Vow of Thieves (Dance of Thieves)

by Mary E. Pearson

  “I didn’t see an arrow,” Jase whispered. “Did you?”

  “No. Nothing.”

  But if not an arrow, what? A stone from a sling? But I didn’t see a stone either. A predator? But a Valsprey was large, with a five-foot wingspan. To take one down, the predator would have to be far larger, something like a racaa. There had been none.

  We both eased up a bit on our elbows, looking for someone to emerge from a hole dug in the plain, but no one emerged. We finally stood, back to back, both of us nocking arrows, synchronizing our turns as we searched and waited to see something. The only thing that greeted us was the quiet hush of a gentle breeze sweeping the plain.

  We went to where the bird had fallen, a white twisted splotch on the crimson landscape. One of its broken wings angled skyward as if hoping for a second chance. There was no flopping or lingering last movements. The bird was dead, which was no surprise. But as we neared and got a closer look, something about it was wrong.

  “What—” Jase said.

  We both stared at it.

  The bird was quite dead. But it was clear it had been dead for weeks.

  Its eyes were sunken leathery holes, and its ribs poked through decayed paper-thin skin, its breast mostly featherless. We both looked around, thinking there had to be another bird somewhere else, but there was none. This was the bird we had seen fall from the sky.

  A trick of the eyes?

  Carried here by some baffling wind current?

  We guessed at possibilities, but none made sense.

  Jase nudged the dry carcass with his boot, flipping the bird over. A message case was attached to its leg. It was a trained Valsprey, after all. I bent down and pulled the case from its leg, then picked at the thread that sealed it shut. It came apart, and a small piece of parchment unfurled in my hands.

  The words I read wrested the breath from my lungs.

  “Who’s it from?” Jase asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Who is it for?”

  I stared at the note, wondering how it was possible, but somewhere deep inside, I knew. Sometimes messages had a way of finding people. The ghosts, they call to you in unexpected moments. This wasn’t a message sent by a Valsprey. It was sent by a different kind of messenger. I held it tight, not wanting to give it to Jase.

  “Kazi? What is it?”

  No more secrets, we had promised.

  I held the note out to him. “It’s for us,” I said.

  Jase took it and read it carefully, several times, it seemed, because he just continued to stare at it. He shook his head, his lips paling. He blinked as if trying to clear his vision, trying to make the words reorder themselves into something that made sense.

  Jase, Kazi, anyone,

  Come! Please! Samuel is dead.

  They’re banging the door.

  I have to—

  In an instant, his expression went from lost to angry. “It’s a hoax. Some kind of sick hoax.” He crumpled the paper in his fist and whipped around, scanning the landscape again for the perpetrator. “Come out!” he yelled. Only a haunting whine of wind answered back.

  “Do you recognize the handwriting?” I asked. It was a desperate scrawl, written in haste. It didn’t seem like a hoax.

  He looked at the message again. “I’m not sure. It might be Jalaine’s. We have Valsprey at the arena … The office door there is…” He paced, shaking his head. “I had Samuel working there while his hand healed. He—” Jase grimaced, and I could almost see his thoughts spinning out of control, while mine were leaden, plummeting to one conclusion—

  “Samuel is not dead,” Jase growled as if he had read my mind. “Jalaine overreacts. She thought I was dead once when I fell out of a tree and the air was knocked out of me. She ran to tell my parents and caused a panic.” He scanned the landscape again, thinking out loud. “Maybe Aram wrote it, or maybe someone we don’t even know, someone trying to trick you, to convince you to release me. Maybe they didn’t get the message that I was coming home and think you’re still holding me? Or maybe—” He stopped midthought and his shoulders slumped. He leaned forward, resting his arms on Tigone’s back like it was the only thing holding him up. “Samuel is not dead,” he said again, but this time so quietly only a ghost could have heard him.

  I looked past him to where the bird had been and saw Death hunched over, his back bowed, lifting a body from the valley floor. He looked over his shoulder at me, and then bird, body, Death, they were all gone.

