The Wings of Ashtaroth

Chapter 7: Traitors: Section II: Iridescia

Iridescia: Mount Nuna: Ipsis: Indas

Night had wrapped the Haven in a starry veil, but the eyes that stared down at Iridescia didn't feel comforting like Tanata's were said to be. It was like being watched through thousands of pin-prick holes, the lights enough to tell her someone was watching, but not who. But if she didn't look at the stars, her gaze would be pulled toward the boat floating in the centre of the pool, where Tobi's mother drifted, silent and dead.

Whatever shades haunted the Haven, Roewyn and Liberio didn't seem to notice. They kept their distance from the pool and the corpse that rested there, but they didn't know about the real ghosts, didn't worry at all about the pitch-dark shore. Their words swarmed like a school of fish around Iridescia, mushing together so that the sounds were like one big monster that eclipsed the smaller parts.

Iridescia shuddered and drew her knees up to her chest atop the round stone where she was sitting. She was as far from the pool and the boat as she could get, but even this distant from the black water, whenever a leaf brushed her shoulder, she felt the shadowy fingers of long black ghosts inching across her skin.

"Iridescia's right," Liberio pressed, jabbing a stubby finger at his broad chest. "Hadrianus meant that slaughter as a message to me."

Roewyn shook her head, crossed her arms, turned away and then back toward Liberio again. "Why? If they knew about us, I'd be dead, especially after Star. She's not the sharing type."

Liberio seemed to flinch, bodily, at the mention of his marriage, but talk of Aunt Star summoned worse things for Iridescia: the roughness of the skiff as Tayri tried desperately to escape along the palace canals; the image of dead, waving hands reaching upwards from the bottom of the water; the ache in her throat when Star had found her and commanded the soldiers to brick up the tower window; Tayri's pregnancy by a man with ruby-red hair, a man who was probably Hadrianus.

She twisted one of her braids round and round between her fingers, pressure building in her chest.

She'd promised to tell Aunt Star about her dreams in exchange for Tobi's life, but it'd been days, and Star still hadn't approached her, even though Tobi had been given to Iridescia days ago. Maybe it had been enough for Star to know that Iridescia owed her something, and that she'd connected somehow with Tayri, the woman in the dream: the woman who was probably Iridescia's dead mother.

"It's nothing to do with you," said Liberio. "He doesn't even know you exist."

Moonlight rolled over Liberio's tumble of red curls, but the light burned twice as fiercely in Iridescia's breast. If Hadrianus was the father of Tayri's child then it made Iridescia his daughter, and Liberio's half-sister. It made her part Lorat.

She turned over her hands. They didn't look like Lora hands, but then, what did Lora people look like when half of Ipsis was filled with the children of Inda women and Lora soldiers? No, it wasn't Lora hands that mattered, nor even Lora hearts, but the cruelty Hadrianus showed everyone around him. If she had that in her, she was better off not being born.

Roewyn's black hair shone thick as midnight under the stars. Roewyn, the goddess of the rainbow with her cloths and her dyes and her dresses. Roewyn who smiled and was kind and was patient.

Roewyn was good, and she liked Iridescia. If Roewyn liked her, she must be good too.

"But your father must suspect you had something to do with Tobi's family escaping," Roewyn said. "He knows that whether alone or with help, you've been shuffling people off to Lera."