Traitor Princess, Assassin Saint

by T. R. Sherwood

  “Couldn’t she have been vaporized in the blast?”

  “It’s possible.” Annara wiped some of the grime off her face. “But there’s nothing here. No limbs, no flesh, just blood.”

  “Then...”

  “I don’t know, Haol. I think we’ll find out soon enough.”

  ✽✽✽

  Haol half-carried her up to her bedroom, where she snapped halfheartedly at him to leave her alone. Annara still slept in the guest bedroom her father had placed her in before she left for Seichre. Anywhere else felt bitterly strange, too clean, too different from the way the palace was when she was a child.

  The ache in her throat would fade. Her pulse was normal, she had no fever, and when she held a handkerchief to her mouth and coughed, there was no blood. Her face was an angry red, but when she washed it in cold, clean water, the burns and the pain faded. She hadn’t been lying when she told Heron she was fine.

  She washed the blood out of her white coat with cold water, before the stains could set. She caught a glimpse of her face in the mirror on the wall, and a wave of pure rage washed over her. She retched dryly into the basin of water, then, catching her reflection in that, too, plunged both hands into it to destroy it with ripples.

  The worst part was, she couldn’t even tell who she was angry at anymore. For years, she had been angry at her father, at the monarchy, at the system kept her in poverty for years. There was nothing to be angry at anymore, but the rage was still there. It had fused to her spine during the years she spent planning this, and congealed from something fiery enough to keep her warm into something sick and acidic that would grow in her, targetless, for the rest of her life.

  Every time she closed her eyes, she saw the afterimage of the moment when she plunged her knife into Senne’s chest. Her hands still felt warm and slick. She could still feel the blood, the way Senne’s flesh gave under the blade, and the way she had tensed, her collarbone tight against the front of her coat. A little breath of air, an exhale. Senne never cried out.

  It was ridiculous, she told herself, that she kept remembering that. It hadn’t killed Senne. It probably hadn’t even hurt her.

  Annara didn’t sleep well that night. She woke up every other hour, aching and too warm under cream-colored brocade blankets. Each time, she went to the window and watched the lights of Chreon Se glitter across the water. Today had been a victory. She had faced down Lord Wraith and lived. She might have been the first person to do so in the history of Seichre.

  She had planned this. She had wanted this. She was in control. She was in control. She was.

  The next morning, she announced that Archon would be invading the neighboring islands. It was time to expand the empire.

  ✽✽✽

  “We’ll start with Chreon Se,” she said the next morning, over an eggshell-thin map of the Crescent. She had grabbed a chunk of stale bread for breakfast, and it left her throat dry and scratched.

  It was a sensible choice. Chreon Se was the wealthiest island in the Crescent, but all that money went to health and education reform instead of its practically nonexistent military. It had never needed a functional army, since it had always gotten on well with the three superpowers of Seichre, Alrhen-Xiun, and Pahinvar.

  One of her advisors shook their head. “We can’t do that, my lady.”

  “Why not?”

  “Lord Chreon Se is on vacation in Pahinvar. If we take the island now, he’ll escape, and the people of Chreon Se will wait for his return.”

  “Is he that well-liked?” Annara said.

  “He isn’t exactly well-liked,” the advisor said. “Saying that his people associate him with prosperity would be closer to the truth. They don’t seem to have a high opinion of his intelligence. If you take the island, though, and its economy suffers, they will definitely want him back.”

  “Hm. When will he get back from Pahinvar?”

  “Difficult to say. Apparently, he’s visiting his mother for one of their festivals.”

  Their tone made their opinion of rulers who spent all their time gallivanting off to foreign countries painfully clear. To Chreon Se’s credit, though, his island seemed to do fine without him. His elected civil officials had so much power that the island was practically a democracy.

  “Chreon Se’s out, then,” she said. “We’ll start with Ervon. It’s not ideal, but it’s our next best option. Any objections?”

  No one said anything. Ervon was relatively small and easy to attack without involving the other islands. It was reasonably wealthy, but not in the way that Chreon Se was wealthy. Chreon Se was saturated with wealth, in a way that touched nearly everyone that walked through it. In Ervon, you could see the gilded edges of the palace from the slums.

