Page 79 of Insolence (Eisha’s Hidden Codices #1)

El

T here isn’t time to second-guess myself.

I head straight to the Learning Annex, still trying to make sense of the fact that my old contact is here. Even worse, she’s the gods-be-damned Screamer this whole time.

Maida keeps extra paper and a spare fountain pen in her lectern cabinet. After grabbing them, I swing into the larder. Emerge with two bottles of brandy.

I’m already waiting inside the compost shed when Lydia arrives, lugging a crate of mangled thistle lilies. The stench precedes her.

Her guardsman escort lags several paces behind. Loafing along, he looks like he’d rather be elsewhere. A sentiment I can wholeheartedly relate to.

I lift my head from the shadows. “Well. If it isn’t Lydia ‘the Screamer’ Catrionne.”

She stops, her expression betraying her. I can practically hear her thoughts: If it isn’t El Asher.

The guardsman finally ambles up behind her.

“Get lost,” I growl.

A slow man, both physically and in other departments, he gapes at me. “What gives? Er, your holiness.” Makes a clumsy bow.

I hold a bottle of brandy out to him. “Take this and scram.”

“Uh, ma'am”—he glances around—“she can’t leave my custody.”

Normally the “ma’am” wouldn’t rankle me so much. After dealing with Deirdre, it does. “And you can have her back in a little while. But I need to borrow her for fifteen minutes.” I look past his shoulder. “You see the clock tower?”

His gaze follows mine, swinging to the 24-hour clock face. “Yeah?”

“You see how the big hand is pointing at the twelve right now?”

Lydia chokes out a snort.

“Er…” The bewildered guardsman blinks several times as if muddling through a trick question. “What about it?”

“Don’t come back until it’s pointing at eighteen, got it?”

“But Mother Deirdre said—”

“I know what she said. What’s your name, buddy?”

Eyes bright with glee, Lydia hefts her crate into the air. Dumps its putrid contents onto the compost heap.

“Colin, ma’am.” He scratches the back of his neck.

Colin’s young. Somewhere in his early twenties. Handsome too, if you’re into things like men. “We won’t go anywhere, Colin. I need her to do something for me.”

His eyes narrow. “What?”

“Temple business. Nothing against the rules,” I lie.

He squints, trying to work out whether I’m having him on.

“Now. Do me a favor and take a walk. Come back in fifteen minutes, yeah? And take this with you.” I shove the liquor into his gigantic paw. “I’ve seen where you sleep, and I know how badly you need it.”

He looks at the bottle, at Lydia, and back at the clock before glaring at me again. “Fifteen minutes,” he says.

“Thank you, Colin.”

“Don’t go nowhere!” He looks between us, posture rigid.

“I give you my word as high priestess.” I lift one hand. “We won’t move from this spot. And if you don’t tell anyone about this, I’ll bring you another one of those tomorrow. Deal?”

Standing off to the side, Lydia studies us adamantly, her aura buzzing.

“All right,” he says after a moment of consideration. “Got yourself a deal.” He unstoppers the bottle, taking a long swig before rambling off toward the Waymark. Hums a lively, out-of-tune song the whole way.

Once he’s out of earshot, I grab Lydia’s wrist. Haul her out of the shed and around the corner.

“Aren’t you a sight.” I pull her into me, wrapping my arms around her.

“Mm-hmm.” She hugs me back.

“But you’re a natural human. Right, Lydia?”

She nods vigorously and motions at her sealed mouth. “ Mmm .”

I separate us and squeeze her arms. “I know. I wish I had scissors, but they keep everything sharper than a blunt paper knife away from everyone, priestesses included. Unless we’re doing a Mediation.

Even if I could free your mouth, I couldn’t sew you back up again.

Not with so little time. This isn’t ideal, but”—I whip out the pen and paper—“it’s better than nothing. ”

“Mmm!” Her eyes go wide. She snatches them like a starving woman clawing for sustenance.

We sit on the ground, tucked behind Kael and Autry’s quaint cottage. The mountain’s chipped sandstone wall digs into our backs, and the compost shed blocks us from view.

My old acquaintance wastes no time, scribbling so quickly her head bobs with the effort. Holds it up for me to read:

You still have memories?

“Yes,” I whisper even though we’re alone. Lower my voice further and lean in: “The ritual didn’t work on me. Only two other people know. Looks like it didn’t work on you either, did it?”

Lydia makes a noise. Scribbles rapidly:

she didn’t bother. Sent here to die. Made me watch the others.

“Goddess.” I flinch.

