She was huffing by the time she reached the next level. It was stifling inside the stairwell, and it stank like three-day-old fish left out on the table. She felt the stench and the dust and grime seeping into her skin. When I get back home, I’m taking a bath that lasts for three days, she promised herself.
Which better be sooner rather than later.
“Kreya?” she called as she pushed against the door and poked her head in.
Zera expected more darkness and grime, but this room was light and airy and surprisingly clean. It had high rafters, plus several windows with open shutters that let the sunlight stream in. A canopied bed in the center was piled with linens.
“Are you asleep?”
Tiptoeing in, Zera crossed to the bed—
She halted as three shadowy shapes lurched away from the walls. They were murmuring wordlessly. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw movement on the rafters above: more of them, doll-like monstrosities made of scraps of fabric scuttling over the beams.
Sucking in air, she let out a proper bloodcurdling scream, while her hands jabbed into her pockets to find talismans. The dolls shrieked back and rushed toward her, and she heard footsteps on the stairs.
A doll latched onto her leg.
Still screaming heartily, Zera activated a strength talisman and flung the doll across the room. It smashed into the wall just as Kreya rushed through the door.
The dolls halted as soon as they saw Kreya. Clustering around the foot of the bed, they chittered at her. Kreya’s face contorted in horror as if Zera had slaughtered a child. “Did you hurt him?”
Zera glanced at the doll she’d chucked across the room. It was collapsed, motionless, on the floor. “Um . . . is self-defense an excuse? Because it attacked me first.”
But Kreya didn’t rush to the doll. Instead she ran to the bed. She examined the linens from top to bottom, feeling along them, and Zera drifted closer, keeping an eye on the freaky dolls. They hung back for now, clustered together.
The linens looked . . .
“Kreya, what’s that?”
It looked as if the linens were covering a body.
Oh no, she didn’t. “You’re making a human-size doll? Aren’t your other horrors bad enough? Are you planning on giving all your visitors heart attacks?”
“He’s no doll.” Kreya blocked Zera’s view. “And visitors aren’t welcome. Why are you here? And how did you find me?”
If it wasn’t a doll, then what? “Please tell me that’s not a dead body in your bed. Because I cannot look the other way if you’ve become a murderer.” Zera may have retired from the official hero business, but she still honored the laws of Vos. She palmed the strength talisman, readying it if she needed it again. The freaky rag dolls were still staring at her, while murmuring in their whispery voices. She’d counted at least seven.
“You shouldn’t be here,” Kreya said as she finished her examination. Apparently satisfied, she exhaled.
“I was concerned about you,” Zera said loftily. “And now I’m even more concerned. What are these atrocities, and who is that in your bed?”
“None of your concern. And I did not hear so much ‘concern’ in your voice when I came to beg, on my knees, for your help.” Kreya sucked in air as if she was about to escalate to shouting, but then she seemed to deflate. “Unless you came because you reconsidered? I still need the talismans.”
“Why?”
“I told you I can’t tell you.”
“What can you tell me? Can you answer other questions? Like why this tower? Why are you alone? Why make these horrors? Why the corpse? I have questions, Kreya, and I’m not leaving until I have answers.” She thought she would have sounded more authoritative if her voice hadn’t crept up an octave by the end of her little speech. She was hot beneath her coat, and her palm was sweating squeezing the talisman.
With a significant glance at Zera’s hand, Kreya asked, “Do you plan to fight me?”
“If necessary. But that’s not why I came. Out of consideration for our past relationship, I came to make sure you’re safe, and I will do what it takes to ensure that.”
“You’d attack me to keep me safe?”
“Okay, yes, that didn’t make sense. But you have creepy dolls! And a corpse!”
Kreya sighed. “Put the bone away, Zera.”
Zera slid the talisman back into her pocket before she even considered why—she was still in the habit of obeying Kreya’s orders, even after all this time. That was almost more unnerving than the dolls themselves, and she nearly pulled the talisman back out just to prove that she wasn’t so pliable. But the dolls hadn’t moved any closer, and she couldn’t imagine Kreya as a threat to her. She left the talisman in her pocket.
Kreya was studying her, so Zera studied her back. Her old friend had many more lines around her eyes than she’d used to, as if her skin had been crumpled like a tissue, then inexpertly smoothed—far more lines than she should have had, at her age. Hard living, she thought. Off the top of her head, Zera knew of at least three creams that could help with that.
At last, Kreya said, “If you promise not to overreact, I will show you who this is, and you will understand why I need your talismans.”
Zera drew herself up. “I never overreact.”
“You are the definition of ‘overreacting.’”
“I react the exact appropriate amount to a given situation.” Yes, she had screamed at the animated dolls, but look at them! “You must admit, we have been in some unsettling situations.”
“Like the mountain lion? Remember that?”
Of course she did. She wasn’t about to be drawn into reminiscing, though. This wasn’t a reunion. This was . . . a check-in visit, to assuage Zera’s guilt over refusing to help. I won’t let it become anything more. She was done with giving her friendship and trust to someone who was willing to disappear from her life without a backward glance.
“I never understood why it targeted Marso,” Kreya continued. “He had zero meat on his bones. If he stood still, you’d have mistaken him for another skeleton. I never saw him eat.”
Zera kept her eyes on the rag dolls. “You didn’t know? He used to carry dried venison in his pockets, instead of talismans. He nibbled as we traveled.”
“Truly? I thought he just absorbed nutrients from the air, or whatever bone readers do.”
“He couldn’t eat if he thought anyone was watching him.”
“Huh. Wonder if he ever got over that.”
“I . . .” Zera shut her mouth. She truly didn’t know. She’d kept in touch with him and Stran for the first few years after the war, but they’d drifted apart, each consumed by their own life. She’d had her business, which needed to be tended and grown. Stran had had his new family, which also needed tending and growing. And Marso . . . She didn’t know.
“You aren’t having regular lunches with them?” Kreya asked. “Then why am I the target of so much of your anger? When did you last see Stran or Marso?”
“That’s different,” Zera said. “You left!”
“I had a good reason.”
“You always have a good reason! But did you ever once consult the rest of us, to see what we thought or what we felt?” Zera was shouting again, and it felt good. The rag dolls, though, became more agitated as her voice grew louder.