  Very quietly, behind her, Haol said, “Are you sure about this? The three-state treaty...”

  “Will hold if we don’t spill too much blood. The three states don’t care about little Crescentian conflicts.”

  “Well, if you’re sure.”

  “I’m always sure,” Annara said.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  They left that day. Annara didn’t remember to eat lunch. She felt faint and numb as they crossed the bridge to Ervon. The horizon was dark with storm clouds, charcoal gray and heavy. The smell of rain was in the air. A storm was about to sweep over the islands.

  The Ervonian side of the bridge was guarded by two sleepy guards. The Archonians slit their throats quickly, to prevent them from raising the alarm. The rest of the walk to the palace was peaceful, as it took them through crumbling neighborhoods full of broken and boarded windows. A woman in a patched dress was taking laundry down from a clothesline in anticipation of the rain; when she saw their white uniforms, she darted back inside, leaving half the clothes still up.

  Once they reached the castle, there was a short and bloody battle. One of the Ervonian soldiers came at Annara with a bayonet, and Annara shot her quickly, without hesitation. Once she collapsed, leaving a rust-colored smear on the wainscoting, it was easy to imagine someone else had done it.

  “You five,” Annara said, hoarse, pointing out a few Archonian soldiers. “With me.”

  They followed her up the magnificent stairs of the entryway. Annara was looking for a banquet hall, and she found it almost immediately, through thick stone walls that would have masked the sound of gunfire. She threw open the doors.

  Candlelight gleamed on the silk clothes of Lord Ervon and his guests. Lace frothed at their wrists and collars. Silver clinked against porcelain.

  Lord Ervon sat at the head of the table. She knew him immediately from the description her messengers had given, but he was younger than she had expected. He was older than she was, but younger than Heron. He had very neat dark hair and a small, pointed beard. She heard the laughter die in his mouth as he saw the guns.

  “Archon is annexing the isle of Ervon,” she said. “Resistance is pointless, so I hope you all aren’t thinking of trying anything foolish. Call for your guards if you like, Ervon. None of them will come.”

  Ervon set his fork down on the tablecloth. She could tell he didn’t really believe it, not really. “Come now, miss, you can’t be serious.”

  “Shoot anyone who tries to resist,” Annara said to her soldiers. “Actually, shoot anyone who tries to reason with you. Make an example of them.”

  “Yes, my lady.”

  “Be reasonable,” Ervon said desperately, as the soldiers filed into the room. He fidgeted with the embroidered hem of the tablecloth.

  Annara looked at his plate. It was polished silver, piled high with brilliantly emerald steamed vegetables and a cut of roast beef, charred at the edges and pink at the heart. She could smell the wine in his cup and on his breath. There was a small jadeite bowl filled chipped ice and lemon syrup just to the left of his cup.

  She swept all his plates off the table, and they clattered to the floor next to him. One of the nobles shrieked. Annara planted her foot on the table where his plate had been, smearing a bloody
footprint onto the tablecloth. She grabbed Ervon by his cravat and used the mouth of her pistol to force his chin up so that he looked her in the eyes.

  “I am being reasonable,” she said, deadly calm. “I am only operating on the same principles you have espoused for your entire life, Lord Ervon. You have money, I have a title, why should I not take it from you?”

  “Please,” he said. “Archon and Ervon have always been friends.”

  She dropped him, and he landed heavily back in his chair. “There is no more Ervon. From today on, there is only East Archon.”

  “No,” Ervon said, face pale.

  “If you’re lucky, I’ll keep you around as a political prisoner. If you continue to protest, I’ll shoot you here and now.” Over her shoulder, to emphasize the point, she said, “Burn the palace down.”

  The guard behind her saluted neatly. “Yes, my lady.”

  “You can’t do that,” Ervon said, white as a sheet. “The fire will—”

  She cracked him across the forehead with the end of her pistol, and he collapsed onto the table. Across from him, one of the Ervonian nobles fainted. She checked Ervon’s pulse. He was still breathing, and the wound didn’t seem serious. Annara opened the window, and let in the sounds of white-uniformed soldiers piling kindling by the walls.

