“Sociable,” Agnes supplied, “but you shouldn’t be reading that right now, Sarai.”
“Wait,” Magdalena said. “I thought that Latents kill you afterward? How could your sister have been with one?”
Sinsara sighed like that was ridiculous. “They don’t kill you. They just take a lot of your energy, that dying is a possibility. It’s just their way.” She shrugged.
Some “Hmms” went around the table like that made it more interesting.
“If you look closer,” Agnes added loudly, “the Sisterhood safe houses are marked with an S. They are anonymous so that when you have children, you can take them there without breaking your sworn word to keep your identity a secret. If you have boys, that’s your pledge’s responsibility to deal with his son and what he needs to know, not yours.”
“Why did you say ‘when?’” Magdalena asked.
Agnes’ brows knitted. “What?”
“Why did you say ‘when’ we would have children, not ‘if?’”
Our High Sister sighed. “If you have a problem with it, then maybe you should think about petitioning for High Sistership.”
Magdalena frowned. “No offense, Agnes, but your job looks terrible from my angle.”
“And who’s fault is that?” Agnes asked.
I shut the rest out as I perused the map for a city I already knew didn’t exist. Probably the most irritating part in this whole situation was that Undaley wasn’t real. It was only the Sisterhood code name for these safe houses.
The entire trip to Undaley was based on a lie. And the thing that gave me the urge to laugh out of near lunacy was that Weston hadn’t even blinked once when I told him my destination. He, instead, came out with an imaginary time of travel without even a smile. He was good, I’d give him that—but he was dead if I ever saw him again.
Though, I had always wondered: what was a Titan Prince doing, sitting in a Cameron tavern? I would probably never know.
My grandmother hadn’t even planned for me to make it to her stupid safe house. They were only going to throw off the magic trail, or I’d have much worse after me than one inhuman rider, but once they came to find me, I was nowhere to be found. I was stuck in a place between annoyance that they didn’t have the slightest of confidence in me, and wanting to gloat that I’d proved them wrong.
It wasn’t until six months ago the Sisterhood was alerted of one lone Sister on a southern beach. Gifts were far and few between before this awakening, but we didn’t truly come into our magic before this. Even afterward we weren’t guaranteed any magic; we each had different gifts and levels of power. It was based on our bloodlines and how much magic our families stole through desecrating rituals. It made a lot of the first Sisters lose their sanity, but throughout hundreds of years, each generation built a stronger tolerance to it, until now, only the weakest minds couldn’t handle their Sister magic.
My mother had found me, thinking I was only sunbathing naked on the beach before taking me here. I never told her what happened to me over those months I’d been gone, nor of the four months that were missing from my life completely.
“Now, I wasn’t jesting when I said I want to know your plans for All Sister’s Day before you go to any festival events,” Agnes said sternly. “Sinsara is the only one who has petitioned for High—”
Sinsara shot her closest friend, Carmella, a look. She was the princess of the group—she deserved the title more than I ever had. “You told me you were petitioning too!”
Carmella was the tag along, you know, the girl who followed the leader. But not this time. She didn’t say anything, only widened her blue eyes in unease.
Sinsara gave her a dirty glare, before pushing her chair back from the table, and running from the room.
“Sinsara—” Agnes started.
“I love Trevon!” Carmella cried. “And he’s already gotten my mother’s approval. I don’t want to be a High Sister. No offense, Agnes, but it looks horrible from my angle too!” She jumped from her seat and disappeared out the door.
Agnes let out a big breath, muttering, “Alyria, help me.”
“Agnes,” Greta, a kitchen maid said, sticking her head in the door, “we have a problem in the kitchens with the new cook. He’s trying to cook meat for supper!”
“Thank Alyria,” escaped my lips before I could stop it. Agnes shot me a look, and I coughed. “I mean . . . how . . . bizarre, eating meat. Sick,” I muttered. I might have overdone it with my tone at the end, but I didn’t think Agnes would believe my revulsion either way.
