Free The Drowning City: The Necromancer Chronicles Book One by Amanda Downum Page B

desperate
     and alone, her back bloody and slick with grease to keep her shirt from sticking to open wounds.
    Selei had paid for her passage on a smuggler’s ship, sent her away before hate and grief poisoned her. It had saved her life.
    The witch locked the door behind them and turned to study Xinai. Age clouded one eye milk-blue, but the other was dark and
     sharp as ever. Not blood-kin, but a friend of the Lin clan since before she was born, the closest thing to family she had
     left in Sivahra.
    Selei’s gaze took in her jewelry, the blades at her hips. One bird-light hand caught Xinai’s, turned it over to trace the
     calluses. “You’ve done well for yourself.”
    Xinai nodded, throat tight.
    “But you came home.” Not quite a question, but her forehead creased in curiosity. Braids the color of steel and ashes rattled
     as she moved, woven through with feathers and bone beads.
    Xinai felt the weight of age and experience in the woman’s mismatched gaze, felt herself being measured. She nodded again
     and found her voice.
    “I’ve come back to help.”

Chapter 5
    W aiting was always the worst part.
    Isyllt sat in Vasilios’s kitchen, sipping bitter green tea and resisting the urge to pace while stripes of sunlight moved
     slowly across the blue and orange tiles. She and Adam had left the inn this morning and settled into the mage’s home. For
     all her flippancy about spending money, she still needed to fill out expense reports when she returned, and the Crown’s accountants
     didn’t believe in luxurious or glamorous spying.
    Nothing to do now but wait for Zhirin to arrange a meeting, or for Xinai to uncover something else of use, some other faction
     in case Jabbor’s people couldn’t help them. Isyllt didn’t remember the mercenary being so tense on the ship, spine stiff and
     brow creased. It hadn’t, she guessed, been a happy homecoming.
    Her parents had fled civil war in Vallorn when she was seven, but she had only vague memories of her parents’ worry, her mother’s
     tears in the night and their hasty descent from the mountains. Memories of their home were vaguer still. And after her parents
     died in the plague sixteen years ago, she’d moved from one shelter to another until Kiril found her. Until Kiril and the Arcanost,
     home was any tenement she could afford or anywhere she could hide, anything better than an alley. Nothing worth fighting for,
     or dying for.
    She tried to picture it, foreign soldiers in the streets of Erisín, the house of Alexios cast out of the palace. Even though
     she’d spied and schemed and killed for Selafai—for Kiril—she couldn’t imagine how Xinai felt, how the ghost of Deilin Xian
     felt.
    She drew a breath sweet with spices and flowers in the garden. Across the kitchen, the housekeeper kneaded bread dough, gnarled
     brown hands slapping and shaping with practiced ease. Flour dusted her apron, smudged the scarf that held back her iron-gray
     braids. She was the only servant Isyllt had seen; the peace in the house was nearly soporific.
    But still her nerves sang, like a child first sent to bazaar alone. Ridiculous.
    Or not, perhaps. Her other assignments had been paltry things compared to this—an ear in the shadows, a knife in the dark.
     Nothing so grand as revolution.
    Footsteps distracted her, light and uneven. She glanced up as Vasilios came in, his limp not quite hidden beneath his robes.
    “I always did hate the waiting most of all,” he said with a wry smile, pulling out a chair. “Kiril was the patient one. I
     always wanted to be
doing
something—it nearly got me killed a time or two.”
    Isyllt smiled; Kiril had told her a few of those stories. “When did you leave the service?”
    “After the old king died. I married, and my wife wanted me to keep my skin intact. I still took an occasional job. It gets
     in your blood after a time.”
    She nodded.
    His eyes narrowed. “My wife died ten years ago and I hadn’t the heart to stay in