A House Divided by Nicole Ciacchella (the giving tree read aloud txt) 📕

Taking note of Wyland's attire, Kila filed the information away for future reference.

"Cianne, Lach, you remember Officer Burl?" Wyland said.

"Yes, of course. How do you do?" Stowley asked, bowing to Burl.

"Officer Burl," Miss Wyland said, with a slight incline to her head.

She doesn't like Burl. Interesting.

"Allow me to introduce my new partner, Officer an Movis."

The expression lasted a split second, but Kila caught it. His name made Miss Wyland's face go rigid, and when she turned to look at him he could see her fighting for control. Her uncanny blue eyes were wide, but she covered up her discomposure with a tepid smile.

"Officer an Movis, it's a pleasure to meet you," she said.

"It's a pleasure to meet you as well, Miss Wyland, Captain Stowley," Kila said, bowing to them both.

"If you'll excuse us, I should introduce Officer an Movis to the Elders," Wyland said to his daughter and Stowley.

"Of course," Stowley said. He didn't seem to mind at all. As it was, his eyes had barely strayed from Miss Wyland, though he had been very civil with both Kila and Burl.

Kila could have sworn he felt eyes on the back of his neck as Wyland ushered them away. Venturing a glance over his shoulder, he saw Stowley talking to Miss Wyland in animated tones, her attention focused on the captain. But Kila could have sworn he had seen her eyes dart away just as his landed on her.

Chapter 7

Heart seizing, Cianne tried to beat back the wave of dizziness that swept over her. Her pulse pounded, her blood roaring in her ears like Cearus's wrath. Over the years she had become good at marshaling her emotions, concealing her thoughts, but the shock of seeing Kila was so great that all her training had gone out the window as she was catapulted back into the skin of her twelve-year-old self.

***

Her nightly forays into the city began shortly after her mother's death, her need to escape overruling all sense.

Daerwyn treated her as if she were an unwelcome stranger. Overwhelmed by his grief and his need to control it, he put on a good show outside of the manor, projecting an image of dignity and strength to the other House members. Inside the manor, he had no room for his daughter's pain, unwilling to offer her anything to help her navigate it.

Coupled with his grief was the bewildering challenge of determining how to raise her on his own, a child he already found so unfathomable he didn't quite know what to do with her. He had counted on Annalith to be there for him, to see to it that Cianne didn't become the wild, feckless creature he feared would disgrace him and their whole House.

Lach was more than kind, though. Annalith had been like a second mother to him, and his affection for her had been genuine. His sense of loss was keen, if not quite as keen as Cianne's. For the first few days after Annalith's death they had spent the bulk of their time together in one another's arms, sobbing over their broken hearts. But no matter how hard he tried, no matter how desperately he wished he could do so, Lach was unable to help her find her way through her despair.

House members crowded the manor, demanding recognition for their own suffering, and she wasn't merely beyond being able to accept the possibility that they were hurting too, she was indifferent to their pain. Who were they to lay claim to her mother? What did they know of her? What did they know of the hole her mother's absence had punched into the universe?

Annalith's funeral was lavish, and Cianne felt in her bones that her mother would have hated it. Clad in the customary deep green, the color of the sea at its most forbidding, every member of the House had crammed into the Council Hall. Funerary rites were read, offerings were made to Cearus, and many House members took their turn to say some words about Annalith, but Cianne was aware of none of it. Her eyes were fixed on the empty, gilded casket, as if they might catch sight of that beloved face one last time if only they could bore through the wood.

She never would see her mother's face again, no matter how hard her eyes strained. Annalith had been swept away while at sea, during a violent storm that had left her vessel severely damaged and Cianne's life destroyed.

When the casket was carried to the sea to be borne away on the waves, Cianne collapsed. Her world had fallen in on her, and she was powerless against the pain.

Her mother's casket was long gone by the time she woke. Cianne regretted that she hadn't been able to watch it disappear, to imagine Annalith being carried out to Cearus's embrace. Perhaps the peaceful image would have cured Cianne of her nightmares. Every time she closed her eyes, she watched the greedy waters swallowing Annalith's lovely, kind face, her silken ebony curls.

The walls of the manor pressed in around Cianne, threatening to crush her, making her skin crawl with the need to get away. Outside the enclave walls she could be alone with her thoughts, could probe the pure, jagged edges of her grief without fear of witness.

