Sisters of Sword and Song

by Rebecca Ross

  “You and I want the same things, Damon.”

  “If that is so, then why are you opposing me on my choice?”

  “Evadne can hardly walk without limping, Son,” Straton continued, trying to calm his tone. “The chances of her being a successful partner for this mission are very slim. It is wrong of you to put it upon her.”

  “Have you not been paying attention this last week, Father?” Damon sounded incredulous. “Evadne has scrubbed your villa’s floors five times over, on her hands and knees, with lye burning her skin. Before that, she stood up in an assembly and asked to take half of her sister’s sentence! No one I know would do that. And I cannot look the other way, telling myself that she is not worthy of this mission. My magic is drawn to her.”

  “Scrubbing a villa floor is nothing compared to what you are about to ask of her.”

  “You act as if physical strength is all there is to life!”

  “That is not true.”

  “It is true, and that is why you favored Xander over me. That is why you gave the mission to him and Halcyon, and not to me, even though I was the one who forged it. I was the one who helped you discover where the crown was! And now my brother is dead.”

  “Enough!”

  The silence was painful. Evadne blinked back tears, told herself she should move away. But she remained at the door, transfixed.

  “You should have come to me first, Damon,” the commander said. “You should have asked for my input before you ran to the Destry this morning.”

  “And what would that input be, Father? Evadne is a foolish choice, even though I sense she is a good balance for me? Even though when I asked her to write a myth, she chose the creation of Acantha’s All-Seeing Crown?”

  The commander made a noise in response.

  “Yes. She chose that myth,” Damon reiterated.

  “I thought she did not know anything. I thought you told me Halcyon did not betray her oath.”

  Damon was quiet. And then he said, low but not at all repentant, “I did not mind-sweep Halcyon.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I did not mind-sweep her. Nor do I ever want to. And you should be ashamed, Father, that you asked it of me.”

  “You lied to me.”

  “Yes, I lied.”

  “Evadne knows, then?”

  “I do not know what she knows. But she is not a fool. We need to either bring her into the mission, or we need to come up with a new set of plans.”

  Evadne could hear the commander pacing. And then he growled, “You ask why I chose Xander for this? Because I do not trust you. When I give you an order, I expect you to follow it.”

  “Yes, well, I am not one of your hoplites, Commander. In case you forgot, I am your son.”

  Evadne rushed away from the threshold, melting into the corner’s shadow just before Straton departed, slamming Damon’s door.

  She stood in the corridor, trying to make sense of it all. And then she realized why Damon had gone to see Halcyon in her cell the night after the trial: to follow his father’s orders to mind-sweep her. The fact that Damon had not done it, instead risking himself to sneak Evadne into the agora, made her ache. She waited until she had blinked away her tears before she cautiously returned to Damon’s room.

  He sat on the floor, his back against the wall, Arcalos curled against his side. Damon’s eyes were closed until he heard Evadne’s soft tread. His face was pale, haunted when he looked at her.

  “I have been waiting for you to return. Come inside so we can talk.”

  Evadne joined him on the floor, hesitant to be so close to Arcalos until Damon stroked the dog’s copper-and-white coat. Arcalos was half-asleep, his head resting on Damon’s thigh.

  “Your dog seems gentle,” she murmured.

  “He was Xander’s dog.” Damon’s caress slowed on Arcalos’s back, as if the memory was taking hold of him. “For years, he begged our parents for a dog. A few seasons before he left for the Bronze Legion, Arcalos was given to him. And we both knew Xander would be gone for a long while, and he was worried about the dog and asked me to look after him. So I did, although sometimes Arcalos still watches the door, waiting for Xander to return home.”

  “Were you close with your brother?”

  “I was before he left for Abacus. I saw Xander again a few weeks ago, and while I was in awe of who he had become . . . I felt as if he were a stranger.”

  Evadne wondered if Damon had also seen Halcyon in that moment, discussing this mission Straton was trying to spearhead. She could not help but think of what she had overhead earlier—Damon choosing Evadne for some difficult challenge that Halcyon was supposed to triumph.