The screams of other women—their shrieks through poison-damp cloths while our life-force was syphoned away—

The ordeal of it is rarely far from my mind. The memories seldom give me peace at night. To force Lydia to watch without the escape of oblivion afterward is cruel. Even by Deirdre’s standards.

“Corporal punishment,” I say at last. “You really pissed off the wrong person, didn’t you?” Someone in such a high place, this was his way of making an example of her.

Besides being a changeling, it’s the only other reason a woman would end up here. It hardly ever happens.

She flashes me a look that says, Tell me something new . Starts scrawling away again. Underlines several words. When I peek over, most of them are scribbled so hurriedly they’re difficult to parse.

She passes me her handiwork:

I found notes. So many notes… D runs experiments down there. As soon as she started as Prioress. Kept busy her first few years in the temple.

“Fuck,” I say softly. Hand it back.

She adds more:

They go mad.

Her attention snaps to me. She waits, eyebrows raised.

“ Who goes mad?”

She adds the next word so hastily she has to squeeze in one more for context, inserting it between two others:

They go mad. starved Demuns.

My mind barely latches onto what she’s saying before she’s off to the races writing and underlining again. She doesn’t stop. The next revelations pour from her pen as if she’s been yearning to spill them for a century:

That sick bitch experimented on them. For years . Final stages they rip own hair out. Tear fingernails off. Gouge out eyes. MONSTROUS.

“Oh, Lydia.” My gaze rises to hers. Barely tamping down the nausea souring the back of my tongue, I murmur, “I’m so sorry you had to discover all of that.”

What makes it worse is not having anybody to discuss it with. Digest it properly.

Instead the information has festered and become a wound she can’t resist picking during her idle moments—even when she doesn’t want to. I’m well familiar with that level of isolation.

Done putting down her next two sentences, she shoots me a look. Taps the fountain pen’s nib against the thick paper above the word chaos until ink spatters and drips.

Horrified, I gape at the words. My throat is so dry it sticks to itself.

Awful things happen down there. Her twisted “chaos evaluations” are ongoing!

“‘Chaos evaluations,’ for fuck’s sake,” I finally mutter, swallowing past my growing dread. Leave it to her to give her little torture sessions a punchy name . “Deirdre’s flat-out insane. Fucking around with chaos is beyond moronic.”

Lydia’s attention is back on writing.

The handmaidens. Most of them turn out demuns. Once 18 hits, they’re taken down and caged. Allowed to feed first time. Induce Anchoring.

Again, the only thing I can do is gawk, posture going slack. Wishing I didn’t know this shit.

No handmaidens have turned eighteen since I’ve been here. I can’t remember by how much, but Enid’s damn close.

After that kept far away from any source of life force. Starved. she makes them suffer for months before letting them feed again. Records everything they do to themselves.

More ink droplets land on the paper with how furiously she’s cramming in the last bits near the bottom of the sheet. I stare at her hand dragging through and smearing, my stomach folding in on itself. As much of a sick cunt as Deirdre is, I had no idea she was capable of such atrocities.

It’s an effort to force my next questions past the shock and revulsion. “So you’re saying it’s only after Anchoring that a starving demun will become destructive? Start hurting herself if she can’t feed?”

She nods, still writing. Scratches out a wrong word with hasty slashes of her pen. Plugs on ahead. I can barely make out the last of it through the smeared ink at the bottom of the sheet:

The others humans are sold off by 19. Menial labor

A chill runs through me, starting at the top of my head. I already knew about the last part and sincerely wish I didn’t. I’ve always assumed she shoved spheres into their hands before getting rid of them. But the rest of it?

Goddess . It’s a nightmare I never imagined. “And I suppose she keeps the demuns here. Subjects them to the ritual after these so-called evaluations of hers?” Mages too, certainly, if I know anything about Deirdre.

Lydia’s sharp huff is clear: What do you think?

But ‘thinking’ is a step up from what I’m currently doing. My brain has halted any and all operations. I stare at the paper lying on Lydia’s lap, no longer seeing. I’ve never heard of these destructive urges before.

It’s all too sadistic. Too depraved.

And Tiss… Goddess . The mad glint in her eye that day she stabbed me. If I’d gotten away sooner, would she have turned the paper knife on herself?

And the greenhouse. The way her eyes were so glassy. And she was trying to seduce me.

Fuck. I should’ve guessed.

The chaos within her was trying to feed. Doing anything and everything it could to ensure she did so before the starvation got worse. And this would be why .

