Bloodleaf

by Crystal Smith

  “He was in the wrong,” I said. “But I’m sure it will work itself out.”

  She pasted a bright smile on her face, a poor cover. “I’m sure you’re right.”

  * * *

  Kate had lied about her skill with a needle. She wasn’t good; she was incredible. Instead of adding the missing sleeve—​a piece of which had become my bloodcloth—​she finished the bodice without it, so that it cut in a fierce diagonal across my chest and joined the single remaining sleeve at my collarbone with a delicate swoop, like the shape of a furled wing. All in less than a day.

  In fact, the entire dress had taken on a decidedly birdlike quality; Kate had embroidered the ivy into soft, silver feathers that danced with a swish of the skirt. And she’d crafted a matching mask to go with it, made from intricately braided threads of silver curved up at my cheekbones like the silhouette of a bird in flight. From one angle, the dress glimmered gold, from another, it shone with silver, and the tiny crystals sparkled white with every slight movement. It was moonlight, starlight, and sunlight, all woven into one. And after Kate was done dressing my hair and dusting my face with pearlescent powder, I became a creature as unworldly as my costume.

  One of the more practical adjustments Kate made to the dress was the inclusion of pockets, which enabled me to carry my luneocite knife undetected without having to stuff it into my bodice—​a profoundly uncomfortable way to carry a weapon. It bolstered me to have a blade so close at hand.

  When my transformation was complete, Kate sat back to admire her work. “What do you think?” I asked, masking my nervousness with flippancy. “Do I look murderable?”

  “Very murderable,” she replied with approval. “Everyone there is going to want to murder you.”

  The canal passage was still too flooded to use; I’d have to make my entrance through the front door, with all the other partygoers. Kate, who’d lost an entire night of sleep working on costumes, insisted on walking with me up to the front steps anyway.

  “Zan left me with some instructions for you,” she said. “The Great Hall will be where the royals are installed, receiving their guests. He was very specific: Don’t go there. Keep to the terraces, where most of the festivities will be taking place. If someone asks who you are, say you’re the great-niece of Baron Percival. His siblings were very prolific—​even he doesn’t know how many great-nieces and nephews there are. Keep a low profile as much as you can, but stay where there are people until midnight. That’s when Zan will meet you. But don’t look for him; he’ll come to you. Nathaniel will be watching the entrances and exits if you need him.” She hugged me. “Also, don’t die. You’re not allowed to die.”

  “That was Zan’s rule?”

  “Mine, but it is the most important. Now, off you go.”

  Every lantern was lit for the event, and the normally gloomy castle glowed spectacularly. I donned my mask and, gathering my skirts and my courage, made my way up the granite staircase toward the doors, which were flung open in golden welcome, framing the glittering display of the party within.

  Inside, my fears of being noticed subsided; as beautiful as my dress was, it didn’t stand out among so much of the spectacular. In the first ten feet from the entrance, I passed a woman resplendent in the colors of a peacock, a man with the sleek black coat of a feral cat, and a lady wearing the jewel-studded skull of what might have once been a bear.

  Growing up, I’d attended balls on occasion: mostly stuffy, mirthless affairs, where people danced with stiff arms and a wide berth between partners. A Renaltan ball could never be too celebratory, lest it risk drawing rebuke from the Tribunal. Hedonism was only one step away from witchcraft in the eyes of the magistrates.

  This was so completely unlike that. The air was humming with a jubilant energy. Everyone on the floor was dancing close together; those on the outskirts were laughing and eating with buoyant enthusiasm. One table was piled with meat: boar, pheasant, duck; another was heavily laden with decadent desserts and exotic fruits. Serving girls in pristine white smocks lined each table. I knew I was not supposed to enter the Great Hall, but I couldn’t stop myself from standing outside of it to watch the merriment. Would it have been like this if the party was for me? If I was the one they were celebrating, and not Lisette?

