Lady of Stone, page 18
“You know me,” she said, hoping she sounded natural. “Suspicious of everyone.”
He rolled his eyes, and she tried to think fast. Calla now knew all about Sylph, but Sylph had destroyed her pyramids, so she couldn’t attack them. No wonder she was so grouchy. And no simple mind pyramid would be able to convince Gunnar and the Order to kill Thana. That much tampering would show.
“Fine,” Gunnar said. “Feel free to keep an eye on her. Is that all you hauled me away for, or are you taking me up on my romantic advice?”
Spirits above, he sounded just like himself. Was he really under hypnosis? She couldn’t just sit around waiting to find out. “Yes,” she said, buying time but not listening as he began speaking of seduction. Maybe she and Sylph could find a way to immobilize the Order before Calla’s comrades arrived or whatever her plan was.
“Got it?” Gunnar asked.
“Yep.”
“Okay, now you also have to remember…”
She needed to get Sylph alone again. Wait until everyone went to sleep? That might be too late.
“It all depends on how long you want the, um, session to last.” By his lascivious wink, he wasn’t talking about a session of the nobles’ council.
“Right,” she said, telling herself to remind him later that she didn’t need actual sex instructions.
“But that was just my experience,” he said. “You might want to be more flexible.”
Spirits, she did not want to know what kind of flexibility he meant. “I’ve got it.”
“Okay,” he said with a chuckle, holding up his hands. He pointed toward the fire before leaning in. “Are you going to try it on tonight after the lights are out?”
She was about to snap that they were in the middle of a crisis, but his suggestion was one way to be alone. “Yep, right now.”
He leaned back, eyes wide. “Now? Than, we haven’t finished discussing—”
“Nope, sorry, right now. Loins afire and all that.” She nearly raced back, snatching up a candle Illis was using to dig around in his tent.
“Hey,” he said, but she paid him no mind.
“Sorry, everyone,” she said. “Time to be alone. Romance and such.” She laughed, knowing she sounded awkward, her hatred of lying mixing with her sense of impending doom. Maybe they’d think it was passion.
Sylph gaped as Thana grabbed her arm and forced her into a stumble toward another tent. “What—”
“Just play along,” Thana whispered. “Good night, all! Good sleeping, and if not…good…other things, too.” Her laugh sounded as merry as two pots grating together, but she hoped it would be enough.
Chapter Fifteen
Inside the tent, Sylph snatched her arm back. “I beg your pardon!” Her ire was up, even though part of her was curious about what was happening. “I will not be commanded into your bed like some kind of…” Words failed her, but the look of shock and fear on Thana’s face stilled her anyway. “What’s going on?”
“I think the word you were looking for is prostitute, but I wouldn’t try to push one of them around if I were you.” She was babbling, the words running into one another. “My friend Marcus has tossed many a client out on their ear.” She was sweating and shaking, far from a paramour.
“What’s going on?” Sylph repeated, narrowing her eyes.
Thana took a deep breath. “I think the prince and the Order might be under the control of a mind pyramid.” She spoke quickly of convenient cousins and false memories, all of it in a quiet rush that Sylph barely followed.
“And what can we do about this?” Sylph asked.
Thana stared at her hopelessly before a nervous laugh escaped her. “I was hoping you’d have an idea. Can you make one of my pyramids into a mind pyramid?”
“I wouldn’t know where to start.” She tried to think of a way, but all her experience had been with destructive or utility pyramids. And though a description had helped her find a cancelation pyramid, creating one seemed quite a different matter.
“Me neither,” Thana said. “I never even heard of it before you, and you’ve only created your stone pyramids.” She nodded. “Maybe that’s the key. You can use the ground to restrain them until we can get a mind pyramid.”
Sylph frowned. She didn’t want to doubt an area where Thana had more expertise, but she had to ask, “Are you certain about this course of action? This is the prince.”
“I know.”
“An Umbriel.”
