Eona - Alison Goodman [18]
Dela patted my shoulder. “Don’t worry. We’ll be back soon.”
Reluctantly, I nodded. “Tell him ‘good fortune,’ then.”
With one last squeeze of my shoulder, Dela headed into the corridor. Vida dumped her basket on the ground and, without a backward glance, followed. Their two shadows moved along the paper wall and disappeared.
For a mad moment, I wanted to run after Dela and tell her she should wait until the inn was asleep to free Ryko. Then again, perhaps this was the right time, when Haddo and his men were setting up their camp, and a bondservant cleaning out a cart would blend into the background.
I slid shut the screen door and surveyed the room again. The place suddenly felt like a prison. I counted my paces across the room: eighteen. Twelve took me its length. For almost five years I had lived as a boy, and even as a lowly candidate I’d had more freedom than this role as a woman. I should be downstairs, helping Ryko, not measuring a room with my feet. I grabbed a handful of my long gown; even the clothes were designed to hinder movement. With the hem tucked into the sash, it made walking easier, but I still had nowhere to go.
I pulled off the mourning headdress and dug my fingertips into the tight coronet of braids; either Dela or Vida had taken care to weave my hair into the style of a grieving mother. At the salt farm, I had seen my friend Dolana do the same for a woman whose son had died from the Weeping Sickness. Although we had tried to comfort the poor woman and observe the death rituals, her grief had grown into madness until she had torn out her own hair and blinded herself with salt.
My thoughts returned to Lieutenant Haddo. A kind man, obviously touched by a son’s death himself, but still a soldier with orders to capture me and kill my friends. I tossed the headdress onto a bedroll and crossed the room again. Our pilgrim masquerade seemed like a flimsy shield against such ruthlessness. One mistake, one tiny moment of inattention, could destroy us all. Still, I was practiced in pretense; lying for my life was second nature.
My restless pacing was interrupted by the arrival of a serving girl. She hauled in the promised pallet and murmured a timid reassurance that our food was on its way.
When she was gone, I squatted under the lamp and unwound the pliant black pearls from my arm to release Kinra’s journal. There was no use dwelling on the threat of Haddo and his men. It merely stoked my fear. Instead, I forced myself to study a page of the precious folio, recognizing only one of the faded characters: Duty.
In the few days of recuperation at the fisher house, Dela had started to teach me Woman Script. It was usually passed down from mother to daughter, but I had been sold into bond service before I was taught its secrets. My progress with it was painfully slow, the task of reading the uncoded parts of the journal complicated by the ancient form of the script. Even Dela was having trouble translating it, and I still knew only ten or so characters, not enough to discover what I desperately needed to know: how to control my power and ward off the ten bereft dragons.
The soft sibilance of voices broke my concentration. Were Dela and Vida back already? I strained to hear who was talking—two men, in the foyer below. Not my friends, then. I pushed the folio back under my sleeve. The pearls slithered up behind it and held the small book tightly against my forearm.
On hands and knees, I pressed my eye to a generous gap in the planking. Below me, all I could see was the dimly lit foyer wall and floor. Whoever was talking was out of my sightline, and too far away for their words to be distinguished. Did I dare creep to the stairwell and listen? Dela would be furious if she found out I had left the room. But there was no real danger—I could run back to safety if anyone mounted the stairs. And maybe I would hear something useful rather than just waiting for the others to return.
Gathering my skirt,