  Lisette was impossible to miss, standing at the front and smiling proudly at the attendees like a shepherd over a flock of exemplary sheep. She was wearing a dress of gossamer and shards of colored glass, made to look like butterfly wings. Beside her, my brother sat in furry breeches, a floppy set of rabbit ears dangling in front of his eyes. He looked healthy and well, despite being deathly embarrassed. I almost laughed out loud, seeing him shrink into the chair, completely mortified, but I was heartened by the sight of him fidgeting with a little metal figurine in his lap. Someday, I decided, I’d have this scene painted. And then I’d wrap it extravagantly and give it to him as a birthday present. Or perhaps I’d save it until his coronation or wedding day and present it to him with all of Renalt watching.

  The thought of a wedding brought me back to myself; standing beside Lisette, leaning heavily on Conrad’s high-backed chair, was a man in a feathered mask. His costume, too, was red and birdlike; it was obviously crafted to look majestic and mighty, but the hunch of his shoulders and the way he kept his head bowed made him look more farcical than fierce. Valentin, I guessed. The ineffectual, sickly prince. My once-betrothed. I should have been eager to finally get a look at him, but I was unsettled instead; I had a quest to fulfill, and I didn’t want to acknowledge that it wouldn’t be Zan waiting for me at the end of it.

  Just then I felt a hand on my arm, and I turned to face a man wearing the mask of a wolf. He held up one hand, inviting me to dance, and I hesitantly took it.

  “I thought you weren’t going to get dressed up,” I said as he placed a hand on the small of my back.

  In response, he gave me a twirl, my dress breaking into a thousand gleaming sparkles in the light as I spun.

  When he pulled me back in, I felt my heart quicken at the intensity of his embrace. His arms were strong, and they guided me with ease away from the crowd. We moved toward the terraces as we danced, away from the commotion of the hall.

  The garden terraces were transformed into something out of a dream—​a fairy tale come to life. Globes with tiny candles were strung across the canopy, and colored ribbons drifted in the breeze. On the perimeter, tables had been laid out with pastries and tarts and spears of fruit cut into stars. He pulled me into a darkened corner, away from the eyes of the other guests.

  Alone with him now, my breath hitched as I tentatively lifted his mask, nervous but eager to find Zan’s sardonic smile hidden behind the canine teeth.

  Teeth. I’d seen those teeth in my vision.

  But just as the mask was about to come off in my hands, the wolf’s eyes flashed and his hand closed around my throat.

  “Toris.” I choked.

  He let the empty-eyed mask drop. “You foolish girl. Always so reckless. Did you think I wouldn’t recognize the dress Genevieve toiled over for months?”

  “Let me go!”

  His hand tightened around my neck. “Where is the vial?”

  “I don’t know what you’re—​” I couldn’t finish; he squeezed harder, cutting off my air.

  “My relic,” he said. “The blood of the Founder. Where is it?”

  I gagged and spluttered as stars began to dance underneath my eyelids. He relaxed his grip just long enough for me to say, coughing, “I don’t have it.”

  “What have you done with it?”

  “I’ve hidden it,” I lied, “and I’ve spelled it. If I die, it will be destroyed.” He let go of my throat.

  “You think you can play this game, girl?”

  “I’ve been playing a long, long time.” My hand had closed around the knife in my pocket.

  “The quickest way to lose is to underestimate your opponent.”

  “Exactly,” I said, and I slashed across hi
s costume with my knife.

  The fabric split open, revealing unblemished skin beneath. I went to strike again, but his hand came up to block me; the knife went straight through his palm and out the other side. I could feel the scrape of his bones against the blade as it went by, but when I pulled it back, it came out clean.

  “There’s no blood,” I said, confounded. “You’re not bleeding.”

  He sprang at me, grabbing my hair to yank me close, tearing the pins painfully away from my head. He laid his knife against my throat, rage in his bulging eyes. Flecks of spittle were gathering at the corners of his lips, which were curled back over his teeth in a savage contortion, mirroring the wolf mask. There was something about his face that was wrong, like a puzzle that had been taken apart and put back together with some of the pieces switched.

  The desire to rend me limb from limb was stalking behind his eyes. Powerful. Primal. But I’d seen the silhouette of the man who’d killed me in Aren’s vision, and it wasn’t Toris. The attacker was too tall, too reedy to be him.

