Vow of Thieves (Dance of Thieves)

by Mary E. Pearson

  “The crypt? They weren’t afraid?”

  “Not as much as they were afraid of Montegue. They knew what he was using them for. I’m sorry if hiding them in the crypt exposed your secret. It was the only way, Jase, the only way I could steal them and be sure Montegue wouldn’t find them. Does your family know?”

  He nodded. “I’m afraid they know everything. Including—”

  “Us? You told them about us?”

  “I blurted it out as I was choking Gunner. I know it wasn’t the way we planned.”

  While choking his brother? Hardly. I sighed and rubbed my temple. My head still ached. “I suppose nothing’s gone quite the way we planned.” I lifted his hand to my lips and kissed his knuckles. I smiled against them. “But I guess that’s how good thieves keep all their fingers. They slip into the cracks. They find shadows. They make a new plan when the last one utterly fails.”

  He stared at me like he was still absorbing everything, just as I was. How close we had both come to never seeing each other again. “Right now my only plan is to kiss my wife. And I am fairly certain not even the gods can derail that.” He leaned forward, and his hand slipped behind my head.

  There was a sharp rap at the door, and a voice called through it. “Supper, Patrei? Should I bring some bowls?”

  Maybe the gods couldn’t stop it, but soup and a waiting family could.

  “We should join everyone,” I said.

  “Are you sure? If you don’t want to go out there, I understand. I know what happened, Kazi. You don’t have to—”

  “I have to face them sooner or later.”

  * * *

  Jase had his arm around me as he escorted me out. I was still shaky. On top of being poisoned, I hadn’t eaten in days, at least not that I could remember. When we walked into the kitchen, the room grew quiet and heads turned. Some set their spoons aside. A few stood as if uncertain what to do. The room was full, not just with Jase’s family, but with others who had taken refuge in the vault too, employees I recognized from the houses and tunnel. It was more overwhelming than I expected. I wasn’t playing a role anymore, or here among them under a pretense. I felt naked. I didn’t know who to be.

  “Keep eating,” Jase told them, guiding me toward a table. A man stepped in front of us, one of the stable hands. He knelt on one knee and kissed my hand, but then seemed too flustered to say anything and scurried away. Another took his place, a woman who placed a rough woven amulet in my hand. “Hear you got that devil in the chops nice and good.” She vigorously nodded her approval before someone else stepped forward.

  “You saved the Patrei and the little ones. We are in your debt.” Similar sentiments rose from the others who moved into our path. Jase nodded and thanked each one. I was too stunned to say anything. I was Ten, the girl who stayed in the shadows. It felt dangerous to be openly acknowledged this way. Before we reached our seats, Vairlyn stood and intercepted us. She pulled me into her arms. Her grip was fierce, and I noted the bulge in her belly for the first time. A baby? Jase forgot to tell me that part of the story.

  She pulled back and cupped my face in her hands, her sapphire eyes glistening. “My daughter.”

  The word snatched away my thoughts and I couldn’t speak.

  Vairlyn seemed to understand. “I was not always a Ballenger,” she whispered. “Trust me, it will get easier.”

  The healer embraced me next, but not before she wagged her finger at me. “No more dogs for you, understand? Twice is my limit.”

  I nodded. “My limit too,” I answered. “Thank you.”

  Jase pulled out a chair for me at last and I sat. Wren and Synové seemed to be studying me. Was it worry, or were they as uncomfortable as I was, and waiting to follow my lead? The last time we had all been gathered around a table with the Ballengers, we had slipped birchwings into their food to knock them out.

  I stared at the bowl of soup set at my place. Did revenge lurk there? But they had saved my life. All of them. Jase had told me so. It was still sinking in. I would take a chance on the soup. I didn’t see Gunner in the room, but Priya and Mason sat at the end of the table. I couldn’t bring my eyes to meet theirs. The soup was my savior. Soup I knew what to do with, and luckily it didn’t send sideways glances at me. I was suddenly ravenous. I tried not to eat too quickly, and Rhea cautioned me to take it slowly. I sipped the broth a slow spoonful at a time. There was a long, difficult silence, everyone absorbed with their dinner, but then suddenly conversation erupted in a rush.

