Inherit the Flame

Chapter Fifteen

Ripka opened the door to her room to find Honey sitting at the foot of her bed. She clutched a linen-wrapped bundle to her lap like it was a life raft, fingers tangled in the twine holding it together.

“Honey?”

She jerked to attention and skittered to her feet, holding the bundle tight with one arm. It was just the right size to have wrapped up a head, or a couple of hands. Ripka pushed the thought away and forced herself to step into her room.

“I couldn’t find you,” Honey murmured. It wasn’t an accusation, just a simple statement of fact – I couldn’t find you, so I waited here. Ripka shrugged and adjusted the weight of the messenger’s orders in her pocket, trying to keep a sudden surge of guilt off her face.

“Sorry, I was up on the flier with Tibal. Did you need me?”

“Here.” Honey thrust the bundle toward her. She bit back an urge to recoil from the package and took it gingerly. It was lighter than she’d expected from the size, and squished pleasantly in her hands like an overstuffed pillow.

“What’s this?”

“For you.”

Ripka raised both her brows at Honey in question, but she just watched expectantly, her lips pursed as if she were humming an internal tune. The last gift Honey had given Ripka had been a shiv carved from a wooden spoon. At least this bundle didn’t have any suspiciously hard edges.

She placed it on the bed and wiggled the knotted strings free, peeling back the shopkeeper’s muslin. Fabric spilled out, in deep tones of crimson and sienna, and it took Ripka a moment to register what she was looking at. Clothes, civilian clothes, cut to modern style in long body-hugging tunics over complementary slim-legged trousers. There was one tunic in bloodstone red, leggings in mustard ochre, and another tunic in rich burnt sienna with crimson leggings. Not the most expensive of dyes, but the depth of their color spoke to their cost.

“These are for me?” she asked dumbly, running the rock-polished material between her fingers. They were thick, sturdy, and smooth.

“You dress like a watcher,” was all Honey said.

Ripka looked down at her undyed trousers and loose tunic, both of which were common off-duty wear for watchers in all cities across the Scorched, and burst into a fit of laughter. Even without her blue coat, the messenger had been able to recognize her for what she was. It seemed Ripka was the only one who felt she’d lost her authority with her jacket.

“I… Thank you, Honey. Where in the pits did you find these?” She held up the red tunic and pressed it against her torso. No surprise, it fit perfectly.

Honey’s lips twisted into a skewed smile. “I know how to find a market, Captain.”

She flushed. “I didn’t mean–”

“It’s all right. I know you wonder about me. But I’m fine, Captain. Honest.”

Whatever ‘fine’ meant to Honey, Ripka couldn’t even begin to guess. The woman’s motives were as opaque to Ripka as an afternoon sandstorm. With care, she took one of the crimson head scarves from the package and wrapped her hair. Honey watched with avid eyes, though her fingers never stopped drumming against her thigh.

Sunlight slanted through Ripka’s half-pulled window, setting the room alight in golden rays that emphasized the amber tones of Honey’s fluffy hair. She’d chopped it to chin length on the trip north to Hond Steading, so that the curls grew tighter without the weight of length and sprang and bobbed about her cheeks as if they had a mind of their own. In her civilian clothes, without the stigma of a Remnant jumpsuit, Ripka mused that they almost looked like sisters. Two daughters of the Scorched, with light-toned hair and darker skin, though Honey ran to a fuller figure than Ripka ever had. In the domestic intimacy of her room, the sweet scent of beeswax candles on the air, Ripka found a question she’d avoided bubbling to her lips.

“Honey, why did you help me, when the riot broke out? You must have known I had been a watcher, just like the warden said, but you told that man that I wasn’t.”

Honey stopped drumming and tipped her head to the side, round eyes glinting as she shifted her gaze to the window. Sere air gusted in, ruffling her hair. She pursed her lips and shrugged. “I liked you. I didn’t like them.”

Ripka bit back an urge to point out that them in this case meant the entire population of the Remnant. “Maybe you shouldn’t have. It put you in a lot of danger. I’m still worried about Forge and Clink. We should never have left them behind.” Her voice caught, and she swallowed a surge of pain.

“They’ll be fine.”

“How can you know?”

“Clink likes to start trouble. Has lots of practice.”

Ripka grinned a little. “Is that why she brought me into her fold?”

“No. Because I asked her to.”

Ripka bit her tongue. What she wanted to know, the question that gnawed deep inside her, she couldn’t dive straight toward. She’d tried that once, on the trip up to Hond Steading. In a quiet moment, when no one was near enough to overhear, she’d asked how Honey had come to be in the Remnant, and why the other inmates had been so frightened of her. Honey’d just smiled and hummed to herself until Ripka changed the subject.

“How did you meet Clink?”

“I ate by myself. Then Clink came, and I sat next to her. She didn’t mind.”

“Did she say why?”

Honey shook her head.

“And Forge?”

“She came later. Clink picked her.”

“Why’d you pick me?”

Honey’s head swiveled until she was staring straight into Ripka’s eyes, a little smile twitching up the corners of her lips. “You’re interviewing me, Captain.”

Ripka flushed. “I’m sorry, Honey. Old habits – it’s just, there’s so much about you I don’t know.”

“Likewise.”

The point stuck. Here Ripka was, drilling Honey for her past, while staying tight-lipped about her own. It was her watcher training. She’d identified Honey as potentially dangerous – and reasonably so – and immediately shifted her into the category of suspect, skipping over the possibility of a friend. Honey was dangerous, she had no doubt of that, but if Ripka looked hard enough at herself, she had to acknowledge she wasn’t much different. Maybe her flavor of violence was worse, too – she justified it, used the common good as an excuse to condone all her actions.

She shook herself. Her watcher coat was gone, there were no more legal justifications for her to ease her conscience with. Any heads she cracked would be done so illegally, any infiltration without government approval. She’d been cut loose, mind stuffed full of tools she no longer had the legal right to use, no matter Watch-captain Falston’s implicit endorsement of her actions.

And yet she was using them. In the defense of Hond Steading, yes, but using them without allowance all the same. She was playing this game from Detan’s level, now, outside the law and also free of its constraints.

She eyed Honey. Whatever that woman had done to end up in the Remnant, Ripka was desperate to know. But in the end it wasn’t really any of her business. So long as Honey kept her knives to herself, or pointed at throats that meant her real harm, Ripka had no right to police Honey’s past. She was here, now. Had thrown her lot in with Ripka and her cause. And Ripka was rapidly running out of allies.

Not to mention friends.

Ripka unrolled the bundle of clothes onto the bed. “Help pick an outfit for tonight. We’d better hurry or we’re going to be late to meet Latia and Dranik.”

Her eyes brightened. “We’re going?”

“Said we would, didn’t we? And anyway, I think Dranik is into something. I’d bet my blues – ah, I mean pride – that Thratia is using the cafes to smuggle weapons to her supporters, same as she did with the honey liqueur in Aransa. If we can catch her at it, feel out the extent of her network, we might be able to stop an uprising happening the moment Thratia arrives at the city’s gates.”

“Is she really that bad?”

Of course. Honey must have been imprisoned long before Thratia’s rise to power. Ripka nodded, sorting through the clothes with Honey at her side. “She’s an efficient ruler, I’ll give her that, but she takes choices away from people, uses them like commodities, and that’s something I just can’t stomach.”

Honey nodded, firmly. “We’ll stop her.”

In that moment, with the sun gleaming down upon a selection of new clothes gifted to her by a friend – quite possibly the first real friend Ripka’d had since the watch, since Detan and Tibal – she found herself smiling as a warm curl of hope unfolded within her. “Yeah. I think we might just pull it off.”