Cress (Lunar Chronicles 3)

The wolf leaped, gaping jaws unhinged.

Scarlet lifted the axe. Braced herself. Swung.

The blade cut clean through the beast, cutting it into two pieces from head to tail. Warm blood splattered over Scarlet’s face as the two wolf halves landed on either side of her. Her stomach roiled. She was going to throw up.

She dropped the axe and collapsed back on the ground. The mud squished around her ears. Overhead, the moon filled up the whole sky.

Then the wolf halves began to rustle. They gradually rose up, now only the soft outer pelt of the beast, shorn in two. Scarlet could make out vague human-like shapes standing over her, each wearing half of the snow-white pelt.

The fog cleared and Wolf and her grand-mère were before her. Holding their arms out.

Welcoming her home.

Scarlet gasped. Her eyes flew open.

She was met with the sight of steel bars, the earthy smell of ferns and moss, and the chatter of a thousand birds—some trapped in their own elaborate cages, others flocked in the tree branches that entwined around the enormous beams supporting the glass ceiling.

A wolf yipped, sounding both sorrowful and concerned. Scarlet forced herself onto an elbow so she could see the barred enclosure on the other side of the pathway. The white wolf was sitting there, watching her. He howled, just a short, curious sound, not the haunting howls that Scarlet heard in her dreams. She imagined he was asking if she was all right. She might have been screaming or thrashing during the nightmare, and the wolf’s pale yellow eyes blinked with worry.

Scarlet tried to gulp, but her mouth was parched, her saliva too thick. She must be going crazy to be carrying on silent conversations with wolves.

“He likes you.”

Gasping, Scarlet flipped onto her back.

A stranger, a girl, was sitting cross-legged in her cage, so close Scarlet could have touched her. Scarlet tried to push herself away, but the action sent pain rippling through her bandaged hand. She hissed and fell back onto the ground.

Her hand was the worst of it—the hatchet had taken her left pinky finger to the second knuckle. She had not passed out, though she wished she would have. A Lunar doctor had been waiting to bandage the wound, and he had done it with such precision, Scarlet suspected it was a very common procedure.

But then there were also the scratches on her face and stomach from her time spent in the company of Master Charleson, and countless aches from sleeping on hard floors for—well, she’d lost count of how many nights.

The girl’s only reaction to Scarlet’s grimace was a long, slow blink.

Clearly, this girl was not another prisoner—or “pet” as the extravagantly dressed Lunars called Scarlet when they passed by her cage, giggling and pointing and making loud remarks on whether or not it was safe to feed the animals.

The girl’s clothing was the first indication of her status—a gauzy, silver-white dress that had settled around her shoulders and thighs like snowflakes might settle on a sleepy hillside. Her warm brown skin was flawless and healthy, her fingernails perfectly shaped and clean. Her eyes were bright, the color of melted caramel, but with hints of slate-gray around her pupils. On top of all that, she had silky black hair that curled into perfect spirals, neatly framing her high cheekbones and ruby-red lips.

She was the most beautiful human being Scarlet had ever seen.

Yet, there was one anomaly. Or—three. The right side of the girl’s face was marred by three scars that cut down her cheek from the corner of her eye to her jaw. Like perpetual tears. Strangely, the flaws on her skin didn’t reduce her beauty, but almost accentuated it. Almost compelled a person to stare at her longer, unable to peel their eyes away.

It was with this thought that Scarlet realized it was a glamour. Which meant this was another trick.

Her expression changed from awestruck and blushing—she despised that she was actually blushing—to resentful.

The girl blinked again, drawing attention to her impossibly long, impossibly thick eyelashes.

“Ryu and I are confused,” she said. “Was it a very bad dream? Or a very good one?”

Scarlet scowled. The dream had already begun to wisp away, as dreams do, but the question reignited the memory of Wolf and her grandmother before her. Alive and safe.

Which was a cruel joke. Her grandmother was dead, and last she’d seen Wolf, he’d been under the control of a thaumaturge.

“Who are you? And who’s Ryu?”