  * * *

  Who wrote the note, how it managed to get to us, or if it was even true became secondary questions. Getting home was what mattered now. We stopped at watering holes only for the sake of the horses. For us there was no rest until the evening when darkness closed in.

  I looked back at the long path we had trampled in the sandy soil, a crooked line on the red landscape. Dying rays of sun puddled in our tracks.

  We built a fire in silence, gathering twigs and sticks and breaking off branches from a dead bush. Jase wrestled angrily with one branch that refused to break free. “Dammit!” he yelled, yanking furiously.

  I reached out and touched his arm. “Jase—”

  He stopped, his chest heaving, his nostrils flared, his eyes still fixed on the brittle bush. “I don’t know how it could happen,” he said. “Except for his hand—” He turned and met my gaze. “Samuel was strong and sharp-eyed, but his injured hand—” His voice caught.

  Was. Samuel was.

  “It will be all right, Jase. We’ll figure it out together.” Every word I uttered was hollow and inadequate, but I wasn’t sure what else to do. I felt pathetically useless.

  He looked away, and his chest rose in a slow, deliberate breath. He raked back his hair and squared his shoulders, and I could see him stitching back together whatever had come undone inside him, refusing to give in to despair. I opened my mouth to speak, but he shook his head and walked away, rifling through his gear. He pulled out his ax and in one fierce swing parted the branch from the bush.

  “There,” he said and threw the conquered wood onto the fire. Sparks danced into the air. He turned his attention to the dead stump, hacking away at it with the same ferocity. The noise was bleak in the emptiness, and every whack juddered through my bones.

  “Jase, talk to me. Please. Do you blame me? Because you weren’t there?”

  He stopped mid-swing and stared at me, the fury draining from his face. “You? What are you talking about?” He lowered his ax to the ground. “This is not your fault, Kazi. This is us. Ballenger history. This is what I’ve tried to tell you all along. It’s always been the wolf at our door. Our history’s been riddled with violence since the beginning, but not because we want it that way. Now we finally have a real chance to end it. No more power plays. No more black markets. No more paying taxes to an absentee king who never does anything to improve the lives of people in Hell’s Mouth. Lydia and Nash are going to grow up differently than I did. They’re going to have different lives, ones where they’re not always having to watch their backs. They won’t need straza trailing them everywhere they go. Our history is about to change. We are going to change it, together, remember?”

  I nodded, and he pulled me into his arms, the bush forgotten.

  The wolf at the door. I couldn’t help but think of Zane.

  My history was about to change too.

  Lest we repeat history,

  Let the stories be passed,

  From father to son, from mother to daughter,

  For with but one generation,

  History and truth are lost forever.

  —Song of Jezelia

  CHAPTER FIVE

  JASE

  The winds howled across the plain like a forlorn beast.

  Kazi and I burrowed close together in our bedroll, the blankets pulled over our heads, sharing each other’s warmth. Her sleep-filled breaths were moist against my chest.

  Do you blame me?

  I knew what silence could do, the fear and dou
bt it could sow. I used it with calculating purpose on prisoners, letting the long ticks of silence twist their imagination into something hideous and painful. I used it on traders and ambassadors to push a negotiation in my favor, making them think I was about to walk away. I used it on Zane to produce Devereux’s name. I never meant to use it on Kazi, but I had been consumed, feeling my denial fade with every mile we traveled. I wrestled with the fact that the note could be true. The silence Kazi heard was only fear trapped inside me. But how was she to know that? I knew firsthand how silence had pushed me to a breaking point when my father wouldn’t speak to me.

  Give it time, Jase, Tiago had told me. He didn’t mean anything by it. He’s blind with grief right now.

  Tiago’s words had meant nothing to me.

  My father had burst through the front door, yelling for my mother. The news of Sylvey’s death had reached him. He’d been away, chasing down the perpetrators of an attack on our farmstead. He had stomped through the hall, muddy, dripping with the wet of a storm. I tried to stop him at the foot of the stairs to explain, and he shoved me aside. Get away from me!

