Zery was in the gym, pummeling a weight bag with her staff. When I entered, the temperature in the room dropped another thirty degrees, at least. And I had thought it was an outdoors thing.
Shrugging off the warriors’ icy stares, I pulled back my hood and strutted across the battered wood floor.
“I could never decide if you were the bravest person I know or the dumbest.” Zery spun and whacked the bag with her foot.
I waited for it to slow its erratic jumping, then grabbed hold. “Cliché,” I said, trying to look nonchalant, like seeing her there so healthy and strong didn’t affect me, didn’t make me want to pull her in for a hug.
She stopped, her chest moving up and down from her exertion. “Don’t you mean touché?”
“Nope.” I grinned at her, my way of apologizing for the horrible things I’d thought of her in the past.
She grunted. But the corner of her lip edged up a little.
She dropped the staff and slammed a fist into the bag. I held on.
“So, you going to tell me what happened?” I asked.
“I could ask you the same thing. I’ve heard some pretty crazy allegations already. And I haven’t seen Pisto yet. She went on a run, but I hear she’s pissed.”
“Pisto pissed? I can’t imagine.”
Zery slammed the bag with another kick, knocking me back a few steps. I tightened my grip and grounded my stance.
“You’re a smart-ass too. I’d forgotten that.” Another kick, then a laugh. She shook her head. “I take that back. I hadn’t. How could I?”
“Someone had to keep your big old ‘I am queen’ head in line.”
She took a step back and folded her arms over her chest. The laughter left her face. “But then you left, and I had to fend for myself.”
“Yeah. Bad times.” I patted the bag, pretended to take extra time slowing it to a complete stop.
She heaved out a breath and stared at me like she could see inside me. Which wasn’t far-fetched. There had been a time I’d thought Zery knew what I was thinking before I did. “Okay, Mel. Let’s talk. I’ll tell you what happened to me, but you have to give something too. I need to know what you’re hiding-all of it.”
I curled my fingers against the bag and scratched the surface of the ancient leather.
Tell Zery what I am hiding. I wished I could-I did. But if I told her I’d known about the girls for weeks, had hauled both of them off without coming to the tribe…She was queen. I’d gotten angry at her before for being who and what she was. I wouldn’t again, but just like I wouldn’t blame a bull for goring me, I wouldn’t stand in front of it with a red cape either. Not unless I had a pretty fancy dance worked out, which I didn’t, not yet.
I stared at my hand. Tiny flecks of red were embedded under my short-cropped nails.
I met her gaze. “I’ll tell you what I did last night.”
“That’s not what I asked for.”
I shrugged. “It’s all I’ve got.”
She dropped to a squat, picked up her staff, and swung it toward my feet, all in one graceful motion. Without thinking, I somersaulted forward in a tiny leap that propelled my body over the staff and back on my feet.
Also on her feet, Zery placed the end of her staff on the floor. “It’s not all you’ve got-not by a long shot, but it’s all you’ll give me. Fair enough-for now.”
Chapter Fourteen
We went to the cafeteria to talk. It was the closest thing we had to neutral ground. And since it was almost nine by this point, the place was empty. I made myself at home, grabbing us coffee and cream.
“You thinking of adding hearth-keeping to your list of skills?” Zery took a sip of her coffee, black, of course.
In the process of adding cream to mine, I smiled. “I might. Just to annoy Mother, if for no other reason.”
She tilted her head. “When are you going to stop competing with your family?” The question was light, but it hit home. Still, I decided to keep my answer equally light in tone.
“Have you met my family? I have no hope of ever beating them. I might as well get some fun out of annoying them.”
“You don’t fool me.”
I looked at her, surprised and a little frightened, but she kept talking.
“Believing you were in your family’s shadow is the only thing that ever stopped you. You could have been queen. Maybe should have.”
I laughed, spewing coffee across the tabletop. That was a good one. I looked up, thinking to share the joke with Zery, but her expression was set. She was serious.
“Yeah, so what happened yesterday…” I prompted.
She flicked her gaze from her coffee to me and back. For a second I thought she was going to push the whole “living in the shadow of your family” thing, but she didn’t.
“It was a pretty normal day. I went for a run. Spent a few hours practicing. Took a shower. Went to bed. Woke up staked to your front yard.”
That was helpful. “Any details in there you’d like to add?”
She twisted her lips. “I had some drink called wheatgrass for lunch. One of your grandmother’s clients made it. You think there was something in it?”
Besides the green gunk most people cleaned off their lawn mowers?
“How’d you get to the yard?” I asked, ignoring the wheatgrass. For now I had to assume anything approved by Bubbe was safe-magically speaking.
“I walked, I think. It’s pretty fuzzy. I remember feeling like someone was calling me, though. Part of me didn’t want to listen, but it was like I had a thread tied around my heart…tugging me forward.”
“Zery, how’s your givnomai?” Last night blood had stained her shirt over the tattoo, but I couldn’t see the bulge of a bandage through her tee.
She placed her fingers on the spot. “Fine. Why?”
My brows lowered. “It was bleeding. Don’t you remember?”
She tapped the spot again. “Was it? I wondered why my shirt was bloody.”
“You didn’t feel it?”
A hollowness appeared in her eyes. “I was feeling so much. It was hard to sort one ache from another.”
I dropped my gaze to my coffee. Gave her a minute to push past whatever was going on in her head.
“Anyway, when it was all said and done, I was fine. No cuts or bruises even. Pisto didn’t have it as lucky.”
Pisto hadn’t had her lips sewn shut or her feet staked through. Although the magic hadn’t done physical damage to Zery, I could tell there were emotional marks. She wasn’t used to being helpless, to fighting a foe she couldn’t see. It would be hard on anyone, but an Amazon queen?
She covered it well.
“Pisto had welts, but me?” She held up a wrist. Her skin was smooth and bruise-free. “Why is that?”
“Wrong Saka to ask. I’m not the priestess.” I took a drink.
“Mel…”
I set the cup down and jerked up the leg of my jeans. Red, raised stripes marked where the silk had lashed around my bare skin when I’d slipped from spider and almost been caught in the web. “Different kind of magic. The web was priestess magic. It’s elemental, but real. Real wind, real fire, water, or earth. But what was done to you…it was something different.”
“What?”
I took another swallow. “Bubbe’d never seen it before.”
She wrapped her hand around her mug, waited.
“Artisan. It was artisan.”
Her hand moved, jostling her cup. Coffee slopped onto her fingers. She made no move to wipe it away. “Artisan magic can only enhance what already exists. This was something else. Those spikes-they weren’t enhancing anything inside me. Or the stitches.” Her fingers wandered to her lips. I wondered if she was even aware of the action.
“I know. I told you Bubbe’d never seen it before. I hadn’t either.”
She flattened both palms against the table and leaned forward. “Are you saying an artisan tied me out last night? Made me feel like metal was piercing my flesh, like a needle was tugging its way through my lips?”