Instead of a wizened crone, I’m met with a formidable woman made of steel and shadow. Like Sonya, she has coffee-colored skin and black hair, though hers is shot with streaks of white. Despite her age, her brown eyes spark with life.
“Lady Mareena, this is my grandmother, Lady Ara, the head of House Iral.” Sonya explains with a pointed smirk. The older woman eyes me and her gaze is worse than any camera, piercing straight through me. “Perhaps you know her as the Panther?”
“The Panther? I don’t—”
But Sonya keeps talking, enjoying watching me squirm. “Many years ago, when the war slowed, intelligence agents became more important than soldiers. The Panther was the greatest of them all.”
A spy. I’m standing in front of a spy.
I force myself to smile, if only to try and hide my fear. Sweat breaks out on my palms and I hope I don’t have to shake any hands. “A pleasure to meet you, my lady.”
Ara simply nods. “I knew your father, Mareena. And your mother.”
“I miss them terribly,” I reply, saying the words to placate her.
But the Panther looks perplexed, tipping her head to the side. For a second, I can see thousands of secrets, hard-won in the shadows of war, reflecting in her eyes. “You remember them?” she asks, prodding at my lie.
My voice catches, but I have to keep talking, keep lying. “I don’t, but I miss having parents.” Mom and Dad flash in my mind but I push them away. My Red past is the last thing I should think about. “I wish they were here to help me understand all this.”
“Hmm,” she says, surveying me again. Her suspicion makes me want to leap off the balcony. “Your father had blue eyes, as did your mother.”
And my eyes are brown. “I am different in many ways, many I don’t even understand yet,” is all I can manage to say, hoping that explanation will be enough.
For once, the queen’s voice is my savior. “Shall we sit, ladies?” she says, echoing over the crowd. It’s enough to pull me away from Ara, Sonya, and the quiet Elane, to a seat where I can breathe a little sigh to myself.
Halfway to Lessons, I begin to feel calm again. I addressed everyone properly and only spoke as much as I had to, as instructed. Evangeline talked enough for both of us, regaling the women with her “undying love” for Cal and the honor she felt at being chosen. I thought the Queenstrial girls would band together and kill her, but they didn’t, to my annoyance. Only the Iral grandmother and Sonya seemed to even care that I was there, though they didn’t push their interrogation any further. But they certainly will.
When Maven appears around the corner, I’m so proud of my survival at lunch that I’m not even annoyed by his presence. In fact, I feel strangely relieved, and let a bit of my cold act drop. He grins, coming closer with a few long strides.
“Still alive?” he asks. Compared to the Irals, he’s like a friendly puppy.
I can’t help but smile. “You should send Lady Iral back to the Lakelanders. She’ll make them surrender in a week.”
He forces a hollow laugh. “She’s a battle-ax that one. Can’t seem to understand she’s not in the war any longer. Did she question you at all?”
“More like interrogate. I think she’s angry I beat out her granddaughter.”
Fear flickers in his eyes and I understand it. If the Panther is sniffing around my trail . . . “She shouldn’t bother you like that,” he mutters. “I’ll let my mother know, and she’ll take care of it.”
As much as I don’t want his help, I don’t see any other way around it. A woman like Ara could easily find the cracks in my story, and then I’ll be truly finished. “Thanks, that would—that would be very helpful.”
I can see that Maven’s dress uniform is gone, replaced by casual clothes built for form and function. It calms me a little, to see at least someone looking so informal. But I can’t let anything about him soothe me. He’s one of them. I can’t forget that.
“Are you done for the day?” he says, his face clearing to reveal an eager smile. “I could show you around if you want?”
“No.” The word comes out quickly and his smile fades. His frown unsettles me as much as his smile. “I have Lessons next,” I add, hoping to soften the blow. Why I care about his feelings, I don’t exactly know. “Your mother loves her schedules.”
He nods, looking a little better. “She does indeed. Well, I won’t keep you.”
He takes my hand gently. The cold I felt on his skin before is gone, replaced with a delightful heat. Before I get a chance to pull away, he leaves me standing there alone.
Lucas gives me a moment to collect myself before noting, “You know, we’d get there much faster if you actually moved.”
“Shut up, Lucas.”
THIRTEEN
My next instructor waits for me in a room cluttered from floor to ceiling with more books than I’ve ever seen, more books than I ever thought existed. They look old and completely priceless. Despite my aversion to school and books of any kind, I feel a pull to them. But the titles and pages are written in a language I don’t understand, a jumble of symbols I could never hope to decipher.
Just as intriguing as the books are the maps along the wall, of the kingdom and other lands, old and new. Framed against the far wall, behind a pane of glass, is a vast, colorful map pieced together from separate sheets of paper. It’s at least twice as tall as me and dominates the room. Faded and ripped, it’s a tangled knot of red lines and blue coasts, green forests and yellow cities. This is the old world, the before world, with old names and old borders we no longer have any use for.
“It’s strange to look at the world as it once was,” the instructor says, appearing out of the book stacks. His yellow robes, stained and faded by age, make him look like a human piece of paper. “Can you find where we are?”
The sheer size of the map makes me gulp but, like everything else, I’m sure this is a test. “I can try.”
Norta is the northeast. The Stilts is on the Capital River, and the river goes to the sea. After a minute of pained searching, I finally find the river and the inlet near my village. “There,” I say, pointing just north, where I suppose Summerton might be.
He nods, happy to know I’m not a total fool. “Do you recognize anything else?”
But like the books, the map is written in the unknown language. “I can’t read it.”
“I didn’t ask if you could read it,” he replies, still pleasant. “Besides, words can lie. See beyond them.”
With a shrug, I force myself to look again. I was never a good student in school, and this man is going to find that out soon enough. But to my surprise, I like this game. Searching the map, looking for features I recognize. “That might be Harbor Bay,” I finally murmur, circling the area around a hooked cape.
“Correct,” he says, his face folding into a smile. The wrinkles around his eyes deepen with the action, showing his age. “This is Delphie now,” he adds, pointing to a city farther south. “And Archeon is here.”
He puts his finger over the Capital River, a few miles north of what looks like the largest city on the map, in the entire country of the before world. The Ruins. I’ve heard the name, in whispers between the older kids, and from my brother Shade. The Ash City, the Wreckage, he called it. A tremor runs down my spine at the thought of such a place, still covered in smoke and shadow from a war more than a thousand years ago. Will this world ever be like that, if our war doesn’t end?