ChaoticArmcandy

  My eyes widened as Roxa Monir’s rangy frame crossed the threshold and swept the room with a gnce. Her stance was confident, rexed, ready–that of an archer with her bow half-drawn, arrow nocked. Her gaze was cold green armor, and it was all for Aralia.

  I looked over in time to catch the furrow of surprise creasing Aralia’s brow before her face closed like a gate coming down.

  Roxa kicked the door shut behind her and spared me not one gnce as she approached the desk.

  She had come alone, then.

  Neither of them said a word. Aralia sat, her spine rigid and straight as a steel beam, meeting Roxa’s arctic gaze.

  I had the cold sense of two opponents facing each other over a vast chessboard, both of them grimly impassive, their mouths the same thin, set ssh.

  Aralia broke the silence first.“And you are?”

  Roxa smirked, then swept her gaze over to me, measuring. I saw her take in the handkerchief gag. “Well, then. Color me impressed, Ellie.”

  I blinked at her in total bewilderment. What in the Nine Abyssal hells was going on? Was Roxa appearing instead of Mi in order to make some kind of counterpy? Was this a bluff or did they have any leverage? Why was Roxa praising me?

  “If you indeed have no idea who I am,” continued Roxa, her eyes going back to meet Aralia’s. “Then this pawn has exceeded my expectations.”

  I flinched. Ouch.

  “How…useful,” Roxa murmured, almost to herself.

  “Your name, student.” Aralia demanded, more firmly. “If I have to ask you again, it will be from outside of a cell.”

  “You’re not in a position to make threats, Cordivar.” Roxa smiled thinly.

  “Watch me,” Aralia retorted. “I don’t have to rely on official channels, you know. My people can make you vanish beneath this school just as silently as the Ministry’s inquisitors can.”

  Roxa looked unconcerned. “If you were going to summon help you’d have done it already.”

  “Who says I haven’t?”

  “I do,” said Roxa, without a moment’s hesitation. “You won’t try until you know whether or not you can win a confrontation. You’ll wait until you know exactly what I have on you.”

  Aralia snorted and eyed the young woman opposite her for a long moment. “Very well,” she conceded, cocking her head to one side. “I’m listening.”

  I watched with bated breath as Roxa took another step forward, braced her palms against the edge of the desk, and leaned her weight over the dark polished wood. Her cocky smile was only a few feet from Aralia’s face.

  “In the unlikely case that I do not return from this little visit in a timely manner, there are several copies of a letter I have arranged to be sent.”

  “Oh?” said Aralia, her voice carefully neutral except for a fractional tightening.

  “Each copy bears details of your record searches for Jyllish names, as well as charges of harboring and hiding a kuffa.”

  “Hm.” Aralia looked amused. “That’s all? Poor girl, you underestimate my resources.”

  Roxa didn’t miss a beat. “There are also details of a smuggling operation that trafficks in alchemical weapons,” she said with heavy relish. “Details like the location of a certain shipment.”

  I blinked in surprise. Aralia was silent.

  “Once the other clues were there, it was a simple deduction to make,” said Roxa smugly. “No one else has the network or the ability to skim heavily reguted alchemical precursors out from under the administrator’s nose. All the Ministry’s inquisitors need to cp you in irons, Cordivar, is the right tip.”

  Aralia looked her over skeptically. “You would turn me in to the Ministry?”

  Roxa threw back her head and ughed. “The Ministry? Oh no, the letters are addressed to my mother, the Countess Monir. You’re an asset of the Duchy of Waterfalls now, Aralia Cordivar.”

  “Ah,” said Aralia. “Am I to understand then that agents of the Duchess Lapita were pying the board in secret this whole time?” Her golden eyes swiveled to narrow at me. “And that you were holding another set of strings to this erstwhile asset of mine, unbeknownst to me?”

  I wavered under her penetrating gaze, uncertain and suddenly gd of the gag in my mouth. It wasn’t actually true, was it? This was just a bluff, right?

  Roxa was silent, smirking, an archer who had hit her bullseye.

  “So.” Aralia mused, still looking down at me. “It seems you’ve been passing more tests than just mine tely, Ellie.”

  I must have looked too confused and overwhelmed to glean useful information from, because she turned abruptly back to Roxa. “But nobody likes a servant with too many inconvenient loyalties, do they?”

  Roxa’s eyes narrowed slightly, giving away nothing.

  “And that’s why you threw her away yesterday, isn’t it?” Aralia tilted her head questioningly. “You found out something else about her, didn’t you? Something that made you unable to trust your hold over her any longer.”

  Roxa’s gaze was cold. “Has she not proven her treachery to you by now?”

  I sagged a little more, my heart staggering under the barrage of pain and shame.

  “But the same isn’t true for Mi Finnochio, not in your estimation, is it?” said Aralia softly. “Despite the fact that I also hold power over Mi, power you can do nothing about. For some reason you value her more, and I do have an inkling as to why. Perhaps we can come to some arrangement.”