  ✽✽✽

  Annara climbed up to the roof to watch the storm sweep over the sea. This part of the castle was stone, and it wouldn’t burn easily. She stood and rested her forearms on the battlements, listening to the sea crash against the castle directly below.

  Behind her, she heard the click of a pistol inexpertly cocked. She whipped around and found a fifteen-year-old girl pointing a gun at her.

  She wore a green-and-yellow Ervonian maid’s uniform, with a slightly stained white apron that wrapped around her waist. Her hair was tied back into a bun under a white kerchief, but tendrils of it escaped and whipped in the storm-driven wind. Her hands were shaking so badly that it would be a miracle if her bullets hit Annara at all. Her eyes were the same brown as Senne’s.

  “Where did you get that?” Annara said sharply, even though it should have been obvious from the drying blood crusted onto the barrel. She had taken it off a dead soldier.

  “This is your fault,” the maid said, trembling like a leaf.

  Annara opened her mouth to defend herself, but then a sunset-colored fragment of light caught her eye. Fire. Behind the maid, the roof of the palace was on fire, and it was starting to spread to the wooden buildings nearby.

  “If the rain doesn’t come, we’re all finished,” the maid said. “The entire island will burn. You killed us all.”

  You can’t do that, Ervon had tried to say, just before she hit him. The fire will spread.

  “The rain will come,” Annara said, but it sounded like someone else was saying it.

  She thought of the woman they had passed in the street earlier, the one who had been taking in her laundry. An image flashed into her mind: the old man who had accepted her cigarette ages ago, after she had finished talking to Mercan. Ervon wasn’t Archon or Midion or Chreon Se. It didn’t have the infrastructure to deal with a fire of this size. It would destroy everything and everyone on the island until it reached the sea.

  “You don’t know that.” The maid shook the gun. “Why? Do you really hate us that much?”

  The truth was, she hadn’t even been thinking about people like this. It was just a power play, like countless other things Annara had done since she was young.

  “I didn’t mean...” she started to say, and then she realized it was pointless.

  It didn’t matter what she had meant to do. She looked for the usual cancerous mass of rage hidden below her breastbone, the anger that made her willing to become any twisted thing, to hurt anyone, and found that it had dissolved the moment the maid drew her stolen gun. There was nothing to say. ‘Sorry’ was too light a word.

  “I’ll kill you,” the maid said, very quietly, almost like she was talking to herself. “I’ll kill you, and then it’ll be over.”

  There was a gunshot. A bullet pinged off the stone next to Annara, leaving a white pockmark in its salt-stained gray surface. Before she could think too hard about it, Annara threw herself over the edge, into the ocean far below. She heard another bullet whip past. The freezing water hit her like a punch to the gut. Blindly, she struck out towards the bridge, relying on her memory to navigate.

  When she resurfaced, no one was shooting at her. Rain etched concentric circles into the waves.

  ✽✽✽

  By the time she made it back to Archon, it was pouring. She was soaked to the bone, soaked through three layers of clothing, and she had lost the circlet on her head. Her ermine collar was plastered to her shoulders. Every muscle ached. She had never been more tired.

  All the guards bowed low as she walked through the palace. Some of them were celebrating, and so were her advisors. She heard the sound of laughter.

  She found Haol in the strategy room, poring over the map of the Crescent. When he looked up at her, his eyes blazed. His face was white with anger, stark against his red hair.

  She had expected him to be at least a little glad to see she was still alive, but instead he hissed, “Do you understand what you’ve done?”

  Of course she understood what she did. She didn’t need him to point that out. “Yes.”

  “You could have killed thousands of people,” Haol said. “You could have started a war. If it hadn’t happened to rain at precisely the right time, you could have annihilated an entire island. Hell, Annara, you were supposed to be in control.”

  “Don’t call me that. I am in control.”

  “You’re not, and you know it. Look at yourself. This has already gone too far, Annara, and you need to stop it before it goes any further.”

