Page 10 of The Gilded Ones

White Hands is human. Terrifyingly so.

“You are awake. Good,” she murmurs. “Are you lucid?”

I blink back at her.

White Hands slaps me so sharply, my head jerks back from the blow. I touch my cheek, shocked, until she grips my chin with those claws again. “Are. You. Lucid. Alaki?”

There it is, that word again. A-la-key. I pronounce it silently in my mind, focusing on its strange, forbidding edges as I sit up. “Yes,” I rasp, licking my lips. My voice is a raw nerve, my tongue drier than our lake bed in midsummer. I haven’t spoken in days…or has it been weeks? Months? How long have I been here? My memories blend in an orgy of blood and terror – of gold, shimmering on the cobblestone floor as the sword slices down, tearing past reattaching muscles, reconnecting tendons…

The elders bring out buckets, gold-lust in their eyes. They’re going to dismember me again, going to rip me apart to harvest the gold that flows in my veins. A scream pours out, shrill, unhinged. It mixes with my prayers. Please forgive me. I didn’t mean to sin. I didn’t know about the impurity in my blood. Please forgive me.

Then the icy sweetness of the knife, slicing through my tongue—

White Hands snaps her claws. “No, do not drift off again.” She rummages in her cloak and unearths a small glass vial, which she wafts under my nose.

An acrid smell sears my nostrils, and I jerk upright, blinking wildly as the memories flee back to their hidden corners. White Hands moves forwards with the vial again, but I quickly turn my head away.

“I’m awake, I’m awake,” I rasp.

“Good,” she says. “I dislike being ignored by alaki.”

“Alaki?” I repeat.

“It means worthless, unwanted. That is what they call your kind.” White Hands peers at me. I can almost feel her frowning under her hood. “You do not know what you are?”

I struggle to understand what she’s saying. “I’m impure,” I reply. Rivers of golden blood flow past my eyes.

Amusement glimmers in hers. “Undoubtedly, but that does not fully explain what you are.”

Something stirs inside me, a dull echo almost resembling curiosity. “What am I?” I ask. “And what do you mean by my kind?” Does she mean the other impure girls, the ones who died here?

More memories surface – impatient whispers in the darkness.

Why won’t she die?

They always die by the second or third death. Beheading, burning, drowning. It’s always one of the three.

She’s unnatural, this one.

Unnatural…

“If you make the correct choice, I will tell you.”

The sound of White Hands’s voice returns me abruptly to the present.

“Choice?” My head throbs and I want to go back to sleep.

I begin to close my eyes again, but she pulls something from her pocket. It’s a seal made of solid gold, with a circle of obsidian stones in the middle of one side and an old Oteran symbol on the other: an eclipsed sun whose rays have been turned into wickedly sharp blades. This is the first time I’ve ever seen one so close before. Only officials carry seals, and it’s rare they come to Irfut. There’s something strange about the circle on the first side. I squint, forcing it to take shape.

Stars. The stones are shaped like stars.

“The ansetha.” White Hands’s voice answers my unspoken question as she points to the symbol on the seal. “It is an invitation.”

Confusion lines my face, and I frown at her. “An invitation for what?”

“For you, Impure One. Emperor Gezo has decided to create an army of your kind. He invites you to join it and protect our beloved Otera from those that would oppose her will.”

White Hands begins untying her mask, and I recoil, unnerved. Is this a trick? Some kind of bizarre test? Women never remove their masks in front of strangers, only family or their dearest friends. I shut my eyes, frightened of what I’ll see, but White Hands’s amused laugh filters into my ears.

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