Engraved: Book Five of The St. Croix Chronicles by Karina Cooper Page A

spend coin for even an hour with young flesh.”
    My cheeks burned. The sweat upon them despaired of any to cool. “Have you given up all sense of morality, then?”
    “Talk of morality from an avowed lover of the tar?” There, that lilting mockery returned.
    Stinging, yes, but familiar.
    I swallowed my retort when it only tasted like blame. “We are not speaking of me,” I managed instead, teeth grinding again. “Those are children.”
    “They are given a warm bed and good meals,” replied the Veil. “Would you have us return them to the streets to die of deprivation?”
    This was only partially a likelihood. Them what didn’t freeze or starve to death, or suffer an agonizing end from disease, would join one of the gangs, turn to thievery, and either rot in the nick or find a bloodier end on the streets. The working children, given to dismal hours slaving for the factories, received no kinder life.
    Yet what the Veil touted as charity galled.
    My knuckles popped from the strain of my clasp.
    Patience. I was in no position to cast stones when I had no foundation upon which to stand.
    I lifted my chin. “I have already seen what you do to them what deny your authority. Has Osoba brought me here so you could imprison me too?”
    “No, Miss Black.” The screen did not move, but I heard a sound—a faint jingle, as though metal tinkled against metal. “We want you to kneel.”
    I raised my eyebrows. “You have spent too long in the smoke you flog.”
    “You have not lost your talent for bravado.” The Veil’s voice softened. “You are and always have been a strange creature. A countess, an heiress, a bedraggled child that has bedeviled our Menagerie for too long.”
    “I am no child,” I said hotly.
    The Veil countered with an even, “You were that and more when first you crossed our boundaries.”
    I blinked at that, for I had not realized Hawke had reported my first foray within the Menagerie when I was but fifteen years of age.
    I did not know his age then, but I wondered how much of Osoba’s storied boy of seventeen lingered in the ringmaster when we’d met. I wondered, too, if he’d seen something of himself in me at such an age.
    I shook my head. Worthless thoughts; Hawke was not the sort to give sympathy. I wouldn’t inflict mine upon him. “What is the point of this, please?”
    “The point,” the Veil said in staccato irritation, “is that despite all efforts to the contrary, you have interfered with us too long, and we are tired of humoring you. Better to have remained in your exile.”
    “Better for whom?” I demanded. “You?”
    “Spare us. You are little more than a gadfly that must be swatted,” sneered the Veil’s spokesman, possibly stung by my inference that I might pose a threat. Or even a bother. “Better for you, more like, and better still for our
wūshì
.”
    The word meant “sorcerer” in the Chinese language, that much I understood. I had thought it little more than heathen ignorance, yet I knew now that it was I who had been the ignorant one.
    Alchemy might have built its precepts on scientific formulae, but cleverer minds than mine had posited that whether it was called alchemy, science, or sorcery, all were names for a thing that simply demanded unraveling.
    Micajah Hawke had been so much more than the Devil guarding this Garden of Eden. He was, in some way, affiliated with that art the Karakash Veil called magic. Although I had not been wholly myself at the time, I knew that he had utilized this talent more than once in my presence.
    So why had he not utilized his unique abilities to escape the cage?
    Why had he allowed Osoba to take me if he thought to protect me?
    What in the name of reason did he hope to accomplish by remaining caged? I didn’t
understand
.
    I had never truly understood him.
    I touched my lips with one hand, irritated to find them trembling, but no longer bleeding. My feet remained rooted to the spot, for if I took one step, the servants would