“I know!” She took another breath and bit her lip as if that would keep her voice down. “It’s Calla. I can’t believe her, and this situation is too important to be working with someone I don’t know and can’t trust. If Gunnar is not under pyramid control…I have to hope he’ll understand.”
Sylph’s heart went out to her, and she was beyond touched that Thana trusted her, especially after their last conversation. She hoped all her faith shone in her eyes. When Thana smiled gratefully, Sylph knew it was so. Then she looked away, expression pained as if she was remembering their earlier words. Before she could ask, Thana brought out the stone pyramid.
Fear bloomed in Sylph’s belly, but she took the pyramid anyway. “What would you have me do?”
“I don’t know. Bury them up to their waists?”
Sylph frowned. “That leaves them awfully vulnerable.”
“And you’d have to keep a close watch, or they might dig themselves out.” She hit her forehead with the heel of her hand. “Why am I so bad at planning? Or being a pyradisté? Or everything except stupid pyramid trivia?”
“You are not—”
“We can run,” Thana said resignedly. “It’s sort of worked so far. Even if some mystery attacker comes, maybe you can cancel all their pyramids so we don’t get blown to pieces. But if they have a mind pyramid, there might not be time to spare it, even with your skill.”
“And yours,” Sylph said, daring to clasp her arm. “You are not useless.” The desire to prove it rose within her. “I’m tired of running. We can do better than burial, and your prince will only have to forgive a minor inconvenience if we’re wrong.” A feeling of calm washed over her, and she wondered if there was a way to bottle this feeling for when she needed it again.
Undoubtedly not.
She moved toward the tent flap, but Thana caught her arm. “How can you want to repress your gift one moment, then use it so readily when asked?” She ducked her head as if fearful of the answer.
“Because it’s for you.” The words came out so easily, another gift of calm.
Thana’s face lit up, then quickly dimmed again. Perhaps she realized that Sylph’s insistence on learning to deny the magic would keep them apart once the danger had passed. A sad thought, but…
Then Thana’s hangdog look evaporated for the most part, and she clasped Sylph’s hand. “Thank you for believing me.” So much hope and admiration shone in those eyes.
Beautiful eyes. Sylph nodded. If nothing else, she would use magic to ensure that Thana lived.
They peeked outside. The others were gathered around the fire, whispering. Calla frowned hard, a sign of thwarted plans or an escalation of her normal expression? There was nothing for it but to trust in Thana.
Sylph closed her eyes and focused on her pyramid. She dropped into it as quickly as if she’d leaped down a well. The feeling of earth surrounded her, stable and eternal. What was forest had once been many different climes, the ground constantly churning, though the living were too quick to notice. What was soil had been sand, and the rock beneath remembered journeys from snowcapped mountains and towering spires of ice.
They stirred at her call. Thana made a little cry as the ground began to tremble. More cries came from outside, prompting Sylph to hurry even as the earth had no such concept. The rumble became a crash, a shuddering roar, then the scream of long dormant stone rising past its fellows. She dared another look.
The Order was on their feet, crying out as spears of stone rose around them. Calla’s wide eyes met Sylph’s, and she pointed, mouth open to accuse. But now that the stone was free, Sylph taught it how to be as water, and it flowed around the Order, snuffing their campfire and entombing them.
Well, not quite. She commanded windows to open on the structure, apertures too small to climb through. When she eased everything into stillness, she couldn’t help a smile.
In the light of the candle, Thana seemed in awe, and part of Sylph considered it might be worth embracing the forbidden if she could see that look all the time.
“Curse it, Thana,” the prince yelled. “What are you playing at?” His pale face shone at one of the windows.
“I…” Thana licked her lips but crawled out of the tent, Sylph following. “I think you may have been manipulated by a pyramid, Gun.”
“You have gone mad.”
“By Calla,” Thana said, her chin lifting as if confidence was rushing back. “This cousin I’ve never heard of.”
“Clearly, we don’t tell each other everything,” he said, the words clipped. “Nothing you told me of Lady Sylph included her masonry skills. Now let me out.”