  Roxa looked bored. “I think not.”

  “If you attempt to bckmail me, I can bring evidence to bear against this girl, as well as Mi.” Aralia leaned back in her chair. “None of us want that, do we?”

  Roxa shrugged. “They’re both disposable assets to me. Well worth the price of compromising the Factor of Special Research.”

  I looked between both of them in horror, my mind reeling. Roxa had just called both me and Mi her disposable assets?

  “Don’t underestimate your own worth, Cordivar,” Roxa continued. “You are in somewhat of a unique position, with the access you have here at the heart of empire, to sway the entire course of the coming war.”

  Aralia watched her like a hawk. “You would do that to her? To both of them?”

  Roxa met her gaze calmly. “Instantly. I never get too…attached.”

  Aralia measured her for a long moment. “If that’s true,” she said softly. “How then did you gain this one’s loyalty?”

  Roxa’s face betrayed nothing. “Surely you don’t expect me to reveal the intricacies of my leverage over her–you’ve been pying this game of masks and knives for long enough to know that. She had no choice but to obey me.”

  Aralia half smiled, sardonic. “If only you knew how many opportunities she had to betray you, and yet still refuses to tell me anything. But it seems you’ve indeed tossed her away, so why is she still protecting you?”

  Roxa looked at me for a long moment, inscrutable, and Aralia watched as I searched her face desperately for some sign, some flicker of meaning. “Perhaps she simply understands what I’m capable of when the stakes are this high.”

  Aralia gave a dark, humorless ugh. “You don’t get it, do you? Whatever leverage you had over her is gone. The stakes have been swept. She neutralized them by turning herself in st night.”

  Roxa’s eyes narrowed. “You’re bluffing.”

  Aralia frowned. “She chose to turn herself in to the administration, to head off the terror of a full-fledged kuffa hunt and purge. She agreed to bear the bme and pay the cost, to protect everyone but herself–everyone who had stolen from the alchemical stockrooms.”

  I saw Roxa’s vivid green gaze flicker to me and back.

  Aralia was shaking her head slowly. “But she wasn’t protecting you at all, and she wasn’t protecting me, was she? She was protecting Mi.”

  I blinked as I sensed the trap.

  Aralia’s mouth quirked up at the corner. “And perhaps you are too.”

  If Roxa could be tricked out of her appearance of cold calcution, if Aralia could call her bluff that Mi and I were disposable assets and nothing else, then the power dynamic would shift. We were the st bargaining chips Aralia had, and if we still held value, she had leverage.

  Roxa’s face was disciplined, impassive stone. “Are you willing to take that chance?” she said, with infinite coldness.

  Aralia was silent, measuring her opponent. The clear golden orbs of a hunting hawk met the green riverjade gaze of a mountain fox, and the hawk looked away first, frustrated.

  Roxa snorted. “That’s what I thought. Now, tell me how you pyed it.”

  There was a fractured silence. Then–

  “I moved preemptively to avert the kuffa hunt,” said Aralia stiffly. “Ellie’s freedom was the cost. I was able to pce myself in the role of her handler, and because of that I can prevent her from being experimented on, but she is the property of Harmine now.”

  I watched Roxa take in this information, frowning. I could read nothing of her true feelings. Perhaps she had none. “So the threat from the Ministry that she warned me of is blunted?”

  “For now it is,” said Aralia tersely. “There was…an unexpected complication. I was able to vouchsafe her life until I file a report on the matter, which I may be able to dey, but not for long–and after that her life is forfeit to Penelope Caul.”

  At that I saw a shadow pass over Roxa’s face.

  Aralia must have noted it too. “If Factor Caul suffered an accident, or were otherwise removed from the field of py,” said Aralia silkily. “I am confident that I could extend that deadline, and convince the Chancellor that I needed her alive for further research purposes.”

  A small, final hope that I had ever actually mattered to Roxa guttered to life in my breast, and then my heart crumpled as she gave a cold shrug. “Nice try, Cordivar,” she said crisply. “But you had best remember that an asset’s life is nothing to me.” Meeting Roxa’s stare was like looking into the heart of a gcial emerald. “Don’t make me prove it to you.”

  Aralia frowned and it seemed as if she were about to argue, but she shot me a gnce and at the look on my face she stood abruptly. “Very well,” she said bitterly. “Deliver your terms, and then I hope for her sake you will leave soon.”

  “Oh, spare me,” said Roxa cuttingly. “If you cared for her at all you wouldn’t have put her in this position. If you’re going to py the game, at least be honest about what it makes you.”

  Aralia's jaw flexed. “What do you want?” she said, low and hard. “Just tell me, then go.”

  Roxa pulled a folded slip of paper from her pocket and slid it across the desk. “Meet me at these coordinates tonight, midnight bell. Come alone.”

  And then the tall, fox-faced noble, having bested Aralia Cordivar at her own game, turned her back to us both and strode out.

  ChaoticArmcandy