“What’s behind there?” Farideh had asked Nirka.
“If you’re lucky,” Nirka said, all but walking on Farideh’s heels, “you won’t find out.”
Farideh looked back at the guard. “That’s where he’s working, isn’t it? Where he brought those people.”
Nirka scowled at her. “If you need to know, he will tell you. Keep walking.”
But she couldn’t stay another moment in the little room. As soon as Nirka had left her, Farideh went back to the study at the top of the tower. The waters still swirled in their basins, two apprentice wizards murmuring questions over them. The third stood unattended, and Farideh looked down into the stirring waters once more.
“May we help you, lady?” one of the apprentices, a heavy-set young man, asked. Farideh regarded him, unsure of what to say, for so long that he started to fidget-and she realized he couldn’t read her gaze any better than most of them. They didn’t know what to make of her.
“No,” she said, and she reached for the bag of petals. And though the wizards watched her, agitated and unsure of what she thought she was doing there, Farideh didn’t budge. Vision after vision after vision-she knew without a doubt that Sairché wasn’t done, that Rhand was no innocent. That there was so much on her to solve. At first, she pulled past events from the water like fishes, hoping one of them would hold a secret in its belly.
But even as she called up the first of those visions, Farideh knew in her heart of hearts she wasn’t asking for answers. She was asking for penance. She was asking for comfort. She was asking the waters to condense her guilt and sorrow into something she could hold and handle, and make into something useful-she owed them all a solution.
She was asking to see that all wasn’t lost, something the Fountains of Memory couldn’t possibly know.
The questions whose answers might make a damned bit of difference to her predicament, she couldn’t ask, not while the wizards were watching her.
That night, she played the cards while Tharra took her hair down and plaited it, and didn’t look up as she bid Farideh good night and left. Farideh did not sleep until the early hours of the morning, when she couldn’t keep her eyes open and watching the door any longer.
She woke up alone, unharmed, and still frightened to her core. Tharra brought water and soap, and a scowling Nirka, and once Farideh had convinced them both that she wouldn’t be so much as shifting a sleeve while they were there, she washed in the chilly water, trying to sort through her thoughts and figure out an escape-
There is no way out, she told herself. You have to make it through.
Rhand did not come to morningfeast, and after, Farideh went back to the iron-banded doors, wondering what went on behind them, wondering what wonders or horrors she might have made possible. Nirka came again and escorted her back to the cold, dark room.
“That place is not for you,” she said. “And the wizards want you out of the study. You stay here.”
Farideh looked up at her. “And what if I won’t?”
Nirka raised an eyebrow and folded her arms, standing directly in front of the door. “Then I will make you.”
Farideh stared at Nirka-if you die fighting shadar-kai, she told herself, with absurd mildness, then Havi is in just as much trouble-then turned to her dressing table and pulled the cards out again.
“What is that you have?”
“Cards,” Farideh held up the painted deck. “To pass the time.”
The shadar-kai woman considered the deck a moment, muttered, “Wroth,” and spat wetly. “What do you ask them?”
Farideh spread the cards out in a fan, considering the faces and stalling for an answer. Dahl had said they were for fortune-telling, even if they could be used for games, but he hadn’t said how they were consulted or who used them or why. The shadar-kai refolded her arms nervously.
“Right now?” Farideh said slowly. “I’d like to know how much longer I’m needed. It seems as if your master has gone ahead without me. If I’m going to sit in a room and dawdle uselessly, I’d like it to be my own.” She laid out the first row.
“He will tell you when you have a use. Put away the cards.”
Farideh looked up at her and very deliberately laid a second row down. “What use does he have for you?”
Nirka gave her a jagged smile. “He knows what it is to battle with the Shadowfell-a cleverer master than most. If we do not have as much to do at this stage, at least he knows how to keep us amused.”
Farideh did not flinch, but she could not stop her tail from flicking across the thick rug, and Nirka smirked at her. Farideh laid the third row.
“Lot of superstitious nonsense, Wroth.”
“Are you afraid of it?”
“You can’t fool me. I think you ask them how to escape.”
The face-up card, a stern-looking man in a crown, riding a chariot drawn by displacer beasts, might have made a decent start, Farideh thought. “Why would I do that?” she asked, mildly. “Master Rhand mentioned it hadn’t been done. Are you suggesting he was lying?”
“Put them away, little demon.”
“Or what?”
In Nirka’s smile there were a thousand threats, a thousand ways she would be thrilled to kill Farideh. Farideh narrowed her eyes. “Or I’ll cut off your hands,” Nirka said. “See if you can manage without.”
“Did you forget what I did to your fellows when I arrived?” Farideh asked.
“You’ll find I have no fellows.”
“I’ve asked the cards how you’ll die,” Farideh said. “I see a castle on a mountain with nothing to occupy you, nothing to keep the Shadowfell at bay.” Nirka’s hands twitched toward her weapons. Farideh held her gaze-the guard couldn’t kill her, not without angering Rhand, and Sairché, and who knew who else. “Quiet,” Farideh said. “Lots and lots of quiet.”
“Mad witch.” Nirka snorted. She turned on her heel and slammed the door shut. The heavy clunk of the lock punctuated her departure.
Farideh laid the last row of cards down with shaking hands-The Offering, number twenty-two; The Companions, number six; The Rising Dragon, number twenty-trying to keep her focus on the painted faces, the numbers, the flow of the game. She might well be mad after all, provoking Nirka like that.
You should have let her stay, Farideh thought. You should have made her tell you what’s happening here. You should have made her tell you what she knows about Sairché, about Rhand. Another time, another Farideh, and that was exactly what she would have done.
But in that moment, all she wanted was to prove she wasn’t a pawn. Maybe Sairché and her strange powers were changing her more than she’d realized.
These powers, she thought bitterly. She laid down another card-number thirteen, The Herald-and bit her lip. They weren’t from her pact-even if Sairché had stolen that from her brother, she would have had to give Farideh the new spells explicitly. If she hadn’t been so quick to snap at Sairché, the cambion might not have sent her into the fortress with no idea she was toting strange powers around or what their purpose was.
A potion, she thought, furious at Sairché as much as herself. An infection. Some charm she didn’t realize she carried. There were ways to do it. They were all ways that might run out, and there was no telling when that would happen or what would happen to her when they did.
As if to assure her they had not run out, her headache sank its claws into her brain, and she dropped the hand of cards in shock, clutching her skull with a hiss of ripe Draconic. Bit by bit, the pain receded, as if the claws were being drawn slowly out of her head, and when she looked up, the cards were strewn over the floor, and the ghost was back.
Farideh turned to fully face the figure, too startled to speak. The apparition didn’t vanish as she had before, but tilted her head, considering. Her horns were slim and sharp as a mountain goat’s, and her eyes seemed to glow silver.