Page 45 of The Lure of Wolves and Whispers
If I give the Whisperers even a shred of a reason to think I’ll endanger their scheming, Wolf won’t hesitate. He’ll kill me, and he’ll kill Finn, too, if he thinks I’m saying anything that might let someone send the gardai after him.
A bead of sweat forms at my temple. The muggy air swims around me, thick with shimmering heat and the heavy scent of too many floral soaps. “My sister taught me.”
At least that information can’t possibly get me hurt.
Aoife’s brows rise. “You have a sister?”
I sit up a little more against the edge of the bath. The heat has risen to a level that borders on suffocating. “She’s back in Quay-side,” I answer. Old Ones, even sitting up doesn’t help my body get rid of the heat. I taste salt, beads of it trickling along my upper lip, and my head spins. “Is there somewhere to just…” I wipe at the sweat, dizzy. “Cool down for a minute?”
I need to get out of this heat, but I don’t want her to follow me.
Not while my head is still spinning.
“It can be a lot your first time here.” Aoife smiles and tilts her head to the tiled hall at the far end of the grotto bathing chamber. “There’s a cooling room that way, or your clothes are still where you left them in the changing room.”
The towel is soft as a blanket against my bare skin. Still, the intense heat flushes up my neck, my cheeks. All I want is to rip the towel off and lie down naked on the cool tile, but I’m not about to risk my neck alone in a cooling chamber where I know nothing about the exits and entrances and don’t even have a weapon on me.
Forcing my tunic and leathers back on over my damp skin is a battle.
By the time I have them on, I’m sweating even more than before.
In the heat-fogged mirrors of the changing room, chestnut hair sticks to my forehead and my hazy eyes stare back at me. Gray as slate and framed with long, dark lashes. A bright flush colors my high cheekbones.
My knives fit back into the sheaths at my side with practiced ease, and I force myself out of the changing room and stumble back into the maze of hewn halls we came here through.
Cool air sweeps over me.
The only sound is the padding of my worn boots on the stone. Orange light flickers from the iron sconces. My head swims, heat still clinging to my senses. All along the hewn halls, tapestries hang from the stones. There are none as fine, or new, as the ones in the upper parts of the castle—the tapestries here fray around their yellowing edges with the wear of centuries.
Maybe almost as old as the High Kingship itself.
A particularly long tapestry stretches down half the length of a hall. And with no one around—I check over my shoulder to make sure—my fingers itch to run over the delicate gems and silver threads woven through the fabric.
How has no one stolen them in all these years?
The specter of the Black Quay weighs at the back of my neck at the thought.
Right.That’s how.
Still, touching isn’t taking. And I let myself touch—running one finger, then another, along the carefully stitched figures depicting long-ago battles, tiny shards of rubies glowing in the torchlight to make the spilled blood of centuries look fresh.
The words across the top of the tapestry make clear why almost a third of the tapestry bleeds with red thread and ruby slivers.
The War of Wasted Blood.
The war after the first High King, Berach the Cunning, ousted the Old Ones and defeated the Cymrean attempts to invade in the chaos that followed.
There is no formal schooling in Quayside. No teachers, no books, no classes. But we have stories, and with the right tellers, they are more powerful than any lecture or text. And no matter how long I live, nothing will fade the soft brush of my mother’s words in my mind as she taught them to me.
I frown.
This tapestry, though… it doesn’t make sense. There are pieces I recognize, fragments that match the broad strokes of the stories she whispered to me as she tucked me in each night. The Seven Wells are vivid, stitched in threads of shimmering black interwoven with silver, so the effect is close to the starlit-night hue of magic in their depths. But there are streaks of fog hovering around the edges of the battlefield, twining around yellowed fields.
Armies do battle across the map of the tapestry, embroidery so delicate that my stomach turns at the pain in the faces of the clashingfighters. And at the far left corner of the tapestry, watching the battle spread across the center from a gray cliff-side tower in the west, a solitary face is barely visible in the shadows of the stone. A lone woman, a golden circlet around her brow and shadows curling around her hands. If I weren’t standing this close, I would miss it. The way the tower is stitched almost looks like one of the Seven Wells, which I can clearly count embroidered across the rest of the tapestry.
And from the far right of the tapestry, the fanged jaws of Cymrea to the east open wide.
Raw revulsion sours in my stomach at the sight of their borders.