She waited until her father locked himself in his room and the servants had gone to bed before she crept down the stairs. She and her mother had made a game of sneaking up on one another, and so Cianne had long since learned which steps to avoid so that she wouldn't make a sound. Slipping through the door of the manor was child's play, and avoiding the night guards wasn't much more difficult. She loved climbing and snuck away to do it whenever she could, so although scaling the enclave wall was a challenge, it was not an insurmountable one.

Skulking through the city streets alone at night was dangerous, she knew that, particularly in the sections of town she preferred to haunt. She didn't much care. A sense of recklessness seized her, and she had to choke back hysterical laughter as she spirited her way along the docks, pausing every so often to peer into the unsavory taverns lining the street. She watched a group leave one house hung with lurid red lanterns, catching a glimpse inside of both men and women wearing shockingly few clothes.

She walked for hours without anyone noticing her, though this was probably more a testament to the extreme levels of their inebriation than it was to Cianne's evasive skills. Still, she was small and able to slip into tight nooks and crannies, which was a decided advantage.

At last, she found herself ghosting along a row of modest rough stone houses. An uneven wall of jumbled stone closed the dwellings off from the street, and when Cianne tested it she found it had excellent hand- and footholds for someone whose fingers and feet were as small as hers were. She began climbing. The wall was higher than she had thought, and when she reached the top and stood staring down at the street below, her heart raced, the first non-grief burst of emotion she'd felt since her mother had died. Vertigo kicked in as her eyes measured the ten feet down to the ground, and she swayed a bit.

"Whoa there," a soft voice called from below.

Whirling toward it, Cianne teetered again, this time coming much closer to falling. Her arms shot out perpendicular to her sides and she didn't draw another breath until she'd managed to steady herself.

"What are you doing up there?" the voice asked. She could tell it belonged to a man, though she couldn't see his face. He was standing too close to the wall, and the shadows obscured his features.

"Climbing," she said, her voice cracking. She tried to remember the last time she had spoken to another person and couldn't. Even with Lach her responses had become mostly non-verbal.

"Obviously," he said in a droll tone. "However, you seem rather unsteady on your feet, so perhaps climbing isn't the best thing for you to be doing at the moment."

Crouching, Cianne lowered her bottom onto the uneven surface of the wall. Stones poked into her rear, but she ignored the discomfort. Dangling her legs over the edge, she braced her hands on the stone, scraping her palms for her trouble, and leaned out over the wall, trying to see the man below her.

"Why don't you come down?" he suggested.

Like any cautious parent, Cianne's mother had warned her about strangers. It didn't matter that this man sounded nice, he was someone she didn't know, and the prudent thing to do would be to go back to the enclave and return to her bed, where she belonged. With any luck, she might even manage to do so without anyone noticing she'd left in the first place.

But something about talking to someone she didn't know felt good. This man didn't know her mother had died. He didn't know that she angered her tutors by skipping her lessons. He didn't know that her father had averted his face at the announcement that his daughter had failed every aspect of her Adept test, trying to conceal the mingled disappointment and disgust that had curdled his mouth, though not quickly enough. He didn't know that ever since then, and especially now that her mother was gone, her father could barely stand to look at her.

She was as much a stranger to this man as he was to her, which meant he knew nothing at all about her. After spending the last week around people who thought they knew everything there was to know about her, this realization was oddly comforting.

"I shouldn't," she said, not wanting to give the appearance that she had caved so readily. "My mother told me never to talk to strangers."

"That's wise of you, and you're right to listen to your mother. I am a stranger, that's true, but I'm also an Enforcement officer."

An Enforcement officer. Cianne chewed her lip, her stomach twisting. It was good, because it meant that he was a safe stranger, but it was also bad, because it meant that if he found out who she was, he would have to report her to her father. The last thing she wanted was for her father to find out what she had been up to, not so much because she feared the punishment that would ensue, but because she knew discovery would make it impossible for her to ever sneak away again. Her father would see to it that every guard in the enclave was on the lookout for her, and her one means of escape would be cut off forever. She wouldn't be able to endure that.

"Prove it," Cianne ordered, hedging, trying to buy herself some time.

"All right, I will. Don't go anywhere," the man said. She could hear the reluctance in his voice, and he moved slowly away from the wall, heading toward a cracked door that was spilling a thin sliver of yellow light out into what she now saw was a garden.

It was a small garden, and the light illuminated his face when he opened the door wide enough to pass through it. He glanced back at her over his shoulder, watching to see if she would run away, so only his profile was visible, but what she could see of it looked kind. His thick, shoulder-length dark hair was pulled back into a tail. His eyes appeared to be dark too, though in the low light of the garden it