  As the following days went by, all energies were focused on my other brothers and sisters who were still sick. Micah died. The rest recovered. The fears I had wanted to share with my father stayed sealed up inside of me, especially once I stole Sylvey’s body. My father couldn’t have known the guilt his silences had helped fuel. But Tiago did. Give it time, he repeated days later when the whole house could hear my parents arguing.

  If I had been here—

  You couldn’t have changed anything!

  I would have—

  You are not a god, Karsen! Stop acting like one! You don’t have a cure for the fever! No one does!

  We should have had more healers! More—

  For the gods’ sakes, Karsen! What’s done is done! What matters is what we do now!

  Their screams had cut through me, colder than the icy wind that howled outside. It was true. He couldn’t have changed the outcome. But what about me? Could I have changed the outcome for Samuel? I shouldn’t have put him on at the arena, but I had thought the arena office was secure. We had well-armed guards posted because too much money traded hands there. Who had attacked him? Or did it happen somewhere else? An angry trader in a back alley? Another mysterious crew like Fertig’s waiting on a deserted trail? Where were his straza?

  “You’re awake,” Kazi whispered, her voice drowsy.

  “Shhh,” I said. “Go back to sleep.”

  “What are you thinking?”

  My arm tightened around her. “I’m thinking how much I love you.”

  “Then I’m glad you’re awake. Tell me again, Jase. Tell me the riddle…”

  She mumbled a few more incoherent words and drifted back to sleep, her cheek nestling into my shoulder. I kissed the top of her head. My breath, my blood, my calm.

  * * *

  We were in the foothills, the sun warming my face. A sense of hope stirred in me, like we were back on course, back in the familiar, and no more dead birds would fall from the sky onto a bloody and barren landscape. We had returned to a world of reason I understood. Still, just in case, we altered our path so we’d approach Tor’s Watch the back way, through Greyson Tunnel, as a precaution. It was the longer route, but if a league was stirring up that much trouble, they would likely be in town, and we had no straza with us.

  Kazi’s lips parted with a sudden small gasp.

  “What is it?” I asked, immediately scanning the landscape.

  She smiled, wonder filling her face. “I just realized, Hell’s Mouth won’t be the only city within the borders of your new kingdom. There’s another one.”

  I knew every hill, valley, and gorge of Tor’s Watch. “No,” I replied. “Hell’s Mouth is the only city. That’s it.”

  “There’s the settlement.”

  The revelation sank in. It wasn’t exactly a city yet, but it was within the new borders I had declared. I whistled out a worried breath. “What will Caemus think of that?”

  “I don’t think it will be a problem. In fact, I think he’ll be fine with it. Now, Kerry, on the other hand, may take another swing at your kneecap when he learns you’re his new sovereign.”

  “I’ll be sure to wear my tall boots next time I visit. What about your queen?”

  “She’s grateful for what you did, Jase. You already know that.”

  I did. She had expressed it again when we’d had dinner with her and the king. “But that was before she knew that her settlement would be under my rule. I don’t want any complications that will jeopardize—”

  “It’s going to need a name. Any ideas?”

  “That should probably be left to Caemus.”

  “True.” But she went ahead and tried out several anyway, her head cocked as she listened to their sounds on her tongue, her dreams as full as my own.

  CHAPTER SIX

  KAZI

  Glints of autumn slivered through the trees, shaking the few sparse leaves with one last quiver as if saying good-bye. Winter was impatient, already frosting the early mornings in white. I wondered what Tor’s Watch would look like in winter. The dark towers would be striking against a white, snowy landscape.

  Today we would arrive. Jase thought it would be just before nightfall, but even darkness closing in could not stop him. He sat forward in his saddle as new vistas came into view, eager, scanning the horizon as if he expected to see someone he knew, his skin itching with the closeness of home. Tonight we would be sleeping in beds at Tor’s Watch. We would be eating dinner at the family dining table. Our new life would be beginning.

