Page 9 of By the Moonbeam and the Mist
Willa clawed her way onto my lap. I tried to soften my expression for her but… it just wouldn’t budge. I could feel my face hardening again, and my fingers had already steadied themselves in my lap.
“This isn’t the right version of you, Rayna,” she said. “I know that.Youknow that. And I think your friends know it, too.”
I didn’t answer right away. I just gave her head a gentle, single-finger pet, then set her back down on the bed and started toward the door. Dinner. Emelle and the others would be expecting me for dinner, where I’d steal a slice of cheese for Willa herself.
When I reached the doorframe, however, I looked back.
And my words felt like I’d swallowed all those pearls one by one.
“I’ll find the right version of myself again when Steeler is dead.”
CHAPTER
4
The carriages came the next day at midmorning.
Emelle, Wren, and I watched from a balcony, lounging on wicker-woven chairs and sipping on coffee. Cook had made mine with all the spices I liked—cinnamon, clove, and nutmeg—so I let the heat prick my throat with all the warmth the sun couldn’t give me.
“Oh, I bet you anything that one’s from my village,” Wren said, pointing at a wooden carriage that swept over the nearby jungle canopies on a supernatural wind, aiming for the courtyard beyond the estuary. “You can tell because it’s the shittiest-looking one. Wyndrip always gets the shit end of the stick.”
We were all carefully avoiding the topic of Jenia’s exile as much as the rest of campus was talking about it. In part because she was a fellow Wild Whisperer in our year no matterwhatshe’d been like, but also because… well, I prided myself in having a group of friends that didn’t pick out joy from other people’s pain like vultures feasting on a fresh carcass.
Beside me, Emelle sucked in a breath, probably to tell Wren that the new carriage flying in wasn’t as shitty as she claimed—then snapped her mouth shut again when one of the wheels popped off in midair.
There came a resounding shout from beyond our line of vision, but I knew the Element Wielding coachmen would have landed the carriage safely with or without all of the wheels intact.
“See?” Wren said, sipping her coffee undisturbed. “Told you. Shit end of the stick. Hey, buzz off. I already told the monkeys to scat.”
She swatted at a parakeet that had fluttered to the balcony’s edge, tilting its head at us and letting its beady black eyes rove over each of our figures. It wasn’t until those eyes tacked onto mine that I recognized it and sat up a little straighter in my chair.
“You’re Kimber Leake’s… friend,” I told it. Kimber as in Jenia’s older sister. Last year’s princess of our house who’d been assigned a seat on the Good Council after she’d passed her Final Test months ago. I’d probably never forget the patched yellow bill fluffing up her bird’s neck, or the way it had looked at last year’s inductees from its perch on her shoulder as if we were dirt between its talons.
Was Kimberhere? Did she know what had befallen her sister? Had she come to oversee tomorrow’s Branding or investigate Jenia’s exile?
The parakeet, however, only coughed out a single word. “Slut.”
Then it flapped away, sweeping up and over the Wild Whisperer rooftop, before I could respond.
“What was that about?” Emelle asked, her eyebrows pinched.
“I don’t—”
Again, my response was cut short by the flood of voices surging toward us from the courtyard. The last carriage musthave arrived during the parakeet’s little one-word speech, which meant the newest inductees were heading this way, led by our new princes and princesses who had been chosen during last night’s elections.
A flash of yellow wings caught my attention just as the first of them flowed over the bridge onto Bascite Boulevard.
Kimber’s parakeet flew against the tide, heading for campus.
“Rayna, where are you—?”
“I’ll be right back!”
I was already up, my coffee mug almost cracking from how hard I slammed it down onto the chiseled balcony floor. I barged through the doors behind it—into Wren’s four-person dormitory—and back downstairs until I was out on the street, sprinting in the parakeet’s direction.
Slut. The bird had spoken with such an air of judgment that I knewitknew something—probably the vision Kitterfol Lexington had shown me at the end of last year. The way I’d been chained up and spread wide open for Coen to feast on. The way I’d had bruises lining my arms and neck. Whatever the pirate in disguise had done to me, it didn’t qualify me as a slut, I knew… but that bird wouldn’t have called me such a thing if it didn’t knowsomething.
I was almost at the bridge when the hundreds of new, sweating bodies converged on me.