  “Venison and wild leek soup. It’s pretty much all we eat these days,” Titus said.

  “Breakfast, lunch, and dinner,” Aram added.

  “Gods’ glory, what I wouldn’t give for one small potato,” Priya moaned.

  “If only the forest had potatoes—and maybe some parsnips too,” Samuel agreed.

  “We bake flatbread every few days,” Vairlyn reminded them. “And have you forgotten about the dates? We have a lot of those.”

  Mason sighed. “No one can forget about the dates.”

  “I like them,” Synové said.

  Mason ignored her.

  Judith banged her spoon against the large pot on the hearth like it was a bell. “That all you got to talk about? Soup?”

  Silence returned to the kitchen. The heavy undercurrent that had been circling below the surface was now thick between us. Priya stood, hesitating, her chin tucked and her lashes lowered, then finally she lifted her eyes to meet mine. “The truth is some of us don’t know what to say. Thank you is not enough. Apologies are not enough. Until the day I die, I will live with the shame of what I did to you. When you told me that you loved Jase—” Her voice wobbled and she closed her eyes. She nodded as if she was trying to encourage herself to keep going, then opened her eyes and continued. “When you said you loved him, I knew. I knew you were telling the truth. I should have at least listened, but I didn’t want to hear it. I wanted to watch you suffer, the way we had, like that would somehow solve everything. I was wrong.”

  I didn’t want hear her apologies or her thanks. I just wanted her to stop. “If I thought someone had killed Jase, I would do the same,” I said.

  She shook her head. “No. You wouldn’t, and you didn’t. I know the whole story. When Paxton told you Jase was dead, you could have killed the king and run, but you stayed. Because of Lydia and Nash. Because you had made a vow to Jase to protect his family. Saving them was more important to you than the momentary satisfaction of revenge. When I helped throw you into that net, that’s all I wanted, revenge, not the truth you were trying to share with us.”

  Mason’s head hung low, staring down at his soup. He nodded. “Me too,” he said. He exhaled a long, slow breath and looked up at me. “I’m sorry, Kazi. I know it’s not enough, but I’m sorry. I just lost one sister because of all this madness, and now I nearly lost another by my own hand. A sister who is a true Ballenger.”

  I wanted to melt beneath the table. Was this what families did? Bared their souls in front of an entire room of people? Their confessions left me raw. These were the kind of conversations I didn’t know how to have. I had only just learned to share everything with Jase, and now I had to do it with all of them?

  Jase’s hand slid to my thigh beneath the table and gave me a reassuring squeeze.

  “When you discovered your mistake, you risked everything to right it,” I replied. “I suppose that’s all any of us can ever do. Try to make it right.”

  I stared at Mason, and then Priya, the last few days of terror and pain still too fresh in my mind. They had risked their lives to save me. I was grateful. But I was angry too. I was too many things I still didn’t understand, and it seemed everyone was waiting for me to say something that would solve everything. Tell me, tell me, tell me now. Montegue’s demands still circled in my head, his taunts, his hands searching me, the heavy weight of a chain around my neck. I had only just woken from my nightmares. I searched for some way to turn the conversation. Pivot. My specialty, but it eluded m
e. A breath trembled through my chest.

  Paxton suddenly raised his finger, poking it into the air in his annoying classic way. “So, Jase, what is this about you having three wives? Tell us about that.”

  All the attention turned away from me and toward Jase, and air swept back into my lungs.

  A new conversation caught fire around the table, and Paxton shot me a sly wink.

  It was what I needed, a moment to gather myself, to breathe, to remember who I was, and what I still needed to do.

  * * *

  I walked down the vault tunnel that led to the entrance. When I had asked where Gunner was, Jase said he’d taken his dinner to the niche by the door. Gunner thought I might be more comfortable if he wasn’t there. I couldn’t disagree, but I needed to talk to him.

