Page 20 of The Song Rising

She wanted a reaction; I wasn’t going to give her the pleasure. I reached under the sink and plucked out one of the bottles she had left with us for safekeeping. I filled five glasses, sloshing red wine all over the counter, and took a few gulps from the bottle.

The alcohol scorched down my throat. In the hallway, Nick lurked like a security guard outside the parlor door. As we made to go in, Lucida Sargas barred our way.

“Alone,” she said.

Nick frowned. “What?”

“The sovereign-elect wishes to speak to the Underqueen alone.”

Eliza squared up to her. No easy feat, as she was a foot shorter. “We’re Paige’s mollishers. What she needs to know, we need to know.”

“Not if you want your revolution funded.”

“Don’t you meanourrevolution?”

I touched Eliza’s shoulder. “Don’t worry. I’ll tell you everything later.”

Neither of them looked happy, but they stepped away. I held out a glass to Lucida.

“I don’t partake,” she said, with something that vaguely resembled a smile. “I escaped the scarring, you see. You will find that they become ill-tempered without wine to numb the pain.”

“And I thought it was just their personalities,” I said.

She tilted her head. “Is that a ‘joke’?”

“Not really.”

Balancing the tray of glasses on my hip, I opened the parlor door. My head continued to hammer, and I swung on my feet. Usually, I had a chance to warm up before dreamwalking, but the shock of Terebell’s aura on mine had caused an involuntary jump.

Errai stood beside the window. Pleione was lounging on the couch (she never seemed to sit, Pleione; shelounged), while Warden was a statue in the corner, his back against the wall. There was also a stranger among them: a female with sarx of pure silver and a bald head, like Errai.

Terebell, who stood beside the fire with her usual ramrod posture, took a glass of wine and raised it to her lips.

“Arcturus,” she said, “you ought to drink.”

“I will endure.”

I put down the tray a little too hard. Terebell emptied half her glass at a draught.

“This is Mira Sarin,” she said. “Another of our Ranthen-kith. She has been in exile for many years.”

I inclined my head briefly to the stranger, a gesture she returned. Her primrose eyes, which were wide-spaced and large, like Errai’s, betrayed her recent feed on a sensor.

“I summoned you to inform you that we are leaving,” Terebell said.

“Leaving for how long?”

“For as long as necessary.”

“Why?”

She approached the nearest window. The other Ranthen watched her. “We have found pockets of Rephaim who are willing to confront the Sargas with us, both here and in the Netherworld,” she said. “They have asked us to prove our commitment to rekindling war before they will take up our cause. To do that, we must persuade an influential member of each of the six families to join us—preferably a Warden, past or present, given that they are the head of the family.”

“Those who went into exile after the war may be sympathetic to our cause,” Lucida said, “so we will approach them first. To begin with, we will seek out Adhara, the banished Warden of the Sarin, who was rumored to have Ranthen sympathies. Mira knows her location in the Netherworld.”

I picked up a glass of wine for myself. “What if it doesn’t work?”

“It must,” Warden said.

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