“Have you not told him we do not consume meat, Greta?”
“Yes, miss. But he does not think that is healthy and will not budge. In fact, there is a lamb sitting on the table now.”
The girls’ eyes went wide.
Agnes took a breath. “I’ll be back, ladies. Study the map while I’m gone.”
The Sisterhood had its rules. They were now in touch with the land and animals, and didn’t eat anything they had to kill. I thought they were only trying to make amends for the ugly past of how they’d gotten their magic, leaving burnt trees and land in their wake. But I knew they weren’t righteous witches; no, there was a lot I didn’t know about the Sisterhood, but I suspected we didn’t hold hands and sing.
“Sarai, is that the new gossip rag? Read it, please,” Marlena said. She was the quietest of the group that sometimes I forgot she was even here. Most times she was in the music room, the sound of the organ filtering through the house late at night.
Sarai sighed. “Fine.”
“Skip to see if there are new stories on the Girl in Black,” Magdalena said.
“No,” Juliana said. “I want to know if the Princess has been courting anyone. You think she’s falling in love with that Untouchable Prince?”
“You mean the one who’s keeping her hostage until he gets the kings’ cooperation? That one?” Magdalena returned.
Juliana lifted a shoulder. “Sounds romantic to me.”
“Everything sounds romantic to you,” her adversary returned.
“You aren’t going to have any kids, nor a pledged who loves you if you keep up that suffragette nonsense.”
“I just merely think that a captor is not the right love match! What’s so ‘suffragette’ about that?”
I traced a crack in the table, ignoring how close that one hit home. “For Pete’s sake,” I sighed. “Just let her read it from the beginning.”
Some shouting from downstairs filtered into the room, and I wondered how much this new cook was fighting to make sure we ate meat. Grandmother never followed that rule. In fact, she slaughtered a chicken almost daily. There were a lot of questions I had for her when she chose to stoop so low as to honor me with her presence.
I’d learned that my grandmother became a High Sister after her husband passed. She spent years in a house like Agnes, until she’d gained enough freedom to do as she pleased. It was awfully strange imagining this when I thought she had always lived in Alger.
Sarai began reading the Princess and Queen’s schedule, of which seemed pretty normal even being ransomed: what they were wearing, what perfume they wore, what they ate. The real entertaining stuff.
I leaned on the table, barely listening to her prattle.
“. . . Princess Luciana of Aldova and the oldest Prince of Titan, Weston of House Wolfson . . .”
How mind-numbing this is. Symbia is the largest city in Alyria and this is all that—
What did she say?
It sounded suspiciously like—
“. . . a confirmed source has informed us they’ve spotted Princess Luciana and the Titan Prince at a pledging celebration less than a fortnight ago . . .”
I swallowed down my surprise. This happened every time I heard his damn name in these gossip rags. But I couldn’t stop the back of my neck from prickling with awareness as if he were in this room standing right behind my chair. I forced myself not to check. This was paranoia—I was quite aware. But when paranoia came in t
he form of Weston, it became acceptable.
“Ugh,” Juliana said. “Princess Luciana is a slut. Everyone knows it.”
Magdalena rolled her eyes. “She is not. And even if she is, who cares? Men get to be with as many women as they want and nobody calls them whores.”
“Men cannot control themselves in that regard. Why, they’d probably get sick if they stayed abstinent.”
Farah snorted from her spot beside me.
“I feel sorry for you, Juli. Your future pledged will run all over you,” Magdalena said.
Juliana pursed her lips. “Alis wouldn’t do that.”
Magdalena burst out laughing. “You can’t be serious! You’ve got no magic to speak of. He’ll have nothing to do with you. He’s going to pick Calamity.”
I sighed, hating this ‘pick’ business. Like he could just select me without my consent. Well, truthfully, he could with my mother’s approval.
“What nonsense,” Juli said. “She’s not even nice to him!”
