25

  The Sage of Meleko was waiting for them outside once they reached the workshop. "I wondered if I would see you this evening," Kamissa told Edric as they approached. She wore the same bright breastwrap and skirt that she'd had on when Edric had left the last time, and the radiant lamp and eyepiece still sat upon her head, both arms retracted and off. "But I expected to see you with my other hunter, not some Homin waif."

  "Sabina," Edric said, and Sara started slightly at hearing her real name. "This is Kamissa, Founder and Sage of Meleko. Kamissa, this is Princess Sabina Augusta Poplicola of New Rome, and she is in possession of an unidentified Astral relic that her father is attempting to reclaim from her."

  Kamissa's spotted tail went rigid, but only briefly. "Ancestors take that Star-cursed lizard," she swore. "He might have mentioned he was sending you after some Star-mad princess. Get inside. We need to not have this talk out here."

  She led them through the front office, down a long hallway, and into a sterile and rather bare examination room that housed only a long table, a radiant lamp, and a wooden cabinet that Edric assumed held various tools. Kamissa ushered them into the room and closed the door behind them before crossing to the far side of the table. "Now what's this about an artifact?" she asked. "I don't see any sign of a symbiote, so where is it?"

  Edric nodded to Sara, and she cleared her throat. "It's in my chest," she said, tapping her sternum. "We don't know what it is, but we know it glows. We were hoping you could help identify it to give us a better idea of why my father wants it."

  "You expect me to believe you have a symbiote in your chest?" Kamissa asked. "You would be dead."

  "There's no symbiote," Edric said. "I can't sense anything Astral about it. My symbiote can access it, but I can't make any sense of what it's trying to tell me about it."

  "That's because you don't know what you're doing," Kamissa said. "And you, girl, how did you get a relic lodged inside your chest?"

  "I don't know," Sara said, an angry frown spreading across her face as she spoke. "It's always been there."

  "Of course it has. Well, let's get to it," Kamissa said. She pulled the eyepiece of her headset into place. "Hop up on the table, girl."

  "Fine," Sara said. "Do I need to take off my tunic?"

  "No, of course not," Kamissa told her. "Why would you need to undress? The symbiotes see via the radiance." Sara cast only the briefest of confused glances at Edric before climbing up onto the table, but Kamissa still saw it and fixed Edric with a piercing, radiance-enhanced glare. "Did you make her strip when you examined her?"

  Edric's tail thrashed. "I was performing a medical examination," he said. "All I knew was that she was glowing and that there wasn't a symbiote in there. I needed to be able to see what was happening for myself because my symbiote wasn't telling me anything I could understand. Besides, she'd just finished training with Simend and another Sanguine dancer, so she was only in her strophium and subligar as it was."

  Kamissa turned back to Sara where she sat on the edge of the table. "Did he make you take your breastwrap off too?" she asked.

  "I asked her to take it off, and she agreed," Edric growled. "That was where the glow was coming from, and it was in the way."

  "Oh, of course," Kamissa mocked. "You just wanted to see what it was covering. Wanted to make sure it didn't get in the way of your digital exam." She raised her cupped hands as though she were squeezing a pair of breasts.

  "He did nothing of the sort," Sara interjected sharply. Kamissa fixed her glare on the princess, but Sara did not even flinch, returning the leopardess's glare with one of her own. "He never so much as laid a finger on my breasts. He asked before he touched me at all, explained everything he was doing, and acted with the utmost professionalism. Which, I might add, is a fair deal better than how you have treated me so far."

  Edric held his breath and watched the two women glare at each other, Kamissa's tail flicking through the air behind her. He remembered the last time somebody had gotten lippy with Kamissa, and it had ended with the fool leaving in several buckets. Even still, he felt himself preparing his arm to throw lightning, felt himself tensing his muscles to leap to Sara's defense, either physically or verbally. When Kamissa finally broke from the staring contest with Sara to glare at Edric instead, the shark set his jaw. He didn't want to fight Kamissa, since he would almost assuredly lose both physical and verbal spars. But he would protect Sara.

