Page 86 of A Chill in the Flame
“Oh, I’m sorry, were you not in the room when Ophir was yelling at me and kicking me out of her life? Apparently, none of you think I would make a very good All Mother. It’s hardly your fault. Why would mice ever love a lion?”
He bit down on his tongue to block his retort. Once the first wave of irritation passed, he said, “I’m not asking why you want a royal heart. I’m asking about your end game with Ophir. If you were going to kill her, you would have done it already. So, if you aren’t going to finish the job, what are you doing with her?”
She frowned at a small piece of stem that had stayed in her date, picking it out of her mouth with her thumb and forefinger and flicking it into the pond. “Figs are a little toosweet, don’t you think? They’re more like candy than fruit.”
“I take that as a no, you won’t answer my question.”
“You won’t like the answer.” She popped another one in her mouth, grimacing at the overpowering sugars and washing her mouth out with the freshly refilled waterskin.
Now that was intriguing. “What could you possibly say that could make me like you less than I already do?”
She winked. “You make a good point.”
Tyr joined her on the shore. She made a bored look at the space between his legs, then looked up at his eyes, unimpressed. It was a joke, sure, but a good one. She was excellent at getting under people’s skin. “So?”
She sighed, chewing on the answer more than she had on her food. She offered him a fig, and he took it, always surprised when she extended him simple courtesies like food. Her answer would win her no favors, but there was no reason to put it off any longer. “The same reason Anwir doesn’t care who gets the prize, so long as one of us does. The same reason I won’t hurt her. The same reason you won’t kill me.”
He turned his head to look at her, mouth open in a mixture of surprise, admiration, and disgust. His eyes shot to the tattooed vine that crawled from her knee to her hip. From where he sat, shirtless and dripping, it nearly looked as though the ink on her hip ended where the markings on his bare chest began, as if they’d been woven together with ink. He knew she was brilliant, though it was a truth he held with both resentment and disdain. She was clever and resourceful and patient and tenacious and so fucking awful. He studied her now in the heat of the late afternoon as the fanning leaves overhead filtered their shade over her prone form. She really was pretty and probably could have done any number of things with her life. She was talented and witty and… “You really are a bitch.”
“Yes, but, if you’re going to be a bitch, you might as well be the best at it.”
***
The city smells of hot food and unwashed bodies and refuse hit them long before they entered the Tarkhany capital of Midnah. Tyr had always hated cities. Getting in undetected would be impossible.
“Well, shit.”
Dwyn sucked in the hot late evening air with a steading breath. “I’ll handle the city folk, just like I handleeverything.”
“Pull your hood up,” Tyr said, eyes darting nervously at how impossible it would be for them to slip through the city unnoticed.
“It’s hotter than the goddess-damned sun!” she protested. She muttered to herself about how much she hated how sweat collected around her sternum and pooled in the center of her back, saying something or other about how she was much more comfortable naked.
“Look around,” he insisted. Many citizens had covered the exposed parts of their skin. Hoods were the norm. The sun was more like an oven when wearing thin, flowing cloaks, and head coverings. Its rays sizzled like a frying pan when they hit exposed flesh. The oven of cotton cloaks and clothing was hot, yes, but it was more sustainable than the bare-skinned alternative.
“Disappear!” she commanded.
“I’m completely in the open right now,” he hissed back at her. “I can’t vanish while people are looking at me. It defeats the purpose.”
While Tyr and Dwyn had gilded undertones darker than the average pink skin in Farehold, they were ashen compared to the rich dark browns of the citizens of Midnah. There’d be no chance of maneuvering through the streets undetected.
They’d barely stepped foot into the city’s outskirts before he knew they were out of their depth. From the burbling conversation of the public to the signs above shops, neither he nor Dwyn had any idea how to make sense of their surroundings.
He’d been a fool to assume anything about the tongues of the desert kingdom, regardless of how adept he’d been at learning languages in the past. Those from Sulgrave had the luxury of never choosing to learn the common tongue, should they desire. While it was spoken in Raascot and Farehold, the Frozen Straits created enough of a separation to keep the continent’s citizens from stumbling into their kingdom. Education was abundant, opportunities were available, and life was long. Most of Sulgrave’s citizens learned the common tongue as a fun hobby of sorts, enjoying the peculiar way that vowels and consonants rolled on their tongue, tasting new words, and lording superiority over any monolingual peers.
They hadn’t expanded their linguistic studies to other parts of the continent. He’d never met anyone from Tarkhany, or the Etal Isles. Information was surely available, had he sought it out, but ignorance was much like a blind spot. It was challenging to know what you were missing when you’d yet to see it.
Dwyn slid off her horse and approached the first person who made eye contact. Their eyes widened, bewildered at her appearance, but she flashed a friendly smile as she gestured to the alley. It took her a moment to step just out of the public eye before she left a husk in her wake.
“And now, I’m an omnilinguist.” She stuck her foot in the stirrup and swung herself back onto her fawn-colored horse.
“And a murderer,” he murmured disapprovingly.
“Oh, but such a cute murderer!”
“Can you be cute in a better disguise? I can easily slip out of sight, but if we get caught because you stick out…”
She looked at him with steely disapproval. Dwyn tugged at her hood, pulling it so it covered more of her face. “Isn’t that always the case? Someone chastises you for killing a person and then it’s ‘Oh, Dwyn, can you please murder someone else for me in order to make disguises? Feel bad about it, though, so I can maintain my superiority complex.’”