I really wasn’t. But I couldn’t pay attention to them anymore because my mind wandered back to that stupid gossip rag. This wasn’t the first time I’d heard his name mentioned next to some woman’s, but it was the first time that suggested ‘courting.’ A hot spark burned in my chest.
Could he have gone any further in picking someone the complete opposite of me?
The answer—no.
Tall, dark hair, deeply tanned skin, and expressive green eyes. That was Princess Luciana. The worst? She was known for being soft-spoken and demure, the absolute opposite of me.
He’d once told me he didn’t do any wooing unless it was of a certain licentious variety. In fact, he said something along the lines of ‘the only wooing I do doesn’t involve clothes.’
I didn’t know why that particular falsehood made me grit my teeth, considering the others, like say—escorting me to a city that didn’t exist.
“All right, the lamb is being sent to the orphanage—Calamity, where are you going?” Agnes asked as I made my way past her.
“To brush my hair,” I replied to the girls’ amusement. And then to add number seventy-three to my ‘Reasons I Hate Weston’ list: being a lying liar about not wooing women who wear clothes.
In Symbia, there was often a saying that passed from the elders’ mouths to the ears of the young:
‘Never tarry in the southern port, for what will befall you is a bad sort.’
Considering I’d only lived here for six months, it was easy to pretend that I hadn’t become aware of the dangers of walking deep into the harbor, where ships docked to unload.
How sailors had a slightly higher set of morals than their captains—who had none. And how walking that close to a vessel known for carrying slaves, with a body that would sell for a hundred silvers in any auction on a bad night, was too tempting to those whose minds revolved around greed.
I was definitely aware of the danger—Henry had warned me himself in a deep voice. I thought he was trying to appear as a man so that I would listen. But he should’ve known I wouldn’t have listened either way. I just needed to get out of that house, away from the future that was closing in on me.
I wasn’t supposed to leave the house after dark or without permission from Agnes. But I always had a problem with rules. Following them, that is. The wards on my windows didn’t work to keep me in, and I took advantage of it often.
The rules were so that we didn’t draw attention to what the Royal Affair truly was: a Sisterhood residence for girls before they were sworn in.
All of the women who worked at the brothel were oblivious to us. The wards around the residence somehow blanked their minds from trying to figure out what our purpose there was. Though it didn’t work to keep men from noticing you, and after you were spotted, well, you were told to do the job as to not draw unnecessary attention to a ‘whore’ who didn’t want to whore. I usually just stayed upstairs for that very reason.
I pulled my hood further over my head as I walked down the dock; the lanterns hanging from iron hooks extinguished with a hiss as I passed them.
When I got a clear look at the dimly lit port and the dark water, I froze. An icy shiver danced under my skin, sending goose bumps to the surface.
The white of a sail was bright in the night. The black T in the middle a formidable presence—and it was only a simple letter. Titan. I’d never seen one of their ships docked here, and never thought I would. Everyone knew Maxim and the Titans were not on good terms. I’d learned firsthand.
But there was no way that Maxim didn’t know; he had this city locked down. No one entered or left without a thorough checking over at the front gates or here at the port. Untouchables stood in line in groups of four, watching the unloading of goods.
“And where do you think you’re going, missus?”
The scratchy voice came from my right, and I turned to look at an older man: short, gray beard with a pipe to his lips, sitting cross-legged in a dilapidated dinghy tied up to the dock.
He nodded toward the harbor. “Wouldn’t go any further were I you. Bad sort o’er there.”
I gazed absently at the waving Titan sail, anger, uncertainty, settling under my skin. My voice was soft, musing. “Maybe I’m one of them.”
He scoffed. “Missus, you ain’t like them; they ain’t normal. Been raised a certain way. Besides, even if you were, you don’t got the mechanics to be one of ‘um.”
I let out a bitter laugh. “And you know me so well?”
