The Wings of Ashtaroth

Chapter 17: Renegades: Section II: Bree

Bree: The Queen's Riad: Qemassen

Since the birth of her son, a boy from whom she withheld a name, Bree had taken to sitting in the riad below her bedroom window, gazing into the pool at the centre, and letting the hot autumn air soak her skin. Eaflied accused her of turning native, and perhaps that was true, but it wasn't the whole of it. No, beautiful as the setting was, Bree preferred her spot beside the pool because here she felt marginally safer than anywhere else.

She scoffed.

As if when the Lora came they might raze Qemassen to rubble, yet not be able to breach these four painted walls. Her ease, as it always was, was entirely unearned.

Bree's child hiccoughed in the arms of the slave who stood rocking him back and forth. The woman craned her neck and cooed at him. She whispered in a soft, hushed tone—whatever secret language other women seemed to know that bandaged a child's anxious thoughts.

Bree would have liked to hold him, but whenever she did take him in her arms he became an awkward jumble of limbs, and he would start to cry. Instead, she watched him, stupidly jealous of the woman in whose arms her child dreamed happily.

She was a ball of jealousy these days—jealous of her baby's nurse, jealous of Aurelius's councillors in their clammy room, wary of Himalit's distaste, which seemed to have grown rather than shrunk in the face of Atlin's fall.

Atlin.

Vivaen—no, Bree—tugged at a loose thread of skin in the crook of her nailbed.

Sympathy was apparently a foreign thing to Himalit, but why would Bree have expected anything else? She might have saved Bree's life at the coronation, but that had been out of duty, not compassion.

With a bitter smile and an unsteady gaze, Bree looked away from the woman who so kindly and gently soothed her son.

Past the enclosed garden with its fruit trees and fountains, and past the double doors leading back inside the ground floor of the queen's quarters, a small dog had flopped itself down on the patterned tiles in a heap of ragged curls. It looked like a dirty carpet balled up against the wall, blending into the foundations of the palace. A high, pointed arch framed its disguised and contented mess of a body. It was just another hapless passenger on the back of this great beast of a city.

There were dogs like that in Atlin. What had happened to them when the city fell and their masters had been put to the sword or wheeled away as Lora property? What happened to the people Vivaen had known—sailors and fishermen, whores and thieves? Who slept in their beds and wondered at the children's toys scattered in empty rooms, never to be held again by their masters' hands?

The dog whined in its sleep—shrill like a child—and Roewyn's screams echoed throughout the riad.

Vivaen dug her nails into her wrist.

Things like this were why it was better to be Bree.

The sweet smell of hyacinth drifted to her on currents of autumn air. Soon it would be winter, or whatever passed for winter here, and Bree would spend her days trapped inside, smothered by shadow. That is, it would have happened that way, had war not come, had Ossa not lost and been led away in chains to be paraded before the people of Lorar, had Atlin not been burned and ravaged and humiliated.

Why, of all things, did it smell of hyacinths? Hyacinth was a spring flower—the flower from the Feast of Ashtet.

Bree stroked her fingers along her arm nervously, feeling a wet trickling sensation against her skin, not wholly realizing what it was until she looked and saw that she'd drawn blood. She swallowed, looking up at the sky, trying to let the beauty of this place bring her peace and silence. Her lip trembled and she bit down on it, startled out of her tremors when she felt a friendly hand close about her shoulder.