but it was just Willa, my dearest mouse friend, sniffling on her hind legs from my nest of pillows. Ever since I’d moved into this four-person room, she’d taken to sleeping in my bed with me at night.
“You heard all that?”
“Well, duh. I hear everything. Except my cousin Barty when he snores. I put earplugs in for that.”
I didn’t evenwantto know what Willa’s earplugs were made of.
Closing the door behind me, I strode to the arched glass window by Emelle’s bed, where she kept her bedside table topped with a chiseled stone birdfeeder—every weekend, she foraged for seeds and nuts all by herself so that she could keep that feeder filled to the brim, a treat for any kind of winged visitor.
No matter how many times she opened that window to let a bird in, though, a tangle of ivy always cloaked the outside of it as soon as she closed it again. Like a curtain made of foliage.
Now, I grunted slightly as I nudged open the window as much as the ivy would let me, then hummed at the vines.
As much as I did need a pain reliever for my head, I also needed to bring my knife in for the night. The jungle could only keep it safe for so long before a monkey or sloth tried to steal it.
The process took a good two or three minutes, since all the vines had to pass my weapon along their endless, fibrous chain. During that time, my head spun and spun and spun with everything that had happened in the last half hour.
The octopus’s claim. Jenia’s exile and the second brand I’d spied beneath her arm. Coen Steelerin my head. Dazmine’s accusation.
I could feel Willa watching me, her whiskers twitching in my periphery, but I didn’t dare turn fully in her direction for fear she’d read it all on my face: absolute and utter chaos. A wrecked version of the mask I’d gotten so good at donning. I had half a mind to run back to that grove of black bamboo and bask in its scent all night, to forget…
The ivy outside the window twitched, and a single tendril of plant snaked inside the cracked opening, slithering in midair to place my knife in the palm of my hand.
I hummed my thanks, shut the window, and shoved the knife in my nightstand drawer, ignoring the sound of all the rolling, clinking objects in the back, before taking out a capsule of cat’s claw extract for my headache.
Willa watched me swallow it, her whiskers twitching.
“You don’t have to pretend around me, Rayna.” She scrambled closer to me, her little glass-black eyes shining with concern. “This isn’t the first rough day you’ve had since… since it all happened. This is just the first day you’ve let your hands shake a bit.”
My hands were definitely shaking as I sat at the edge of my bed and clasped my fingers in my lap, trying to steady them. If nothing else, that rolling and clinking in the back of my drawer—that sound of the twelve little things I’d stuffed away—had sent me right over the edge.
Out of everything that had happened today, Steeler’s voice in my head surprised me the least.Predators can’t stay away from their prey, dear one,Dyonisia had told me three months ago.And despite the fact that Kitterfol Lexington showed up every week to ask me about my progress, despite the fact that Ishouldhave told him everything I knew, I’d managed to keep one thing from the Good Council’s head Mind Manipulator: I was almost positive Steeler had been sneaking into this house, this very room, and watching me sleep every week since he’d left.
Who else would leave a little black pearl on my nightstand every Monday morning? Why else would I have twelve of those pearls rolling and clinking together in the back of my knife drawer right now?
It didn’t matter how hard I tried to stay awake to catch him. I always ended up falling asleep and waking up to a new pearl staring me in the face until I hastily stuffed it away. As if I could deny the fact that Steeler had somehow cleaved through theshield again and again without alerting the Good Council’s spies to his presence.
But I couldn’t deny it anymore. He’d spoken to me. Alerted me to his upper hand. And now—rather than simply wanting to catch him and turn him in—my blood was singing to spill some of his.
