Chapter 47. Three Ways to Tell a Lie

Veilgrove has three gates of sound: the market, the amphitheater, and the cliff paths. Vesper had learned to use all three. Rhea hammered bolts into saint mouths until she started naming each one after a politician. Syra sealed sluices and swore in a dialect I filed away for special occasions. Ilyra wrote the names we hadn’t been allowed to hear last night along the stone’s inner lip in chalk that bled softly into the wet like veins becoming maps.

By sundown, the square looked like a throat ringed with teeth.

“Trial of Bond convenes,” High Luna Mara said as the torches caught and made their ritual swallow. “We speak. The city decides whether to hold it.”

Neris stood two steps off my right shoulder, exactly in the position to look like an ally and act like an audit. Orla watched from the shadow of a statue she had personally dragged into the fountain to stop the saints from listening. Vara lounged like a knot tied in the idea of trouble. Mavienne rolled a strip of l