The hand shoving her forward seemed to indicate Leopald had been speaking to her. Searching the pile of fabric for the flesh within, Danika walked toward the Imperial Soothsayer, telling herself she wasn’t doing it for Leopald, she was doing it to satisfy her own curiosity. She’d met two Soothsayers. One had to be kept in restraints to keep from harming himself and the other had walked out into a lake with a concrete block tied around her neck barely a month after Danika had met her. Their families tended to keep them out of sight—there’d never been a Soothsayer in the Pack—and they certainly had no place in Aydori politics.
Lifting her dress, Danika dropped to one knee at the edge of the fabric. If Terlyn was an adult, he was sitting on the floor under what appeared to be layers of scarves. There were fewer layers at the top where the faint outline of a face was just barely visible and an impressive number of layers farther down. Danika moved one. Then another. An undulation slid a third scarf aside, exposing a hand so pale it made Kirstin’s milky skin look ruddy. The Soothsayer had bitten his fingernails short and ragged.
When Danika touched him, his skin felt warm, almost feverish. He shivered.
But he said nothing. He sat unmoving as Annalyse, Jesine, Kirstin, and Stina came up to him in turn and briefly pressed a finger to the back of his exposed hand, wiping the finger off against their skirts as they left him.
“Well,” Leopald sighed as Stina returned to her place in line. “That was a disappointment. Terlyn has been quite vocal about how the sixth mage is being pulled toward the palace. I had hoped with you all together he might…”
“Two, two, two, zero, three.” Terlyn slapped the floor. “Sixth! Two, two, two, zero, three.” Slap. “Sixth!”
“Ah, confirmation that she’s on her way.” For a moment, Danika thought Leopald was going to applaud. “The numbers are new. Are they dates? They could be, couldn’t they? Or measurements. Or coordinates. It’s always fascinating to hear what they’ll come up with, isn’t it?”
“Bag of nothing.” Terlyn’s voice was surprisingly deep.
“Not that it’s always immediately useful.”
“White light!”
Leopald leaned forward far enough to smile indulgently down at him. “I’m sure the Interpreters will eventually discover where these particular puzzle pieces fit into the larger rhyme. And can you believe the Voice said he’d be too frightened to speak outside his usual environment?”
They left the room as Terlyn repeated the list of numbers, over and over. The skin between Danika’s shoulder blades tightened. Although his face remained covered, she could feel the Soothsayer’s gaze on her back.
“Remove your garment.”
Danika smiled and unbuttoned the dress, slipping it off her shoulders and laying it neatly across the examination table. The room was cool enough her nipples hardened, but it wasn’t uncomfortable.
Eyes narrowed, ignoring the new guards, Dimples and Freckles, so vehemently she might as well have been pointing at them, Adeline took measurements. Not only height and weight, but every possible measurement—length of fingers, width of nose, circumference of head. Danika cooperated so graciously, it appeared she was doing the midwife a favor.
Adeline took her time, clearly waiting for Danika to be embarrassed by her nudity.
Danika resisted the temptation to box the midwife’s ears, so often so perfectly in position, and considered Terlyn’s prophecy. Bag of nothing could mean he Saw empty cells and white light could stand for freedom. Of course, it could also mean he Saw an empty bag—there had to be a few around the palace—and a beam of moonlight through his window, if he had a window. That was the problem with Soothsayers.
Finally, after entering the distance between navel and hips in the ledger, Adeline growled, “You lay with beasts and you have no shame.”
“I’ve done nothing to be ashamed of,” Danika chided gently, but she spoke Imperial because she doubted the watching guards spoke Aydori.
“Talk to me.”
On the way back to her cell, she breathed harmless at Dimples and Freckles.
No one missed the second meal. The emperor did not join them.
Talk to me.
Later, lying on the floor by the door, Danika dug her fingernails into the wood as the young male howled.
“Can you hear him?”
“Yes.”
“Race you to the tree!” Holding the bedroll tight against her side so it wouldn’t bounce, Mirian took off running. They ran at least half the time now and every day she ran farther and faster. Her skirt felt looser where it moved over her hips, and her feet had become so callused she doubted any of her old shoes would fit.
A black wolf ran by, bundle of clothes gripped in his teeth, a dangling sleeve dragging through last year’s grass.
“Tomas, you cheater!”
He dropped the clothes at the base of the tree, circled it, and changed. “You didn’t say anything about staying on two legs.”
“It’s not much of a race if you’re on four!” she panted, throwing an arm around the trunk to stop herself.
Tomas grinned. “You only say that because you lost. If you want to rest here for a minute, I’ll go make sure we’re still on track.”
“Be careful.” The words were habit more than anything. Without a map, the road was their only way to Karis; the compass she’d taken from Captain Reiter, no good without a heading. She watched Tomas run off to the south, then sank crossed-legged to the ground. Circling a breeze around the tree about ten feet out so she’d know when he returned, she settled in to practice.
By the time Tomas broke through her circle, she’d blown down three dead cedars, tipping their roots up out of the ground, pulled a scattering of old bird shot out of the tree behind her, re-formed it into a small lead bar, and had lifted a trio of fallen leaves about fifteen feet above the ground. She set the leaves on fire—one, two, three—and scattered the ash as Tomas settled beside her, the silver streak at his shoulder glittering in the first strong sunlight they’d had for a couple of days.
“It’s not silver like a standard silver wolf, is it?” The fur felt both coarser and sleeker under her fingers. “I mean, Jaspyr was really more a pale gray. This is almost a metallic silver. Very elega…”
“When did you meet Jaspyr?”
Mirian sighed and pulled her hand away. Tomas almost never changed when she was touching him now. She suspected it had to do with what they’d almost done. “At the opera.”
“In fur?”
“No, that was the next day.”
He stared at her for a long moment. Mirian lifted her chin and stared back. “You were the mage he had up his nose.”
It wasn’t a question, but she answered it anyway. “Yes.” It didn’t hurt anymore. Apparently, she wasn’t quite sensible enough to not miss the ache.
“Why didn’t you tell me before?”
Only one possible answer to that. “It wasn’t any of your business.”
“Wasn’t? And now?”
She shrugged and sent another half dozen dead leaves up into the air, far enough she had to squint to bring them into focus. Far enough seemed to be getting closer every day, living rough doing her vision no favors. She split the breeze carrying the leaves and danced them around each other before igniting the odd numbered and letting the evens fall back to the ground.