Daughters of Ruin (5 page)

The dummies in the dark room each found a new way to die.

The wound on Endrit's shoulder bled.

The left side of his tunic was nearly soaked.

The final stunt was a subtle routine that began with Endrit grabbing Rhea's wrists. Some of Marta's best choreography. Rhea stepped out to break Endrit's balance and twisted her hands around to grab his wrists. They struggled for leverage.

The music the next day would swell—every stringed instrument in full volume. Then, just as abruptly, the music would drop.

Rhea and Endrit straightened, hand in hand.

They were back in waltz position as if nothing had happened.

Except now Rhea's curls were untamed and unbearably hot. Her hands still shook, twitch reflexes still set to caution. Endrit's tunic was a sopping rag—sweat and blood. He said, “Well done,” but his grimace gave him away. He was hurt.

The chamber was a slaughterhouse strewn with two-dozen dummies—stabbed, poisoned, or crippled.

They each stepped back, bowed, turned, and bowed again to the pretend audience.

Rhea instinctively angled her bow in the direction where her father would be sitting—the king's balcony of the Royal Coliseum.

The instant they finished, Rhea rushed to Endrit's side. “I'm so sorry,” she said, helping him take a seat.

Endrit took the help, but didn't seem to need it.

“Don't worry. That was perfect.”

“I cut your shoulder open.”

“They want realism. Your dad would have loved it.”

Rhea paused a moment from examining the shirt.

“You think?”

“I'm telling you, Princess, it was perfect.”

Rhea took a moment to relish the idea of gaining back the honor she had lost after the Revels of the previous year. No one told her she had lost it, but she saw it in the eyes of the king and in the way Marta patted her on the shoulder and said, “Good work. Learn from this and you've won.”

She only ever said that to the loser.

Rhea had certainly lost her sparring exposition to Cadis. In front of all the nobles of Meridan, Rhea had dropped to a knee before the future queen of Findain. It may as well have been surrender—a banner that read
THE BLOOD RUNS THIN IN MERIDAN KEEP
. The entire crowd had been stunned. Her father, who loved her—she knew he loved her—still couldn't hide his disappointment.

It wasn't his fault. Rhea knew she had caused him endless jibes in the court of public opinion. Rhea had subordinated the house of Declan to a bunch of treacherous Findish merchants in one clumsy step.

She heard a voice.

Endrit's.

Rhea snapped out of her memory to see his obsidian eyes peering at her.

“Where'd you go, Rhea?”

“Nothing,” said Rhea. “Take your shirt off.”

Endrit laughed. Rhea added, “So I can see your cut, you dandified peacock.”

“Of course,” said Endrit. “And anyway, to the victor go the spoils.” He gave a cheeky grin.

Rhea rolled her eyes and helped him pull the sleeve so he didn't have to move his left shoulder. The cut was shallow. It would be scabbed by tomorrow.

“We have bandages in the outer hall,” said Rhea.

“We're done? Are you saying all I had to do was stab myself?”

Rhea pressed down on Endrit's shoulder. He howled with laughter and pain.

“You're lucky we got it perfect,” said Rhea, standing. “Otherwise I'd make you go until you bled out.”

“A noble way to die. I'm sure there'd be a royal funeral.”

“A royal funeral? Ha! We'd flop you down behind the barn,” teased Rhea. She left the jewels scattered around the private chamber: the pins stuck in the dummies, the blades of the sun necklace embedded in several wooden posts. She'd return the next morning.

“I suppose that's fair enough,” said Endrit. “That happens to plenty of royals too.”

When Rhea and Endrit walked into the common hall that connected the rooms of the four queens, Rhea was disappointed to find her sisters and Marta there, thus ending her privacy with Endrit. And Rhea's sisters seemed disappointed to see a shirtless Endrit—not because of his partial nudity, but because he was in that state with Rhea.

The six-sided room had one door on every wall—four leading to the queens' rooms, one coming from the throne room, and one for the servants to use coming from the kitchen.

At the center of the room sat a giant round oaken table large enough to seat fifteen and sturdy enough to stage a Tasanese circus. The sisters ate their meals at the table, studied there for Hiram's exams, and on nights such as these, when they couldn't sleep, they convened around it to while away the hours.

Cadis had been regaling them with an improvised tale of Rusila, the Maid Marauder, something about winning a race to a treasure by lashing her ship to the back of a sea dragon. Only Suki had been listening, as she lay on her back in the middle of the giant table, throwing an iron ring up to the vaulted ceiling between the segments of the chandeliers and catching it on her feet.

Iren and Marta sat together on the far side. Before them were several sheets of stained glass. Iren used a long steel cutter that looked like a fountain pen, with a diamond tip, to cut intricate shapes into the glass. Marta used Iren's nippers to snap the cut pieces out of the sheets.

At first blush, it looked like she was making an elaborate set of wind chimes in the old Corentine style. The spires of her home were famous for decorative glasswork, situated as they were in the windy mountains, above the cloud line. The Corentines admired the elegant and delicate work. Many of the balconies of the Academy spires were hued of colored glass.

When Rhea and Endrit entered from the bedroom, everyone stopped—the storytelling, the juggling, the glasswork.

In that short instant, as Rhea weighed all the disappointment in the room, she couldn't help but feel hurt. Hers was not malicious. She just wanted more time with Endrit.
Why shouldn't she?
But theirs, well, their disappointment was because they wanted to spend
less
time with her.

Marta stood up when she saw Endrit bleeding. The pliers in her hand fell to the table. Just as quickly Marta controlled herself, as she always did. She wouldn't embarrass him by doting over it. But for the slightest of moments—every time one of them injured her son—they would see the shadow of outrage pass over her.

