by Amanda Joy
“Dagon?” I whispered.
He shoved me away with his cross guard and I went stumbling back into the sand. He stood above me and lifted his sword. I still found nothing in his expression.
I grabbed a handful of sand and threw it at his face. I backed away as he clawed at his eyes.
My attention slid past him, in search of Falun or Anali, but the air was strange past the space between Dagon and me—almost warped.
My gaze swung from the shining blur of the blade to Dagon’s face, searching for a sign he’d come back to himself. I barely dodged his strikes. The sword, once unfamiliar, became light in my hand—striking with such uncanny speed and accuracy that I managed to avoid his attacks.
I leaned back as Dagon’s sword flew near enough to cut off a lock of my hair. It didn’t matter that Dagon wasn’t himself, taken over by some strange magick.
Whoever he was, he was trying to kill me.
I couldn’t hesitate. Luck and near misses had kept me from death when the assassin attacked; now I would have to depend on skill. I struck out as his guard opened, cutting a line across his chest. Blood welled through his clothing, but Dagon continued forward with no reaction to the wound. I drew my sword back and lifted my right arm to block him. His sword bit deep into my arm.
I cried out, stumbling away from him. For a desperate moment, I considered using blood from the cut to call magick, but Dagon raised his blade again. I knew he was going to put me down. I screamed as I thrust out my sword, stabbing Dagon deep in his stomach. He didn’t flinch or make any sound. The ground seemed to melt beneath my feet as his flesh parted around the blade, but I pressed forward, fighting my roiling stomach the whole time. My arm was steady, blood slipping over my fingers, until the sword was buried in his gut to the hilt.
I let out a sob as the blade scraped against his spine. Confusion knit his brow and he fell, taking my sword with him. I collapsed, retching and trying to wipe his blood off my hand. It was the assassin all over again. My skin burned where his blood had touched it. Magick simmered beneath my skin.
There was another burning, though, in the arm Dagon had wounded. It didn’t feel magickal, because it was inside my arm. I peeled back the fabric of my shirt. Blood leaked steadily from the wound, soaking the sand.
Anali appeared at my side. I could see the shadows of others gathered around. She was speaking quickly, but I didn’t hear her. “Check the sword, Anali,” I whispered. Fearing I would vomit, I turned over on my side.
Shadows hovered around me; someone touched my shoulder, my hair. “Check Dagon’s sword,” I repeated. “Poisoned.”
My entire arm seemed set upon by scorch ants crawling inside and outside my flesh. I screamed, scratching at it.
Bile filled my stomach, and my words were garbled, incoherent. The others couldn’t hear me and I was going to die because of it.
Only one thing cut through the pain: Dagon was dead. Someone, some magick, made him attack me.
A weak groan escaped my lips as I started to cry. The world went sideways as I fell back into the sand.
* * *
“Why should it take this long to find a healer?” Anali groaned.
I opened my eyes to find Prince Aketo drifting in and out of focus above me. “Captain, I can help her.”
I writhed as the pain in my arm remembered me.
Someone’s hands ran over my brow, rough calluses surprisingly gentle. “Explain.” This was Anali’s voice, sharp as a well-kept blade.
“I can heal her.”
“The healers will be here soon,” a man’s voice protested. Falun?
Prince Aketo’s voice hardened. “Captain, forgive me, but there is only a short window to keep this poison from killing the Princess.”
It was in my shoulder now and moving toward my heart, like sand boring pathways through my skin. A newer, more primal fear gripped me. A shaky breath rattled in my chest. “Do it now,” I breathed. It took all my strength to force out those words.
Aketo’s eyes flew to mine and held. The skin was tight on his face, like he was in pain just watching me. He dropped down beside me in the sand.
Aketo’s fingers probed the wound. I cried out and jerked away.
“I am sorry, Your Highness,” he said as he tilted my head to the side. “I can save you by using my venom to slow the flow of poison in your blood. My other small magick will keep both of us safe.”
I shook my head. His words made no sense. Small magick.