  Then Kamissa sighed and smoothed her whiskers. "Well, Edric was right about one thing," she said. She gave Edric a look the shark couldn't quite place in context. Was she sad? Maybe he was just bad at reading emotions regardless of Aspect. "Our symbiotes don't know everything. Some things require a human eye to see." She turned back to Sara. "I apologize if you and I got off on the wrong foot here, Princess. While I admit I am more interested in what is inside your chest than in you personally, I don't want you to feel uncomfortable in my city. But first, I need to perform an examination similar to what I'm sure Edric performed earlier. I, however, have both a much closer link to my symbiote than our piscine friend and a host more knowledge of Astral phenomena to draw on than he does. So. Are you ready to glow for me?"

  "Are you sure that's safe?" Sara asked.

  "If this glow hasn't killed you yet, it won't kill you now," Kamissa told her.

  "She's not worried about her own safety," Edric said.

  "She can talk for herself, Fisher," said Kamissa, and Edric snapped his mouth shut.

  "He's correct. I'm not worried about me specifically," Sara said. "Lucilius said the Enforcers could hear me from anywhere over the radiance, so Edric has been keeping me shielded. But when I glowed before, Navius managed to track me down even through that shielding. And the Enforcers are monsters now. I'd be worried about your entire city if they manage to find me again."

  Kamissa's tail twitched as she tapped her muzzle. Then she raised her augmented left arm. "That's interesting," she said. "You do emit a signal. Why did I not get alerted to that?" She stared into the pulsing crystal on her palm then flexed her fingers and shook her head. "The risk is worth it to figure out what this thing in you is, because now I'm even more curious. Besides, I'm confident in Meleko's defenses against monsters. So I will ask again. Are you ready to glow for me?"

  "I am," Sara said. She laid back on the bed and put her hands on her belly. Something about seeing her stretched out on the table like that twisted Edric's gut. She was safe there. He knew that. Probably safer there, surrounded by Kamissa's collection of defensive relics, than anywhere else in the world. Kamissa wouldn't harm her, no matter how eager the leopardess was to uncover the secrets locked within her. But still. She looked so vulnerable. So small. He didn't like it.

  Kamissa stepped up to the side of the table, cracked her knuckles, and held her symbiotic hand above Sara's chest. The crystals on the sage's arm flickered and pulsed, and Sara began to glow brightly enough for it to show through her tunic. "Now that's fascinating," Kamissa said. "It's a memory crystal."

  "Memory crystal?" Sara asked.

  "Like one of our archives, but more specialized," Kamissa said, still focused mostly on her symbiote.

  "Archive?" Sara asked, still lost.

  "They record things as they're happening, so you can watch them again later," Edric explained for her. "Simend has a lot of them. I'll show you one or two later. It's really impressive."

  "I can't access anything. It's all encrypted," Kamissa said. "My symbiote can't make sense of any of it. Or won't, perhaps. What are you hiding?" She glared at her hand briefly before returning her attention to Sara. "I've never seen a crystal quite like this either. There's no symbiotic interface, but it's still active. How does it process memories without an independent interface? Wait. Hold on." Kamissa leaned closer, and the radiant ring around the lens over her eye began to glow. Her tail twitched. "Is it alive? No, that's not it. That's impossible. And yet…"

  "It's attached to me," Sara said. "I can feel you prodding it even though you're not touching me. I also think I might be able to hear it sometimes."

  "You managed to see through Lucilius's invisibility back in Byzantium too," Edric noted.

  "It's using you as an interface," Kamissa said. "Fascinating! Can you decrypt its memories?"

  "I don't know how to answer that question?" Sara said slowly.

  "Here. Let me just…" Kamissa's arm flashed, and the glow from Sara's chest dimmed somewhat. "I've set it to an open query. Ask it a question, like you would to your… You don't have a symbiote. Just think a question."

  "Why is your father after you?" Edric asked.

  "She can pose her own question, Fisher," Kamissa snapped.

  "No, he's right," Sara said. "The two of us talked about this. That is the exact question I want answered." Sara took a deep breath, set her jaw, and stared silently at the ceiling. Then her eyes rolled back into her skull, her eyelids closed, and she began to twitch.

  "Sara!" Edric cried, rushing to her side. "Are you alright?" He clasped her hand between his own.