“What happened?” said Marta in a controlled voice.

Only then did Rhea realize she was in bigger trouble than she'd thought. She had summoned Endrit to her chamber after-hours. She had continued to train at full contact, though they all knew that Marta forbade training the day before the Revels, to give them time to mentally prepare. And she had cut a bleeding gash into her son's shoulder.

Rhea's answer caught in her throat.

To her eternal gratitude, Endrit stepped forward. “This? This is nothing,” he said.

“How did it happen?” said Marta.

“Game of checkers,” said Endrit, grinning brighter than a three-tiered candelabrum. “You should teach these girls how to lose gracefully.”

The ludicrousness of the excuse, and the sheer confidence it took to expect the others to believe it, made Marta finally crack a smile. Endrit glanced back at Rhea and winked.

“You will address them as ‘queen,' or ‘highness,' or ‘princess,' ” said Marta as she sat, but the bite in her tone was already gone.

“Yes, ma'am,” said Endrit.

Suki rolled over, sprang off the table, and walked with Endrit toward a hutch in the corner. At fifteen, she was one year younger than Rhea and two years younger than Cadis and Iren. Somehow the divide seemed even wider. She still wore her hair in two pigtails.

“Hey, Endrit!” she chirped.

Endrit guided her over to his right side so he could put his good arm around her shoulder. “Hey, Susu. How's my favorite acrobat?” he said.

Even from behind, Rhea could tell that Suki was blushing.

She couldn't help but envy his easy air and his ability to make friends with them all.
How can any one person like four such different girls? And how do they all like him?

It was a mystery to Rhea. She suspected the world outside of Meridan Keep, outside of the Protectorate, had plenty of easygoing friends, whereas the four queens could never be so casual and could never escape the fact that they were in constant competition.

For instance, in the competition for Endrit's attention, Suki had clearly just won. She took him to the hutch, grabbed several bandages, and was already helping him tend to the wound. Meanwhile, Rhea was standing in the space between her door and the table, with nothing for her arms to do but dangle.

“How was the game of . . . checkers?” asked Iren, as she cut a long line across an azure sheet. The glass sang a high, grating pitch.

“Uh, good,” said Rhea. She sidled into a high-back chair at the table. Marta's disapproval soured the air.

Iren, of course, didn't notice, or pretended not to.

She has such slender fingers,
thought Rhea as she watched Iren inlay a razor-thin shard of glass onto a tableau. Iren's exhibition last year was an obscure juniper tea ceremony from the Corentine dale country. The year before that, she'd played her harp—all thousand veils of the
Falconer's Dream
by PilanPilan.

It was as if Iren wanted to prove how advanced the Corentines were, how cultured, how smug.

Rhea's father didn't mind it as much as he did Cadis with her athletic exploits. Hiram lapped it up as if it were the first time anyone had played PilanPilan in Meridan Keep. Though to be fair, it might have been.

Rhea couldn't keep her eyes off of Endrit and Suki in the corner. Endrit's rakish grin was all she could see and Suki's obvious tittering all she could hear.

“We were just saying it should be nice weather tomorrow,” said Cadis.

Rhea doubted that they were sitting together and discussing some almanac. She recognized halfhearted court conversation when she heard it.

“Oh?” she said. “Should we switch to plate leather?”

Marta looked up from her study of Iren's glasswork. “Of course not. Full armor if you plan to go full speed.”

Rhea knew it. She just had nothing else to say. It was getting harder and harder to be around them. To force herself where she was obviously not wanted. Where she halted all sisterly conversation and sucked the warmth from the room. Rhea was about to excuse herself back to her bedroom when she heard the unmistakable scraping of a shinhound's paws on castle stone.

When they all turned to the outer door, Rhea used the opportunity to steal a gaze at Cadis. She had tied her long blond hair into many thin braids that became dreadlocks—the common tradition of the Findish marauding parties. Bits of shell, coin, and other precious stones where woven into each braid and clinked musically when she turned her head. The green and gold sash that wrapped the braids back accentuated her resolute jawline and sharp-hewn nose. She was a queen already—although of a different sort from Iren. She was a war general, a queen by no right other than that she was stronger, more charismatic, and deadlier that anyone else.

Rhea made sure to look away before anyone caught her staring—“stewing in her own jealousy” as Suki had put it once. Rhea swore she wasn't jealous. What was she to be jealous of? Meridan had beaten Findain. No, she preferred to think of their relationship as an early distancing of Meridan and its subjects.

The truth was that she and Cadis had been avoiding each other ever since the last Revels, their last match, a full year ago.

Marta wouldn't allow them to spar anymore. “Not until you can stand as sisters again,” she'd said. Rhea wasn't sure they had
ever
been sisters.

The shinhound scrabbled into the hall—a welcome distraction for everyone but Suki. Without looking up from her glasswork, Iren reached out a finger, pointed to a square of marble on the floor, and said, “Ismata, sit!”

The massive beast lowered its head, marched directly to the square, and sat awaiting further orders.

Cadis exclaimed with surprise, “Ha!” No one had ever dared order a shinhound before.

“You can tell them what to do?” said Endrit.

“And you named him Ismata?” added Suki.

Iren continued to work, but she smiled and nodded. After making them wait a moment, she said, “I'm counter-training them.”

“Without Hiram's knowledge?” said Marta, scandalized by such an impertinent idea.

“I had to name them so my commands could override his. Come here, Ismata.” The shinhound bounded forward and let Iren scratch him under the chin. To Iren, this was just another project. But if Hiram found out, the magister would put the entire kennel to the sword.

Iren reached into her sleeve, drew out a strip of salted beef, and held it out. The shinhound snapped it up.

“Now you're showing off,” said Cadis.