“You observe prettyworkers, Luca,” I say, snorting. “Believe it or not, I’m not a walking mess of urges. And a lot of this is new to me, as well, even if it’s in a different way.” I blush a little to admit this. “Do you mind postponing your offer for another time? I’d like to see that pillar of salt.”
It’s more than that. I’d still like to have my date. I’d still like to hold his hand and walk in public as an item. Me, the girl without eyes, and him, beautiful in a way that makes me feel beautiful just to stand beside him. I still want that private night, even if it’s just lying on his chest. But I want this first.
“Not at all,” he says. He links his arm with mine and walks us down the path. “And I don’t actually think of everyone as if they’re in a permanent state of lust.” He laughs. “But you know what they say about Gomorrah girls.”
“Careful, that’s your girl you’re talking about.”
As we turn down the path, we bump shoulders with the princess. She clutches at her bodyguard’s arm but never looks at him, as she’s too preoccupied with the sights around her. She glances at me and then recognizes my face. “Oh! It’s you again.” Without hesitating, she links her second arm with me, and I’m so taken aback that I tense. Luca shrugs beside me. “We’re looking for the pillar of salt. It’s supposedly famous.”
“It’s cursed, Your... Reia,” the man says.
Luca raises his eyebrows but says nothing.
Reia ignores him. “I heard it was once a woman,” she says to me. “Is that true?”
“So the story goes,” Luca says.
She smiles at him, and I grip his hand tighter, a bit possessively. “Do you live here, too? You don’t look like you do.”
“My tent is only a short walk from here.”
“That’s marvelous.” She sighs as we approach a clearing with a statue in its center. “I’d love to travel more.” She pauses when she sees the statue. “Well, this must be it!”
The white statue appears to be of a woman, but her salt features are so weathered down that her form is barely recognizable as human. Her head is turned, as if she’s glancing over her shoulder. When Luca mentioned the statue to me, I expected it to be taller. Instead, it’s about my height. Life-size.
I let go of the girl’s arm and creep closer to it, to see if there’s an expression on the woman’s face. There isn’t. If there ever was, the years have worn it away. I run my hand along the woman’s nonexistent facial features.
Someone chokes behind me.
I turn around just as Reia raises both of her hands to her throat, which is spurting out blood. Her eyes widen in terror, and she crumbles to the grass, facedown.
I scream and grasp for Luca, several feet away from me. The man with the princess lunges toward her body and swiftly turns her over. He tears off a piece of his shirt and ties it around her neck to stop the bleeding, but it’s clear she’s already gone.
“Who did this?” the man shouts. The people around us begin to notice what has happened, and they shriek and step back.
“I didn’t see...” Luca says. “I’m not sure what I saw.”
“But there’s no one around,” I say. “It was only us.”
“It looked like...” Luca hesitates before continuing. “It looked like her throat sliced open on its own.”
The man stands over her, ushering the crowd back. “No one move. If anyone saw anything, anything at all, you’ll be questioned. In the name of Ovren, come forward.” His voice sounds more frightened than authoritative.
The people around us whisper.
“The princess,” one says.
“I saw it. Her throat just slit open. There was no one near her. Like she was attacked by a spirit.”
“Maybe a Frician assailant we didn’t see.”
Luca squeezes me against him. “We were just talking to her,” I stutter. “How did this happen? And how did anyone else recognize her?”
Luca shakes his head. “I don’t know.” I can’t blot her panicked face from my mind. She was young. Barely twenty. With the sort of beauty befitting a princess. Yesterday, she was married. Isn’t she supposed to be living a fairy tale?
“We should get out of here. There will be trouble later.” He pulls me away from the gathering crowd. “I’ll take you home.”
He squeezes my hand comfortingly, and I try to pretend that seeing the princess so gruesomely killed hasn’t shaken me, only moments after speaking with her. I’ve spent the last month talking myself out of panic attacks. I can’t let this death of a random Up-Mountain princess cause me to utterly break down, no matter how kind she’d been. I have to be stronger than that.
But it’s hard to convince myself of this when I can’t help but think that my family isn’t okay, even if everyone is safe and under the protection of Gomorrah’s guards. Two people I loved were murdered, and we still don’t know who did it, or how, or why. Nothing about that is okay.
Luca said her throat slit open on its own. It just doesn’t make sense.
“I want to go back to my tent,” I say. There’s a lump of dread in my gut.
We don’t speak on the way there, where members of Gomorrah’s guard stand outside speaking with Nicoleta, whose back faces us. Since it’s only a little past midnight, it doesn’t seem like anyone else is home yet. Unu and Du aren’t running around the yard outside. Hawk must be on her usual hunt for a midnight snack. And Crown on one of his walks. All of them are accompanied by their guards, but, still, I cannot help but worry.
Luca hugs me and presses my face lightly into his chest. “I’m sorry. You’ve seen too much death lately.”
“I can’t get her face out of my mind.”
“I imagine. I... Do you want me to stay with you tonight? You don’t have to stay here. Or I could stay here. If you—”
“Sorina,” Nicoleta shouts. She whips around, and her eyes are bloodshot and puffy. Unlike the last time I saw her this way, I don’t make a move toward her. I’m frozen. Last time she cried, we learned Blister was dead. Rather than my heart pounding and urging me forward, I feel as if it’s stopped.
As Nicoleta runs for us, Luca squeezes my arms, as if bracing me for what I might hear.
Nicoleta throws her arms around me. “You’re back. We’re waiting on the others. The guard and I have already sent some men to find—”
“What happened?” Luca asks for me. My voice is gone. I’m petrified, shaking.
“You need to sit down. Sorina, look at me. You’re trembling. Sorina—no! Don’t go in there!”
But I’m already running to our tent. I don’t want to hear Nicoleta tell me that another member of our family is dead. I need to see it myself. I need to make sure this isn’t some terrible dream repeating itself over and over until everyone I care about has been taken from me.
I halt as soon as I cross the threshold.
The throat of the body on our living room floor is slit, blood staining her black-and-white-striped clothes and pooling around her on the floor. She appears untouched, except for her neck. There’s no evidence of her backing away or of a fight. It seems the killer attacked her from behind, and she crumpled to the floor, the shock rigid on her face.
I wail at the sight of her and grasp Luca’s forearm for support once he and Nicoleta enter. “Sorina,” he says, trying to pull me toward him, away from Venera’s body, out of the tent, but I squirm away and rush to her side.
There’s no point checking her pulse. No person could survive that amount of blood loss. But I do it anyway. I check on her neck. On her wrists. I press my ear to her chest and listen to nothing within it.
Unlike with Gill’s or Blister’s death, there is no shock. Maybe because I’ve been afraid this would happen for weeks now, bracing myself for another loved one to be ripped away. The pain of it seems to tear me in two.
My best friend. My sister.
The anger, the grief and the suddenness feel as if a screwdriver is jutting out of my chest and turning, twisting my insides together.