Page 38 of The Verdant Cage
“She wasn’t,” Marina says. “She tagged along. Misia wants her to help me with the census tomorrow.”
Lozen smirks. “No need to sound so pissed off about it.”
I hold my breath. Never in my life have I seen someone stand up to Marina Seingalt, not even her own father.
“Screw you,” Marina says, angling past Lozen to enter her cottage. There’s no malice in her words, though, and I wonder if I’ve just learned something valuable about how to treat her.
“After you,” Lozen says, stepping aside. She barely waits until we’re inside to press me. “Did you sleep together?” she asks, tossing herself onto the sofa. Her eyes are bright, her lips on the verge of cracking into that sly smile. “You and Gryphon?”
Marina had asked a version of that same question after Jonas was Harvested. “None of your business,” I say. The words suggest confidence, but my voice quavers.
Lozen throws her head back and howls with laughter. “All right, little chicken. Itisnone of my business.”
Marina sits next to her, crossing her legs daintily at the ankle. “Too bad he hates you,” she says.
“That was a dramatic scene at chapel.” Lozen’s smile stays put. “You’d think he was being forced to marry his own mother. How do you think he’ll behave when it comes to your actual wedding day?”
Lozen is two years younger than me yet manages to make me feel like a child. “I think it doesn’t matter,” I say, done with this conversation. Let them make of my comment what they will. I rub the bridge of my nose. “I’d like to review last year’s census. Is it in the library?”
“Yes,” Marina says. She smooths the front of her tunic. “I’m sure you can locate it on your own. Let’s go upstairs, Lozen. I have something to show you in my bedroom.”
Lozen seems reluctant to leave. Her interest in me is distressing. Riding a burst of annoyance, I hold her gaze well past the point of comfort. She breaks first, winking at me before hopping off the couch to follow Marina up the stairs.
“I see you, Rose,” she calls over her shoulder. “The real you.”
Not bloody likely, I think, striding over to the library section of the cottage. I don’t even pretend to search for last year’s census. Jonas’s words are vibrating through me.
We’re not what you think. Go to the vault.
Now that I’m about to trespass, my pulse flutters along my throat. I suspect Jonas only went into the vault that one time; he’d never mentioned it before our last conversation.
Grief knits through me, an ache where my missing family members used to be. With the pain comes a clear, unexpected memory of Mom teaching Jonas and me to swim. Dad had already passed then, but it was a rare chunk of time where Aunt Florence, Uncle Richard, and Gran could handle the Apothecary duties, so we took the afternoon off. The day was hot and sunny, the water cool. I took to swimming right away, while Jonas sank like a stone. Mom joked we should call him Pebble, and he said then we might as well call her Mountain because he’d come from her, and it was so dorky that we’d all laughed until our bellies hurt.
The memory strangles me.
I toy with Lucky Bunny inside my pocket, glancing back toward the Record Keeper family quarters. Lozen and Marina are laughing about something upstairs, the sound muffled. Simon is hopefully still hanging out with Eero. I’ve no idea where their father, David, is, but we hadn’t run into him coming home from chapel.
There’s never going to be a safe time to do this.
I charge across the library before I lose my slim thread of courage. The village’s communal books used to be housed in chapel, we’re told, but three generations back, the Council of Elders decided to move them to an addition on the Record Keeper cottage to more fairly distribute duties, as the Record Keeper did not have many outside of the census. That reconfiguration is the only reason anyone is allowed to get this close to the entrance to the most confidential chamber in all of Noah’s Valley.
The wood floor creaks beneath my feet. Normally, the cool weather would make this an ideal day to curl up with a good book, something encouraged on Sundays, but I only have eyes for the basement door. It’s embedded in the bookshelves and made of wood that doesn’t grow inside the Wall, a blood-red mahogany girded with metal. Instead of a doorknob, there is an ornate steel ring in its center.
I push against a lifetime of conditioning and reach for the ring, its metal cool in my hand.
I pull. It doesn’t budge.
“You have to turn it,” says a voice behind me.
24
I spin so fast that I nearly lose my balance. David Seingalt, Simon and Marina’s father, stands in the doorway leading to their living quarters. It isn’t possible. I didn’t hear him come in through the front door. Had he been in the kitchen or his bedroom this entire time, and how did he sneak up on me with his foot in a cast?
“I’m looking for census materials!”
It’s a good enough lie, except that I’ve yelled it.
He raises an eyebrow. He’s a compact man, skinny to the point of skeletal except for his round belly. The few times I’ve stood close to him, my attention has been drawn to his medicinal scent, that and the thin mustache that he wears like a twitchy black caterpillar riding his top lip. Jonas once told me that he and Simon called it David’s “mouth brow.” I hadn’t wanted to laugh, but I did. It takes the weight off now, imagining an eyebrow below the Record Keeper’s nose.
