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

flank me. I needed space between us.
    And fewer eyes upon my face, for I was certain I could not hide my feelings as well as I might once have. I fixed my gaze upon that screen and asked quietly, “What have you done to Hawke?”
    “Done?” A laugh, brittle as the ice sliding down my spine. “Why, we have
done
nothing. Our
wūshì
is as he has always been.”
    There was a trick there, buried somewhere in that statement, but I had not the tools with which to unravel its tangle.
    “Fortune, however, favors you this day.” The Veil’s tone gentled; which is to say that the sting lessened, and once more left little more than smug certainty. “We are feeling generous with our gift, and generous with our wayward
wūshì
.”
    This so-called generosity did not bode well.
    I braced myself. “What do you intend?”
    “An opportunity, Miss Black,” said the Veil, lapsing into the old habit of a given moniker.
    “For me?” I asked.
    “Oh, no.” The Veil’s inflection turned dry as bone. “That is no longer an option. However, you may rest easier to know that your death will not be a private affair.”
    The words meant little enough—I had heard them before from this very spokesman—but the tone no longer bore a lightness, an amusement, that I had come to expect from the so-called dragon.
    In prior threats, each reminder of what I would owe were I to fail had been painted in terms of flesh. Performance, coin for the pound—each option had included an opportunity for survival; assuming that one without pride might consider such vulgar displays as surviving.
    My fists clenched, but not in fear. Not this time, and not for the Veil. “You would have me executed, then?”
    “We should have done so at the first transgression,” returned the Veil, and that gave me pause.
    To me, the tone smacked of an unspoken, “I told you so.”
    Told whom? It made no sense to suggest such a thing to me, for I’d been here from the start, uneager to give my life to the Veil that demanded it.
    I filed this away for a clue to be puzzled over later.
    Assuming I survived whatever it was the Veil intended to throw at me this time. “I must admit that your threats grow tiresome,” I pointed out. “I believe we’d all be grateful if you’d simply—”
    The door slammed open, in such a way as to create a vivid sense of
déjà vu
within me. We all spun—those of us on this end of the dividing screen—and I watched in wide-eyed wonder as the manservants aborted a maneuver that would have blocked the intruder from the interior.
    Though my heart slammed high in reaction—in
hope
, blast it—it was not Hawke who provoked such a response, but a plain-faced Chinese girl.
    There was nothing about her to speak of power or authority, especially clad in a similar knee-length tunic and wide pants as the servants favored. She bore no eyebrows to speak of, a detail that lingered in my awareness as a familiar thing.
    Perhaps it was the courtesy given to one of their own, for she ignored the Veil’s warriors almost as quickly as they ignored her.
    She ignored me too.
    The high manner in which she peppered the spokesman sounded too similar to the Veil’s to truly understand the gist. Most of the Chinese I’d heard spoken did so. Only Hawke refrained from altering his deep voice; a thing I suspected lacked a certain amount of courtesy.
    That was Hawke, after all. Barely polite, when he must at all.
    I watched, the foreigner in my own city, as the woman faced down that screen with all the apparent confidence of a dragon-tamer.
    Was I only an extra in this drama?
    An inappropriate urge to laugh outright seized me, and I cupped a hand over my mouth lest it trickle out and mortally offend the players.
    The Veil’s anger snapped in his reply, bore with it a ragged crack. I’d never heard the spokesman as such.
    Fury might be too soft a word for it.
    A string of cruelly sharp Chinese cut the air, and the servant flinched faintly about the eyes. Those