Empire of Dust (18 page)

Heph sucks in a breath.
Cynane.

His body tingles a little as he remembers a passion the likes of which he never shared with any Mieza village girl. Afterward, he was surprised that his sheets hadn't turned to ash. But what is Cyn doing here, in Egypt? No one had seen her since the night nearly three weeks ago when the Aesarian Lords invaded the palace and set fire to the library. Briefly, he wonders how she could have possibly caught up to them so quickly, but of course: if he and Kat hadn't been delayed at sea and stranded in Caria for several days, she probably wouldn't have.

“Get this net off of me!” she says, flailing in it as pebbles fly off her and hit the floor with little pings. The loud orders certainly
sound
like Cyn. Tucking his sword into his belt, he pulls the net off, and together he and Kat stare down at the lost princess wrapped in a black Badaween hooded robe. She sits up and impatiently pushes back the hood.

“What are you doing here?” he asks, slowly pulling out his sword. Her cheekbones are razor-sharp, the curve of her jaw severe. Has she lost weight, or is it just shadows from the lantern?

“Jacob sent me,” she says, sitting up and rubbing a lump rising on her forehead where the heavy bucket hit her, “to make sure Kat is safe.”

Heph groans inwardly.
Jacob.
The one who beat him in the Blood Tournament in front of all Pella, using tricks and nets rather than hand-to-hand combat. The one Kat does not believe would ever harm her, despite the fact that Heph saw him crouching over her on the battlefield with a bloody sword. Their enemy, an Aesarian Lord, the merest mention of whose name makes Kat all misty-eyed because they grew up together, sharing memories Heph knows nothing about. Jacob, haunting him even here, in Egypt.

“That's ridiculous,” Kat scoffs, keeping her sword pointed at Cyn sitting sprawled on the floor. Even in the warm golden-brown glow of the lantern, she looks suddenly pale, and her voice shakes a bit. “Why would Jacob send you anywhere, much less to find
me
?”

“The Aesarian Lords captured me in the library,” Cyn says, pushing herself up from the floor. “They tortured me for weeks, trying to get me to tell them things about Pella. They chained me, starved me...”

Heph frowns at her. On the one hand, she looks like the Cyn he's known: tall, lithe, and beautifully wild. But on the other hand, her voice has notes of pain in it, softening it, adding weight to her story.

“You look fine to me,” Katerina says. “Did they let you go once you agreed to be their spy?”

Cyn shakes her head, and her black hair flows across her shoulders. Heph notices that the lump on her forehead is rapidly turning a nasty shade of dark blue. “It was Jacob. He gave me water when he wasn't supposed to. He snuck me food. He...he helped me after...”

Her breath catches, and she turns her head. A darkness seems to descend on her like a raptor dropping from the skies. She flings off her black robe. Beneath it, Heph sees, she's in her usual outfit of leather breastplate, skirt, and boots. But she's much thinner than she was, her muscles like cords of rope. “After what the Scythian Lord did to me.” She turns and raises her left arm to the light.

Heph sees a tribal tattoo of a stylized stag covering her entire upper arm. In the Greek world, only slaves wear tattoos. Now Cyn will have to bear the humiliating mark the rest of her life. How will she hide it?

“He didn't give me poppy juice before he started,” she says, her voice thick with the memory of it. Heph knows it must have hurt like a harpy's talons. He imagines the hot needles digging into flesh, the bloody wounds rubbed with soot as Cyn whimpered in her chains. He feels something twist in his gut. To do that to a woman. Those bastards.

But his sympathy goes only so far. Heph looks at Kat out of the corner of his eye and grips his sword hilt firmly. He doesn't know what to make of Cyn's story. She's too good a manipulator, too good a liar, to be trusted. He, of all people, should know.

An image of her tanned body, glistening with a sheen of sweat in the lamplight of his room, comes unbidden into his mind. The black tangle of her long hair in the white tangle of his sheets. He shoves the memory away.

“Well, what do you think, Katerina?” he asks, more harshly than he intended.

To his dismay, Kat's jaw relaxes and she lowers her sword. “Yes,” she says softly. “That sounds like Jacob.”