  He sat against the massive door that closed us off from Tor’s Watch and watched me as I walked toward him. A deep scarlet votive flickered in his lap, and his mouth hung half open. If I hadn’t known better, I would have thought he was drunk. When I stopped in front of him, he set the votive aside and stood. His eyes narrowed. “You going to kill me?” he asked.

  “Funny, that’s exactly what Jase asked me when I told him I needed to talk to you alone.”

  “Jase nearly did kill me when he found out what I’d done.” He cleared his throat, then eyed me squarely. “I wouldn’t blame you if you did.”

  “Believe me, I’ve thought about killing you many times, Gunner, but not for the reason you think.”

  “I suppose any reason would be good enough.”

  “But it is a reason you need to hear. Of all the things you ever did to me, the worst happened months ago. There are some things in my life I haven’t gotten over. Things I may never get over. For a Rahtan who has worked hard to become strong and smart and overcome everything through intense training, that weakness eats at me. You knew that weakness.”

  I took a step closer to him. “You could have shot me with an arrow. You could have done a hundred things, but instead you dangled Zane in front of me, knowing what he had done. In an instant, you brought back the horror of a night to a small child. That’s what I became. A terrified child looking for her mother. For that, I should kill you. I was six years old, Gunner. Six.”

  “I didn’t—”

  “Don’t. Don’t tell me you didn’t know. You were as precise as a surgeon cutting out a heart. You knew exactly what you were doing to me.”

  He grimaced and nodded.

  “And then you let him loose to terrorize me more. You didn’t care—”

  “I didn’t let him loose. That part was an accident. In the chaos of that night, he escaped. We were all rushing to follow you, and he wasn’t locked up securely. He broke out of the warehouse and disappeared. I’m not saying that as an excuse—I know there’s nothing I can say or do to earn your forgiveness—”

  “You’re wrong. There is one thing. I will try my best to find a way to put this behind us, to forgive you and move forward, for Jase’s sake, if you give me a truthful answer to one question.”

  “I’ll tell you the truth about anything, whether you forgive me or not.”

  “The papers. The ones that were in Phineas’s quarters. Where are they?”

  “Papers? There were no papers.”

  Gunner explained how they went through the ashes of the workshop, hoping to recover something, and then went on to the scholars’ quarters and found nothing.

  “Who helped you search?”

  “Priya, Titus, and Samuel…” He rubbed the back of his neck. “Tiago, Mason. I think that was it.”

  “Could one of them—”

  “No. Nobody took anything.”

  Someone did. Papers didn’t walk off on their own, and I knew I had seen a stack of them the night we took Phineas. The king had known they existed too. “All right,” I said. “But you won’t mind if I check with the others.”

  “Check,” he answered.

  We looked at each other, and I guessed the same question lurked in both of us: Could we really move forward?

  And maybe the same answer: We were family now. What choice did we have?

  We walked back to the kitchen together.

  We are forty-four now. Our family continues to grow.

  Yesterday we added three more children. We found them scrounging through the ruins. They were afraid but Greyson offered them food, just as Aaron Ballenger had to me when he found me wandering alone.

  I am not that frightened girl anymore. I have changed. So has Greyson.

  I see him looking at me differently now. I look at him differently too, and I wonder about all the feelings inside me that I don’t understand.

  I have so many questions and no one to ask.

  Everyone older than me is gone.

  —Miandre, 22

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

  JASE

  It was beginning to look like the formidable arsenal we had always envisioned. More than enough to protect caravans from raiders. Nine launchers were laid out on the table, and beside them were a stack of loads. Twenty-eight, which translated into a hundred and twelve shots. That was a lot of damage and firepower.

  But it wasn’t enough.

  Paxton had tempered our elation quickly. “The king has a warehouse of munitions—thousands of loads—plus two hundred more launchers and enough soldiers to carry every one of them. The only reason he’s been guarding the town with a handful is because he can. He made a show when he roared in that first day, blowing up everything, and it worked. Everyone has a healthy respect for his power now.”