He opened his mouth so wide, it seemed like a smile. But his lips pulled back farther, revealing fangs.
It wasn’t like a bite from the bloodkin boys I knew, whose fangs slid neatly into my neck with their lips there, pressing a soft and careful seal around the wound to catch all the blood and their magick drawing away the pain. When Aketo struck, his fangs drove into my neck with shocking force, the pain enough to surprise a scream to my lips. I clenched my teeth and let only a whimper slip out. A numbing sensation spread from the bite, cooling the burning in my chest until I felt nothing of my body. This venom spread faster than the poison had.
He turned my head back toward him and looked into my eyes. “She shouldn’t be feeling any pain now.”
I tried to open my mouth, but I could barely lift my eyes to watch him work. He cut open his palm and pressed it to my skin. Seconds later the numbing weighed on my eyes until they fell shut.
CHAPTER 12
WHEN I WAS seven and Isadore was nine, the royal family left Ternain at the start of Far Winter and traveled with a caravan the size of a small city for three months. We passed through the edge of the Deadened Jungle, our wagons and carriages painted with fresh lamb’s blood to sate the wretched—the restless ghosts, furies, and old, long-dead Godlings lurking in the jungle.
Next we journeyed to Adonsai, the Desert Crystal, greatest of the five desert cities. It sat at the edge of the Kremir Sands, part citadel and part temple, marked by seven towers piercing a relentless cerulean sky.
The citadel seemed to be the only thing holding back the Kremir’s seething gold dunes. Great masses of them shifted by day, as if hulking beasts lived deep within the sand. The Lady of Adonsai Citadel’s bard told stories about the desert creatures—the hekerrita, a serpent large enough to swallow villages whole; the krakai, who crawled from the bottom of the Silvern Sea, up through the sand; and the karansa, winging through the sky, part vulture, part lizard, with acid poison in their throats.
Isadore loved it all—the dry, sweltering heat, the sun turning her skin a rich copper and bleeding every trace of color from her blond hair. She wanted to march into the desert and command the karansa to fly her to the bottom of the world, where even the ocean ran dry and the sand turned black. She wanted to challenge the hekerrita to a duel, where she would climb into its mouth and savage it from the inside.
I hated it all—the grit of sand everywhere you stepped, shaking out my boots for fear of enterprising scorpions and horned vipers, and, most terrifying of all, the dunes. Nightmares of being buried beneath them with the beasts as my only company woke me every night.
Waking now was like those nightmares.
A cruel slumber of memories turned nightmares wore down my strength the way desert storms ate away villages.
In them I stabbed Dagon over and over. Sometimes I wasn’t wounded and after I gutted him I bent over his dead body, weeping. Other times it wasn’t Dagon I cut down at all, but the assassin. In the next, I turned away from the corpse without a second glance. Details changed, but every time I still cut him down and left him bleeding in the sand.
Then the dreams changed. I was in the Patch: kissing a faceless boy beneath the half-collapsed eaves of a building; sleeping curled up on a threadbare pallet; lining my eyes with kohl before I went out at night. In these dreams I wasn’t a Princess—my wish finally fulfilled—but they were somehow still equally terrifying.
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br /> Wading through my nightmares was like clawing my way up the dunes as sand sucked at my feet, teeth and claws scratching at my ankles. There were moments of clarity. I heard snatches of conversation, felt rough hands on my face, and smelled sandalwood candles and incense. But every time I began to rouse, fine sand seemed to draw me under.
Finally I woke with a gasp that dissolved into a coughing fit. I opened my eyes to find Mirabel peering at me from a chair next to my bed.
“How long?” I asked. A rough whisper was all I could manage.
“I’ve been bending over backward to keep your mother from moving you to the Palace infirmary. She said she wanted to keep an eye on your progress, but I told her, why should the Princess move if the same healers in the infirmary have already seen you? It’s my care she objects to,” she said, rising from her chair. No question of how I was, no such warmth from her. “It’s been three days. Took you long enough.”
