Lori Devoti - Amazon Ink

We went to thecafeteria 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?”

“Someone with artisan skills, but they’d have to have priestess powers too. The web was pure priestess.”

“No one is that strong in more than one area, except…” The anger in her eyes changed to suspicion. “You got me out when even your grandmother couldn’t. You got past both spells. And in the gym, the way you leapt, and the other day when Pisto went for you…?” She leaned closer; her next words were a low growl. “How many skills do you have, Mel? What have you been doing while hiding up here? Did you really leave because of your son, or did you have some other agenda all along?”

The distrust on her face hurt. It shouldn’t have. We hadn’t trusted each other for a long time, but just as I was ready to forgive her, admit I’d been wrong, she was accusing me of…what?

“I wouldn’t hurt you, Zery.” I expected her to laugh at the very idea. Me be able to hurt her, the Amazon queen? It was ridiculous. But she didn’t. Instead, she stared at some spot beyond me.

“Why would I save you, if I had lured you out there?” I added.

She kept her face turned for another second, then covered it with one hand. When she looked back at me, the wear of everything she’d been through last night, with the dead girls, all of it showed on her face.

“If not you, who?”

I didn’t let my relief that she was willing to let her suspicions go, at least for now, show. “I don’t know. It could be a priestess. Bubbe doesn’t think so, but it could be.”

“Don’t accuse Alcippe.”

Her vehemence startled me.

“I didn’t, but why-”

“If you even make a hint of accusing her, it will backfire on you. I told you, the tribe already suspects you. If it looks like all of this is an opportunity for you to get Alcippe…” She drummed the table with her fingers. “Don’t do it.”

“Even if I think she’s guilty?”

“If you think she’s guilty and you get some real proof, come to me.”

It was a fair answer, but not what I wanted to hear-not now or ten years ago, but this time I swallowed my ire.

“It did kind of ache yesterday.” Zery rubbed her chest, where her givnomai lay hidden under her tee. “I hadn’t thought about it a lot, but now that you mentioned it…”

“How about your back? Your telios ? Did you feel anything there?”

A line formed between her eyes. “Maybe a twinge, in the afternoon, but I’d been working out pretty hard that morning.”

I took a breath, pressed my hands flat on the table, and used my best coaxing voice. “Can you go through your day again…with a little more detail?”

“Really, nothing special happened. I told you: breakfast, exercise, spar, lunch, spar some more, then…” She looked at me sideways. “I’ve had a team watching the bar-the one the girls were going to. I had a meeting with them in the afternoon. I had to pull them off. They were…they weren’t getting along with the locals. I needed a new plan. I was thinking of going myself or sending Pisto, but I don’t know that either of us would pass for a twenty-year-old human.”