“Those are quite interesting ideas,” the Hindlegs candidate said to Nico’s pitch, and then he widened his legs suggestively beneath the heated waters of the bathhouse. “But what’s in it for me?”
Nico could promise a future of untold prosperity and riches, but the ambition of some was always limited to sex. Not as if the Councilor could hope for much here, with the sheer number of people enjoying the steamed baths after work. Each neighborhood had its own bathhouse, and they were undoubtedly the best places for meetings and gossip.
She lounged naked across from the Hindlegs Councilor and smiled shrewdly at the roving eyes. Kenji-ta’s suggestion had worked like a charm. He had found an old friend willing to run for the Hindlegs seat, and once the competition grew serious, all she had to do was wait for the inevitable message to arrive.
“If you aren’t industrious enough to see the benefits of my proposal, then perhaps this isn’t a good match. I’m sure your competitor will more than appreciate my endorsement,” she said. She stood up and water dripped down her skin. She might not be the Ohan, but she had the power to rip the blood from a person’s veins or drown them on their own spit and bile. She had a respectable number of names, and everyone clamoring for her favor. They needed her, more than she needed them.
“Wait-” the Councilor said. Nico hiked a well-crafted indifferent eyebrow. “I believe the heat is making me a little light-headed. I meant no disrespect. Your vision for the Grankull sounds like a worthwhile endeavor. Of course, I’d like to have your endorsement.”
She smiled and mentally crossed the Hindlegs Councilor off her list. She knew she had to keep her face clean with this one. Someone who was so willing to flip sides would easily do so again. She’d continue playing the two candidates against each other and maneuver the Councilor exactly into the corner she wanted him.
She waded forward, and the Hindlegs Councilor straightened with lecherous hope. He was of her tah’s generation but built well and no doubt unused to rejection. He didn’t have a kulani, but she had no doubt he would sign a stranger’s name tomorrow if he thought that it would win him the campaign.
Steam thickened around them. The shrouded kids playing nearby disappeared within the white haze. The Councilor’s eyes widened and pressed a hand to his throat. Nico gripped the tiled edge of the bath and bent over the Councilor. She whispered in his ear as he gurgled up water.
“You ever send assassins after me again, and you’ll never be able to take another bath without seeing Death in the steam. It is so easy to stay in too long and get light-headed, after all. It would be a shame to accidentally drown.” She patted him on his bearded cheek. “I look forward to working with you.”
Nico moved toward the stairs. Behind her, she heard the Councilor cough up water from his throat. She held him pinned to the spot long after she had dried, oiled, dressed, and left the bathhouse behind.
As she exited, she locked eyes with a messenger weaving through the crowds. She retrieved the scroll the messenger had been tasked to deliver. Her stomach dropped at the contents, and a storm brewed overhead. She raced home.
Nico thundered into the lounging room, and even though she knew what to expect, nothing compared to the visceral sight of Zephyr bleeding all over the ottoman. All sound blurred as if she had been dipped underwater, and for a moment she stopped breathing.
“Nico!” Kai caught her attention from where he knelt beside Zephyr, applying pressure to a stomach wound with what had previously been Zephyr’s shirt. The knife was still in him. She focused on the present, one step at a time: If she allowed herself to slip and imagine a future without him, she might become a useless sopping puddle, and that was no help to anyone.
She moved forward with purpose. She crouched at Zephyr’s side and used her magic to dry the top layer of blood to temporarily staunch the wound.
“You sent a message for Suri?” she asked Kai.
“Ysai sent her a message at the same time he sent yours,” he said. “We didn’t want to pull out the knife until she got here.”
She crossed over to the window and opened wide the shutters of the lounging room. “Go get the linens and needle ready for when she arrives.”
He cleared Zephyr’s bloody shirt away as he left the room. It was heavily pouring outside, and she honestly didn’t know if that was her magic or the season. She whistled, and a drenched Flock scout appeared at the windowsill.
“Double the security,” she ordered. They nodded and disappeared.
“That’s a little overprotective, don’t you think?” Zephyr grumbled when she returned to his side.
She breathed a little easier to realize he was conscious. She squeezed his hand and demanded, “What happened? Who did this?” The message she received had been light on the details. “Give me a name.”
“My cousin,” he grumbled, “came after me for revenge against tah. His parent had been the one they killed in her stead.”
“That bloodprice is owed to your tah, not you. This attack on you was unlawful. We can apply for restitution. I can—”
“No,” he said. “This is my family’s mess. I’ll handle it. I should have been more careful.”
Suri finally arrived and entered the room soaked to the bone. She stripped off her shroud, worn against the rain, and moved with that intense concentration of someone expecting much work to do. She didn’t hesitate to start inspecting Zephyr’s wound.
Kai quickly returned to deliver the supplies and then left to join Rae and Ysai in the serving room, while Nico remained to assist Suri.
“What are you feeling?” Suri asked.
“Cold . . . burning,” he said.
“Hold him down,” she instructed. She twisted the blade to break the suction. He groaned, and Nico had to force him down with her magic as Suri pulled out the dagger. Nico could see his small intestines.