  "Hush, Edric," Kamissa hissed. "She sleeps. The memories seem to come as dreams."

  Sara did not sleep for long. She soon gasped, her eyes opening wide. "He's not my father," she whispered.

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  Edric squeezed her hand and sighed. "Oh, praise the Oceanlord, you're okay," he said.

  "I know that dream," Sara said. She pulled her hand out of Edric's to try and sit up on the table, but her arms gave out beneath her weight, and she collapsed back onto her back.

  "Sara!" Edric cried, taking her hand again. "What's wrong?"

  "Just a little weak," she said with a groan. The glow in her chest vanished. "Like everything's still asleep. It'll pass. But I've had that dream before. I'd forgotten, but now I remember it. I've had it often. You're telling me it isn't a dream?"

  "It was one of the crystal's memories," Kamissa said. "And you understood it? It's still encrypted to my senses."

  "It was The Ballad of the Butcher," Sara said, still a little loopy. "The ghost story version that Dalya and I sing. My father is the Butcher, and I am the child that vanished."

  Edric's stomach tied itself into a knot. He'd heard her rendition of The Ballad of the Butcher, and he would not wish that horror on anybody. Sara continued her story in a somewhat detached voice. "But that's not right. I'm not one of the kidnapped girls. He killed them, just like he killed his own daughter trying to shove this thing in me into her chest. No. Nobody's looking for me. My real father sold me when the emperor came, drenched in his own daughter's blood. The money was worth more than me." Edric's stomach lurched again. Had the dream been as detailed as an archive's recording? He couldn't imagine having to watch something like that.

  "That's incredible," Kamissa said, clapping her hands. "But it doesn't answer the question you posed. Why does your father want it?"

  Sara covered her face. "Hold on. Let me think. I heard some of his thoughts too." She dropped her hands. "How did it read his thoughts?"

  "Focus, please," Kamissa said. "One question at a time."

  Sara sighed and covered her face again to think. "He found it at a crater in Syria," she said. "It burned through every containment flask they had on the way back to Italia because it needed a living host. It needed to be in the child who… would crown the king to save the world?"

  "What kind of nonsense is that?" Edric asked.

  "Oh no," said Kamissa.

  Sara uncovered her face. "I think I know that story," she said. "Isn't that the Star Cult's prophecy?"

  "It is," Kamissa agreed. "And it is a problem if they think you are the child from their prophecy. They will not rest until they recover you and your crystal."

  "But that doesn't make any sense," Edric said. "Why would her father want to kill her if she's some prophesied savior? Especially if the crystal needs a living host."

  "Did your father actually say he wanted to kill you?" Kamissa asked.

  "I mean," Sara said, lazily waving her free hand above herself. "He said I was to be presented to the major relic in Cibalae and that the cultists might need the Enforcers' help getting my body into Sarmatia." She dropped her hand back onto her belly. "Oh. They weren't going to kill me. They were going to curse me. Like they did to the Enforcers. So I wouldn't be me anymore. I'd just be the host of their precious Singing Crystal." She paused briefly, and Edric didn't breathe until she continued. "I'd rather be dead."

  Edric squeezed her hand, and she laced her fingers through his. "That's monstrous," he said.

  "It is," Kamissa said. "And I know that this is a bad time to say this, but you cannot stay in Meleko, Princess."

  "What?" Edric yelled. "You're kicking her out? I expected you to keep her safe!"

  "Oh, I very much want to keep her safe," Kamissa said. "Both because I want very much to know what is stored on that crystal that the insane cultists want so badly and because I want them to not have it. But she cannot stay here. I can protect Meleko from monsters, but not from war. The Star Cult hates me and my city enough as it is, and if they find out that I am harboring their savior, the entirety of the New Roman Legion will sail into my harbor within weeks. No matter how many luminaries and relics I have here, the Star Cult has more. Allowing this girl to stay here dooms both her and my entire city. So she must leave."

  "But—!" Edric began to protest, but Sara squeezed his hand.

  "I understand," the princess said. "I'm sorry for putting your city in danger."

