Soulwoven: Exile

Chapter 21

~21~

Fifty days before the destruction of Nutharion City

The sun rose through a haze of blue and brown smoke. The manmade canyons of Nutharion City cascaded in concentric rings below it, lower and lower until they petered out at the city’s perimeter and the haphazard wooden slums that surrounded it.

Cole had looked at that view, every morning and every evening, for weeks.

Beyond the stone city, the fields of central Nutharion carpeted the land in gold and green late-summer crops—wheat, corn, tomatoes. Two bluebirds capered in the early light, chirping as they rode the air. Cole leaned on a stone railing and watched them play, trying to ignore the goose bumps on his skin and the churning in his stomach.

He felt caged, and he was pretty sure there were people in the city responsible for that.

For a month, he and Dil had been guests in Nutharion, shepherded from meeting to meeting, dignitary to dignitary. They’d met the king—a red-faced man with none of the gravitas of the soulweavers who surrounded him—and the twelve heads of school who formed the council that ruled the land. They’d met most of the council’s immediate subordinates and a lot of children and soulweavers of various ranks and duties. They’d been forced to learn dances and rituals and to play interminable rounds of a game the Nutharians called Truths and Lies, in which the goal was to tell a lie so convincingly that all the other players accepted it as truth.

Nothing particularly disturbing had happened—just a lot of jawing over what Nutharion would do about the dragon. But he’d seen the looks, heard the whispers. He and Dil had faced Sherduan and lived. Most Aleani hadn’t seemed worried about that, but in Nutharion it cast a pall over everything they did. There was a sense of waiting in the interactions they had with people, as if the Nutharians were trying to decide what to do with them.

And in the meantime, they were caught in a cage gilded by cool white stone and manners.

The bluebirds flew over the roof, still chattering, and Cole walked into his empty bedroom. A white suit with buttons up the front, cut high in the Nutharian style, waited for him on a wardrobe. He tossed the pants on a chair near his bed and began to put the top half of the outfit on. The sun had cleared the horizon, which meant—

“Ambassador Jin?”

A light-skinned, mostly bald, round-faced man in an impeccable gray uniform cracked open the door to Cole’s room. “Will you be requiring hot water this mor—”

“No,” Cole snapped. The buttons on the shirt were cloth covered and difficult to do up, but he hurried with them anyway. The door opened further, and Willem a’Raeth, the good-natured, middle-aged man who’d been assigned as his steward, entered the room. The Nutharian had a paunchy stomach and a patch missing from the left of his otherwise ample eyebrows. Taken by a kitchen fire, he’d told Cole one morning.

Willem held himself as straight as a board whether he was sitting or standing, and he’d been simultaneously a godsend and a pain in Cole’s ass since the day Cole had met him. Willem had been in the domestic service of the Cityhall since boyhood, and while that was useful when Cole had questions, Cole had a sneaking suspicion that the man meant to acculturate him by any means necessary.

The trousers to his suit had caught on the back of the delicate wire chair he’d thrown them at. He snatched them just as Willem’s hand was reaching for them, and then he sat on the foot of his bed and pulled them on.

Willem cleared his throat. There was a tension to the way he held himself, a worry hiding in the creases around his eyes that Cole wasn’t used to seeing there.