I tried to speak, but coughed instead, my throat dry and itching.
She lifted a cup of water to my mouth. As I sipped, she continued. “Rumors of your death reached the city soon after the attack, but the Queen came to visit and, after several of her favored healers inspected you, it was announced that you were in good health. Still, there is unease in the city. You’ll have to issue a statement of your own and be seen in public. I believe a short ride around the city will do.”
“And what of Dagon?”
Mira shook her head. “I’m so sorry.”
Why feel sorry for me? What about Dagon’s family?
Guilt cut through me cleanly, so sharp and keen that I couldn’t speak. I swallowed thickly, closing my eyes against tears. “Do we . . . do we know why Dagon attacked me?”
I couldn’t yet force myself to ask about his body or whether news had been sent to his family. I wanted to write those missives myself and personally sign off on his pension. I wanted to pack up his medals, folding them carefully around Myre’s flag, and tuck a cobalt-handled dagger into a rolled-up Killeen banner.
Mira’s lips thinned. “There was some sort of compulsion laid on him and a spell that repelled anyone who came near you two. Lord Baccha arrived soon after you’d passed out. He could detect it in the air, said it was Sorceryn work. Thank the Mother Prince Aketo was there to heal you.”
“How did he heal me?” I remembered the bite. I pulled my hand from the blankets and found a bandage on the side of my neck.
“He used his own venom to slow the progression of the poison in your veins, then used his own blood and its immunity to poison to heal you—no poison can kill lami khimaer.” That had been the cut on his palm, then. “He said it would take your body some time to heal, though we did not expect it to take this long. He didn’t either, it seems. Everyone has been quite beside themselves. Falun most of all.”
I bit my lip hard enough to draw blood. “Have you found out who might’ve set the spell? Or who might have ordered it set?”
“No. Anali thought to connect Dagon to your sister or her allies, but it seems no one spoke to Dagon in Ternain before you saw him. Even the gatemen hadn’t registered his arrival in Ternain. But we will keep searching for a way to connect him to the Sorceryn who set the spell.” She paused. “I did find something, though.”
She held up a gold coin with a square cut out of the middle. I’d never seen any like it before. The gold coins minted in Ternain were thicker, with my mother’s profile on one side. “Falun brought Lord Baccha along when he came to visit you yesterday, per my instructions. I slipped into the Hunter’s rooms while they were here. The easiest way to know where travelers have been is to check their coin.”
I inspected it. The square seemed to have been cut out after the coin was minted, because it was engraved with a castle, those massive dwellings of the North. I couldn’t read the words etched onto its other side, but I recognized the letters, small and sharp and artless. “This is from Dracol.”
But this wasn’t news. It only confirmed Baccha’s story.
“It was minted in Dracol, but I’ve only heard of coins with this square cutout coming from one place—the Roune Lands. Every coin in his possession is like this.”
I stared at her, mouth ajar. The lawless land in the northeast corner of the realm was populated with roving bands of thieves and criminals exiled from Dracol and Myre. The country was barely livable; the soil was rocky and little grew there. Only one city, Yrsai, held to a set of laws. In truth, it seemed the sort of place where Baccha could’ve whiled away the decades. Except if he had been in the Roune Lands, why lie about Dracol?
“There’s only one way to enter Myre from the North,” I said.
The A’Nir Mountains between the Roune Lands and Myre weren’t navigable. The only way to reach Myre was to travel downriver through Ydara’s Pass. Every ship that came from the North was stopped at the Sister Citadel.
Mirabel smiled broadly. “I sent a raven north early this morning. I know a few of your father’s contacts there. But at least now we know where Baccha truly came from.”
At the mention of my father, I sank back into the pillows with a heavy sigh. It was time I told Mirabel about Papa. If anyone could have guessed his motivations back then, it was Mira. “I have news too. Really it’s more of a puzzle I can’t work out. There’s a binding on my magick. I found it during my first lesson with Baccha.”
