Page 10 of Dark Mate

“Yes, love?”

“What’s in the tea?”

The brush doesn’t stop this time. The rhythm stays dead even, each stroke the same length, the same weight, the same path root to end. Her breathing doesn’t change. Her posture doesn’t shift.

“Herbs,” she says. “The sisters blend them in the annex. Chamomile, valerian, a local flower—I don’t know its proper name. It helps with sleep. With settling.”

“With settling.”

“Mornings can be restless. The tea eases the way into the day.”

The answer’s smooth. Polished. Handed over with the same warmth as everything Mora hands over, the same certainty, thesame gentleness that won’t be stopped. I look at her in the little oval mirror. Her face is calm. Her hands are steady. The leather case sits open behind her, the vials catching the lantern light.

She believes what she’s telling me. That’s the thing I keep coming back around to. Mora isn’t lying. Mora is telling me the truth the way she knows it, the herbs help with settling, the settling is good for me, the good is part of the Cage’s care, the care is part of the holy plan. Each piece links to the next in a chain with no flaw anywhere in it. You can hold the whole thing up to the light and not find a single seam.

Unless you’re looking for the seam. Unless Neve’s told you the tea tastes wrong some mornings. Unless you put your hand on a warm wall and felt something breathing on the other side.

“Thank you,” I say.

She finishes the brushing. Ties my hair in a loose knot for sleeping. Presses her lips to the crown of my head—quick, soft, the way a mother would. The gesture pulls my throat tight.

“Sleep well, love.”

She takes the leather case. She takes the tablet. She goes.

I sit on the stool a long time.

The mirror gives me back my own face, pale, blonde hair loose from its braid, the kind of face the Ordained keep clean and soft and presentable. My eyes are pale green, washed nearly gray in the low light. My skin’s got the particular paleness of someone who’s never once stood in unfiltered sun.

I look at my own reflection and try to see what the reading sees. What the numbers and codes mean when they mean me. A body. A womb. A fertility that’s strong, whateverstrongis supposed to mean about the chances of being bred by something ten feet tall with claws that scar stone.

My fertility reading is strong. I don’t know what that means. I only know it means something to the Ordained—something with tablets and lists and little marks beside my name.

I know Mora opened a case of vials and a pipette while she brushed my hair. The tenderness and the measuring lived in the same hands at the same time. The leather case has been there every night for thirteen years. I never asked about it, because the tea made the not-asking feel natural, feel right—the simple contentment of a woman who trusts the one taking care of her.

I lie down. The bed is soft. The silk is cool on my arms. The fountain runs in the courtyard below, steady and constant, the sound of water recycled and recycled and recycled.

Outside my window the night presses close. The canopy’s a black wall against the stars. The scratch on the east wall is lost in the dark.

But there’s something new.

A second scratch. Below my window. Lower than the first, closer to the glass. I can just make it out in the moonlight—pale stone torn open, the gouge deep enough to throw its own little shadow. Whatever made the first one came back. Came closer. Tried the stone a foot nearer to where I sleep.

It’s on purpose. Not the careless mark of something brushing past, but the focused work of a thing learning the wall’s weak spots the way a mason learns stone. Testing where to push. Where it’ll give.

The moonlight catches the depth of the gouge. Whatever made this was patient. Whatever made this is coming back.

I pull the coverlet to my chin. I close my eyes. The warmth of Mora’s hands is still in my hair, the almond oil sweet on my pillow. The tenderness is real. The leather case with its vials is real. Both things are true at the same time. Both of them are Mora.

I sleep. The scratch on the wall faces the canopy. The canopy faces the dark. Both are patient—and so, I think, is whatever waits on the far side of it.

5

ELLIE

They take Lissa, Hanne, and Rem at dawn.

I see it from the courtyard. The morning bell hasn’t even rung. I’m early, awake before the tea, standing in the garden with the dew on the olive leaves catching the first pink light. The flagstones are cold under my bare feet. I came out without sandals, pulled by a sound I thought was a bird and turned out to be one of the sisters singing the preparation hymn from inside the wing, her voice thin and clear and formal in the pre-dawn quiet. The fountain’s louder in the morning. The air’s cool, carrying the jasmine and the sharper smell of wet stone, the mineral taste of the courtyard after a night of dew.