Emilia raises her eyebrows and hops from stone to stone. She spins on one foot.
“Be as nervous as you like. I’ve been running these walls since I was nine. The war gift gives balance. You could do it as well as I. Perhaps even better. Faster.” She smirks at Jules’s doubtful face. “Or perhaps you could had your naturalist mother not bound your war gift with low magic.”
Emilia spins away, miming sword slashes and dagger strikes with imaginary weapons. She has the grace of a bird. Of a cat.
Maybe Jules could do what Emilia does. She is legion cursed, after all. Cursed with two gifts: naturalist and war.
“Had Madrigal not bound the curse, I’d have been driven insane and been drowned a long time ago.”
“Yet you can use your war gift now. It is weakened, but it is there. So maybe you would have been fine all along.” Emilia spins again and thrusts an imaginary sword at Jules’s throat. “Maybe the madness of the legion curse is nothing but a lie spread by the temple.”
“Why would they lie?”
“To keep anyone from being as powerful as you could be.”
Jules narrows her eyes, and Emilia shrugs.
“I see you think it is not worth the risk.” She shrugs again. “Fine. You have the war gift, however muted, so I will hide you however long. Until you no longer want to hide.”
On tiptoe now, Emilia jumps to another stone. But the stone she lands on is loose, and she wobbles precariously.
“Emilia!”
Emilia grins and lowers her arms.
“I knew it was loose,” she says, and chuckles when Jules scowls. “I know every step of this wall. Every crack in the mortar. Every creak in the gates. And I hate it.”
“Why do you hate it?” Jules looks back at Bastian City, the light and shadow slatted across it by the setting sun. To her it is a marvel, fortified and ordered, built-up buildings of gray brick and timber. The marketplace with stalls covered over in red cloth, the shades as differed as the offered goods as the dye fades with age.
“I love Bastian,” says Emilia. She jumps down. “I hate the wall. We keep it up now because of the gift, because to be ever prepared is our way. But a wall isn’t needed when we have the mist. So it just seals us off.” She clenches a fist and pounds the stone. “Until we forget the rest of the island. The wall makes the people turn their backs, lazy and safe, and who cares if the gift grows weak? Who cares that another poisoner wears the crown?” She watches Jules run her fingers along the mortar lines. “I suppose there are no walls at all in Wolf Spring.”
“Not like these.” Only fences made of wood or pretty, piled rocks to mark the borders between farms. Easily jumped by a horse, or by a person with enough of a running start. “When we rode into Indrid Down to save Mirabella from Katharine in the duel, we passed what was left of the wall that once enclosed the capital. It was overgrown with grasses and weeds. Half-buried. There’s nothing else on the island like this. Not even the ramparts that protect the Volroy fortress.”
“I have heard they still have a fine border wall in Sunpool.” Emilia sighs. “Oracles. They are a paranoid lot. Are you going to do what you came out here to do or what?”
“Can we go down to the beach?”
“Not today. I did not send scouts. There could be others down there in the dunes. Others to recognize you and your cat and send word back to the Volroy. The longer the poisoner queen thinks you left on that boat with her sisters, the better.”
“The longer the better.” Jules takes the pair of silver shears from her back pocket. “How about forever?”
“Nothing lasts forever. Why do you want to go down to the beach?”
Jules pulls her long brown braid over her shoulder.
“I don’t know. To cast it out into the water, I guess.”
Emilia laughs.
“Are all naturalists so sentimental?” She gestures toward the shore full of red and white stones. “Throw it anywhere. The terns will tear strands of it to line their nests. That should please you. Though you don’t have to do it at all. That braid is the last thing that will give you away. More likely are those two-colored eyes of yours.” She nods at Camden. “Or that.”
“I’m never going to put Camden aside, so you can stop hinting about it,” Jules snaps.
“I’m not hinting about anything. I like her. Only a war-gifted naturalist would have a familiar so fierce. Now get on with it.”
Jules touches the end of her braid. She wonders how long Emilia’s dark hair is. She always wears it pinned to her nape in two small rolled buns.
She sets the braid between the open blades of the shears, just below her chin. Arsinoe used to do this. Every season, she would hack off what had grown, anything to avoid the sleek, groomed beauty expected of the queens. One year she left it cut so crooked that it looked like her head was perpetually cocked. Her Arsinoe. She would be so proud.
Jules takes a deep breath and then cuts off her braid. She throws it out as far as she can, out toward the water her friend sailed away on.
The family house of the Vatros clan is tucked into the southeast quadrant of the city, along the wall. It is a large house, with many floors and rows of brown-shuttered windows. The shingles of the pitched roofs are deep red. And it is old, some parts older than others and made of the same gray stone as the wall. The newer additions have been constructed in white. It is one of the finest houses in Bastian City, but all houses seem quite fine to Jules, who is used to clapboard and paint faded by damp, salty breezes. The war gift may have diminished over the centuries, but they have done what they can to not let it show; it is only visible upon much closer inspection, in the patched masonry in the walls and the stitches over stitches in their clothing.
“Attack at half speed.”
Emilia turns the sparring stick over in her hands. It is a clever weapon: sturdy, oiled wood joined in the center as a long pole and able to be twisted apart quickly into two shorter staffs for dual striking.
Jules does as she is told, though her own sparring stick feels heavy and clumsy. She sweeps low for the legs twice, then blocks Emilia’s attacks and dodges an attempt to pop her in the chest. Emilia nods, the only encouragement she ever gives.
“You never ask me to use my war gift,” Jules says. “You never tell me when to use it.”
“You’ll use it when you use it.” Emilia twists her pole into separate staffs. “And you will know when.” She comes forward, still at half speed, but even so, Jules’s arms cannot keep up. The poles crack against each other.
“Though it would come easier if we could get your mother to lift the binding.”
Jules lowers her staff. She flexes her fingers and tucks her hair behind her ear. When she cut it, she cut too short, and now it escapes from its ribbon. She does not like it. Camden does not either. The mountain cat licks it every night when they go to sleep as if she is trying to slick it back into a braid.
“Stop asking that,” Jules growls.
“I am only teasing.”
Except that she is not. At least not entirely. Jules rubs the ache in her poison-damaged legs. Bound gift or no, she might never be the warrior Emilia hopes she will be, thanks to that.
“Come on,” Emilia says. “We don’t have all day.”