Page 35 of This Monster of Mine

Departing the morgue, she drew deep gulps of fresh air. At the entrance to the vigile station, Kadra mounted his horse and steered it to face her.

“Ready?” The strange stillness she’d glimpsed in the morgue was back in his eyes.

Her gut tightened.Kadra’s just a man, Cato had said, but she couldn’t afford to believe it. Ur Dinyé’s most notorious Tetrarch was a formidable strategist, a powerful magus, and, above all, a manipulator who could warp a situation to his advantage in a blink.

But he must have a weakness.She’d keep her head down and her guard up throughout this investigation or whatever charade he was conducting. She’d arm herself with his secrets. And he wouldn’t see her coming when she ruined him.

Mounting Caelum, Sarai faced the monster who could be her assailant. “Ready.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

Reading hadn’t been her strongest suit growing up. There’d been too much that Cretus needed done for her to learn, and when she’d once made the mistake of staring longingly at booksellers from Sal Flumen in the town square, Cretus had spread word that the tunnel rat was getting aspirations.

She’d resorted to eavesdropping behind Arsamea’s only schoolhouse, memorizing organs, blood vessels, which herbs, roots, and fungi could be used as anesthetics and which would induce pain—the town’s healer had limited that discussion to a disappointing “if you don’t recognize it, don’t eat it,” and her dreams of giving Cretus laxatives had died early. But healing had come easily to her, while her reading had been limited toViolet Snowgrape Delight, bottled in the Month of Seas,Year 548 of the Tetrarchy—Cretus’s worst wine, though no one dared say it—until Cisuré.

The first time she’d spoken with Marus’s daughter had been upon finding her crying outside the schoolhouse, clutching the ends of her newly chin-length hair.

“It looked so pretty on Instructor Flavia,” she’d wailed, tugging up her hood when other children leaving their lessons snickered.

“It looks nice,” Sarai had ventured. Her own hair kept snagging on barbs when she climbed for snowgrapes. Cisuré’s shorn locks made a good deal of sense.

She withdrew her small harvesting knife and took it to her braid. Dropping the hair, she shook her much lighter head and found Cisuré gaping at her like she’d gone mad.

“You really like it?”

Sarai thought her hair spoke for itself but nodded anyway. A few girls had halted, looking from Cisuré’s hair to Sarai’s. She fidgeted, conscious of her grimy face from pressing too close to the window to listen, and quickly left. The next day, no less than four other girls showed up with short hair, much to the dismay of their mothers.

She hadn’t thought much of it until Cisuré sat at the back of the schoolhouse. She’d wondered if the other girl had gotten in trouble. Then, Cisuré had angled her slate to show Sarai the paragraph she was copying down as their instructor read aloud fromAn Accurate History of Ur Dinyé. Their eyes had met with identical grins. And at the age of ten, she’d acquired three great gifts: Cisuré’s friendship, every book the other girl had, and literacy.

She’d never been more thankful for it than now.

Sarai reached down to massage a cramp in her legs and immediately adjusted herself at Kadra’s searching look.

“Tired?” Behind his desk, he sat across from her without a hair out of place, as though reading a hundred petitions took no more energy than pouring a glass of wine. Meanwhile, her head was swimming, and she could feel the hollows under her eyes growing deeper.

“No.” She forced her sagging back to impeccable posture. His faint huff of laughter proved that she wasn’t fooling anyone.Damned man.

She hadn’t had a lick of time to visit the Hall of Records. Departing the morgue, they had returned to Aoran Tower, much to her bewilderment.

“Shouldn’t I be helping adjudicate cases?” she’d asked upon entering his tablinum.

He’d sat at his desk, and she’d prepared to firmly inform him that she wouldn’t be frozen out of the job simply because he hadn’t wanted a Petitor. Then, he’d shifted half the scrolls on his desk toward her. And he had alargedesk.

“Start with those.” He’d tilted his head expectantly at the pile.

She’d been swimming in ink and parchment since.

Petitions were preludes to a trial, setting down the parties, grievances, and witnesses, and infrequently accompanied by statements given by the defendants. Scribes across Ur Dinyé recorded both and referred them to iudices, the closest town’s judges, for trial. Where matters involved complex issues of law or where the iudex saw no reasonable path to resolution, the petitions were brought to a Tetrarch. From every corner of the country.

She rested her head in one hand, dazed after hours of going overhomicidium,calumnia—malicious prosecution—and crimes that just kept coming. No wonder the Tetrarchy didn’t decide the outcome of every case together. They’d never get anything done.

She returned her last scroll to Kadra’s desk and fought the urge to collapse onto it. Beyond his windows, Edessa’s rosy dawn had given way to noon.Nihumbandzostablazed scarlet on her armilla, warning that she’d be out of magic in a couple hours.So this is the infamous workload of a Tetrarch’s Petitor.But she hadn’t expected for Kadra to work just as hard.

Cretus had been a lazy taskmaster, but Kadra seemed to demand as much of himself as he did of her. In the few hours of their reading, he’d worked his way through his half of the pile of scrolls and then started on hers, focus unwavering for so much as a second.

Sarai risked a glance at him in the sunlight. Faint lines hardened his temples and bracketed the grim set of his jaw. Yet there was a grace to his features, unyielding in the way of a sculpture. As she stared, one of his brows rose.

“Yes?”

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