The Mask of Mirrors by M. Carrick; (different e readers txt) 📕

And now Tess was leaving.

Ren searched desperately for words, but Tess laid a soft finger on her lips. “Now you’ll say something to make me stay. Don’t. I know you can talk the birds from the trees, but I deserve better than that. If you ever loved me, don’t go making me another one of your marks.”

Tess turned and picked up the bag. And Ren had to stand, swaying, the world fading to black at the edges, as Tess walked out the door.

Leato caught Ren as she collapsed. “Renata—Ren. Breathe. It’s just another nightmare. Tess isn’t really leaving. She wouldn’t, would she?”

Ren turned over her own wrist, revealing the scar there. “She is my sister. For her I would do anything—but if I blinded myself with my own schemes, if I forgot that she is not just a resource…”

“A resource,” Leato said softly. “Like Mother, Giuna, and myself?”

It startled her into looking up. “You—”

His blue eyes caught and held her. The first time she met him, she’d only seen a wealthy cuff, lazy and sure of his own worth. But her attempts to worm her way into the Traementis family had changed things. They were people to her now, not marks: Donaia’s hardworking devotion, Giuna’s good-hearted kindness, and Leato…

Leato, who had kissed her outside the Charterhouse.

And she’d kissed him back because she wanted to, not because it would sink her claws in deeper.

“No,” Ren said softly. “Not anymore.”

His frown softened. Not a smile—there were no smiles in this hell—but the anger had abated. “Good. Because whatever lies you’ve told, what you’ve done for my family is real. And we may not shed blood to add people to our register, but that doesn’t mean someone can’t earn a place among us—if they try.”

It stole her breath again, but this time not in pain. He knew the truth… and he wasn’t turning away.

He wasn’t forgiving her, either. Not that easily. But he was offering her a chance to earn it.

The emptiness of the kitchen still closed around her, trying to insist that she had no one, that she was alone. But it wasn’t true.

The last card was Drowning Breath, the card of fear—and the ill future.

“Whatever comes next will not be pretty,” she warned him.

“Because everything until now has been roses?” He snorted and helped her stand.

Roses. They were a symbol of Ažerais, blooming during Veiled Waters every year.

“The wellspring,” Ren said. “I’ve been to the Charterhouse, where this began, and that helped not. But this is Ažerais’s Dream, twisted. And her wellspring is a source of dreams.”

Leato frowned. “I don’t want to correct a Vraszenian, but I thought the wellspring only appeared on the night of the Great Dream.”

Ren shook her head. “It is always present, here in this realm. The Tyrant paved over it with his amphitheatre, but it is still there, beneath the stone. We should—”

The door splintered inward with a crash.

She expected a jump, to find herself and Leato suddenly up in the Great Amphitheatre. But they were still in the kitchen, and hawks with bared blades were streaming through the door, with Grey Serrado at their head.

His steel-cold eyes fixed on her. “There she is. Arrest the imposter.”

“Grey?” Leato said in disbelief, his sword half drawn to defend them. “Grey is part of your nightmare?”

Ren didn’t stop to explain. She grabbed him by the arm and ran.

Up to the ground floor, but the hawks were flooding in the front as well—no, not hawks; it was Vargo’s people, all the knots of the Lower Bank. Ren cursed and flung herself sideways, into one of the unused rooms. A quick jab of her elbow broke the window glass, the shards gouging her arm as she writhed through. “Come on!”

Leato followed, not asking questions anymore. Ren tried desperately to control the dream as she’d done before, to jump them from Westbridge to the top of the Point without covering the ground in between, but it wouldn’t let her; this was the terror, to be hunted through the streets by every enemy she had. Hawks, Spiders, soldiers from Ganllech—she heard Mettore Indestor bellowing commands, and even Donaia’s voice raised in strident demand, promising rewards to anyone who would bring the imposter “Renata” to her in chains.

They made it across the Sunset Bridge and onto the Old Island. Ren’s breath burned in her chest as they began their climb, and she knew with the certain dread of a nightmare that their pursuers wouldn’t be similarly slowed.

“What will we do if it’s there?” Leato asked between gasps. “I can’t imagine drinking for true dreams is going to fix this.”

“I don’t know,” Ren admitted. “But I think if that were not the right place to go, something would have chased us back down by now.”

They’d left the buildings of the city behind. The stone of the Point rose above them, and atop it the shadow of the Great Amphitheatre, the Tyrant’s failed attempt to obliterate the wellspring.

The sounds of pursuit vanished as they entered the amphitheatre. But they were not alone.

Figures flowed along the stones of the stage, their joints bent and angular, but their movement sickeningly smooth. Their skin was charred and pitted, like the ribs of burned buildings, and they were skeletally thin: emaciated as starved corpses, but still, somehow, alive.

Ren had seen them in her nightmares. Not tonight, but all through childhood, when her mother put a red string around her bed to keep her safe.

“Zlyzen,” she whispered, her stomach twisting.

Someone was moving among them, a bent and tattered woman, the flesh of her face stretched paper-thin over her cheekbones, sagging at the jowls. Hair dry and brittle as winter grass covered her head in tufts, leaving other patches bare and spotted liver-dark. One of the zlyzen nibbled at the edge of her sleeve, and she caressed its head like a pet’s.

Something about that gesture struck a memory in Ren, the grace of it at odds with the woman’s diseased appearance.

The zlyzen chittered at the woman