The girl smiled. It was both warm and conspiratorial and it made Scarlet shiver.

Stupid Lunars and their stupid glamours.

“Ryu is the wolf, silly. You’ve been neighbors for four days now, you know. I’m surprised he hasn’t officially introduced himself.” Then she leaned forward, dropping her voice to a whisper as if she were about to share a closely guarded secret. “As for me, I am your new best friend. But don’t tell anyone, because they all think that I’m your master now, and that you are my pet. They don’t know that my pets are really my dearest friends. We shall fool them all, you and I.”

Scarlet squinted at her. She recognized the girl’s voice now, the way she danced through her sentences like each word had to be coaxed off her tongue. This was the girl who had spoken during Scarlet’s interrogation.

The girl reached for a strand of filthy hair that had fallen across Scarlet’s cheek. Scarlet tensed.

“Your hair is like burning. Does it smell like smoke?” Bending over, the girl pressed the hair against her nose and inhaled. “Not at all. That’s good. I wouldn’t want you to catch fire.”

The girl sat up just as suddenly, pulling a basket toward her that Scarlet hadn’t noticed before. It looked like a picnic basket, lined with the same silvery material as her dress.

“I thought today we could play doctor and patient. You’ll be the patient.” She removed a device from the basket and pressed it against Scarlet’s forehead. It beeped and she checked the small screen. “You’re not running a fever. Here, let me check your tonsils.” She held a thin piece of plastic toward Scarlet’s mouth.

Scarlet knocked her away with her uninjured hand and forced herself to sit up. “You’re not a doctor.”

“No. That’s why it’s pretend. Aren’t you having fun?”

“Fun? I’ve been mentally and physically tortured for days. I’m starving. I’m thirsty. I’m being kept in a cage in a zoo—”

“Menagerie.”

“—and I hurt in places that I didn’t know my body even had. And now some crazy person comes in here and is trying to act like we’re good pals playing a raucous game of make-believe. Well, no, sorry, I’m not having any fun, and I’m not buying whatever chummy trick you’re trying to play on me.”

The girl’s big eyes were blank—neither surprised nor offended by Scarlet’s outburst. But then she glanced out toward the pathway that wound between the cages, overgrown with exotic flowers and trees to suggest some semblance of being in a lush jungle.

A guard was standing at the pathway’s bend, scowling. Scarlet recognized him. He was one of the guards that regularly brought her bread and water. He was the one who had grabbed her rear end the first time she’d been thrown into this cage. At the time she’d been too exhausted to do anything more than stumble away from him, but if she ever had the chance, she would break every one of his fingers in retaliation.

“We’re all right,” the girl said, smiling brightly. “We’re pretending that I cut off her hair and glued it to my head because I wanted to be a candlestick, and she didn’t like that.”

While she spoke, the guard’s glare never left Scarlet, only narrowed in warning. After a long moment, he meandered away.

When his footsteps had faded, the girl pulled the basket onto her lap and riffled through it. “You shouldn’t call me crazy. They don’t like that.”

Scarlet faced her again, her gaze dragging down the raised scar tissue on her cheek.

“But you are crazy.”

“I know.” She lifted a small box from the basket. “Do you know how I know?”

Scarlet didn’t answer.

“Because the palace walls have been bleeding for years, and no one else sees it.” She shrugged, as if this were a perfectly normal thing to say. “No one believes me, but in some corridors, the blood has gotten so thick there’s nowhere safe to step. When I have to pass through those places, I leave a trail of bloody footprints for the rest of the day, and then I worry that the queen’s soldiers will follow the scent and eat me up while I’m sleeping. Some nights I don’t sleep very well.” Her voice dropped to a haunted whisper, her eyes taking on a brittle luminescence. “But if the blood was real, the servants would clean it up. Don’t you think?”

Scarlet shivered. This girl really was crazy.

“This is for you,” she said, astoundingly bright once again. “Doctor’s orders are to take one pill twice a day.” She tilted toward Scarlet. “They wouldn’t let me bring you real medication, of course, so it’s just candy.”