Sweat gathered at Zephyr’s brow as Suri worked to clean the wound. He blinked feverish and unfocused. Both Suri and Nico frowned. She reached out with her magic, while at the same time, Suri leaned down to smell the wound.
“He’s been poisoned,” she confirmed. “We don’t have time to brew an antidote. You’re going to have to do it.”
“Zephyr-kull,” Nico said. “Listen to me. You’ve been poisoned. I’m going to pull it out, like I did with Rasia, okay?” She tightened his hands in hers. “Stay with me.”
She didn’t know if Zephyr heard her, but she couldn’t afford to wait for an acknowledgement. She focused on the poison spreading from the brackish wound. The poison wasn’t as pervasive as when Rasia had been poisoned. Still, it was a different type than last time—oily instead of heavy. It was slippery and hard to hold onto. She summoned magic from the Elder’s stores and picked through Zephyr’s blood like picking lice from hair.
She extracted the poison from the open wound. She replaced the water in her gourd with the poison to preserve it for Suri to study later.
Through a concerted effort, both she and Suri stabilized him. He lay unconscious on the ottoman, heartbeat steadied. Nico slumped back and pressed her hands to her face, shaking. That had been too close for comfort, and it was still a wait and see for any infections. Outside, the Elder bones groaned at the water flooding the streets, but she knew the heavy storm wouldn’t last long.
“Thank you,” she told Suri.
Suri closed her eyes, her head also reclined back against the ottoman while she held her bloody hands upright in her lap. She glanced in Nico’s direction. “Are you okay?”
“Sometimes, I question why I fight for such a terrible place,” she whispered. “At times like these, I wonder if it’s worth it or if I’m wasting my time. How many more people are going to get hurt? How many more people are going to die for this cause? How many more sacrifices are going to be made? Can the Grankull truly be salvaged?”
The rain pelted the roof, striking hard enough to beat drums against the adobe. Zephyr’s arm drooped from the ottoman, and she pressed her forehead against it.
“Sometimes, I want to give up,” Suri admitted and gazed down at her hands. “I don’t even like blood.”
“There’s got to be something better than this. There has got to be,” she said, tightening her hands as if she could physically, stubbornly, hold on to hope.
Sometimes, Nico wanted to give up too. In her weakest moments, she wondered at a life where her only responsibility was herself, at a life where she didn’t care about everything and everyone so damn much. But for all her stubborn faults, she didn’t know how to stop trying. No matter the results of the election, she would never stop fighting for this harsh, beautiful, and complicated place. Even if it was hard sometimes.
She welded the armored cracks of her resolve, sharpened the spear-edge of her determination, and kept dragging on.
Nico checked on Zephyr the moment she came home from work several days later. She had offered him one of the empty bedrooms to stay and recover, and she admittedly preferred to have him close while he was injured and weak. They had been keeping an anxious watch on him for infection, but the danger had now passed.
“How is he?” she asked as she passed Kai in the kitchen preparing for dinner. Smelled like scorpion kebabs.
“He managed to sit up today,” he said, as she dipped a finger into the bowl that he used to mix the seasoning. Had a little spice to it. She nodded her approval, and then wound through the maze to the bedrooms.
She was a little surprised to find Rasia on the bed talking with Zephyr. Rasia leaned against the lotus carved pillar of the bed frame and gesticulated her hands as she talked. “You’re lucky that cousin of yours was stupid. If you’re trying to kill someone, never stab them in the gut—too high rates of survival. Should have gone for the heart or the throat.”
“I doubt he cared where it hit considering the blade was poisoned,” Zephyr remarked. He looked like he desperately wanted to escape, while Rasia deliciously enjoyed the fact that he couldn’t.
“Look at that,” she teased. “We’re poison buddies.”
Zephyr glanced at Nico, who found herself holding in a laugh at the door. He mouthed, ‘save me.’ Rasia turned and rolled her eyes.
“Fine.” She patted Zephyr’s leg and hopped from the bed. “Protect yourself better. I’d have been pissed if you had died. It is so hard to find a good sparring partner.”
“We’re not sparring partners.”
“Right.” She winked at him. She nodded at Nico and then swiveled out of the room.
“And I have to live with that,” Nico said, as she came in and replaced Rasia on the bed. “Becoming friends?”
“She enjoys torturing me,” he grunted and crossed his arms. Despite the grumbling, she could tell he didn’t mind Rasia’s company, but he also didn’t want to encourage her. He shrugged his shoulders and added, “But she does have good fighting insights.”
“Hmm-hmm.” She smirked. She looked over him and checked his bandages. “Your tah is pissed.”
“I know,” he groaned. He had been more than willing to take Nico up on her offer to stay over in order to avoid his tah. “I should have been paying more attention to my surroundings. She’s going to ream me out for that. I should have been more careful. I knew living in the Grankull was dangerous and I knew . . .”
“It was more than that,” she said.
