Put back together stronger.
Crouching beside the stream was a new agony, but she forced herself to sink to her heels and stand a handful of times before finally settling in to wash. The linens stained with her brother’s blood had dried into an itchy and hardened cast around her forearms. Yvenne rinsed them as best she could. Her satchel held new linens but it seemed foolish to wear anything clean now, when travel would just soil it again.
Arms wrapped in wet cloth, she shivered while hobbling back to where the warriors had gathered in a circle to break their fast.
Fassad was skinning three lizards. Yvenne recognized their type. Scavengers, they often swarmed Syssia’s refuse piles. With dark green skin lightly covered with scraggly dun feathers, they were the size of a dally bird—and she hoped as tasty.
The warrior offered Yvenne an apologetic look as he gave her a skinned leg. “We do not risk a fire this morning.”
Raw, then. Her mouth already watered and her empty stomach had not a care.
She sank her teeth into the white meat and her entire body revolted. Never had she tasted anything so foul, as if the fresh meat had already rotted. But she chewed, gagging, then forced herself to swallow.
The warriors ripped into theirs. She did not even wonder if the manners of Parsatheans were as uncivilized as she’d heard, for there must be only one way to eat this lizard: as quickly as one could. Yvenne wished to eat as quickly as they did. But she could not manage the great tearing bites and swallows that Maddek took. Her throat would not allow her, revolting harder the bigger the mouthful she took—and the tiny bites she managed, she battled to keep down.
A throat cleared. “Do you see beyond what is seen?”
Her gaze flew to the young warrior who had asked it. Toric, who still wore furs over his broad shoulders though the others only wore the leather spaulders that served as light armor. The same braids fell back from his forehead, and his clean-shaven face was broad, his dark eyes holding hers—for the barest moment, before his gaze dropped.
All of them were looking to her. Each had finished with their lizard. And were waiting for her to finish, too, she realized.
So the Parsatheans’ manners were not so different from a Syssian’s—but their faces were. Oh, all the features were in the same places and the coloring was similar. Yet rarely did Syssians so plainly wear their thoughts and emotions. Fear, anger, even joy were hidden away.
These warriors concealed little. Now they watched her with undisguised curiosity.
“No,” she said, returning her gaze to Toric. “Though my mother could, I have not that gift.”
And was sorry for it. Her mother had taught her what lay beyond the walls of their tower chamber by using that sight. After her death, seeing beyond the reach of her own eyes would have helped Yvenne many a time.
She might have known why Maddek had come for her.
“Not that gift?” Eyes narrowed on her, Maddek wiped his fingers on the red linen folded over his wide belt. “You have another?”
She met his gaze and he did not look away. “Not a gift as you mean—nothing that will benefit our alliance.” Not after Zhalen severed her fingers. “I do not possess the goddess’s sight. But I believe Vela has mine. I can feel her looking through me, seeing what I see.”
Uneasiness seemed to pass through the warriors as they frowned and exchanged glances.
Kelir spoke. “Always? Even now?”
“Yes.” Such a familiar touch at the back of her mind that Yvenne hardly noted it.
“She looks through you as she looks through a priestess?” That came from Banek, the older warrior who had shown her such kindness the previous night.
Yvenne could not answer him directly, for she had no knowledge of what a priestess did, only of what her mother had told her about the goddess. “I hope Vela also looks through them. I hope not all she knows of humans and men is what I have seen.”
That thought appeared to unease the warriors, too—apart from Maddek, who only studied her with that unwavering gaze. “And what of your brothers? Their eyes are the same as yours.”
“Yes. But they do not have Vela’s sight.”
“It is said that Aezil does. It is said that before taking Rugus’s throne, he sacrificed one of his own eyes to gain the sight.”
“That is said,” Yvenne agreed. “I have no knowledge of its truth, however. Only that he has lost an eye. But my brother Tyzen, who serves as Rugus’s minister, has seen no evidence of such dark magics. Thus far, it is all insubstantial rumor—perhaps even one started by Aezil himself, so that his missing eye would not be viewed as a weakness but as something to fear.”
“You trust that minister’s words?” Maddek’s tone said that only a fool would.
“I do.” Always would she believe her younger brother. And Tyzen had not said the rumors were false—only that he had not seen evidence of their truth. “I also believe Aezil would attempt that sacrifice if it gave him the power to see as my mother did. But it would not be Vela’s sight that he would gain. He would need to appeal to another god. Stranik, perhaps—and we know his priests did the same.”
The same priests that the alliance’s army had defeated ten years before. She knew that Maddek had witnessed the horror of exactly how those priests had appealed to their god with the blood of Farian children.
Now darkness moved across his expression before his features hardened again. “Did Aezil poison King Latan?”
She took another bite of lizard and forced it down. “He did—after he, Lazen, and Cezan killed every heir that stood between my father and Latan. And then my father bragged of his success in finally securing the Rugusian throne for his line.”
“Did Zhalen also brag when he murdered our king, and then our queen?”
His father and mother. Her chest tight, Yvenne simply nodded.
Sheer rage and grief seemed to take hold of his body. Rigidly he stared at her, eyes hot with loathing.
Ardyl’s voice pierced the burning silence between them. “Is it true what your brother said—that Zhalen set his male warriors upon our queen?”
Bile that was more sour than the meat shot up Yvenne’s throat. Anger tightened her fingers upon the bone.
“I cannot speak of her,” Yvenne said.
Expression like stone, arms braced over his broad chest and feet squarely set as if prepared for a blow, Maddek told her, “This you may answer.”
“Yes, he did,” Yvenne spat with the force of all the hatred inside her. “He set upon her himself. As did his personal soldiers. As did my brothers Lazen and Cezan. There were many reasons for me to kill them both, but that was the most recent. So I rejoice in their deaths and their blood on my hands.”