  "Do not apologize to me, child," Kamissa said. "I must apologize to you for being so poor a hostess. I will give you all the relics I can spare to ease your journey and keep you safe. Shields. Communicators. Weapons. Even a symbiote for your jackal friend if he will take it. But you must leave. And soon."

  Edric scooped the still-limp Sara up in his arms. She leaned against his chest. "Come on, Sara," he told her. He tried not to sound angry in front of Kamissa, but he knew that he did. "Let's get you out of here."

  "You know the job is done, Edric, don't you?" Kamissa called after him as he stomped out of the room. "You are home. She is not your concern now." Edric didn't answer her. He wasn't even entirely paying attention to where they were going. All he could think was that he'd been right to worry, that he'd been right to come, that he'd been right that everything was going to be awful.

  She would be gone.

  Sara began to come back to her senses as Edric stormed almost blindly through town. "I'm sorry," she said. "My head feels a bit fuzzy. Did Kamissa really say I have to leave again already?"

  "She didn't say when," Edric said. His voice was rough. "She just said you couldn't stay."

  "Oh," Sara answered. She tried to adjust herself in his arms to a more comfortable position. He helped her sit higher so she could wrap her arms around his neck. She rested her head against his scarf, and his gills fluttered beneath the pressure. "There really is no place in the world for me anymore, is there?"

  "We'll find you a place," Edric growled. His feet kept moving, though he wasn't even certain where they were. His eyes still worked fine, he knew, but he couldn't seem to focus on what they were telling him. His head vacillated wildly between feeling entirely hollow and being crammed full of firewasps.

  "We?" Sara asked. "Edric, you're home. I thank you for everything you've done, but this is where we part ways. You have a life here, and I…" She buried her face in his shoulder. "I don't have a place anywhere. Please, Edric. I already ruined Dalya's life. I can't ruin yours too."

  "You're not going to ruin my life," he told her. "Having you in my life has been nothing but good. I promised to protect you, and I'm not going to just go back on that. So don't ask me to leave again, alright? We'll figure this out together, and if it comes to it, we'll leave together too."

  "You'll what now?" someone called.

  Edric paused and looked around. He knew that voice. He even knew where they were. His feet had led him directly to the plaza where they'd agreed to meet Simend and Dalibor. And Binta, who was the one who'd addressed him and was currently sitting on a bench across the plaza with the two jackals.

  "Oh! Bea!" Edric said. He crossed the plaza to the others. "Good. We found you."

  "It looked like you were going to walk right past us," Simend said.

  "What's this about us leaving?" Dalibor asked.

  "And about you leaving with them?" Binta added, standing up from the bench.

  "Have we met?" Sara asked, her arms still wrapped around Edric's neck.

  "Oh, right," Edric said. "Here. Can you stand yet?"

  "I can, yes," Sara said, and he set her down. She smoothed her tunic and drew herself up to her full, if short, height.

  "Sara, this is Binta, my mate," Edric told her. "Bea, this is Sara, one of the people Kamissa sent us to protect."

  Sara held out her hand to Binta, but the lioness did not take it. "And you brought her back with you?" she asked.

  "The job was to protect her," Edric said. "And given the things that are chasing her, this was one of the safest places to go. She also has a relic that we needed Kamissa's help with."

  "And so now she is here, and she is safe," said Binta. "You can leave her and her jackal friend with Kamissa and we can go home. The job is done."

  "That's just it, though," Edric said. "Kamissa's kicking her out. She says it's too dangerous to the city for her to stay here."

  "What?" Dalibor asked, folding his ears back. "She's dangerous? Is this about her relic?"

  "No, it's because of the Star Cult," Sara said. "My relic isn't harmful. Kamissa was very helpful on that front."

  "Exactly," Edric said. "Kamissa's worried that if Sara stays the entire New Roman Legion will march on Meleko."

  "Then you must get rid of her!" Binta said. "Edric, the Legion will destroy everything if they come here!"

  Edric took a step back. "I can't just get rid of her, Bea," he said. "She's not garbage to be thrown out. We have to help her."

  "We?" Binta asked. "We have to go home. Let Kamissa help them if they must be helped. Your job is done."

  "You don't understand," Edric said. "I promised to take care of her."

  "Edric…" Sara said.

