Queen of Thieves

chapter 12

Lamir was sulking.

He knew that he was, but he couldn't help it; it was like the compulsion to pick at a scab. He wanted to keep picking and picking until it bled. He crossed to the window, staring out at the streets of Zibhok below. Desert pack animals called makhora pulled carts filled with gemstones along the dusty streets, and men in linen cloaks shouted greetings to one another. The palace was built into the rock wall, and Lamir could make out servants rushing down the red stone steps and into the street.

"Something's bothering you," Ireefa said.

He turned. The queen was stretched out like a cat, her naked skin glistening gold against the bedspread. Her anklet glinted as she moved her leg. She pulled the white fur throw over the swell of her chest, and Lamir thought of the snow that covered the mountains in Balutu. When he was a child, his mother had let him leave the court to go sledging if it was a warm day.

It was his only happy memory of their time there.

"Lamir," Ireefa said. "Tell me."

She was smiling coyly, but it wasn't a suggestion. It was an order.

"Why?" Lamir raised an eyebrow. "You already know what it is."

"The mission. You want to go."

"Of course I want to go." Lamir began to pull on loose white trousers. "You know how I feel about the prophecy." He paused to look at her. "The Sage spared my life for a reason. I'm meant to find this girl. To help her."

"Maybe," she said. "And maybe not."

Ireefa's eyes roamed over his chest. Lamir could still remember the first time that she had looked at him like that, when he was sixteen. He had returned from dune surfing with his friends in the Neralim desert, and Ireefa had caught him hosing down in the palace garden. At first, she had only paid him special attention — gifts wrapped in red ribbon delivered to his door, the best cut of meat at dinner put on his plate — and then when Lamir turned eighteen, she invited him into her bed.

What Ireefa wanted, she got.

Male, female, old, young; if it was beautiful, she wanted it.

"Don't tell me you're a skeptic." Lamir sat on the end of the bed. "The prophecy is clear that she's the only one that can kill the Poison Queen." He yanked on his shoes. "She might be a child, but she's our best shot."

Ireefa smiled. "Alice Black is hardly a child, Lamir. She's seventeen. Only two years younger than you are."

"And she's human."

"We're descended from humans," Ireefa reminded him. "Their blood runs in our veins. They are not so different from us."

Lamir tugged on his shirt. He caught a glimmer of white wings in the mirror on Ireefa's vanity, and he started involuntarily. He had become so accustomed to hiding his wings in Zibhok that sometimes he forgot he still had them. Like a tattoo on his back that he never saw.

"What about the Zibhok academy?" Ireefa asked. She was grasping at straws, though, and they both knew it. "Who's going to teach the children while you're away?"

"I'll find someone."

"Who will entertain the court?"

"There are jesters."

"And me?" Ireefa rose from the bed. "Who will entertain me while you're gone?"

He watched through half-closed eyes as Ireefa slipped into a sheer robe, settling by her vanity. Her robe slipped down as she clipped rubies into her topknot of box braids, revealing her bare shoulder. Lamir waited for his body to react. But there was nothing. His pulse beat steadily under his skin.