In the flickering lamplight, Cyn's eyes glow with something like triumph. “I made a deal with him,” she says, seating herself on the low chair of woven river rushes. “He'd help me escape if I swore I would find you, Katerina, and make sure you were all right.” She looks down at her tattoo and traces the curling blue-black patterns of horns and legs with her finger. “And I kept my word. I went back to Pella, but you were gone. Alex didn't want to tell me where you were—he said it was secret—but after I told him I had to find you and keep you safe, that I had
promised
—he told me where you were going. He said he wanted me to keep you safe, too. Especially now, since the Aesarians have gone against the treaty, and he is planning to go to war. Macedon is vulnerable.”

The words send a chill through Heph, reminding him why he's here in the first place. To protect Macedon. To protect Alex.

“Did Jacob escape with you?” Kat asks, and the tension in her voice is palpable. Her longing, tangible. Heph's chest constricts at the sound. Cyn shakes her head in answer, her black hair swaying.

“But when the Lords realized he let you escape, what would they do to him?” Kat demands, sitting on the bed directly in front of Cyn, and laying her sword across her knees. Heph moves to stand next to her, sword at the ready.

Cynane shrugs. “He said he had a plan. That's all I know.” She raises the palms of her hands in a gesture of innocent ignorance. Her shoulders are white in the lantern's light. He's seen them bare before.

He clears his throat. “How do we know Jacob sent you? I think Kat's right. It seems much more likely that Lords sent you to spy on what we're doing for Alex.”

Cynane smiles, her teeth straight and strong. “Jacob warned me you might say that,” she says, unpinning something from her breastplate, “which is why he gave me this to show you as proof.”

In the soft orb of glowing lantern light, Cyn shows them a crudely fashioned iron pin with a smooth green stone flecked with gold set in a frame of iron on top. Kat inhales sharply. As she takes the pin and runs her fingers over the smooth stone, a look of wistful longing appears on her face. She holds it like it is something holy—something sacred. Something beyond Heph's reach. Kat is clearly overcome with the belief that Jacob still cares about her.

He feels as though she has just plunged the long pin into his heart. At the look on her face, he knows that he has been foolish to hope, to dream, to even think...

Kat looks up at him, her green eyes bright. “It's his,” she says, unaware that her eyes have already confirmed this.

Heph shakes his head and tries to keep his voice level. “Things still don't add up.” He looks at Cyn. “Why didn't you reveal yourself immediately? Why did you sneak into Kat's room?”

The princess looks at the ground, and Heph blinks in surprise. Cyn has never shown remorse or humility or fear before. Perhaps, then, she has truly been broken by the Lords.

“I was afraid,” she says, “that you wouldn't trust me. That you would pull swords on me. I finally decided I would write a note explaining everything, and have a boy deliver it with the pin.”

She looks at Kat now, brown eyes meeting green, smiling apologetically, and leans back in the chair, her hands on her thighs. “But then I noticed the door to Katerina's room was open, and I was afraid some harm had come to you. I was coming to check.”

After everything Cyn did earlier in the summer to cause a rift between him and Alex, Heph would rather trust a rattlesnake's promise not to bite him than any story she tells them. He learned the hard way that Alex's half sister is a master manipulator with a secret agenda. Their mission for the prince is too important to let her try to ruin it, if that's what she's up to. She has always harbored a burning jealousy of Alex for being a boy destined to command armies and rule, while she was destined to marry a foreign king.

Yet she does have Jacob's pin. And Alex must have told her where Kat and he had gone. How else would Cyn have known? Indecision weighs heavily on him. He prefers fighting pirates in a storm. At least there he recognizes his enemies clearly—heaving waves, filthy men waving swords—and knows how to deal with them. This is all so unclear.

He looks at Kat. “Should we let her go?”

Kat turns toward Heph, and he feels her gaze as though a sword has pierced him. Kat knows about that night Heph spent with Cyn. Knows—and has judged.

“She's a hard person to trust,” Kat finally says, “but I trust Jacob.” A snort escapes Heph before he can stop it, and Kat narrows her eyes at him. “I trust Alexander, as well,” she adds loudly.

“Alex is worried that the Aesarian Lords will try to harm you,” Cyn says looking straight at Heph now, her eyes not wavering. “Since Arridheus has been kidnapped, Alex feels that everyone he
loves
is under threat.”

