Page 5 of This Monster of Mine

Sarai looked away. “Where are you selling it?”

“Sal Flumen.” Vela fell into step beside her.

“You’re mad.” It was a fifteen-day walk. She’d attempted it once and nearly died of cold.

“I’ll survive.” The younger girl set her jaw. “I’m staying there for good.Havïdto this village.”

“Agreed.”

A few minutes south of the tavern, they stopped before a depression in the snow. Vela tapped her boot over it in a series of metallic thuds, and the trapdoor to Arsamea’s tunnels swung up. Centuries-old relics of Ur Dinyé’s wars, they ran under the village and through the mountain, though no one dared venture that deep. A bedraggled girl waited atop the ladder leading down. No more than eight winters, she stared at the amphora, all hollow eyes and cheeks.

“Guard it, and I’ll bring you dinner, Elise,” Vela promised.

Sarai reluctantly relinquished the amphora when Elise held out her hands, wincing when the girl staggered at the weight. But assisting herwould only make Sarai a target. The folk in those tunnels would gladly rip the pouch from her neck and divide her savings just as they had done to many others. She knew their ravenous hunger well. The tunnels were her birthplace, and where her parents had met their end in anibez-smuggling run gone wrong, leaving her with misshapen memories of gaunt faces and what could have been a mother’s smile or a drunken grimace. Cretus had plucked her out at seven when searching for exploitable labor, because she’d been small enough to harvest snowgrapes from their thick, brambly vines. She’d been lucky. Those tunnels held more corpses than people.

“Any other children this winter?”

Vela closed the trapdoor with a clang and followed as Sarai turned back to the tavern. “Just Elise. Parents lost everything at a gambling house and crawled down with her. They’re long dead.”

Damn it.Pretending to adjust her birrus, Sarai discreetly withdrew a silver denarius and shoved it at her.It’s fine.She was nowhere close to affording the Academiae’s tuition anyway.Vela’s eyes widened as she took it.

“Take Elise with you.” Sarai tamped down all regret as the coin left her fingers. “When are you leaving?”

“Tomorrow morning, while everyone’s wasted in bed. Might even steal a horse.” Vela’s grin faded. “You don’t have to keep looking out for any of us, you know. It’ll confuse Elise into thinking that people are decent. Still confuses me.”

“Tell her that the coin is yours. In Sal Flumen, pretend to be middle-class siblings whose parents were attacked by brigands. Pity and a child in tow might get you far.”

“Brilliant.” Vela marveled at the denarius, flipping it between her knuckles. “You sure you don’t want to leave Cretus to rot and join us?”

The thought was always compelling, like spun sugar on her tongue until reality dissolved it.

She feigned a laugh. “The rent’s twice as high, and I can’t compete with the fabri. They’ll say I’m too old for any profession but pleasure-work.” The irony was that Arsamea was the safest place for her until she had enoughfor tuition. She knew the villagers’ habits. In any other northern tavern, she could suffer much worse than Marus’s fist.

“Must be warm.” Vela stared longingly at the golden glow emanating from the town square at the end of the street. Raucous cheers carried on the wind. “Do you think they ever wonder if we’re cold?”

“They don’t think about us at all.” Sarai eyed the snow-mottled furs strewn on the street in a semblance of a carpet for the assessors, while people froze to death in the tunnels only yards away. “So you shouldn’t think about them. If they poisoned us all tomorrow, no one would care.”

Wind shoved at their backs. Both moons hovered above, silver Praefa melding with Silun’s bluish incandescence to cast the town in a sepulchral glow. A moonbright night—both orbs near full but never full together, ordained by the gods to wax and wane at different intervals. Perhaps her dreams were the same, destined to never intersect with her.

A sharp rap snapped her out of self-pity. Squinting at the tavern, a frisson of worry ran through her at the violet-robed figure silhouetted at the door.What inhavïdis an assessor doing away from the square?

He knocked again. “Anyone inside?”

Sarai sighed. “I’d best go get his drink.”

Vela nodded, staring at her feet. “Well … goodbye then.”

Sarai managed a smile. “I’m glad you’re getting out of here. Steal that horse tonight. There’s a snowgale in the air.”

The younger girl sniffed the wind and scowled. “Damn. I’ll leave now then. I’ll try to send some fruit on the next merchant wagon.”

“Save your coin and eat well instead—” Sarai grunted when Vela threw her arms around her. Letting go just as quickly, the other girl stuffed her hands in her pockets and bobbed her head awkwardly before racing in the direction of the stables.

Live well, Vela.The ache in Sarai’s stomach rose to her chest. Envy, yearning, happiness for the other girl. She let it fester, grow tendrils that sank all the way to her threadbare boots. Then, the cold seeped in and killed the roots, the buds, the ache.

Glancing at the annoyed magus banging on the tavern door, she returned to her frozen life.

Sidling in through the back door, Sarai peered at the assessor framed in the window.

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