  She reached out to pet Arcalos. Her fingers trembled until they disappeared in his soft fur, and she could have wept, to be touching something that had once terrified her.

  “There is something I need to tell you, Evadne,” Damon said, drawing her eyes to his. “It is something that cannot be shared beyond this chamber.”

  Evadne waited patiently, and when Damon finally spoke, she gathered his words like they were gold.

  “Two years ago, I was a student in the Destry. I was in my aunt’s class, and she was teaching one particular enchantment that surprised me: the spell of thought. You could go so far as to call it manipulation. By its power, a mage can plant thoughts or steal them from someone’s mind. It is a shade of magic that we rarely perform, and we are taught to be wise and careful in such casting. But my aunt showed me that day that she was alarmingly good at casting it.

  “I began to watch her more closely. I noticed she was missing from the Destry every morning. That she would arrive late. And then the news broke that she had been selected as Queen Nerine’s hand, so Selene was beginning every day in the palace, and then coming to the Destry. And decrees soon began to pass, laws that seemed counterintuitive to Nerine’s reign, and I started to worry that my aunt was using the spell of thought on the queen, planting ideas in Nerine’s mind, manipulating her slowly. I did not know what else to do, so I went to my father. He was in Mithra for a brief visit, but he listened and believed me, and we began to forge a plan.

  “He asked if I could break Selene’s enchantment. There is only one way I could, and that would be for me to steal her written spell and to create my own in opposition to it—a great crime among mages. And then I would have to sing it in the queen’s presence. Selene’s scribe is loyal; he guards all her spells with his life. But even if I could have stolen her enchantment, my aunt possesses a very deep well of magic. She is far more powerful than I am. It would be foolish for me to think I could unravel what she had cast. So I began to think of another way. I turned my mind to enchanted objects, which brought me to the study of divine relics, something I had scarcely given a stray thought to before. There are only two of them that can break enchantments: Nikomides’s Devouring Sword, which is carried by the lord of the mage’s prison, to keep convict mages from enchanting a breakout, and Acantha’s All-Seeing Crown.

  “Not long after this, a spymaster for the queen approached my father and claimed that there was a group of people—mainly mages—who were striving to find and collect all of the relics. They desire to hoard them, so no one but mages have magic. And this group is currently working in opposition to Queen Nerine.

  “Because I had already done so much study on the relics, my father brought me into this knowledge, inviting me to become a member of Nerine’s underground alliance. There is a race to find and reclaim all of the relics—our group desires to protect and save the queen by doing such, while our opposition plans to use them to spur the queen’s decline.

  “Nerine’s spymaster asked me to study Acantha’s legends, which I did in the beginning, until I found no trace of where her crown might rest. But then I reread the myth of its creation with Euthymius, and it soon became clear to me that he was vital in all of this. So I dared to approach the only priest of his within the kingdom: Bacchus of Dree.”

  “Bacchus?” Evadn
e breathed, leaning closer. “Bacchus knows about this?”

  “Yes,” Damon replied. “Bacchus is loyal to Nerine and has secretly supported the queen’s underground alliance for years. He spoke to Euthymius in prayer, and Euthymius granted the priest knowledge of where the crown rests, as well as a map, so we could recover it.

  “Prior to all of this, my father, who began to believe my magic was not strong enough to fulfill this mission, decided to pair Xander with his most favored of hoplites. Your sister, Halcyon. They, too, were brought into our confidence. They began to train with one another, and my father covertly sent them to Dree, to speak with Bacchus and procure the map. It was dangerous for me to leave Mithra at this point, because my aunt began to suspect me, and I also did not have a scribe yet. And I knew that it would be impossible for me to recover the crown without a scribe. So it would fall to the warriors: my brother and your sister. They would memorize the map and recover the crown, and we would present it to the queen and break the hold my aunt has on her.”

