“Pretty much.”
That sounded about right. Lily lowered her voice to a whisper again. “I was thinking it might have been a setup.”
“You mean that Dick Boy and Kongqi were only pretending to ignore you?”
“I mean the whole thing. It could have been a way to test me, see if I’d keep my promise of secrecy. Not that I think all the spawn were in on it,” she added. “Maybe none of them were. Maybe it was all Alice. She could have said or done something to make Dick Boy suspicious, couldn’t she? Knowing he’d react the way he did. I get the idea that Dick Boy is more obvious and direct than the others.”
“I guess that’s possible.”
Cynna sounded dubious. Lily couldn’t explain without saying things out loud that she shouldn’t—and maybe because it wasn’t clear to her, either. But it all wrapped around Alice. Alice had her finger in everything here, and she kept doing things that didn’t make sense.
One thing was sure, though. They made sense to Alice.
Overhead, the single mage light winked out. Lily grimaced at the darkness. One of the most aggravating things about being a prisoner was not being in control of even the small stuff, like light.
“We should get some sleep,” Cynna said.
“Yeah. Tomorrow will show up at the usual time.” And tomorrow the kids might arrive. Or not.
Toby and Ryder. Diego, grandson of Ybirra Clan’s Rho. Four-year-old Sandy, son of the Cz?s Lu Nuncio. And three-month-old Noah, whose grandfather had been the Etorri Rho. All of them lupi. All of them born to Change when they hit puberty. All of them except Ryder closely related to the Rho of his clan . . . and that could not be coincidence. Cynna thought the rite to transfer the Change must require children with proximity to the mantle. Children with founder’s blood.
And thinking about all that made it hard for Lily to settle her mind when she lay down on her thin sleeping mat. She did try poking at her mindsense, but it was so sluggish and her head hurt so much . . . Rule wouldn’t panic. He’d known she was having trouble holding the connection. He wouldn’t be going crazy, wondering what had happened. She hoped.
She rolled onto her side, but that was the bruised hip. A thin mat between it and the floor did not work. She sighed and rolled onto her back again and stared up at a ceiling dusted with moonlight from the rebuilt window slit. The countdown clock kept clicking in her brain. One more day until the kids got here . . . or maybe five. Or four, or three, or two . . . Between one and three days until Rule arrived. It depended on whether the boat he was on had to wait on some magistrate.
The kids might get here before he did. Rule’s plan depended on him, Grandmother, and Gan getting here first.
Rule’s plan was pretty damn shaky.
It was better than anything she’d come up with, she reminded herself. It did what it was supposed to: maximized their assets and gave them the best chance they had of succeeding. It wasn’t the fault of his plan that their chances were so damn slim. They didn’t have many assets, not when stacked up against an Old One, six dragon spawn, and an entire world.
She was not cheering herself up, was she?
Cynna’s mind must have been giving her a hard time, too. She’d been doing the same sort of shifting around Lily had. Finally she sighed. “You’re awake, too.”
“Yeah.”
“I’m just so scared.”
“Yeah.”
Cynna snorted. “That’s it? That’s all I get? No pep talk about how it’s all going to work out?”
“Come on. You’d hit me if I said something stupid like that.”
“That is oddly comforting.” A pause. “It’s a wonder I didn’t pee myself when Dick Boy did the magic jujitsu to me.”
“Um . . . the jùdà téng?”
“That thing. Yeah. I’ve never felt pain like that. I’ve given birth, but I’ve never hurt like that. He could have done that to me before instead of killing that little boy. I’d have cracked like an egg. Told him anything.”
“That’s the thing about torture. It both works and doesn’t. If we hurt enough, we’ll say anything to make it stop, but ‘anything’ doesn’t mean what we say is true. We’ll say whatever we think will make them stop hurting us.”
Another pause. “You didn’t. When they used the pain ants on you, you didn’t crack.”
Lily did not like thinking about that. It made her gut feel like jelly—a mooshy, quivery, about-to-fall-apart feeling. “I would have.”
“But you didn’t.”
“Cynna. Get real. The hallucinations hit before I broke, and then I was too crazy to give Kongqi what he wanted. I couldn’t even make sense of the question. Half the time I didn’t know he was asking a question. His voice turned into a gong or his mouth turned into a cavern and bats flew out and attacked me.” Attacked with burning, horrible bites. Ate her arm with acid mouths.
“But you said no. Over and over, you told him no.”
“Did I? Yeah,” she said, remembering. “It seemed like that was the one thing I knew, the one solid thing. I had to keep saying no.” Say no to the monsters. That’s what she’d held on to.
“I don’t have anything that solid. I don’t have your strength.”
“Strength isn’t something you have, like blond hair or a sweet tooth. You have to make it up fresh every damn time.”
“What does that even mean? I have no idea what that means.”
“It’s what Grandmother told me a long time ago.” Not long after Lily’s friend had been raped and killed in front of her. “I’d heard some of Mother’s friends talking about how strong I was. ‘So strong to be so young,’ they said. Stuff like that. It made me mad. I didn’t feel strong. I felt ripped up, angry, horrible. I told Grandmother what I’d overheard and how mad it made me. She asked what I thought strength was. I said I didn’t know, but I didn’t have it. Nothing was easy. Getting up in the morning was hard. Going to bed was hard. So was everything in between.”
“What did she say?”
“That strength doesn’t make things easy. It makes things possible. And no one really is strong. We don’t have some well of strength we can drop a bucket into and scoop some up. We all have to make it up as we go along, she said. So I asked, even you? Oh, yes, she told me. She was good at making strength because she’d had so much practice. No doubt I would get better at it as I grew older, but I must not expect to feel strong. At the times we most need strength, we never feel strong.”
Cynna was quiet for several moments. “Is making it up the same thing as pretending?”
“Not exactly, though I guess you could use that if it’s what you have. You make strength up out of whatever’s at hand in that moment—anger, a bit of song, a sunset, a memory. Habit. Training. Stubbornness . . . that’s my personal favorite. And what you’ve got changes, so you can’t always use the same stuff. What worked last time might not work next time.”