  But Binta did not give her a chance to speak. "You promised?" she hissed. "You promised? And what of your promises to me? Did you not promise to take care of me as well? Did you not promise to always be there for me when you returned home? And yet here I find you, parading through town with this wretched wisp of a half-baked woman in your arms while I have been waiting, Ed, waiting for nearly a year, thinking that you must certainly be dead!"

  It was then that Edric finally realized the danger that he had walked into. Simend had even tried to warn him, but he had brushed the jackal's concerns aside. The same jackal was now sitting beside Dalibor, staring down into his lap where his hands clutched his bristling tail. What was Simend afraid of? "It's not like that, Bea," Edric said. "You know that—"

  "What do I know?" Binta interrupted. "What can I know? Because I know that I cannot trust you to tell me the truth given what Simend has told me of your behavior while you were gone."

  Simend looked up, his eyes pleading. "Binta, no," he begged. "I didn't—"

  "Even you will refuse me!" Binta shrieked. Edric looked around nervously. Other people were beginning to watch now. "I have been wronged! For a year I waited at home without a single word or letter, convinced my lover had died at sea, when instead he was rolling around with some furless whore!"

  "She's not a whore!" Edric shouted at her, suddenly not caring who was watching. "And we didn't sleep with each other! But what if we did? We agreed we could sleep with other people while I was away!"

  "That was when I thought it was only Simend you were sleeping with!" Binta shouted back. "Or some tavern prostitute, not a child you were traveling with. For a year! Not somebody you might actually care about! Not some hussy who should only ever have been a job!"

  "She's not just a job!" Edric yelled. "She's a person, and I do care about her!"

  He wished he could take it back as soon as the words were out of his mouth. The words were true, but he should not have said them. Not now. Not here. Not like that. He saw them hit Binta like a slap, saw them knock the air out of her, and he wanted so badly to reach into his arm and command his symbiote to reverse time just five seconds so he could do it over again. But he could not. Not even the radiance could unwrite the flow of time.

  "Fine," Binta said. She had lowered her voice, but her tail thrashed, and her entire body trembled with her rage. "I wish you all the joy of each other."

  "Bea, wait," Edric said, holding out a hand for her, palm facing forward, hoping to connect with her as they had so many times before.

  She slapped his hand away. "If she can find any joy in something like you."

  Something dark loomed, and Edric's stomach roiled. "What?" he croaked.

  "Did you think I didn't know?" Binta asked, her voice clear and furious. "Did you really think you could keep it from me? That I wouldn't know that my mate, my so-called lover, was some passive cock sleeve?"

  Edric stopped breathing. His vision began to blur around the edges. That couldn't be what she had just said. It couldn't be happening. Not in front of everybody. Not again.

  "Binta, stop," he heard Simend snarl.

  But Binta did not stop. Though he could barely hear her words over the growing roar in his ears, still each syllable seared its way through his head to brand itself forever onto his heart. "I could always tell you were no more a man than I was. I didn't need to see an archive of you with your tail in the air and Simend between your thighs, railing you from behind, to know how useless you were as a man." There were gasps from around the plaza, and the world shrank further. All that remained was the scorn writ plain upon Binta's feline features. "Did you think you could hide something like that? Did you really think that nobody could just look at you and see you for the unmanly tail-raiser that you are? You are disgusting, and it's a wonder I put up with you for as long as I did. Do I not deserve a real man? And yet here you are, thinking you can hoodwink yet another woman into believing you're worth anything despite your perverse tastes. Well let me be the one to tell you, since you apparently haven't learned this lesson on your own. You are broken, you are useless, and you will die alone, because what woman could ever love something like you?"

  Edric fled. He didn't know where. He knew he stumbled, knew that he ran into one of the witnesses to his shunning, knew he was weeping, knew that he had to get away. He glanced back only once because he had to see. Had to know. But Sara wasn't looking at him. She looked away from him, furious, fists clenched and mouth twisted. Because what else could she be now that she knew he had been deceiving her? But it didn't matter anymore. Edric ran, wishing he hadn't looked back. He didn't want that to be the last image he had of the princess, but his symbiote could not undo what had happened. No matter how much he might wish it, he knew that he would not have another chance to see her.

  She would be gone.