With Tide and Tempest by Kate Avery Ellison

Author:Kate Avery Ellison [Ellison, Kate Avery]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Kate Avery Ellison
Published: 2014-08-03T04:00:00+00:00

~ ~ ~

I visited Krank next, as I’d promised her. I made the long trek to the art district slowly, stopping every so often to catch my breath. I was still a little weak from my fainting incident. As I walked, my mind spun. Valus knew who I was. He’d known, at least for part of the time I’d been meeting with him.

I had let my guard down with him, and it had been a mistake.

Krank threw her arms around me when I reached her shop. “Mia,” she trilled. “So good to see you again!”

I let her hug me. It felt good to be embraced so freely. I savored the feeling of comfort, my eyes prickling in the wake the encounter with Valus and my inner turmoil. When she released me, I felt an ache at the lack.

“And how are you faring?” she asked as she crossed the room to dig through a drawer. “You look pale.”

“I have a lot on my mind,” I admitted. I couldn’t say anything about Valus, but it wasn’t the only thing I worried about. I chose a safer worry to air. “Surely you’ve heard the things they’re saying about me?”

“Oh,” Krank said. “I don’t listen to that sort of thing. I’m usually here, working.” She flashed me a smile. Something about the fact that not every person in Itlantis knew the rumors about me was comforting, and I managed to smile back.

“And I found something for you,” she added. “Look.”

She withdrew a rolled piece of paper and extended it to me. Hope fluttered in my chest as my fingers closed over the paper. I unfurled it and saw blue and green.

“Perilous?”

She nodded. “A crude replication, unfortunately. It was his practice sketch. But it’s one and the same.”

“Thank you,” I breathed. I stared at the image, drinking in the sight of it. It was a jumble of shapes and colors, difficult to decipher, but I memorized them anyway.

Krank smiled and wandered back to her workbench.

“Krank?” I asked.

“Yes?”

I paused. The words were trapped inside me. I didn’t know how to shape them. I gazed at the paper in my hands and felt the helplessness swamp me. The words of the city guardsman swirled in my head. I remembered my mother’s cool gaze, my sister’s withdrawn manner, Valus’s recognition of me, the distrust in the eyes of the other nobles. “How... How do you live bravely when everything seems to be falling apart?”

In my hands, Perilous seemed to burn like the leftover memory of a dream.

Krank considered her words. “Well,” she said. “It’s like art, I suppose. I was trying to make a painting once, but nothing I tried worked. It was all wrong. Stiff, posed. And then I realized that I was trying to hide everything I really thought as I worked on the piece, because my feelings, if exposed, would leave me open to the world. Vulnerable.” She paused. “But in the end, embracing that vulnerability is what gave me my greatest strength. Acknowledging it

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