  “I told you not to call me that,” Annara snapped. “My name is Lady Archon. Remember your place, captain.”

  “What is my place, exactly? Am I here to be your servant or your friend? Because if I am your friend, it’s my duty to tell you that you’re hurting yourself and the people around you.”

  “You’re not my friend,” Annara said. “How could you be? I am Lady Archon, and you’re nothing but the son of a servant.”

  She hadn’t meant to say it, but it was what the kind of person she was trying to be would have said. Haol stiffened. Good. She wanted him out of the room at any cost, so that she wouldn’t have to look at him and listen to him say things she already knew.

  “What happened to you?” he said. “You weren’t always like this. The person I knew would never have done that to Ervon.”

  “Don’t talk nonsense. I’ve always been like this.”

  “No. I don’t think you have.”

  “Does it matter? Do we really have to do this?” Annara said. “Do I have to stand here and listen to you enumerate all the ways I’ve changed, all the ways I’ve failed, all the ways I’ve been deficient, until what? Until I change my ways? Until I repent? That’s not going to happen.”

  “I see,” Haol said. Silently, he unbuckled his belt and placed it, sword and all, on the table. “In that case, you clearly don’t want me here. We’re not friends. I have no obligation to keep you from doing this to yourself. I resign.”

  “Good,” Annara said. “Get out. Don’t come back.”

  As he met her eyes, Annara could see a spark of fury in him, but it was old, and heavily watered down with sorrow.

  “As Lady Archon commands,” he said, and then he was gone.

  ✽✽✽

  After that, Annara washed her face with warm water. She could still feel the salt from the ocean, grainy on her skin, but she couldn’t quite bring herself to take a bath. Instead, she changed clothes and wrung out her hair. After her shirt and pants were dry, she put her father’s coat back on, even though it was still damp.

  It was still her father’s coat. Even after all this time, and despite all her best efforts, getting it wet had brought out the gho
sts of his cologne and tobacco, just under the smell of brine. When she looked in the mirror, she didn’t look confident or brave. She just looked like a smaller, younger, hollowed-out version of him. A nameless, howling pressure built in her chest. Her mind felt like a sponge slowly being soaked in ink, darkening by degrees.

  She took out a knife. It was an old knife, thin and chipped, built more for a kitchen than a battlefield. She had brought it to Seichre with her. She had stabbed Senne with it. She hadn’t used it since.

  Annara turned the knife over and over in her hands, watching the blade catch the light and then turn dark. She pressed the hilt to her forehead. Annara no longer believed in the grace of the goddesses, nor did she expect any help from any supernatural quarter. She never had, even when she was a nun. But now, for the first time in a long time, Annara closed her eyes and started to pray. It wasn’t because she thought it would do something. It was only because it was familiar, and it reminded her of a time when her plans for vengeance and domination were just plans, instead of things that were supposed to be victories.

  Someone knocked very hesitantly on the door.

  “What is it? Come in,” Annara said, feeling very tired.

  A messenger bowed herself into the room, looking cowed. “I’m so sorry, Lady Archon, that I have to be the one to break it to you, but there’s some bad news.”

  “Spit it out, then.”

  “Lord Wraith is alive, my lady. I’m sorry,” the messenger said, cringing.

  “Oh,” Annara said distantly. Some of the pressure eased, just slightly. “No, that’s a good thing. That’s good news.”

  “My lady?”

  “Tell people I’ll be waiting for her at this address,” Annara said, scrawling it across a piece of paper. It was an abandoned church near the potter’s field, one that was suitably remote. “Tell as many people as you can, and the rumor will reach her eventually.”

  “Yes, Lady Archon,” the messenger said, bowing low.

  Annara watched her go, then she sat at the vanity table, brushed a few jars of cosmetics aside, and wrote a note. She wrote it as if she was talking to Haol, but Haol was gone. It was unlikely that he would ever return to the House of Archon. More likely, the note would be picked up by a maid, or a soldier, or whoever first opened the door to the guest room to discover that Annara was gone.