Cynna glanced at her once, then away. “I didn’t know about that.”
“I don’t talk about it.” She hadn’t talked to the therapist her folks sent her to. The only words that had made sense to her at the time had been, “I want to kill him,” and she’d seen how that affected the adults around her. Most of them anyway. “Grandmother understood. She helped. She taught me about gardening.”
“Gardening.”
The disbelief in Cynna’s voice almost made Lily smile. “When I told Grandmother I wanted to kill the monster, she patted my hand and said that of course I did, but I could not.” Not that it was wrong or unsafe or illegal or that she should not think such things, but that she could not do it. She remembered the relief she’d felt. At last, a sensible response. “I could, however, kill all the grass and weeds I wanted, and she showed me where. That first year, I killed the hell out of a lot of Bermuda grass. I planted things, too. Planting stuff, that’s leaning into the future.” She’d needed both aspects of gardening—the vegetative murder and the leaning forward.
Cynna wore an odd expression. Not quite a smile, but something more open, more like her usual self. A bit bemused maybe. “No offense, but I’d rather kill the spawn than a bunch of grass.”
“You’re not eight years old. You might be able to do it. Or you might get yourself killed trying, and we’re going to need you, so don’t make it your top priority, okay?”
“No.” Cynna drew a deep, shaky breath. “No, my priority is Ryder. Ryder and the rest of the kids. But killing Dick Boy is pretty high on the list. If I get a chance . . .” She let go of Lily’s hand and shook her head, but not as if denying something. More like the way a dog shakes after getting wet. “I didn’t intend to fall apart on you. I might do it again, though. I’m not exactly at my best.”
“I was told the children weren’t here.”
“No. Not yet.” But Cynna put a finger to her lips.
In the silence, Lily heard the guards on the other side of their door. It was heavy wood with a tiny window not much bigger than a peephole. The hinges were iron, but there was no latch, the door being held in place by a wooden bar on the other side. Crude but effective. On the other side of that door, dice rattled on the wooden floor. One man exclaimed. Another complained about his ill luck.
She understood Cynna’s caution. If they could hear the guards, the guards could hear them. Good thing they had another option.
Lily gave the glowy stuff in her middle a nudge and let it unfurl.
Cynna had some kind of mental shield, but not the kind that blocked mindspeech. To her mindsense, Cynna’s mind was like a fuzzy, glowing kiwi. The green was unusual for a human, that being the color she associated with lupi minds. Lily thought it had something to do with Cynna being Lady-touched, Rhej to the Nokolai Clan. But it might have meant something else.
The fuzziness meant that Lily could mindspeak her. To do that, she had to touch a mind with a probe, then send pulses along the probe that corresponded with what she wanted to say. Those pulses sank into minds she perceived as having texture, but slid off the slick ones. She didn’t know if the pulses carried her actual words or their meanings; people “heard” her as if she was speaking English, but maybe someone like Li Po would “hear” her in Chinese. There was a lot she hadn’t had a chance to learn about her new ability before the world started blowing up around them.
Regardless of the content, though, she had to mouth words to create the pulses. At first she’d had to speak out loud, but she’d improved enough that mouthing them silently worked now. Do you think the guards know more English than they’re admitting?
Cynna’s eyes widened in what looked like relief. All Lily got back from her, though, was gibberish that reminded her of a baby’s babble, word-like sounds without meaning. That didn’t work, she sent. Try mouthing the words the way I am.
Possibly, Cynna mouthed. Or they might [babble] translation device like they use in Edge.
Lily’s eyebrows went up. Are these people trading with Edge?
[babble] possible.
They could come back to that later, Lily decided. What about the children?
They haven’t left Dis yet. They [babble-babble] time not congruous.
Lily’s eyes widened. What?
The time here is earlier than when we left Dis. I don’t know [babble] Sam said the [babble] not more than two weeks. Might be less.
You think it might be as much as two weeks earlier here? Lily repeated to make sure she understood—though that was not the right word. She didn’t understand this at all.
It’s not more than two weeks anyway. Technical reasons for that limit. Lily, we need to talk out loud some so [babble] suspicious.
Lily rubbed her head, hoping to rub some sense into it. But yeah, it made sense that they shouldn’t just sit in silence. They didn’t want anyone guessing they could communicate this way. “So how did you get captured?”
Cynna grimaced and answered out loud. “Easily. I arrived about fifteen feet in the air and fell. Fifteen feet might not seem like much, but I fell on . . . did you see any of Lang Xin? The town outside the compound?”
“Part of it.”
“You maybe noticed that they like to build with stone. I smashed into a stone wall. I don’t know if I broke my arm then or when I hit the ground because I’d passed out by then. Made it really easy for them to capture me.”
“You hit your head?”
She shook her head. “I might have blacked out from pain, but I suspect it was from the crossing.”
“Why would crossing make you black out?”
“When you cross to a realm with a major time incongruence, that can make you disoriented enough to pass out.”
Lily frowned and spoke slowly. “I was unconscious when I first arrived. But I’d hit my head and thought that was why . . .” Her voice drifted off as the obvious rose up and smacked her. “You didn’t break your arm today. You didn’t arrive when I did, not even close. How long have you been here?”
“Six days.”
Six days. Six days as a prisoner, with a broken arm, captors who didn’t speak her language, and no way of knowing if anyone else had lived through the battle in the audience chamber. Six more days without her daughter, her baby. Six days alone in this small cell after watching the dragon spawn break a four-year-old boy’s neck. “Shit.”
“Pretty much, yeah. Do you . . . can you tell me anything about what happened after I left our little hell party?”