Page 84 of The Gilded Ones

I turn to her. “What do you mean?”

“Ye keep changing,” she says. “Every day, it feels like you’re becoming more and more different…”

She doesn’t finish her sentence, but she doesn’t have to. I know she’s talking about what happened at the temple today when I heard the deathshrieks speaking. “Isn’t change a good thing?” I whisper. A hopeful thought if there ever was one.

Britta looks up at the ceiling. “Not if yer an alaki. Not if yer just about to go on campaign in a few days, where the emperor and everyone will be watchin’.”

I don’t have to ask further to understand the warning behind her words. “I’ll be fine, Britta. I won’t draw attention to myself.”

“Ye say that, but ye canna help yerself, Deka. Sometimes, it seems like something just takes over ye, like ye lose yer common sense when yer using yer abilities. It’s like ye can’t reason properly.”

“That’s why I have you to protect me.”

“But what if I’m not there?”

“You’ll always be there, Britta. And I’ll always be there for you.”

Britta sighs. “Just be safe, Deka. Be safe.”

I nod silently as we both go to sleep.

It’s cold in the caverns when I enter, mist trailing clammy fingers down my spine. As usual, Rattle is standing near the bars of his cage, watching me as I walk down the line of cages housing the other deathshrieks. There’s that horribly familiar expression in his eyes, that look I’m only now starting to understand.

Betrayal… “You can understand me, can’t you,” I whisper, approaching his cage.

He doesn’t answer, doesn’t make a sound. He just watches me, that expression in his eyes.

“Speak,” I urge. “Say something – anything, Rattle.”

But he remains silent. After everything that’s just happened, this show of stubbornness infuriates me. “Speak!” I command, lacing my voice with power.

Rattle flinches, his eyes widening, his mouth moving, but no sound comes out. No words. It’s almost like something is stopping them in his throat, preventing them from emerging. I walk closer – the closest I’ve ever been to him in all the months I’ve spent here in the Warthu Bera – and that’s when I smell it again: the sickly sweet smell wafting from his spikes, his skin, the one I never before recognized – until now. Blue blossom, the tiny blue flower the matrons sometimes eat when they want to forget their sorrows.

Understanding sweeps over me. Rattle is being drugged. All the deathshrieks in the Warthu Bera are.

That’s why they seem so brutish, so unintelligent, compared with the ones in the wild. The karmokos, the assistants, keep them that way, and for once, I don’t have to ask why. Everyone employed at the Warthu Bera has a simple goal: keep us alive long enough to take part in the campaign. Deathshrieks in their wild state are much too difficult to control, especially for the naive, unschooled neophytes freshly condemned by the Ritual of Purity who come here.

So they drug them into docility.

Rattle is a tool, just like the rest of us – a pawn to help prepare for the campaign. It’s not that he won’t speak to me, it’s that he can’t.

I nod, stepping back from his cage. “My apologies, Rattle,” I say as I walk towards the cavern’s exit. “I’m sorry for what we’re doing to you.”

“And what exactly are we doing to him?”

I nearly gasp, startled, when Keita steps out of the shadows. “Keita. What are you doing here?”

“Looking for you. You’ve been avoiding me.”

It’s not strictly true. I’ve been avoiding everyone, too frightened by my discoveries at the last raid to burden anyone else with them.

My stomach clenches as Keita walks closer, his eyes gleaming softly in the darkness. I haven’t spoken deeply to him in days, embraced him in what feels like longer. All I want is to feel his arms around me. But I can’t afford that, not now, when I’m in such a state. I’ll tell him everything if I do, and then there’s no going back. He’ll be drawn into White Hands’s web, and who knows the deadly paths that will lead to.

“What happened when we were at the raid?” he asks. “What is it you’re not telling me?”

I look up at him, wondering how to answer. Finally, I sigh. “Let’s get some air,” I say, walking towards the entrance to the caverns.

We end up, as we always do, at our nystria tree. It’s dark outside now, night rapidly falling around the Warthu Bera. The last few stragglers from the jog make their way indoors. Once we reach the tree, Keita takes a seat between one of the roots, then pats the space beside him.

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