  “If you kill me,” I rasped, “you will never get your relic back.”

  With an angry growl, he shoved me to the ground.

  I regained my breath in hard, barking gasps while struggling to my feet. He stalked away, clutching his bloodless wound as he went.

  “Emilie?”

  Zan was standing among the tall garden grasses, dressed in his typical linen shirt, long leather jacket, and breeches. “No costume for you, then?” I tried to sound unruffled, but my hoarse voice betrayed me.

  “You didn’t stay inside,” he said accusingly. “I panicked when I couldn’t find you. You weren’t supposed to come out here alone.”

  “You’re not my guard, Zan. You’re not my governess. I don’t need you to hover over me.”

  “No? Because your own account of what is supposed to happen tonight says otherwise.”

  “And if I’m supposed to accomplish your goals for tonight, I need you to step back.” I knew it was not Zan’s fault that I’d mistaken Toris for him and let myself be led so stupidly into danger, but I was angry at him anyway, because of how much I wanted it to be him. How confounding it was when it wasn’t. My throat still ached from Toris’s fingers, but my pride had taken the more grievous injury.

  “I’m supposed to stand idly by while you let yourself get sacrificed?” Zan’s black eyebrows were drawn down into an angry V.

  “Your plan, not mine.” I looked at the clock looming over the glass terrace doors. “It’s almost time.”

  I was turning on my heel when Zan grabbed my arm. “I was wrong.”

  “What?” I was startled; Zan didn’t seem capable of such an admission.

  “You’re not bait. No one should be bait. I should never have suggested such a thing. I was wrong.”

  I blinked up at him as he continued, “I hate using you. I hate seeing you in pain, knowing I’m the one who put you up to it. If it weren’t for the wall, if it weren’t for a lot of things—​”

  Above us the clock began to chime.

  “Midnight,” I gasped, pulling away. I raced toward the terraces, knowing that, with his heart, he could not follow. I made a sharp skidding turn and found myself in the exact location of my vision, directly under the clock tower. How appropriate, I thought darkly. What better location to execute a witch?

  I saw him at that moment, twenty feet ahead: a man dressed in the costume of a third-century Renaltan cavalier, dyed black instead of blue. He was hunched over, back to me, alone in the moonlight.

  No, not alone. He was crouched over a girl. A servant girl, from the look of her. One of the many who’d been manning the banquet tables, wearing those gleaming white aprons.

  Only hers was not so white anymore. She was gagging and spluttering thick blood all over the front of it.

  Red. Red. Red.

  “Nihil nunc salvet te.” The man’s voice was low and liquid, like oil.

  A flash of a knife.

  The twelfth toll of the clock.

  Streaks of blistering light above, and a scream.

  My scream.

  He plunged the knife into her chest.

  I dove at him, brandishing my own tiny knife like a saber, inflicting a good-size slash on his forearm before he knocked my knife away. His face was a blank black mask, and I knew at once that he was costumed as the horseman of the Ebonwilde, a faceless executioner in Renaltan lore. I swiped at his expressionless mask with my fingers curled into claws, leaving red trails across his ear and neck. The mask wouldn’t budge. I snarled like a rabid dog until he struck a blow to my temple with the hilt of his knife: a glass knife, a mirror to mine. I saw swirling stars for a moment, but my mask took most of the blow, cracking across the right side.

  Crack in the eye.

  I lunged again, this time from below, aiming for his midsection. The force of my tackle knocked him off balance; he fell with me against the terrace stones, hitting his back against the edge of a stair with a heavy crack, emitting a gruff cry of pain from behind the mask. I wondered if he’d broken his spine until he threw me off him with a roar. I tripped on the girl’s body and found myself falling, entangled in her lifeless limbs, down the stairs. After rolling to a stop at the bottom, I climbed out from under the glassy-eyed corpse, sobbing.

  Blood on my hands.

  The man vanished into the shadows.

  I’d made a mistake. I’d misidentified the maid, and this girl had died for it.

