Cold Magic (Page 24)
“Aunt and Uncle are so ashamed of what she was that they’ve forbidden us to even speak of her. I can’t even ask questions about her life. Is that fair?”
“I don’t think it’s fair. But if we Barahals are touched with any possible stigma of association with the Iberian Monster, we’ll lose all our business.”
“That’s your father talking.”
“People must eat. That’s why your parents came to live with the family in Adurnam, isn’t it? What else could they do? Your father had to go to work again for the family. Yet his heart wasn’t in it. He fought with everyone. The reports he prepared were useless. He did not want to leave your mother and you alone, and your mother could not travel with him into those regions that lay under the rule of Camjiata’s empire where the family needed your father to travel.”
“To spy for them,” I muttered.
“Hush,” I whispered through my tears.
Bee froze with her right hand clasped to her chest and her face raised, posed unmoving like one of the living re-creations of the honored ancestors in a tableaux at the Feast and Festival of the Sun Sacrifice, which here in the north the locals called the winter solstice.
Put a saber in her upraised left hand, and she’d have run me through, just to put me out of my misery. Because she was right. Everything she said was right. It’s just I didn’t want the story to end that way.
“Beatriz? Catarina?” Our governess, Shiffa, had been imported all the way from the Barahal motherhouse in Gadir to teach us girls deportment, fencing, dancing, sewing, and how to memorize large blocks of text so we could write them down or repeat them later. All of which she did, and always with a rigid smile. Her giddily cheerful voice rose in volume as she entered the parlor. “Girls! It’s time to leave for the lecture.”
“Girls?” Shiffa stumbled among the couches and rattled the journals I’d left lying open on the table. “Oh, dear,” she muttered in a grating tone of fond exasperation. “What are these doing out again? That child!”
Abruptly, her breathing shifted. Her fingers fluttered pages, and she sucked in a hard breath and whispered to herself in a tone so steely it was as if a different person were speaking, “Melqart’s Curse! We were assured every copy of the codebook had been burned.”
Bee lowered her hand to grasp my wrist, her fingers tightening until I thought she would crush my bones. We had left Lies the Romans Told on the table. The codebook?
“Have you found the girls, Shiffa?” My aunt’s voice rose from the direction of the stairs. She sounded as if she were trying not to laugh.
“I told you, Tilly!” My uncle’s voice rumbled from farther below. “They’re hiding in the attic.”
Aunt moved down the staircase to the ground-floor foyer, still speaking. “It’s your own fault for trying to force them to attend a lecture that they assured me they already heard once today.”
“We are not attending to hear the lecture, but to be seen. The girls have made excellent connections at the college. Tonight’s lecture is more about politics than aerostatics. It’s a bold step for the Prince of Tarrant and his court to agree to tether an airship in the Rail Yard, much less hold a public exhibition of it for all to see. He and his clan are declaring through this act that they do not support the mage Houses’ opposition to the new technological innovations.”