“Yer a woman. Don’t got the ire in you that men do.”
I don’t know. I felt ire, all right.
But I only said, “‘S’pose you’re right,” because he didn’t know. He didn’t know what I had dreamed, what I had seen or heard. What I was.
“Now be a good girl, and help an achin’ old man out.” He held his hat out for me, and I frowned before digging in my cloak and dropping a few coins in it.
“Thank you, missus. ‘Bout out of smoke.”
I glanced at him disapprovingly.
A figure caught in the corner of my eye, and my heart beat like a drum as I watched him walk out onto the deck of the ship. A rush of uncertainty flooded me, and the visceral fear sparked some anger in my chest.
Dark cropped hair. Black Titan wear.
Roldan.
My palms itched as I watched him skip the ramp and hop over the edge of the ship onto the docks, walking toward a few Untouchables. Roldan followed in the direction of mainland, and I knew he was heading to the palace.
The ship just sat there. Taunting me with its waving sail and its hidden secrets. The two Titans who had walked down the ramp to stand in front of it were only a roadblock. Two large and formidable roadblocks, but I guessed we’d find out how immovable.
I took a step towards them.
“Be careful, missus. Even worse sort over there. Would stab you in the back. Can’t win against ‘um, even face to face.”
I turned to glance at him.
He faltered with the pipe to his lips.
It was my eyes—always was. Sometimes I could make them appear young and innocent, other times I didn’t care, and let the dark deepen.
“There’s a way to beat them, you know,” I said softly.
He raised a brow, taking a drag on his pipe and letting the smoke out in a contemplative puff. “What’s the secret, then?”
I smiled, glancing at the dark ocean water.
“You die.”
My footsteps were hollow against the wood.
Nostalgia, the slimy feeling that leaves you with a heavy heart and a sense of loss rushed over me for whatever reason as I saw the determined and strong gazes of the Titans who stood in front of the ship, looking more like statues than humans.
I forced more cheer into my voice than necessary. “Gentlemen? Do you know what time it is? My mother is always saying I need to bring one of those new pocket clocks around, but—”
“No,” one of them barked. He was taller than the other, his face a li
ttle sharper. He wore the same thing I’d always seen Roldan wearing: a fitted sleeveless jerkin, loose pants, and boots. All black. And just like Roldan, neither had a red ring incorporated in their brand, only a couple of thin black lines circled their forearms.
The church bell rang, alerting me of the hour and I smiled. “Oh, nevermind!” And then I tripped, spilling my coin purse all over the dock, the rattle of coins spreading across the wooden planks.
“Oops,” I said, glancing up apologetically to see both Titans with a look of distaste marring their features. “I’ll, ugh, just pick these up . . .”
“Leave them and go,” the taller one snapped.
“But—”
“Go.”
I got to my feet. “Now, listen here. I’m not some crying maid you can scare off. These coins are mine, and I’ll stay to pick them up!”
An outstanding performance, if it wouldn’t be a little presumptuous to admit.
They both stared at me blankly, like they couldn’t believe my insolence. But then the one doing all the speaking walked slowly toward me. A thrill of anticipation rolled through me, and I met him with unwavering eyes. He reached me, standing so close I was forced to take a step back. “You have three seconds to disappear before I decide this ship needs a woman to liven it up.”
“Does it usually work to threaten your adversaries with a good time?”
I could have choked out a laugh at his dumbfounded expression.
“She’s mad,” he spit out to the Titan standing behind him who only grunted in reply.
“Hopefully you have no reservations against bedding a crazed woman,” I said.
“None.” The response was immediate.
I held back a laugh. This was beginning to be too easy. Didn’t Titans have more sense?
I met his eyes. “You’ve made three mistakes. Want me to tell you your first one?”
His lips formed a frown, but his gaze said he was intrigued.
“Meeting me.”
He ran his tongue across his teeth. “My second?”
A Girl in Black and White (Alyria Book 2) Page 5