“She cannot,” Sylph said. “They are my masonry skills, after all. The stone is under my power.” She bowed. “I must beg your forgiveness, Highness, for I will not set you free until Thana is certain your mind is clear.”
He slid his lip through his teeth, no doubt holding in a wealth of expletives. “And do you possess a mind pyramid?”
Thana glanced at Sylph and swallowed. “No.”
“Then how, in your spirits-cursed brain, do you propose to clear us?”
Luckily, his angry tone seemed to make Thana more determined, a reaction to an angry royal that Sylph had never witnessed. “If I’m right, I’ll steal one when Calla’s cohorts catch up to us.”
“Curse you, I don’t have any cohorts,” Calla yelled from another window. “And if you haven’t heard of me before, trust me, you’ll remember me after I get my hands around your neck.”
Sylph’s gaze shifted back to the prince. He didn’t censure his so-called cousin for threatening his friend, but that could be for many reasons, the most obvious being that he wanted to strangle Thana, too.
“Highness,” she said, ignoring Calla. “We are acting in the only way that makes sense to us at the moment. If you have not been hypnotized, I am certain you will understand in time.”
Several cries of protest came from behind him. He closed his eyes, then opened them and said in a calmer voice, “And what do you intend to do when these supposed cohorts arrive?”
“Best if you don’t know,” Thana said quickly. She pulled Sylph some distance away. “What should we do now?”
Sylph blinked and nodded at the prison. “This concludes what I had planned.”
Thana ran her free hand through her hair. Sylph took the candle so she could pace and gesticulate as she liked. “Well, I have some pyramids, and you have your stone power. If anyone tries to cancel our pyramids, you can turn it against them. And Calla is unarmed.”
“Quite.” Sylph was still proud of that.
“And it’s not cold, so the Order won’t be that uncomfortable. And they’ll live.”
“Yes.” She suspected Thana’s questions were rhetorical but thought she should contribute something.
“Traps,” Thana said, snapping her fingers. “You hunt. You can make traps.”
Sylph frowned, casting her mind back to the hunt but finding nothing useful. “I believe riding down prey and shooting it is a separate skill from laying a trap.”
“Makes sense,” Thana said with a sigh. “And it’s just our luck. Illis is the person I’d ask, but I don’t think he’ll be in the mood to help.” She lifted her arms, dropped them, and blew out her cheeks.
Too adorable. Sylph bent slightly and kissed her, lingering for just a moment before she stepped back.
Thana smiled. “What was that for?”
“Inspiration.”
She tilted her head as if confused, still grinning before her eyes widened. “I may not know how to lay a complex trap, but I know how to dig a pit.” She tapped the stone pyramid. “If you don’t mind, of course.”
Sylph found she didn’t mind, not even a little, not in this moment. “For you? I never mind.”
* * *
Sylph’s abilities were awe-inspiring, worship-worthy, and a thing of beauty to behold.
And Thana was so jealous, it felt as if she were eating her own liver.
Before, she’d been too swept up in the moment to ponder how unfair it was, but now, as she waited among a sea of wide pits and a prison of stone, she could really sink her teeth into some old-fashioned envy.
As Sylph had dug the pits, Thana had labored with her hands, covering their work with piles of branches. Sylph had covered other holes with a brittle crust of earth that wouldn’t hold any weight. And now came the waiting, the pondering, and the spirits-cursed jealousy, the kind that could easily bake into resentment and kill a relationship.
As if they had one.
Now that the crisis had been temporarily suspended, Sylph had gone back to silence, though it didn’t seem as tense as before. Thana didn’t know what to do. Their every interaction seemed a lot harder than a relationship should be.
She wandered to the prison. Gunnar leaned against his window, the picture of idleness, but she recognized his coiled grace, the ability to react at a moment’s notice when his enemies didn’t expect it.
“I’m not your enemy, Gun,” she said. “I’m trying to help.”