Guilt spreads through me like a virus. Here I’ve been judging her. Distrustful of her. Chalking her behavior up to being out of control and rash.

With the way she seduced me the night our soul-tie was forged, I just assumed—

And I was so hard on her last night, throwing things in her face that weren’t even her fault. Not really. Goddess save me, I need to talk to her.

Lydia clears her throat. Nudges my shoulder. She’s flipped the paper over and scrawled information that brings on a different type of shock:

Bard Fiach put me here. I know something I shouldn’t

“ What ?” The past is suddenly breathing down the back of my neck like never before.

Her hand must cramp because she rotates her wrist. Lays down more hasty words and holds it up:

About his daughter.

Wait. My head snaps up. “His daughter ? What does your being here have to do with Tiss ?” A steely protectiveness flares to life, gripping me in a visceral way. “You two knew each other in Aronya Dar?”

“Mmm,” she tilts her head, eyebrows pinched. Writes:

Never met. Heard of her.

Hard at work, she’s breathing rapidly now as she writes. My breath races alongside hers, my stomach crawling up my throat as I lean in to read:

Boss told long ago. I’m only other person who knows.

“Your boss… the Viper ? What could he possibly have told you about Tiss?”

She scribbles the next thing. Underlines with a quick slash of her pen that steals the air from my lungs.

Not his true daughter.

What the fuck? My brain stalls out. Nonsensical combinations of letters swim on the page. “What do you mean Tiss isn’t his true daughter? Whose daughter is she?” I hiss.

Lydia is bending to write more when out-of-tune humming drifts across the courtyard. Our heads rise in unison.

Damn it . “Listen, we have a lot to catch up on. Maida and I are cooking up a plan to get out of here. The two of us and the acolytes. You too, if we can get our shit in order before the Festival of Eisha.”

Lydia makes a strangled noise. Puts her head down, writing again.

“We’ll need your help,” I continue.

She shoves the paper in front of my face:

HOW? Impossible!

A boot scrapes the pebble-littered path over by the radishes.

“Trust me, I’m aware,” I whisper, hurriedly snatching back pen and paper. “We’ll figure it out. Then we’re freeing the rest of the girls and burning this infernal place to rubble.”

She nods, brows bunched low over eyes glimmering with determination.

“I’ll send someone to make contact in the next few days.”

The sound of Colin nearing the compost heap has us scrambling to our feet.

“You girls done doing… whatever it is you’re doing over there?” His tenor comes from the other side of the shed.

Lydia’s gaze is darting between her ink-stained hands. “Mmm!”

Gesturing for her to stay put, I pop out from behind the shed.

Run face-first into Colin. “Hey, bud! Can we get a few more moments? We’re not quite ready for you.

” I brace my hand against the shed, making myself an obstacle.

Lay my most amiable grin on him as my heart tries to kick its way out of my chest.

“But you said fifteen minutes! It’s been fifteen min…utes…” He trails off when my grin flattens to something sterner. He swallows, his throat bobbing. “Uh, your holiness.”

“I’m helping her fix something. Then she’ll be ready.” I clap my hands on his shoulders and walk him backward several steps. “Wait right here, will you? I’ll get her for you.”

“But your holiness, I just saw her, right—”

“Two seconds, Colin. Stay there.” I return to Lydia. “For fuck’s sake,” I hiss. “Relentless as a fucking cadaver dog.”

I’ve already got the second bottle of brandy out. Pop the stopper. “Hold out your hands. Alcohol is a solvent. It’ll dissolve the ink.”

We’re standing close together, facing the corner where the mountain meets the shed. Out of eyeshot, Colin’s standing nearly on top of the vegetables and looking dejected.

I dribble the clear liquor over Lydia’s hands. She sighs through her nose when the ink stains blur on her skin. Rubbing her hands together, she gets as much of it off as she can.

I pass her my handkerchief and mutter, “Again, not ideal, but it’ll have to do till you can get to a washbasin.”

She casts a grateful glance at me before jamming the stained handkerchief into my hands again.

“Yeah, you’re welcome. And it’s been good seeing you too.”

She steps around me, her sticky hands nestled within the folds of her black skirt. Colin glances up. Tips his bottle at me when he sees her.

“Remember. Keep this between us, and I’ll bring you another tomorrow.” I raise what’s left of mine in turn. We both drink.

He gives a quick nod before following Lydia to the front of the building. As for me, I lurch backward until the mountain stops me. Let out a jagged breath, my heart wrung out.

The hard work hasn’t even begun, and this circus is already trying to fucking kill me.