  He paused and closed his eyes. His dark hair was draped across his brow, a hint of blue gleaming within it, and there was a sheen of perspiration on his face.

  “And then you know what happened next,” he whispered, looking at Evadne. “Everything has come apart, and I wish that I had never agreed to let my brother take this mission from me.”

  “This is not your fault, Damon,” Evadne said, her mind reeling from all he had shared with her. “Nor is it my sister’s fault.” She hesitated for a moment. “You said you need a scribe to recover the crown. You have me, and I will go with you.”

  Damon met her gaze. His eyes were full of sorrow. “You have yet to ask me where the crown rests, Evadne.”

  “Where does it lie, then?”

  He was silent, and she sensed his dread. His fear. “Acantha’s crown hangs on the door to the Underworld. In the heart of Mount Euthymius.”

  XVIII

  Halcyon

  Thales . . . I think I am being poisoned.”

  Halcyon kept her voice low as they sat in the mess hall, eating their morning gruel. Ten days had come and gone since she had first arrived at the common quarry. Ten days, and Macarius had not summoned her again. It filled Halcyon with unspeakable dread; had he found what he wanted in her memory, then? Before she had defiantly slipped from his grip?

  She must have inadvertently given something vital away during the mind-sweep.

  “What makes you think such, Halcyon?” Thales asked, just as quietly as he continued to sip gruel from his bowl.

  “I have been weakening more and more each day. I can hardly sleep. I feel . . . unwell.”

  Thales met her gaze, soft with understanding. “The first few weeks in the quarry can cause that.”

  “No, Thales. The quarry work does not intimidate me. This is something else.” She stared down at her untouched gruel. “I think Macarius has ordered poison to be stirred into my food. I have noticed the past few days that when I reach the gruel pot, the guard does not serve my portion from it. He has a bowl waiting on the shelf beneath, already filled.”

  Her stomach growled and throbbed with hunger. She wanted so badly to eat. But her mouth was dry; her head felt foggy. Her arms were slow to respond. Something was wrong, and it would only grow worse if she ate what the guards were giving her.

  There was a flash of movement, and Halcyon glanced up to see Cassian approaching their table. The relic hunter who had spit in her food the first day.

  “Is Mistress No-Hair too good for her gruel, now?” Cassian said with a sneer, leaning across the table from Halcyon. “Or perhaps you need me to flavor it for you again?”

  “Why should you care if I like my gruel or not?” Halcyon said. “I will eat it when I want. Go back to your table.”

  Cassian grinned. He did just as she wanted; he snatched her bowl and carried it over to his table, where his companions were smirking and chuckling.

  Halcyon and Thales both watched as Cassian did not share with his friends but drank the entire gruel himself.

  “Well,” Thales said, brows arched. “I suppose that is one way to see if your food has been tampered with.”

  Halcyon almost smiled. The feeling felt stiff on her lips. “Yes. Exactly as I hoped.”

  “Here.” Thales edged his bowl to her. “Eat part of mine.”

  And she wanted to refuse, to insist that he needed his entire portion. But she was so hungry, so desperate to ease her pangs, to give her body fuel. She took only a few sips and tried to hand it back to him. But Thales was already rising, heading to the deck line.

  They worked on track thirty-two that day. The sky was bright above them, the sun hot on their hair as they chiseled and hammered and poured water and listened to the marble crack. Halcyon moved slow and heavy; she was in a fog, and her head continued to ache. She was hammering the wooden wedges into the cracks, but every time she blinked, the wedges multiplied before her, and she could not tell which was the real peg and which was the mirage. She wavered, close to the edge of the track. Thales dropped his chisel to grab her arm, a moment before she would have lost her balance and slipped over the rope, plunging leagues to her death.

  She blinked at him, saw two Thaleses before her, gripping her arm. His faces were pale; his eyes were wide.

  “Halcyon?” His voice sounded distant.

  “I told you,” she said. “I am being poisoned.”