“I know that’s what you think. What you’re actually doing is wasting time, and you’re not even doing that in your beautiful lover’s arms. I don’t know if I can forgive that.”
Partly a jest but partly not. It stung. “I don’t know what to do about her. When I need her, when there’s action to be taken, she’s there. When it’s over, she…freezes, and she says things that make me want to smack her.”
“Are you seriously asking my advice after imprisoning me?”
She shook her head. What else was there to do? “I just don’t know what to do.”
“Unbelievable. You could let me go. There’s idea number one.”
“Nothing like this has happened to you before?”
The light from the newly made campfire flickered in his eyes as he looked at her without expression.
“I’m not letting you out, and I can hear snoring in there, so I’m guessing you don’t have many people to talk to at the moment.”
He sighed. “Why would you want the advice of someone who’s been hypnotized? Advice I’ve already given you, by the way, and which you clearly did not attend to.”
“I attended enough to know it was sex advice, which I do not need, by the way. And if you have been hypnotized, it would only work if they manipulated a little of your memory, enough to make you trust Calla and perhaps mistrust me when the time came.”
He pointed at the ground, his eyebrows up. “And that’s now, right? You didn’t need Calla’s help, then.”
Thana’s irritation rose, and it felt nice to be angry at someone besides Sylph. “I bet that if I asked you to punch her, you couldn’t.”
His jaw dropped. “No, I wouldn’t, you ass, because why would I strike an innocent person on nothing more than your say-so?”
And he was right, but so was she. “You couldn’t do it even if you wanted.” Maybe she could prompt Calla to attack him, and then…
No, that was madness. She was getting too tired to think straight. “I’m sorry.”
His smile was brittle. “Nothing says apology like freeing your chum from prison.”
She chuckled and reconsidered for the hundredth time. Maybe she was wrong. It would take a master of mind magic to tinker with someone as she suspected. But it wasn’t impossible, according to the lore, and the academy had many masters.
And Gunnar wouldn’t speak with her, it seemed. She couldn’t blame him. She went and sat by the newly made fire, trying not to drown in all the assumptions she’d made, hoping this didn’t spell the end of their friendship. She’d never hoped that someone had been hypnotized before.
If Calla was the enemy, Thana hoped her reinforcements would come to her. If she was supposed to lead the Order to them, Thana might be waiting a long time, and she couldn’t keep the Order locked up forever. She and Sylph would have to sleep eventually. There were so many ifs and too few people she could trust with pyramids thrown in the mix.
No wonder so many people disliked pyradistés. She wasn’t feeling very charitable toward them at the moment.
Sylph settled beside her, and Thana hoped she wasn’t going to compare nobles and peasants again. That would definitely lead to a fistfight.
“You’re tired,” Sylph said, and Thana wondered how she looked if her fatigue was that noticeable in dim light.
“I can’t sleep.”
“I wish I knew how to make a bold, romantic speech,” Sylph said. “A way to invite you to spend this time in bed with me, not sleeping.”
Thana gaped, unable to believe what she’d just heard. “Well, you…say exactly what you said, but you flower it up a little.” Her cheeks burned, and to deny her own lust would have been a lie, but she raised a hand. “Please don’t try. I wouldn’t be able to concentrate, and I wouldn’t want…” Her face grew even hotter.
Sylph smiled. “To give less than your best?”
Thana rubbed her forehead. “Is there any way to make this more embarrassing, so I can just die?”
“I know we can’t…do anything,” Sylph said. “Because of the danger.”
Thana bit her lip. She didn’t want to start another fight, but she couldn’t remain quiet, either. At least she wasn’t embarrassed about the point she had to make. “For more reasons than danger. I don’t know what you want from me, Sylph. Am I your teacher? Your servant? Your partner in crime against the crown?” She gestured at the stone prison. “All of those? None? Until I have the answer, I don’t think I can be your lover, too.”
Sylph’s eyes were steady, her posture as correct as always, and Thana braced herself for Lady Sylph or a frosty exit, but she said, “You want me to be someone I’m not.”
