Tonight was a reminder of that.
“Hello? Gideon?” Harrow snapped her brown fingers in front of his face. “I said: what do you want to drink? It’s on me.”
The raucous noise of the Crow’s Nest came rushing in. The pine table was sticky beneath his elbows, and the air smelled like sour ale.
Gideon shook his head. “Nothing for me.”
Harrow clucked her disapproval. She turned her head toward the bar, and Gideon tried not to stare at the place where her left ear should have been. She kept the hair on that side cropped almost to the scalp, where it shone like dark fuzz. As if she took pride in the disfigurement and wanted to show it off.
He guessed she was close to him in age, but didn’t know for sure, and he’d never asked how she came by the loss of her ear. A family of witches had indentured Harrow before the revolution. Gideon could piece together the rest.
They’d been lucky to grab this table just as its last occupants left. Harrow refused to order at the bar in case someone snatched her stool while she was gone. So while she shouted her request to the barkeep, Gideon’s mind wandered back to Rune.
He couldn’t make sense of her sudden appearance on the balcony tonight. She’d barely spoken a handful of words to him in five years, and suddenly, she was … inviting him to her house? Why?
He tried to shake off the strangeness of it. But try as he might, he couldn’t banish the memory of her next to him in the opera box. Her strawberry blonde hair was a little wilder than usual, and her stylish gown put her elegant clavicles on display. The rust-colored fabric contrasted with her gray eyes and pale complexion, pulling his gaze toward her more times than he’d like to admit.
She might have been the shallowest girl in the opera house, but he couldn’t deny that she was also the prettiest.
A waste of a pretty face, he told himself.
A better person would feel guilty for insulting her. Gideon didn’t. He hoped he’d made his feelings clear, so she’d avoid him in the future. In fact, he thought he’d made his feelings clear years ago, when they first met.
He’d often observed the way his brother looked at her, noticed how his voice softened on her name, and while he had no idea what Alex saw in Rune, other than the obvious—which wasn’t enough to tempt him—Gideon had no intentions of going anywhere near her. That was as true now as it had been when they were kids.
Back then, Rune Winters was the aristo his little brother wouldn’t stop talking about. Alex found ways of inserting her into every conversation. Rune thinks this. Rune loves that. It would have annoyed Gideon if he hadn’t been so goddamned curious.
But then he saw her. Met her. And he knew at once they’d never be friends.
“Those twin girls who escaped three weeks ago?”
Harrow’s voice dragged him back to the table in time to see her creamy ale slosh over the side of her glass as she set it down. When the foam dribbled over her fingers, she licked it off.
“The Crimson Moth stole the pair the night you were supposed to transfer them to the palace prison. Remember?”
How could Gideon forget? They were exactly his sister’s age when she died. Skinny little things. He could picture them huddled behind the bars of the cell he’d locked them in: wide-eyed and trembling as they clung to each other. “I remember.”
He also remembered when they disappeared from that same cell one night later. A casting signature had appeared over the cot where they’d slept. Gideon could recall the mark perfectly in his mind’s eye: a delicate, blood-red moth fluttering in the air. He’d been so angry, he’d wanted to grab the thing and squeeze it. But it was only a signature—the mark left behind after a witch cast a spell, like an artist signing their name to a painting.
The moth faded less than an hour later.
Harrow sipped daintily at her beer. “A dockworker found signatures aboard a cargo ship three days ago, after it docked in Harbor Grace. The two witches must have illusioned themselves to look like cargo.”
And when the illusion faded, the signatures would have remained behind.
Harbor Grace was a busy port on the mainland. Everything this island didn’t make, grow, or mine was shipped over via that port.
Gideon frowned. “Were they recaptured?”
Harrow shook her head. “No. But …” She glanced around and leaned in toward him. He could smell the ale on her breath. “The cargo ship belongs to Rune Winters.”
What?
The alehouse spun around them. Gideon flattened his hands on the beer-sticky table to steady himself.