This Poisoned Tide: The Last Water Witch Book One

CHAPTER 32

Ch. 32

Their home—Elara's home—was small and cramped and cluttered in a way that Juda should have loathed, but strangely didn't.

Aleina had been the orderly type and had taught him the same, showing him how best to get the grease off the cooking pots, how to polish his boots—for a rat needn't always look like a rat, Juda—and how to neatly fold the laundry just as she did for the nobles of the upper echelons of the citadel. Ever since, he'd taken some comfort in orderliness, something that had fared him well when indoctrinated as a novice. There was little possessions to be had there, and he was used to that and cared nothing for meaningless things, but even with what little the novices were allowed to have, Juda kept everything meticulously organised. He even took some small pride in how he could fold sheets better than half the King's laundry maids. A ridiculous thing to be proud of, but Juda knew she would have been pleased and that was enough reason for him.

Yet, looking around the home Elara shared with her friends, Juda found the jumbled disorder gave him some small connection to her, even though she was not here. He could imagine her in the armchair, legs draped lazily over the side, delicate fingers trailing the spines of books that were stacked haphazardly on the small, rickety table. He could see her laid out on one of the two beds, the blankets tangled in disarray about her bare legs, gazing up at him with mocking eyes, a world of chaos in the shape of her mouth.

Chaos, that's what she was. Chaos and disorder and downfall and Juda was no longer sure he did not want to be a part of that. This yearning nagged inside him, a desperate, clawing thing that twisted in his stomach as if it fought to escape the confines of his body. She was the noise inside his head. The toll of a bell inside his chest.

Everything about her was too fucking loud.

The three he'd followed from the Sea Dog Inn to the alleyway close to their abode stared at him in silence. They stood close enough to each other for Juda to know their fear of him bound them together, uncertainty, confusion and suspicion tethering them as one.

He'd got the measure of them fast. He'd always been good at that. Sizing up everyone he met as a possible foe so that he could calculate his means of defence, and ultimately, his triumph.

There was the tall one—Anton—who was a courtesan working the nobility of the upper echelons, and much in demand in particular by Leon Kro-Balnar, a repellent sea slug of a man with deep pockets and an even deeper throat by all accounts. This Anton housed an indignant fury within him, as if Juda's very presence in their home and the newfound knowledge of a Highguard's connection to Elara offended him to the core.

Then there was Bazel, the boy thief, one of Cree's slum-rats. Light of foot and fingers and with a scowl so vehemently dark that it reminded Juda of the goblins in the fairy tales his mother used to read to him when he was a child. He was a wild thing, this lad. The one most likely to do something rash and violent.

And finally, there was the one Elara had called Kelena, but who was actually Tala Koh-Miralus, the silk merchant's young and errant wife. The one for whom Elara had risked everything. The one who'd called her monstrous for what she had done, for what she was. The one who had rejected her.

He had to admit, she was not what he had expected. There was a fierceness in her face. A surprising strength. Her hair, while still braided at the sides, was cut short into her neck and dark—so dark he suspected she'd added something to deepen the colour, because he was certain Koh-Miralus' wife had been fair, as were her parents. Her form was well-defined, and Juda knew the body of someone who had trained to shape it so when he saw it. There was a knife tucked into the side of her right boot, and a looseness to her hand and to that side of her body that suggested she would reach for it with speed if she felt the need to.