I grinned and nudged his head off his body, watching as it fell and rolled away from me, stopping with dead eyes staring at me.
Grabbing Hortensia’s body, I lifted it up at an angle and sliced her head clean off in an easy move, and kicked it over to rest next to Umar’s—side-by-side, their lifeless eyes gazed up at me.
Failures. The both of them.
Athena and the other companion stood mere feet away, their mouths agape.
The companion lifted his hands as if he were going to move against me.
I whipped the bloody knife up. “Try it. The aesthetic would be even better with a third head staring dead at the ceiling.”
The room erupted in applause. The humans watching had thought it was all a show for their entertainment, so I whipped around and bowed to them, accepting the praise for something they didn’t even understand. As I turned to leave again, I found Lord Otto and Cato standing in the shadows, three body lengths away, their expressions void of any emotion.
Apparently, they had been spying.
And they had let me handle it.
I threw the knife on the floor in front of them. “Clean up on aisle ten.”
Someone’s muscled arm wrapped around my waist from behind, lifting me off my feet.
Then I was yanked away.
Jallina sat at our usual spot in the coffee shop.
She jerked her head up when I sat down and gave me the biggest grin I had seen from her in months. “Kimber? That’s really you?”
“Certainly is, Jallina.”
She reached across the table and squeezed my hand. “I’ve missed you these past few weeks.”
Nodding, I squeezed her hand back. “I have missed you, too. It’s been a while since I’ve had time to do…anything.”
A small, proud smile danced across her lips. “You are quite the celebrity around here.”
Laughing, I sat back in the chair and shook my head. “I don’t mean to be.”
Once I ordered my coffee, Jallina sat forward and wrapped her hands around her mug. “Are you still teaching?”
I shook my head. “No. They took me off that duty a while ago. I train with magic most of the time now. I don’t even know why. And you? What are you doing?”
“Same thing I’ve always done. Organize the shelves and books in the library. Though they have me checking the returns now as well, for damage, so life got a little more exciting.”
“Baby steps, Jallina. You’ll get to director eventually.”
Her eyes were fixed on the coffee foam in her cup, and she grunted. The mood at our little table changed immediately.
“Is something wrong?”
“No…”
My head tilted in curiosity and I waited.
A deep sigh preceded Jallina’s explanation. “Everything has changed now, Kimber. You and Elex are not around because you’re off being important at the temple, but the rest of us have splintered apart. And not for the reasons you think. Not because you and Elex were the glue of the group—”
I laughed. We weren’t. We so very much were not.
“But we have changed. Our group has…morphed.”
“Morphed?”
She swirled the coffee this time and nodded slowly. “Morphed. Like rock under pressure. I guess none of us ever saw it because we were young and used to each other. Once you and Elex disappeared up to the temple, we all came to odds.” A little chuckle escaped her. “Drez and Milgran came to more than odds. I think they are both still sporting black eyes.”
“What on S’Kir happened?”
“The temple, if, she looked through the coffee shop before looking back at me. “Let’s talk elsewhere. There are ears here.”
I nodded, but I wasn’t reassured. There were ears everywhere. I didn’t understand why she was so worried about being overheard, either.
Passing a dozen other little shops after paying for our drinks, Jallina stopped in front of a door that had nothing more than a mark in the corner.
I knew the mark well. It was the mark of the temple.
Jallina gave a furtive glance up and down the street before she pushed the door open and stepped inside.
It was as though I had stepped back into the temple I had walked away from angrily just an hour ago. The smells, the sights, the lighting. Everything was familiar. “What is this place?”
My friend didn’t answer right away. She swept her coat off her shoulders and hung it up before motioning for me to do the same.
She led me, still quiet, into the depth of the room and sat at a table. I sat down across from her, the question still hovering between us, unanswered.
A young man, dressed as an acolyte in the main temple, hurried over.
He gasped when he saw me and dropped into a deep bow.
“How may I serve you, Lady Raven, Mistress Topir?”
“Two coffees,” Jallina answered, and the acolyte disappeared.
When had I started thinking of acolytes as separate from myself?
Jallina finally answered my question. “This place is an outlier temple. It is a safe house, a place where people come if the temple is too far for them to walk or they fear something between here and there.”
My face must have given me away.
“You didn’t know about these, did you?”
“No. Not at all.”
Tracing a pattern in the wood of the table, Jallina took a moment to gather her thoughts. “When they call us infants, Kimber, they are right. We may be closing in on our first century, but we do not know the ins and outs of this world. There are still a lot of things we won’t know for a long time.”
I put a hand to my head. “I just had this conversation.”
“What?”
“With Mistress Danai. It’s why I walked away from the temple for a while. I needed to clear my head.”
“She’s right if that’s what she told you.”
The acolyte placed the mugs of hot, rich coffee on the tabletop between us and left a plate of sugars and creamers.
In companionable silence, Jallina and I made our coffees the way we liked, the way we had left them at the coffee shop.
I took in the room around us a little bit more.
It looked a lot like the temple but was clearly not meant for dedications and prayers alone. The room was more functional, more welcoming.
Certainly, much more versatile, as evidenced by the delicious coffee.
“What happened?” My quiet words didn’t seem to break our pleasant silence too uncomfortably.
“There were arguments. When Milgran realized you were the one at the temple and spreading the news of the Breaking Times, he was… angry.” Jallina snorted in the coffee impolitely. “Well. Perhaps angry was an understatement. He was furious. He was at a loss for words, and he wanted to…”
She cleared her throat, trying to put off what she was about to say.
I waited.
“He wanted to go there and…kill you. At first. He calmed enough within a few moments to amend that to take you away from the temple, but Drez and I heard the words leave his lips.”
A week before, a day before, I would never have believed that Milgran would say such a thing. Either sentiment, killing or kidnapping.
I was now a day older and wiser.