Immediately after the incident, since Zephyr had been unconscious and couldn’t tell her anything, she had gone onto the streets and pieced together what had happened from eyewitnesses. Zephyr’s cousin had ambushed him on a crowded street, but the initial assault hadn’t grazed or harmed him. In fact, he had evaded and avoided every attack, never going on the offensive until he had slipped on a too smooth stone and gotten a knife in the gut. Only when he had a foot of steel in him, did he finally decide to kill his cousin. The fight was all over one quick brutal move later.
“You know what happened?” he asked and blew out a breath when she nodded. “I thought I could be strong like my tah wanted me to be. I thought I could be cold-hearted, but . . . he looked like her. I didn’t want to kill him. I fully knew situations like this might happen, and I . . . I don’t know if I can do this.”
“I know,” she whispered and rearranged herself on the bed. He didn’t hesitate to settle his head into her lap and she stroked her hand through his coils. “Perhaps your tah will be disappointed in you, but there is no shame in not wanting to kill your family. You deserve to feel devastated.”
“She warned me,” he grumbled. “She thought me strong enough to handle living in the Grankull, and I’ve let her down.”
“You can’t always be her embodiment of vengeance. Nor can you always be the voice of your family, or always the shoulder people lean on. You also need to take care of yourself,” she soothed.
He scoffed and pinched her side where she was the most ticklish. “Take your own advice.”
“Hey, I have a self-care day planned with Jilah-shi after this election is over. We’re going to do mud-masks, braid my hair, and I’m going to go shopping and buy something for myself, for once. Then, I’m going to close my door and finally get some uninterrupted sleep.” She smiled and then wondered when sleep had become something to long for.
He placed a loose lock of hair behind her ear, that same lock of hair that had escaped her bun in the middle of work today. “Let me know if you need any help with your self-care.”
“I said sleep, Zephyr-kull.”
“I could join you for the mud-masks.”
“Sure.” She laughed at him. After all, she certainly wasn’t lacking any in her sex life. She had admittedly taken advantage of Zephyr’s new role as night sentry on several occasions, and Suri had a habit of popping in whenever she thought Nico could use a break from work.
She placed a kiss on his lips, careful to keep it light and avoid crossing into the dominance territory Zephyr sometimes craved from her, and the submissive pliancy she sometimes craved from him. Didn’t want him to get too worked up with his injury. “Feel free to stay as long as you need.”
“I appreciate it, but . . .” He lifted off her lap with a groan, “might as well face her sooner rather later. Help me to the Tents?”
She sighed. Maybe she should have seduced him to stay if he thought himself strong enough to traverse the Grankull and face Zara-shi, but she helped him dress since he was so determined. The shirt he had come with had been bloodied and torn beyond repair. Kai’s shirts were too small, but she had found an older shirt of tah’s that fit tightly around his chest.
She smirked at the comical sight. “You might as well walk to the Tents half-naked.”
“The cruel luck of genetics,” he said, tone flat, but Nico heard the sarcasm.
He grabbed one of the lotus pillars. She placed a hand around his waist and helped him to stand from the bed. She didn’t remove her hand from his arm.
“Listen,” she said. “I know you don’t want me involved, but there is something that you should know. Suri analyzed the poison used on the knife and identified it as one of her tah’s mixes. The Neck Councilor knows I can heal poisons from my Forging story, which means the poison was a message intended for me. A lot more layers are at play here, and it seems other people might be exacerbating the conflict between you and your family. It might be your family drama, but it’s politics, too.”
“Politics or not, you’re not my triarch. You have no legal obligation to avenge me, and I’m sure they know that. It would be messy for you to get involved.”
She turned and stared at the wall, all hand-painted with water and lotus flowers. It was one of the rooms they always used for when extended family came to visit because it was the most beautiful. Even the wall that looked out toward the garden was located on the colorful side of the pond. Nico stared at the pond lotuses and admitted, “I was scared to lose you.”
“I know. I was scared, too,” he said and grabbed her with big hands, pulsing with a fragile heart at his wrists. “If they’re so willing to resort to subterfuge and threats, it means that they are scared of us too. It means that we are winning.”
“But at what cost?” she asked. “They’re targeting everyone around me, now. Who will it be next?”
“It won’t be me,” he promised. “Spend all your worry on someone else, but do not worry for me. I’ll be more careful. Next time, I won’t hesitate.”
She frowned at that. “Who do we become when we no longer hesitate?”
“Survivors,” he said easily, as if knowing that was what he should have been all along. He sounded like his tah. Nico didn’t know if she agreed. And yet, hadn’t she done whatever it took to win against Kibari? She certainly hadn’t hesitated.
She didn’t know when she had become a survivor. She didn’t remember the exact moment when she began searching for assassins in the shadows, when strategies waged war in her head before breakfast, and when each day had become a battle.
She hoped for a future when all the survivors could finally walk the Grankull’s streets in peace.
“It’s so heavy,” she whispered. Life was so damn heavy sometimes.
“Yeah.” Zephyr dropped his forehead to hers and they held each other for a brief eternal moment. Sometimes, they needed this from each other too—someone to hold onto, someone to lean on and to lessen the weight to stay standing. He said her name as a promise. “We’ll help each other carry it.”