TWENTY-THREE

Zaethan

   It had been ages since Zaethan studied anything. He hated parchment. The smell of it. The feel of it. Yet here he sat, in an office he never used, scrutinizing every map of the Proper he owned for the third consecutive hour.

He chewed on a stalk of camilla root, what was left of it, as he examined the intersecting web of streets. There was no pattern to the cross-caste murders, apart from the youth and lineage of each victim, each having been robbed of their Ascension. Zaethan grimaced, charting a path between the various marks he’d scribbled onto the parchment. From one bloodred dot to another, he surveyed the crimson lines between. With most alleyways unrepresented on palace maps, it was impossible to determine how the killer moved about unobserved.

A triplet of beats knocked at the door. Zaethan considered ordering the sentry away, as he hadn’t made much progress, but neither was he about to anytime soon.

“Uni!”

The door cracked open and a head of sable ringlets popped through. Long fingers brushed the shelf of hair away from a boyish face to reveal a bright, crooked grin.

“Owàamo, Alpha Zà,” the warrior tested. “You call, I come report, yeah?”

“Uni, Jabari. I called for your report,” Zaethan reiterated, pinching the bridge of his nose.

He’d admitted Jabari Muthwali into his personal pryde six months ago, but still found it difficult to communicate with their new addition. Bred in the mountains and raised in Yowekao, Jabari’s Andwele was fragmented, his Unitarian worse. Any attempt to combine the two resulted in kakk soup.

A crash and roar of masculine laughter came from behind Jabari, where the offices connected to a common area in the guard house. The screech of moving furniture and more voices joined the ruckus.

“Jabari, what the Depths is that noise?”

“Eh….” The trim Darakaian turned to investigate. “That be the Jwona rapiki, Alpha Zà.”

Zaethan bit down on the camilla root until it snapped.

“Are we all calling him that now?” he growled. At Jabari’s look of confusion, Zaethan rolled up the maps and motioned briskly. “Just get in here.”

The youngest member of his pryde bobbed on his heels in the doorway before slipping inside. “Uni, Alpha Zà.”

If the freshly Ascended warrior wasn’t such a natural talent, Zaethan didn’t know how his patience with Jabari would have fared. His thumb tapped a stout glass of water, wishing it were full of something brash and bitter instead.

“You may begin, Jabari, and do make it brief for once.” Zaethan pointed to the space in front of his desk.

“Eh, uni. No trouble come two-night pass for prince, ano. Easy like breeze, but for dark and light al’Haidren come a call. Dark al’Haidren prince send away, say ‘not feel well, tell her go.’” Jabari’s cheerful grin returned, having also developed a dislike for Sayuri Naborū-Zuo during his stint in Bastiion. “Then, prince send small gangle boy to fetch y’siti al’Haidren. She come like moth after midnight, in sleep dress. He spend all night with y’siti in the garden, yeah—”

“Wait. Doru, stop.” Zaethan’s hand cut off Jabari’s jumbled explanation. “What do you mean, ‘in sleep dress’?”

Jabari danced in place as his hands mimed around his chest and middle.

“Erm…tie-dress. For night-night walkabout.”

“Jabari, are you telling me the al’Haidren to Boreal—the y’siti—was brought to the prince in the middle of the night wearing nothing but her dressing gown?”

The warrior clapped his hands together enthusiastically. “Uni, yeah!”

Zaethan spit the pulverized root out the side of his mouth and shot out of the chair. “And how did our prince seem when she left?”

“Eh.” Jabari wiggled a brow, chuckling to himself. “Little happy, not big happy, ano.”

Another bang emitted through a wall shared with the common area. Zaethan’s hand clutched the back of his neck and clenched when a second followed.

“Jabari, how often does the prince send for the y’siti?”

Before he could answer, the office door creaked open again to allow a boulder of muscle through.

“Ahoté,” Kumo interrupted. “You want to step out here.”

The beta locked eyes with Zaethan and latched the door in retreat.

“We aren’t done,” Zaethan told the younger warrior. “You will tell me how many times this occurred and how often it happens in the future. Do you understand me, Jabari? Yeye qondai?”

“Uni zà, Alpha Zà, meme qondai.” He bumped a fist against his chest and stepped back, allowing Zaethan to lead the way into the main room of the guard house.

His beta waited rigidly outside the door. Zaethan’s cheeks went hot as Kumo sucked his teeth and jutted a bristled jaw toward a crowd of sentries in the center of the guard house. A ragtag collection of chairs had been dragged around a table, and over the heads of the sentries, dice flew in the air, eliciting a raucous cheer at their return to the wood.

Half the men should have been at their posts. Zaethan recognized more than enough faces to confirm it.

“Owàamo.”

A cluster of sentries parted at Zaethan’s greeting, though he spoke primarily for the Darakaian audience. Across the division sat the author of the commotion. Glass of bwoloa in hand, Wekesa had a cross-caste laundress perched in his lap and a single muddied boot propped on the table, soaking a soiled ring into the wood surface. Zaethan knew the other alpha hadn’t chosen his guard house for a random game of dice.

Ano. He’d come to piss in it.

“Zaeth, won’t you join us?” the bastard shouted in mock camaraderie as he lowered the shallow glass of liquor. Wekesa rolled the pair of dice between bruised knuckles and let his free hand roam the woman’s bare shoulder. “So much sweeter, a mix, uni? But our commander’s son already knows this—don’t you, Alpha Zà?”

Wekesa twisted his neck as if to admire the woman’s teak skin, but slid his coal-black eyes toward Zaethan and smirked. The angle invited sunlight to bathe the ragged scar along the side of his skull. Zaethan anchored onto the rapidly fading reminder of his rival’s defeat.

“Get out of my guard house,” Zaethan barked at the laundress, hunkering down over the tabletop when she hesitated. “I said, get out!”

“A bit hypocritical, yeah?”

Murmurs and smothered snickers rumbled through the grouping at Wekesa’s insinuation.

“Your pryde is on duty, Wekesa,” Zaethan said coldly. “Yet they are here, in my guard house.”