“I’m fine. I needed to lose a few pounds any—”
“You did not!” The flush was becoming more prominent. “And here I wondered how you’d go to bed late and be up early, sit for ten hours listening to other people’s petty problems, play games with the girls and then attend a council or senate meeting for half the night, only to wake up and do it again! I was amazed at your stamina, told everybody I don’t know how she does it, I’d have hit the wall weeks ago. Only to find out that you fucking did!”
The last comment had been accompanied by a coffee cup being slammed down onto the tray, hard enough to rattle the now mostly empty dishes.
“But you being you, that wasn’t good enough,” she continued. “You decided to keep on hitting the wall, over and over again. Killing yourself to keep up with a schedule that no one could manage—”
“That’s not true,” I said stubbornly. “Other Pythias—”
“Other Pythias didn’t do this!”
“They did! Where do you think I got the idea?”
“That’s not what your acolytes said.”
Tami sat back in her chair with the remains of the danish, enjoying every flaky bit. And equally enjoying lecturing me, because she was winning. And she knew it.
“They said that, sure, some Pythias cheated a little bit, once in a while, either because it was crunch time or because th
ey didn’t want the damned Circle knowing all their business. They’d shift back, reclaim some time, and look all innocent if questioned—”
“Guess they didn’t have you for an inquisitor.”
She ignored that. “The point is, it was only done when there was an emergency—”
“Tami!” I looked at her in disbelief. “Ever since I became Pythia, it’s been an emergency. I live in an emergency—”
“Yeah. Only you can’t. That’s what I’m trying to tell you.” She leaned forward and put a hand on my arm. “Everybody wants a piece of you, all the time, but you can’t give it to them. They’ll take and take, until there’s nothing left. That’s how people are—”
“You don’t get it!” I said, thrashing my way across the big bed and getting up, because I was starting to feel trapped.
“Then explain it to me.”
I glared at her, because the last thing I wanted this early was to bare my soul, but I knew Tami. Had known her off and on since I wasn’t any older than the group of magical runaways that she’d all but adopted. In fact, I’d been among them once, plucked out of a very scary shelter by a woman who I’d learned to look to for guidance and advice. But she couldn’t help me now.
I only wished she could!
“You know the Tears of Apollo?” I asked, referring to a potion that the Circle made for the Pythias, to increase our stamina.
“Sure. The stuff old man Marsden wanted to play games with.”
I nodded. Jonas Marsden, head of the Silver Circle and Rhea’s estranged father, and I had had some issues, when I first became Pythia. He’d wanted a compliant little puppet who would do what he said, and I . . . wasn’t one. There was still some tension there occasionally, but we’d mostly made up.
But he hadn’t restricted the amount of potion just for that reason.
“I . . . was taking too much of it,” I admitted. “Like, a lot too much.”
Tami frowned. “What are you saying?”
I looked up and met her eyes, because if I was going to do this, I was going to do it right. “For a while there, I was sort of addicted.”
Tami blinked. “And you didn’t tell me?”
“That’s not the sort of thing you around telling people—”
“You do if they’re a friend!”
“—and I didn’t want to worry you—”