58. Hearts Sisters

Hearts' Sisters

Luella

Taln answers the door to the closed infirmaria, his usually brown face a sickly two shades lighter. A bead of sweat marks his brow even though the suns have almost set and a cool breeze whispers down the cobbled streets.

“Taln, are you alright?”

Taln nods too many times, the motion hurried. I look behind me and to the side but can’t put my finger on what could be wrong besides his awkwardness. Perhaps Mia told him something about me?

Is he afraid?

“Where’s Mia?” I ask, keeping my tone gentle.

“This way,” Taln says, turning to lead me into the dark hallways. Not a single light shines, each room instead yawning with darkness as we pass on our way to the back room. I grip the vials in my pocket and the stones in the other.

It’s too dark. Too quiet.

One of the stones at my fingertips seems to whisper to me. It’s small and smooth, shaped like a single grain of wheat in the bread that’s always sustained me. I follow Taln down the hall, hesitating for just a moment. I pop the small charged stone into my mouth and swallow hard. After doing it once, it feels right to do it again. I trace each stone, until I find another that reminds me of grain. It follows the first, and I decide this is either the wisest or stupidest decision I’ve made in awhile.

I manage to stuff three more of the grain-like stones into my mouth and swallow them dry. They settle cool and heavy at the base of my belly as Taln stumbles ahead of me.

“Taln, is Mia alright?” I prod as we enter the private area.

He hesitates. “Y-yes.” Taln steps aside to let me in the very back room. Perhaps Mia had a bad patient again, or one who had died. That might set off the boy.

Moving into the backroom I see that Mia does have a patient, but they are very much alive. Three men stand in the room, Bacchus masks on their faces. One holds a knife at Mia's throat, and the other two rush to flank me. I side-step, elbowing the closer one in the throat. Regret rings through me like a bell as Mia makes a strangled noise. The brute holding her squeezes the knife ever closer, drawing a small trickle of blood. “Don’t make me kill the healer, venefica .”

I freeze. How did they find Mia? Why? Surely not because of the Emperor’s games. They must know more. I lock eyes with my friend, my friend for ten years, and try to see what she knows. She tries to move her eyes to the side, like she wants to shake her head but can’t against the knife on her throat.

She hasn’t told them anything.

“Why have you accosted my healer?” I say, mustering my most unaffected and Domina-like voice. I channel Cassius in all his righteousness, Ledo in his arrogance, and the Emperor in his dismissiveness.

“Cause she’s friends with you, venefica ,” the man holding Mia says. He seems to be in charge, and while the other two men haven’t grabbed me, they do block the door behind me. Not that I would run while my friend was in danger. Taln huddles off to the side. “Or should I say, Vidua .” He grins at that, as if it’s funny to him that I have this name.

Then he shifts to the side, intentionally, cruelly. There’s someone behind him, crumpled against the wall. Someone who was very much alive yesterday, but no longer witnesses the horrors of the republic.

The last of seven favors her pater traded for, finally joining her sisters.

But she wasn’t a favor to me, or to Cassius. She was just Flavia. The man must see my eyes, wavering on her still form, her bruised face, her bloody back. He doesn’t have to tell me what my eyes have already pieced together, but he does. “She told us all about your secret. Working with the Dominus to eventually kill the Emperor. She didn’t know how you changed your face or what magic you possess.” He laughs. “But she knew enough.” And once she was used up for her information, she was discarded, like so many others.

I meet Mia’s eyes again. I can’t risk her, too. “I’ll come with you,” I say.

“No!” Mia moves forward as if on instinct and the man holding her slices the blade straight across her throat. A choked, gurgled sound comes from Mia as her vocal cords tear beneath his blade and I scream. I scream and scream and scream as I watch the woman who braids my hair, who first called me Lue, who is the sister of my heart, crumple to the ground.