  “You mean a healthy fear.” I stared at our stack of ammunition. My fingers tightened around the back of the chair. “We’ll get more, then,” I said. “Enough to make our own show. Where does he keep it?”

  That was the question Paxton had been trying to answer since all this began. The king and Banques kept it a closely guarded secret. It was somewhere at the arena, he knew that much. Kazi had told Paxton to check warehouse seventy-two—the number that was on the piece of paper she had stolen from the king, but Paxton never got the chance to go there.

  “Seventy-two is near the end of the third row. We could approach at night from behind through the pastureland,” Priya suggested.

  “Getting to it is one thing,” I countered. “Hauling out thousands of pounds of munitions is another. I’ve been to the arena, and it’s crawling with guards, and our towers are manned with more of them. They can see everything.”

  “Then we don’t haul it out,” Aram said. “We just commandeer the warehouse and claim it as our own. We have enough arms to defend it. If it’s out of their hands, their power is gone.”

  “Until they blow you to kingdom come, the same way we did with the icehouse,” Mason said. “They still have enough loaded launchers to do that.”

  “Or we could blow up the munitions ourselves,” I suggested. “It would be an even fight then.”

  “Even? He has five hundred trained soldiers,” Paxton said.

  “Mercenaries,” I corrected. “Their loyalty only goes as far as a full bag of coins. On our side we have citizens prepared to take back their home.”

  “We could do it,” Judith said. Tiago and a few others echoed her enthusiasm.

  I watched Aram and Titus scan the room, sizing up our motley group in the vault. Several, like Tiago, were injured. Paxton still had an arm in a sling so he wouldn’t tear loose the stitches in his side. Their spirits might be willing, but their ability to fight was in question.

  “There’s more in town who would gladly fight with us,” Aleski said as if he’d read my thoughts.

  “Hundreds more,” Imara confirmed. “It won’t take long to get them organized. Every one of them is hiding some sort of weapon, whether it’s a sword, club, or hoe. We can—”

  “Jase?”

  I turned and saw Gunner walking toward me carrying Kazi. She was limp in his arms. I ran and took her from him. “What did you do?”

  “Nothing, I swear. We were
walking in the tunnel and her eyes rolled back and I caught her before she fell.”

  The healer rushed over and felt Kazi’s head, and then her wrist.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked, trying to make sure she was breathing.

  “Shhh, Patrei. Her pulse is steady. It’s only exhaustion and a full stomach that have overtaken her. Whatever she has been through in these last few days, you can be certain sleep was not part of it. The agony of the ashti is consuming. She needs rest. That is all.”

  * * *

  There will be times you won’t sleep, Jase.

  Times you won’t eat.

  Times you wish the world would stop for just one day.

  This was one of those times.

  I had stared at the ceiling for most of the night, except for when I was staring at Kazi. She slept soundly, her face serene. She needs rest. That is all. What had she been through these past days? As tired as I was, the question kept me awake. I knew she had only told me a small part of what she had endured. When I asked about Zane, she shook her head, and I saw fear return to her eyes. He still had a hold on her past, but now he knew it and had reopened the wound to his advantage. She said he threatened her with lies about her mother.

  When I asked about Montegue she told me he was a power-obsessed monster, then added, But other than power, he was mostly obsessed with you, Jase. He remembered every detail of your first meeting when you were both children. I guessed we had that in common now, but I was obsessed with him in an entirely different way, and I was more interested in our final meeting, one I hoped to arrange soon. She told me how he had taunted her, and put a chain around her neck like she was an animal. Some things she couldn’t even say. Later, she said. I promise. But I saw the pain in her eyes. I wanted to kill him. That’s all I wanted to do. But I had a lot of other things I had to do too. Like keep everyone in here alive.

  You’ll be torn a hundred ways … Remember that you have a family, a history, and a town to protect. It is both your legacy and your duty. If the job of Patrei were easy, I would have given it to someone else.