  He guided her away from the ropes, making her lean on the marble. “Here. Drink.” He opened a jar of their water and gave it to her, glancing around to ensure none of the guards were watching.

  The water washed through her, easing her symptoms. When she looked at Thales again, there was only one of him, and he hovered close, concerned.

  “I am fine. I just . . . needed a moment.”

  A guard began to approach them, his sandals thrumming on the tracks. Thales quickly picked up his chisel and resumed work. And Halcyon began to pour the water over the wedges, although it pained her to waste it when she wanted to drain it herself.

  “Why would Macarius want to poison you, Halcyon?” Thales asked when the guard had passed them.

  Halcyon fell quiet. She could not tell Thales the truth, and so she eventually answered, “Because he dislikes me.”

  Thales made no response. It irritated her, and Halcyon pressed, “You do not believe me, do you, Thales?”

  “I do believe you,” he was quick to respond. “But Macarius would not risk something so foolish. Not unless there was a reason for it.”

  Thales studied her. She kept her blurry gaze on the marble, schooling her face to be calm.

  “If he is poisoning you,” Thales said, low and urgent, “then he is doing so to weaken you. And if he is trying to weaken you . . . he must want something. Something you know, perhaps?”

  She felt the draw of Thales’s insistence. Her eyes shifted, meeting his concern.

  “What could he possibly want to know from me?” she said, but Thales was not convinced. No, his eyes were dark and shrewd, as if he were seeing into her. It made her shudder, even though Thales no longer wielded power to mind-sweep.

  She moved away from him, but he followed.

  “Has he harmed you, Halcyon?”

  “I can handle it.”

  “Look at me.”

  Halcyon bristled but turned to glare at him. It was only then that she realized it, reading it in the lines of his brow. “You knew Macarius before you were sentenced here. And you are not surprised that he has wormed his way into this quarry, that he has targeted me.”

  Thales was silent, but his distress was evident. “I was one of his professors at the Destry.”

  “Was he a menace as a student?”

  “He was once a good student. One of my brightest. But he was easily influenced, easily swayed. He eventually joined a group of friends who led him down a sinister road.”

  Halcyon thought about Queen Nerine’s secretive opposers, seeking her destruction. She knew Macarius was one of t
hem. He was Hemlock, Selene’s puppet.

  And the longer Halcyon stared at Thales, the more she sensed there was more to him, too.

  No one was quite as they seemed.

  She wanted to continue asking about Macarius, but there was a sudden thump above them, on one of the higher tracks, and then a groan.

  Thales and Halcyon glanced up, just in time to see Cassian on his knees, leaning over the track, vomiting into the quarry void.

  “I think you have proven your theory, Halcyon,” Thales said, mournful, as if he did not want to believe it.

  “And what am I to do about it?” She felt her own stomach clench at the sound of Cassian’s heaving. She turned away and snuck another sip of water from the jar.

  “I am not sure yet,” Thales whispered to her, returning to his work. “But we will think of something.”

  Thales’s plan was for Halcyon to continue taking her poisoned bowl of gruel from the guard, let as much of it as possible slosh over the side as she walked to the table, so it would appear that she had eaten some of it. And then she was to set her bowl down and wait for one of the relic hunters to come and steal it. Which they would, every time. Even when they noticed how Thales drank half his porridge and gave the other half to Halcyon. Even when the ones who drank her gruel wound up vomiting a few hours later.

  This plan lasted all of two days before a guard finally noticed.

  On the twelfth morning in the quarry, Halcyon rose and waited for her cell to unlock. She could hear the other cells around her clanging open. She could see the other prisoners walk by, up to the mess hall. But her cell door remained bolted.

  Eventually, a guard approached her, slid a bowl of gruel beneath her door.

  She merely stared at it. The past two days, she had felt her strength return, a slow but steady trickle, now that she wasn’t ingesting the poison. But it seemed she had arrived at an impasse. To eat poison or to go hungry.

  “I am going to stand here and watch you swallow every drop of that gruel,” the guard said.