Only the slightest stress marks the word
love
, but to Heph it feels as though she shouted it. He looks at her on the low chair, her hands on her knees, every gesture designed to appear unthreatening, every word aimed at eliciting sympathy or stirring up emotional memories.

But the choice to allow Cyn to join them does not belong to him. It belongs to Katerina—a fellow princess. Cynane's
half sister
, he realizes with a start.

Heph sighs and sits back on his calves. The combination of Kat, Cyn, and him has to be a recipe for explosive disaster, something like naphtha, quicklime, and sulfur mixed in a barrel, set on fire and catapulted against a wall. But if Alex sent her, and Kat wants her...

“All right,” he agrees, his shoulders sagging. “You can come.”

* * *

The Nile is alive with boats of all shapes as the
Hathor
sweeps past more pyramids, the rising sun painting them pink and reflecting off their gold tips. Soon, the pyramids are lost in the distance, and they rush past fields of wheat and orchards of fig, date, and pomegranate trees, past temples and palaces, obelisks and grand estates.

As they glide through the hot afternoon, Cyn takes off her boots and stretches her long, tanned legs out on the deck, flexing her toes. Her head is back, the curling tips of her black hair grazing the wooden planks as she closes her eyes and drinks in the sun. The lumpy black bruise on her forehead where the bucket hit her has, oddly enough, disappeared. As she inhales, he can see the rise of her breasts.

“Heph?” she says, opening her eyes and smiling. “Why don't you lie here beside me and get some sun? It feels wonderful with the cool river breeze—and you could use the color. You seem a little pale.”

Heph can't help staring at those legs, remembering... He feels a blistering gaze upon him and turns to see Kat looking at him, her arms crossed, her lips pursed. She storms as far away from Cyn as she can. But it's a narrow boat, so she can't get very far. Only to the bow, behind the large square sail which now shields her from sight.

“Maybe later, Cynane,” he says, enunciating her full name with formality. He joins two of the crewmen on break who are sitting cross-legged under the long awning in the center, throwing dice.

As he holds the small, cool cubes of carved ox bone in his hands, he sees Kat's unmoving shadow behind the sail. If only she could feel for him the way she does for Jacob. But when he made the huge mistake of kissing her in Ada's palace, she cried. At that moment he felt more humiliated than the very public embarrassment of losing the Blood Tournament. To finally get the girl he desired in his arms, to feel his blood throb and his pulse race as he held her tightly, inhaling her scent, exploring her mouth with his tongue, and then have her burst into tears, push him away and run from the room—the memory of it causes the back of his neck to burn as hot as if someone has poured boiling water on it.

Why does Heph always long for forbidden fruit?

He throws the dice and gets one Nun—a man carrying a boat on his head and symbol of chaos—and one Anubis—the jackal-headed god of Death. The two crewmen laugh at Heph's bad luck. Hearing them, Cyn rises and joins them, her black hair tossed by the breeze. She, too, is forbidden fruit. Though she never cried when he kissed her. She liked it. Very much.

“May I play?” she asks.

Dinner that evening is extremely uncomfortable in the courtyard of the main inn of Henen-Nesut, a walled city of limestone rising out of the Nile floodwaters. Kat barely touches her food, while Cyn drizzles honey from a flagon onto her lips, licking it off and intentionally spilling some between her breasts. Heph, feeling the tension tight as a drawn bowstring, drinks more wine than he should, even though he knows he will have a headache in the morning. Wordlessly, Kat leaves the table as soon as she's done eating, stomping up the wooden stairs to the covered balcony that leads to her room. But Cyn lingers.

“You know,” she says, pouring more fragrant golden wine into his cup, “the sound of footsteps on stairs will forever remind me of being in that tower room, chained and starved, knowing the Lords were coming to get me for a new torture session. I had to think of happy things so that I would not fall apart.”

Heph can't even imagine what it was like for her. He studies her as he sips his wine. He should put it down, not have any more. But it's good wine, different from anything he has had in Greece, with a biting tang to it. It would be a shame to waste it.

“What did you think of?” he asks Cyn.

“Well,” she says coyly, tucking a loose tendril of black hair behind her ear, “I often thought of you.”