The Bone Palace - Amanda Downum [167]
“I don’t like you going into an Iskari prison alone.”
Isyllt smiled ruefully, tugging the curtain shut against the damp. When had her apprentice become her caregiver? The first time she’d cried herself to sleep in Moth’s lap, no doubt. “I promise to come out again.” And not alone, if all went well.
It might have been an argument, but Moth had a magpie’s curiosity—or merely an adolescent’s—and a new city to explore. She’d gone out every night since they’d arrived in Kehribar, winding farther and farther each time. Dangerous to be sure, but the girl had grown up a street rat and had no use for coddling. Six months ago she had been Dahlia, a whore’s androgyne child with a prostitute’s life awaiting her. Now she was an apprentice mage, and shed more of her old life with every new place they traveled. She was due her freedom.
Six months ago Isyllt had been a Crown Investigator, student to Selafai’s spymaster. Now she was jobless, her master dead, her home miles away, abandoned to ghosts and memories. What was she due?
The carriage slowed, knocking Isyllt’s shoulder against the bench. She snorted humorlessly—due a cut purse or a cut throat, if she couldn’t shake the maudlin distraction that fogged her wits. She might no longer be employed as a spy, but she wasn’t yet out of the game.
The driver tapped on the connecting panel. Wet wood squealed as it opened. “We’re here, effendi,” the man called. “The Çira gan Serai.”
“Thank you.” Her Skarrish was atrocious, but functional. She had money enough to ease translation.
“Be careful,” Moth said, leaning close as Isyllt opened the door. Light warmed the curves of her face, still soft with youth. Less so now than mere months ago.
Isyllt couldn’t say the same in return—prickly adolescent pride wouldn’t allow it. I always am, she nearly said, but they both knew that was a lie. “I’ll try. Send the carriage back for me.”
Her boots splashed in a puddle as she stepped down, and the wet summer night settled over her. The rain had slacked into haze. She shut the door and rapped her knuckles on the side, and the carriage rumbled into the mist and dark, leaving her alone in front of the bulk of the Çiraan.
The Çiraan Serai, the people called it, the Çiraan palace, a dour stone fortress crowning the westernmost of Kehribar’s five hills. It was one of the few buildings in the city that had never truly been a palace. At the height of the Ataskar Empire every bey and sultan and merchant prince had built one, and after its fall they had been repurposed one by one into brothels and hostels and gambling halls. The dark façade before her had only ever been a prison.
Once it had faced a courthouse—a hope of justice, or a mockery of it—but over decades of revolution and power shifts the court had been burned and abandoned and eventually razed, leaving the Çiraan alone in a wide, desolate courtyard. The closest neighborhoods were poor and mostly empty, populated with squatters and stray dogs and patrolled by the city guard. The Çiraan wasn’t isolated as many prisons were, but the guards were known for their brutal efficiency; escape was the stuff of folktales.
An old friend was inside.
Her nape prickled. Only the attention of the archers on the watchtowers, perhaps, but she thought not. A shadow had haunted her steps for decads, and she’d had no luck shaking it. Her years of “good service”—as spying, theft, and murder were euphemistically called—had won her enemies, and now she was far from home, far from her friends and allies, with no king to protect her. No one to avenge her. And she meant to walk into an Iskari prison.
Isyllt touched the diamond ring on her right hand, the briefest indulgence of nerves. Then she straightened her shoulders and strode toward the black iron gates.
He was dreaming when the guards came for him. Blue shadows beneath fir trees, the crunch of snow and clean taste of winter, the wind on his face as he ran for the joy of it—the echo of booted