  The yearning stirring in me came as a surprise. Maybe Jase’s unflagging belief that this was just the beginning was taking hold in me too. I was eager for what was to come, but at the same time, a swarm of nervous bees hummed in my chest. Somehow, I would have to fit into a close-knit family that shared a history and traditions. And there were other worries.

  We’ll get our answers soon, Jase had promised, because uncertainty was a worm that ate through both of us. We both desperately wanted to know the meaning of the note and what had really happened to Samuel, but my stomach twisted at the thought of Zane. It wasn’t that I was afraid of him, at least not afraid of what he could do to me anymore. Natiya and Eben had taught me all the ways to kill someone, even without a weapon. I was far better trained than Zane. But I was afraid of what he might tell me.

  I had been terrified the night that I asked him about my mother. In an instant I became a child again, my bones turned to liquid, the uncertainty I had punched down for years suddenly alive. And now I would have to face that moment all over again when I faced Zane. That fear had warped into a new question—could the answers be worse than not knowing?

  Just kill him, Kazi, I told myself. It’s what you always planned to do. Kill him and be done with it. You don’t need answers. I had lived with doubt for this long—I could live with it forever. Justice was all I cared about. Answers wouldn’t change anything. My mother was gone.

  How can you be certain she’s dead?

  Jase’s question had been as fragile as a robin’s egg in his palm. He had held it out carefully to me, as if the shell were already cracked. Of course, I couldn’t be certain she was dead. Not really. I had never seen her body, but I had taken a dream and molded it into a conclusion somewhere along the way, a carved piece of puzzle that fit into the shape of my life.

  I had been certain, for so long, that one day she would find her way back to me, or if I only looked a little harder, one day I would find her. And then one bitter winter, when many Vendans had died already, I was curled up, shivering in my hovel, blue with the cold, thinking I might be next, and I heard a noise.

  Shhh.

  It was only wind, I told myself.

  Kazi.

  It was only my rumbling belly.

  Shhh.

  I was so cold already, frozen to the marrow, but I raced outside anyway, searching, desperate, not
wanting to be alone, the snowflakes whirling in cutting blades, drifts numbing my feet, wind whipping at my face, and then … there was a curious calm. Against the startling white that made the empty streets of Venda unrecognizable, I spotted something.

  Had it been a shivering frozen dream? Delirium fueled by hunger? Even then, none of it had really seemed real. How could I explain to Jase something that even I didn’t understand? I saw my mother, her long raven hair trailing in a loose braid down her back, with a crown of fresh green vines woven atop her head, like the kind she used to weave for me on holy days. She was spring in the middle of a harsh winter. She turned, her eyes warm amber pools, looking into mine as if trying to send me another one of her silent signals, her lips mouthing my name—Kazi, my beloved, my chiadrah—and then she turned and walked away from me, but now someone was beside her. He looked at me too. Death. She looped her arm through his and then she was gone. But Death lingered a moment longer. He looked at me, then finally stomped his foot in warning, and I ran back to my hovel.

  Maybe you saw what you needed to see so you could move forward? Jase suggested.

  I had mulled that possibility over in my head countless times since then. Had it only been the desperate loneliness of a girl finally letting go? She had already been slipping away from me for months and years, my guilt rising as my memory of her faded, and that guilt would spike a renewal of my search for her.

  Maybe seeing her that night was her message to me to stop waiting for her to return. So I would stop looking.

  Except some time after that, I began looking for someone else.

  One way or another, I couldn’t quite let go.

  Since that night I had seen Death many times—and that was no dream. Maybe he had always been there, and in the busyness of trying to survive, I simply hadn’t noticed. Or maybe once a dark door has been opened it can’t be shut again. Now in unexpected moments I heard the warning whispers of ghosts, and Death took pleasure in taunting me, pushing me. He became like a quarterlord I was determined to beat, and the prize was my life.