I pull my hand out of his grasp. “I have to go.”
“Scorpion Fountain. Anise.” He hurries away through the mob of waiting carriages.
10
Jes! There you are!” Amaya waves. “Hurry!”
I trot over, hating how the fashionable sheath gown makes it so hard to climb or run. But if I’d escaped the soldiers, Kalliarkos wouldn’t have rescued me. Thinking of the way he casually treated me as just another adversary makes me smile as I reach the carriage.
“Thank the oracles!” Amaya grabs my hands so tightly I think she might actually have been worried. “How did you get separated from us? We have to get home.”
“It was stupid to stop here!” I say as we clamber in.
“It’s stupid of you to run the Fives in defiance of Father. Do you want to have this argument again, Jes?”
No one is more annoying than Amaya gnawing on an argument so I tweak aside the curtains and stare outside to ignore her. The view seaward is stunning from this height. The city has two harbors that are almost perfect circles, their rocky rims washed by water. Many ships sail in and out bringing in goods from foreign countries and taking away the grain, gold, spices, and cloth that our enemies covet. Between the harbors rises the peninsula that houses the City of the Dead and the tombs of the oracles. The deep blue sea stretches to the horizon to the south and west, its waters glittering under the sun.
Far away to the south, much too far to see from here, lies the land of Saro, where my father was born, the same land out of which the ancestors of the current king and queen fled during a terrible civil war a hundred years ago, as Lord Kalliarkos has just reminded me. With their army and their priests the newcomers established a royal dynasty here. But even so, it wasn’t far enough away, because the deadly hostilities they left behind plague us still.
My gaze drifts back to where Coriander waits like a person drugged by shadow-smoke. I wonder what terrible crime her brother committed. Probably he murdered someone in a fit of rage.
“What are you looking at?” Amaya shoulders me aside. She glances toward Coriander but then turns to look forward for so long that I wonder what she is looking at. Finally she sits back. “How I wish I could trade places with Coriander! Then I could walk anywhere I wish in the city instead of being trapped by Father’s honor!”