The Tyrant's Pet novel · Chapter 3 of 32

Chapter 3: The West Wing

In the Coil, the eleven tributes everyone thinks were eaten are alive at supper, and Agatha's map shows the Blight starts at the Tarrow mine.

"How do you know that?" I asked.

"I don't. Yet." He let go of my wrist. "Tell me about the cup."

So I told him.

The night the moon marked my palm.

The Alpha's speech about bonds that need feeding.

Blaise with the knife, Corran holding the cup, the whole pack watching from the benches.

What happened to the cup after, I didn't know.

I'd never been allowed to ask.

He listened without interrupting once.

When I finished, he looked out the window for a long time.

"Sleep," he said. "It's three days to Coldharbour."

"In front of you?"

"I've been told I eat women. Nobody's ever accused me of watching them sleep."

I didn't mean to sleep.

I woke with my head against the window and his coat over my knees.

He was reading letters by lamplight and didn't look up.

On the third evening, we came down out of the hills to the river.

I'd never seen Coldharbour.

It climbed both banks under a hundred chimneys, all gray stone and copper roofs gone green.

On the highest rock stood the palace.

It wound up the hill in a long black spiral, tower after tower.

"The Coil," he said.

"It looks like a snake."

"That was the idea."

The streets were full.

People stopped on the bridges to watch the black carriage pass.

A woman pulled her daughter behind her skirts.

A man in an apron spat in the gutter and made the sign against the evil eye.

"They think I'm already dead," I said.

"They think you're dinner."

"Are they wrong?"

"Wait and see."

The carriage stopped in a courtyard under the Coil.

Servants bowed so low I could see the backs of their necks.

None of them looked at me.

He led me up a stair, through a hall of black stone, and down a long gallery hung with old maps.

At the end was a plain oak door.

I could hear voices behind it.

Women's voices.

Somebody was laughing.

He opened the door.

A long kitchen, warm and bright, with copper pots on hooks and bread on the table.

Eleven women sat around that table.

They stopped talking all at once.

The woman at the head stood up.

She was tall and solid, with a red-brown braid wound around her head and keys on her belt.

There was ink on her fingers.

"You're late," she said to the Emperor. "And she's barefoot."

"She has shoes," he said. "They're tied on with string."

"That's worse."

She came around the table and looked me up and down.

"Ione Thistle?"

"Yes."

"Agatha Tarn. I was the first one he ate. Twelve years ago." She tilted her head at the table. "That's everyone else he ate. Sit down. The soup's getting cold."

I didn't sit.

I looked at the faces.

Some were my age. Some were older.

A woman by the fire was sewing a shirt. Another had flour to the elbows.

The youngest, at the far end, had been crying recently and was trying not to show it.

"You're alive," I said.

"Mostly," Agatha said. "Some days more than others."

"All of you?"

"Every one."

"Then why don't you go home?"

The room went quiet in a different way.

The woman sewing by the fire put down her needle.

"Because home sent us," she said.

Agatha pulled out a chair with her foot.

"The packs send the girls who saw something," she said. "The one who found the Alpha's second ledger. The one who saw where the border taxes went. The one who knew who really burned the granary. Every one of us was sent here to be eaten, because dead girls don't talk."

"And you talk," I said.

"Constantly." She smiled for the first time. "To him."

I looked back at the Emperor.

He was leaning in the doorway with his arms folded, watching me.

"You made them spies," I said.

"They made themselves spies. I just pay them."

"Badly," said the woman with flour on her arms.

"Very badly," said the woman sewing.

I sat down.

Somebody put a bowl of soup in front of me. Somebody else put shoes beside my feet.

Real shoes, soft leather, a little big.

I ate the whole bowl without looking up.

When I did look up, they were all watching me.

"Sorry," I said. "Nobody's ever fed me first."

"Get used to it," Agatha said. "We eat first here. He eats whatever's left."

"I eat women," the Emperor said from the doorway. "Apparently."

The youngest one laughed, then covered her mouth.

After supper, Agatha took me to a little room off the kitchen.

One whole wall was a map.

It showed the river from the Tarrow Hills all the way down to Coldharbour and the sea.

A long stretch of it had been painted over in black ink.

"Two years ago it started up there," Agatha said. "In the hills. A stain in the water nobody could explain."

She moved her finger down the black line, town after town.

"Every spring it comes on faster. Fish first, then grass, then dogs. Then children."

The black ink stopped at a town marked Saltgate.

Past Saltgate, the river was still blue.

"How far has it come?"

"Forty miles in two years."

I looked at where the black started.

It didn't start in the hills.

It started at a tiny drawing of a pit and a wheel, and a pond held back by a dam.

My stomach turned over.

I knew that pond.

I'd died in it.

"That's the Tarrow mine," I said.

"Yes," Agatha said. "Every inch of it starts there."

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