Then she winked, and Scarlet couldn’t tell if the wink was to indicate that the box contained candy or not.

“I’m not going to eat it.”

The girl listed her head. “Why not? It’s a gift, to cement our forever friendship.” She pulled the lid off the box, revealing four small candies nestled in a bed of spun sugar. They were round as marbles and bright, glossy red. “Sour apple petites. My personal favorites. Please, take one.”

“What do you want from me?”

Her lashes fluttered. “I want us to be friends.”

“And all your friendships are based on lies? Wait, of course they are. You’re Lunar.”

For the first time, the girl deflated a little. “I’ve only ever had two friends,” she said, then glanced quickly at the wolf. Ryu had lain down, resting his head on his paws as he watched them. “Other than the animals, of course. But one of my friends turned into ashes when we were very little. A pile of girl-shaped ashes. The other has gone missing … and I don’t know if he’ll ever come back.” A shudder ripped through her, so strong she nearly dropped the box. With goose bumps all down her arms, she set the box on the floor between them and picked mindlessly at her dress. “But I asked the stars to send a sign that he was all right, and they sent me a shooting star across the sky. The next day was a trial, like any trial, except the Earthen girl standing before me had hair like a shooting star. And you’d seen him.”

“Do you ever make sense?”

The girl pressed her hands onto the ground and leaned forward until her nose was almost touching Scarlet’s. Scarlet refused to pull away, though her breath hitched.

“Was he all right? When you saw him last. Sybil said he was still alive, that he may have been used to pilot that ship, but she didn’t say if he’d been injured. Do you think he’s safe?”

“I don’t know what you’re—”

The girl pressed her fingertips against Scarlet’s mouth.

“Jacin Clay,” she whispered. “Sybil’s guard, with the blond hair and beautiful eyes and the rising sun in his smile. Please, tell me he’s all right.”

Scarlet blinked. The girl’s fingers were still on her mouth, but it didn’t matter. She was too baffled to speak. The battle aboard the Rampion was mostly a blur of screaming and gunshots in her memory, and her focus had been on the thaumaturge then. But she did vaguely recall another person there. A blond-haired guard.

But the rising sun in his smile? Please.

She sneered. “I remember two people trying to kill me and my friends.”

“Yes, and Jacin was one of them,” she said, evidently unconcerned with the whole killing part of Scarlet’s statement.

“I guess so. There was a blond guard.”

Glee spread over the girl’s face. The look had the power to stop hearts and brighten rooms.

But not to Scarlet.

“And how did he look?”

“He looked like he was trying to kill me. But I’m sure my friends killed him first. That’s usually what we do to people who work for your queen.”

The smile vanished and the girl shriveled away, tying her arms around her waist. “You don’t mean that.”

“I do. And believe me, he deserved it.”

The girl was beginning to shake now, like she was on the verge of hyperventilating.

Scarlet decided without much guilt that if that happened, she wouldn’t do a thing about it. She wouldn’t try to help her. She wouldn’t call for the guard.

This stranger was no friend.

Across the aisle, the wolf had climbed onto all fours and was pawing at the base of his enclosure. He began to whimper.

After a few moments, the girl managed to get herself under control. Sliding the lid back onto the candies, she settled them into her basket and stood, hunching in the small cage.

“I see,” she said. “That will conclude this visit. I prescribe adequate rest and—” She sobbed and turned away, but paused before she could call for the guard. Slowly, stiffly, she turned back. “I wasn’t lying about the walls that bleed. Someday soon, I fear the palace will be soaked through with blood and all of Artemisia Lake will be so red, even the Earthens will be able to see it.”

“I’m not interested in your delusions.” A sharp, unexpected pain shot up through the arm that Scarlet was using to support herself and she crumpled to the ground, waiting for the pinpricks of pain to fade. She glared up at the girl, angry at how weak and vulnerable she was. Angry at the flash of concern in the girl’s eyes that seemed so honest. She snarled up at her. “And I don’t care for your mock sympathy, either. Your glamour. Your mind control. You people have built your entire culture on lies, and I want nothing to do with it.”