Page 76 of City of Snakes
I hated the callous command to my voice, hated how Sybilla grimaced and glared because of it. Ryn and Elsedora nodded in agreement, though they, too, looked unsure.
“Do you think this map tracks where they are? It’s suddenly in the South Corridor isles. Maybe they traveled through an Egress?” El speculated.
“We could hunt them down,” Ryn added. I desperately wished my advisors were less good at their jobs.
Sybilla eyed me and spat, “You willnotkill him. None of you.” Her tone turned more pleading than I’d ever heard it before. “Promise me.”
Ryn glanced at me. “We cannot promise that.”
Sybilla pushed out her chair and stood. “Then at least promise you will wait until there isactualproof that Em is an envoy. Not some fucking symbol from a piss-stained map and the word of a dead man.”
“If all must fall at once, we’d need to know who the others are first,” I cut in. “No one is being killed today.Wedon’t act on impulse.”
She looked slighted and flushed. I’d done my best to repress our earlier encounter in the library; now I’d gone and revealed it still lingered in my mind.
“How could I forget,” she said and then stormed out of the dining room.
Ryn asked, “What wasthatabout?”
“None of your damned business,” I retorted.
Before we left for Eros, I headed up the bell tower to light the candles, only after having checked our bedchamber door. Locked.
VII. Willful
Chapter 25
Sybilla
Some time after our tense interaction in the dining room, I met Krait in the courtyard, ready for the council meeting. Wordlessly, he motioned toward the Egress. What had I been thinking in the library? Something about the levity of the moment, of him laughing and smiling up at me, had made me convinced there might be something good in him.
I’d been terribly wrong.
I needed to ask Emmerick about the dagger, needed to tell him of his father’s memorandum and the risk to his life. What I’d seen in that vision must have been distorted by Death’s manipulations.
Krait wore the same dress robe that I’d first seen him in on the wall of the Palace of Luz. The golden embroidered rattling serpent coiled across his chest and up the shoulder of the rust-red fabric. His dark breeches were tucked into brown buckled boots.
I stepped into the Egress beside him.
“South Tower,” Krait commanded.
We were pulled away—weightless, like the sensation of falling just before drifting asleep. Traveling by Egress was still disorienting to me. I fought the creeping nausea.
We exited the Egress into the South Tower in the Southern isles. Krait’s hand hovered at my shoulder as though contemplating whether to help ground me.
He leaned down to whisper into my ear. “It gets easier.”
“I’m fine,” I snapped back.
“I never said you weren’t.”
I hated that he’d noticed I was out of sorts.
Maybe it wasn’t only the Egress travel making me ill. In all the commotion of Asterie and Fen’s visit, I’d forgotten to ask her to have Healer Mortag make more of my tonics. My mind and body felt at odds with one another. Every joint ached. It took all my energy just to put one foot in front of the other.
Lashing out came more easily than being vulnerable. Showing any form of vulnerability to King Darvan-dick seemed foolish. Krait raised a brow at me before we stepped into the hallway of the South Tower. A tense energy greeted us. Dozens of guards with shell-shaped shields surrounded us at the Egress.
“Announce yourself,” one commanded.