I explained what I’d learned from Mother. When I finished, Mirabel’s face was ashen. “I can’t think that your father has betrayed you, but what the Queen said is true. Lei brought you to me the day after your magick was named.”
“What other explanation is there?”
“I’m not certain. Your father is a man full of secrets. Like you, he tends to keep his plans to himself, but he couldn’t have done this,” Mirabel said. “Have I told you the story of how we met?”
I shook my head and she continued. “I stopped keeping track at some point, but I marked my hundredth nameday decades before you were born. Fey long-livedness is a fickle thing, passed down from our Godling ancestors, but even with the little fey blood and magick that I have, I inherited it. I outlived my mother and all but one of my seven siblings. Once I realized my aging had slowed, I left my birthplace and came to Ternain. It was not an easy time for me. I couldn’t find a job because of my horns, and I’d taken to cutting purses to survive.”
I knew some of this—that Mirabel had grown up in the desert, and her mother, a human with distant fey relatives, had been the steward of a minor Fort near the Southern Enclosure. Her father had been khimaer, and he lived in the Enclosure. But she’d never told me why she left or what came after.
“I’m not proud of it, but it kept food in my stomach. I survived. One morning, I saw a young lord with a heavy purse. He was without guards, so I tried to steal it, but he stopped me and asked if I wanted a job. When your parents first married, your father used to walk the streets alone just like you. He said he was in need of a secretary, but what he really wanted was a spy. No one would’ve suspected that the King had an old khimaer woman to do his bidding.”
She laughed, and there were tears in her eyes. “I worked for Lei for two years until the Queen became pregnant with you. It took Lei months of convincing, of begging, but eventually I agreed to care for you. He knew your life would be . . . difficult. He wanted someone who could protect you, and see to your interests, just like I’d seen to his. I’d cared for younger siblings and watched them age and die. Outliving you or your father would be one thing—I’ve lived that and I will live it again—but having you ripped from me? I couldn’t—I still don’t know how to accept that.
“I only decided after I saw the way your father held you, like you were blown from glass, draped in gold, and would break if he just breathed the wrong way. I knew he would spoil you within an inch of your life, most everyone here would, and I knew a girl, a Queen especially, would need more than that. So I c
oaxed you from his arms and held you tight, just long enough for you to get the measure of me, and then pressed you into the wet nurse’s hands. I loved you instantly, before I saw that your eyes were like petals of a flower on fire, before you gasped out my name like a growl, and spat up in my hair. I knew I would do anything to protect you, long before I accepted that your safety wouldn’t always be up to me.”
Hot tears slid down my cheeks. I knew Mirabel loved me, but she rarely said so. Hearing it just now released something in me.
“If your father asked the Sorceryn to do this, it could only have been to protect you.”
I wiped my face. I wished I had her faith, but I’d been disappointed too many times by my mother and sister. Even when you loved them, people were unknowable. “Then I need to see him.”
“Your mother left two of her guards outside your rooms to keep an eye on you, I suspect. If she believes you’re attempting to leave this close to your nameday . . .”
She would keep me under guard, probably locked in my rooms, until I turned seventeen. “I’m not going to run away again, Mira. I’ll tell her I’m leaving.”
“Are you sure you want to go now? It’s been days since Dagon attacked you. Whoever’s trying to kill you, they will probably try again soon.”
My heart gave a stutter. “You’re right, but Ternain isn’t exactly safe. I’ll be better protected on the road with the guard to watch anyone following, and at Asrodei, Papa will be there.” I asked Mirabel to have the guard start preparing for the journey. After Court tomorrow, it would be time to ride back to Asrodei. Somehow I would get my mother to agree.
Finally Mirabel left. Alone, the weight of Dagon’s death struck me again, memories pouring over me until I could barely breathe. I retreated into my dressing room because I didn’t want anyone hearing the broken sounds coming from me. What would Papa say when he learned I’d killed one of his oldest friends?
As I wept, I prayed he would forgive me, because I knew I would never forgive myself.