  Zan and Nathaniel reached me at the same time, with Zan breathlessly pulling me to my feet and then into his arms. With my head tucked under his chin, he shouted to Nathaniel, “He went that way! He can’t be far. Find him.”

   23

  The girl was named Molly. She was a server from the kitchen. She’d snuck from her post at the party to rendezvous with a secret beau; indeed, she’d gotten the job in the castle in an effort to be closer to him. The other girls all said that she’d never told them his name, and now she never could.

  The man’s trail was cold. He was a blood mage, after all, and probably used his wound to render himself invisible, as I had done so many times. If I’d obtained a sample of his blood, even just a drop, I might have been able to locate him, but the scene was a gruesome one. There was no way of knowing which blood, if any, was his.

  News of the brutality of the girl’s death was overshadowed, however, by another peculiar happening: inside the city, everything green was turning slowly to brown. Roses rotted on the vine, the woods were carpeted with fallen needles of now-skeletal evergreens . . . and the terrace gardens, which had been a sight of wild magnificence at the masquerade, now lay wilted and ruined. The smell of decay hung low over the city, permeating everything; it was impossible to escape it. The only thing that still seemed to flourish was the carpet of bloodleaf around the tower.

  The bruise on my temple was an unpleasant purple, but it could have been much worse if the mask hadn’t absorbed most of the blow. As Zan was eager to remind me, I was lucky.

  It didn’t feel like luck.

  The next morning I found Nathaniel, Kate, and Zan gathered around Kate’s table in silence, a melancholic mood pervading the air. “Nihil nunc salvet te,” I said.

  Zan said, “You’re supposed to be resting.”

  “I’ve rested long enough. I’m done resting.” I repeated, “Nihil nunc salvet te. Do you know what that means?”

  “‘Nothing can save you now,’” Zan replied in a low voice. “Why—​”

  “It’s part of the Tribunal execution script,” I said. “They say it before they hang people.” I gulped. While they all grimaced, I continued, “He said it to her, last night, before he killed her. For the Tribunal, the phrase is ceremonial. But this felt like a spell. A consecration, even.” I paused. “I knew, once he drew her blood and said it, that nothing could be done for her.”

  Kate patted my hand. “What a terrible thing to witness.”

  “I’ve never seen that phrase mentioned in Achlev’s writ
ings or in any of the spell books. Only in Renalt, and only from the Tribunal.”

  Skeptically, Zan said, “You think this has something to do with the Tribunal? But they don’t use magic. They hate magic. They want to destroy magic. This person wants to unleash it in monstrous proportions.”

  “You’re probably right,” I said. “It was just a thought. It’s just that we have so little to go on, and so little time . . .”

  “Less time than we thought, even,” Nathaniel said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You should be the one to tell her,” he said to Zan.

  I frowned. “Tell me what?”

  Zan’s lips were set in an unhappy line. “The king was very upset about how his party last night was so rudely interrupted. Never mind that a girl lost her life.” He shifted in his chair. “Combined with his disappointment that a prisoner escaped his gibbets, his spirits have been very low. So he’s decided to raise them the only way he knows how: by lavishing himself with leisure activities. This time he’s decided to take Prince Conrad and Princess Aurelia on a grand old hunt.”

  My jaw dropped. “The plants are rotting. People are being murdered, and he’s going hunting?”

  “Usually when he gets this way, I’m glad,” Zan said. “If he’s gone, he can’t do any damage at home.” He was avoiding my eyes. “But this time he’s decided that every lord and lady must go with him. Myself included.”

  “Everyone? The prince too?”

  Zan shot a look at Nathaniel and Kate. Hastily, he said, “Him too.”

  “You’re not serious,” I said. I struggled to formulate a better response. All I could come up with was “When?”

  “We leave tomorrow. Before sundown,” Nathaniel said.

  “You’re going too?”

  Kate said flatly, “I told him to.” There was still something cold in the way she and Nathaniel were acting toward each other. Nathaniel did not comment; he looked the other way. “Zan needs him,” she said curtly.

  “You can’t go,” I said bleakly. “Tell Domhnall no. We need you here. I need you here.”