Home > Wonder Woman: Warbringer (DC Icons #1)(8)

Wonder Woman: Warbringer (DC Icons #1)(8)
Author: Leigh Bardugo

It seemed bizarre to Diana to stand there plaiting her mother’s ebony hair into braids when the world around them might be falling apart, but a queen never appeared as anything less than a queen to her people.

Diana summoned her courage. She needed to tell her mother about Alia. She couldn’t let her go into a Council meeting without that knowledge. Maybe it isn’t Alia. It could be a disturbance in the World of Man. Something. Anything. But Diana did not really believe that. When the Council consulted the Oracle, Alia would be discovered and Diana would be exiled. Her mother would look weak, indulgent. Not everyone loved Hippolyta as Tek did, and not everyone believed that a queen should rule the Amazons at all.

“Mother, today, during the race—”

Hippolyta met Diana’s eyes in the mirror and clasped her hand. “We’ll talk about it later. But there is no shame in the loss.”

That wasn’t remotely true, but Diana said, “It’s not that.”

Hippolyta set two more amethysts in her ears. “Diana, you cannot afford more losses like that. I didn’t think you would win—”

“You didn’t?” Diana hated the hurt that spread through her, the surprise she couldn’t keep from her voice.

“Of course not. You’re still young. You are not yet as strong as the others or as experienced. I hoped you might place or at least—”

“Or at least not humiliate you?”

Hippolyta lifted a brow. “It takes more than the loss of a little race to bring low a queen, Diana. But you were not ready, and it will mean you must work even harder to prove yourself in the future.”

Her mother’s assessment of her chances was the same as her measured embrace on the platform, just as practical, just as painful.

“I was ready,” Diana said stubbornly.

Hippolyta’s look was so gentle, so loving, and so full of pity that Diana wanted to scream. “The results speak for themselves. Your time will come.”

But it wouldn’t. Not if she was never given the opportunity. Not if even her mother didn’t think she could win a damned footrace. And Alia. Alia.

“Mother,” Diana tried again.

But Hippolyta was sweeping out of her chambers. Lamplight sparked off the gold in her armor. The earth shook, but somehow her steps did not falter, as if her very stride declared, “I am a queen and an Amazon; you are wise to tremble.”

In the mirror’s glass, Diana saw herself reflected—a dark-haired girl in disheveled clothes, her blue eyes troubled, teeth worrying her lower lip like some hand-wringing actor in a tragedy. She squared her shoulders, set her jaw. Diana might not be queen, but the Council members weren’t the only ones who could petition the Oracle. I am a princess of Themyscira, she told the girl in the mirror. I’ll find my own answers.

Diana hurried to her room to change clothes and fill a traveling pack with a blanket, rope, lantern and flint, and the rolled bindings she used for her hands when sparring—they would do for bandages in a pinch. Four hours had passed since Diana had left Alia in the cave. The girl must be terrified. Hera’s crown, what if she tries to climb down? Diana winced at the thought. Alia had all the substance of a bag of kindling. If she tried to get out of the cave, she’d only end up hurting herself. But there was no time to return to the cliffs. If Diana was going to fix this, she needed to speak to the Oracle before the Council did.

She opened a green enamel box that she kept by her bed, then hesitated. She had never been to see the Oracle, but Diana knew she was dangerous. She could see deep into an Amazon’s heart and far into the future. In the smoke from her ritual fire, she tracked thousands of lives over thousands of years, watching the way the currents moved and what could be done to alter their courses. Access to her predictions always came with a steep cost. The most essential thing was to approach with an offering that would please her, something personal, essential to the supplicant.

The green enamel box held Diana’s most cherished objects. She shoved the whole thing into her pack and ran down the stairs. She’d been pocketing food throughout the feast, but she stopped at the kitchen for a skin full of hot mulled wine. Though the kitchens were always a tangle of clatter and chaos, today the staff worked with grim determination and strange smells rose in billows of steam from the cook pots.

“Willow bark,” said one of the cooks as Diana peeked beneath a lid. “We’re extracting salicylic acid to help bring the fevers down.” She handed over the goatskin. “You tell Maeve we hope she feels better soon.”

All Diana said was “Thank you.” She didn’t want to add to her list of lies for the day.

The city streets were full of bustle and clamor as people ran back and forth with food, medicine, and supplies to shore up buildings damaged by the quakes. Diana pulled up her hood. She knew she should be at the center of it all, helping, but if her suspicions about Alia were right, then the only solution was to get her off the island as quickly as she could.

A glance at the harbor told her that stealing a boat would be close to impossible. The wind had risen to a full gale, and the sky had gone the color of slate. The docks were crawling with Amazons trying to secure the fleet before the storm descended in full force.

Diana took the eastern road out of the city, the most direct path to the Oracle’s temple. It was bordered by groves of olive trees, and once she’d entered their shelter, she broke into a run, setting the fastest pace she dared.

Soon she left the olives behind, traversing vineyards and tidy rows of peach trees clustered with fruit, then passed into the low hills that bordered the marsh at the center of the island.

The closer Diana drew to the marsh, the more her unease grew. The marsh lay in the shadow of Mount Ptolema and was the only place on the island that existed in a state of near-permanent shade. She had never ventured inside. There were stories of Amazons entering its depths to visit the Oracle and emerging weeping or completely mad. When Clarissa had sought an audience at the temple, she’d returned to the city gibbering and shaking, the blood vessels in both of her eyes broken, her nails bitten down to ragged stumps. She’d never spoken of what she’d seen, but to this day, Clarissa—a hardened soldier who liked to ride into battle armed with nothing but an axe and her courage—still slept with a lit lantern beside her bed.

Diana shivered as she entered the shadows of the marsh trees, draped in veils of moss like funeral-goers, the gnarled masses of their exposed roots reflecting sinister shapes in the murky waters. She could hear no sounds of the approaching storm, no familiar birdsong, not even the wind. The marsh had its own black music: the lap and splash of the water as something with a ridged back broke its surface and vanished with the flick of a long tail, the scuttle of insects, whispers that rose and fell without reason. Diana heard her name spoken, a chill breath at her ear. But when she turned, heart pounding, no one was there. She glimpsed something with long, hairy legs skittering over a nearby branch and quickened her steps.

Diana kept heading what she hoped was due east, farther into the marsh as the gloom deepened. She was sure now that something was following her, maybe several things. She could hear the rustle of their creeping legs above her. To her left, she could see the glint of what might be shiny black eyes between drooping swags of gray lace moss.

There is nothing to be afraid of here, she told herself, and she could almost hear the swamp’s low, gurgling laugh.

With a shudder, she pushed through a curtain of vines bound together by milky clusters of cobwebs and stopped. She had imagined the Oracle’s temple would be like the domed buildings in her history books, but now she was confronted with a dense thicket of tree roots, a woven barricade of branches that stretched as high and wide as a fortress wall. It was hard to tell if it had been constructed or if it had simply grown up out of the swamp. At its center was an opening, a gaping mouth of darkness deeper and blacker than any starless sky. From it emanated a low, discordant hum, the hungry murmur of a hive, a hornet’s nest ready to crack open.

Diana gathered her courage, adjusted her pack, and stepped onto a path of wet black stones that led to the entry, leaping from one to the next across water the dull gray of a clouded mirror, her sandals slipping over their glossy backs.

   
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