Caden anchored his gaze to Vaness, and his two Hell-Bards anchored their gazes to the commander. Waiting.
Until at last Caden asked, “How do we know you will not turn on us, Your Majesty?”
“Because there is no time,” Vaness said. Yet even through the madness hitting the room, even through the heat now rising against the floorboards, Safi felt the lie in her words.
“We can’t be killed by your magic,” Caden continued, sheathing his knife. A cautious movement, as if he still debated what to do. “There is no point trying.”
“Your death,” Vaness flung back, faster now, “will not help me. Seafire burns much faster than natural flame, and we are out of time!” She slung a pointed finger toward the door, where smoke now coiled in through the cracks.
Zander swore; Lev grabbed for the wool blanket; Caden’s hands settled on either side of Vaness’s collar. His mouth moved silently until a click rippled through the room. The wooden collar cut wide.
Instantly, Vaness was moving. Out of the collar, which fell to the ground in a plank-trembling thunk, she grabbed Safi and shot for the door. “Pull down the wards,” she ordered Zander. “We cannot exit while they still stand.”
Zander looked at Caden. The commander nodded. “Do it.”
The giant’s arms rose, and he muttered softly. The room flickered and hummed, and power unwound strand by strand in a way that made no sense to Safi—Hell-Bards doing magic?
Then silver and darkness erupted, blurring streaks as Vaness called every piece of iron in the room to her. Two chunks reshaped themselves into blades, effortlessly slicing through Vaness’s and Safi’s ropes, before spiraling up into thin rapiers to be plucked from the air. One for the empress, one for Safi.
The ward fell. Safi felt it in a great eruption of noise and a violent battering of crossbow bolts against the outside walls.
“Get us out of here!” Caden barked at Vaness.
“No,” she replied. Her hands rose. The Hell-Bards’ blades turned on them and drove straight for their skulls.
Like minnows through a stream, the iron simply sizzled through and flipped out the backs of each Hell-Bard’s head—and the chains at the Hell-Bards’ throats glowed red.
Vaness seemed to know this would happen, though. She seemed to want it for the brief distraction it gave while she turned her magic to the door.
A groan of metal sent Safi spiraling away from the Hell-Bards. The door’s hinges were peeling back. The latch was releasing, reshaping. Then, before any of the Hell-Bards could stop her, Vaness’s arms flew straight up.
The door swung past Safi and Vaness. A blast of air and smoke and heat. It spun sideways before crashing into all three Hell-Bards. It flung them back against the wall, as easy as a flyswatter to three flies.
“We were only following orders,” Caden shouted. With smoke rushing over him, he looked ghostly. Skeletal. “We were only doing our jobs.”
“And I,” Vaness growled, her face striped with blood, “am only doing mine.” She spun for the empty doorway.
Safi didn’t chase after, though. She was staring at Caden on the left. At Lev in the middle. At Zander on the right. She didn’t trust the Hell-Bards, she didn’t like the Hell-Bards, yet that did not mean she could leave them to die.
“Wait!” she hollered at Vaness, and the empress paused at the door. Behind her, a wall of iron scuttled upward, plucked from hinges and nails and anything her Ironwitchery could grasp. “Let them go.”
“They will try to capture us again.”
“No!” Lev cried. The scars on her face flickered and glowed. “We will help you!”
“We cannot trust them,” Vaness insisted. She reached for Safi’s arm. Blood dripped from her chin. “We have to go, Safi. Now.”
“You can trust us.” This came from Zander, his face drawn tight as the door squashed him harder, harder to the wall. “We can prove it. Just let me remove my noose—”
“I already did.”
All eyes snapped to Caden, whose fingers poked above the door, a gold chain woven between his knuckles. It was the necklace all Hell-Bards all wore, including Safi’s uncle. And it was, Safi realized, what they’d all meant when they referred to the noose.
“On our honor,” Caden croaked, the words seeming to take great effort—and to cause great pain—“we won’t hurt you.”
It was the first assertion from a Hell-Bard that rang against Safi’s magic, and it was true.
“We won’t capture you again,” he went on, his face screwed tighter. “We’ll all escape together.”
Still true, true, true—there was no denying it. Safi’s magic was alight with the honesty in his words, and though it made no sense to her, she couldn’t deny what she saw. What she felt.
“Free them!” she shrieked at Vaness. “He speaks the truth—we can trust them. They’ll help us.”
A pause took hold of the world. Smoke, heat, sparks. It all melted back while the empress considered.
“Hurry!” Safi tried to scream, but at that precise moment, the entire inn cracked! Then sagged sharply down.
Time was up, and the empress knew it. With a snarl, she let the door fall. Caden fell into Lev, who instantly helped him refasten the noose. Meanwhile, Vaness claimed all iron from the door, strips of black to fill the air. To expand her shield before they all tromped off into the corridor with a wall of iron to press back the smoke, the flames.
It protected them step-by-step, Safi and Vaness at the fore, three Hell-Bards staggering behind.
* * *
It was right as Aeduan and Iseult were gathering their things from the ruins that a boom split the air. A distant sound, like a cannon fired off leagues away.
Iseult met Aeduan’s eyes. “People,” she said.
He nodded.
“We should check,” she said.
He nodded again. “Stay here.”
She didn’t. And he sighed—something he found himself doing more and more often around her. He didn’t stop her, though, and in minutes they’d threaded their way back to the same steppe they’d sparred upon.
The grass remained trampled where he’d pinned her again and again. Aeduan had never hurt her—he’d been careful to always stop, to always watch her face for pain—but he also never let her win. Just as Monk Evrane had never let him win.
From the steppe, they ascended, zigzagging up the forested cliff until they reached an opening in the oaks and pines.
Until they saw the boats drifting up the Amonra.
Aeduan exhaled sharply; Iseult’s nose twitched. “Red Sails,” he guessed. “Baedyeds too. With the Twenty Year Truce over, I suspect they’ve allied for an attack.” Quickly, he explained who the two pirate factions were and how whatever alliance they’d formed hovered beneath the tip of Lady Fate’s knife.
As he spoke, Aeduan eased a bronze spyglass from his baldric and scanned the view. Each ship was packed with soldiers, and each soldier was well armed. People teemed along the shore too. Almost invisible, but if he fixed on one spot long enough … There. Movement. Horses. More soldiers.
“Where are they going?” Iseult asked once he’d finished his explanation.
“Upstream.”
Now it was Iseult’s turn to sigh, but she didn’t say anything. In fact, the silence hung so long that Aeduan finally lowered his spyglass.
And found that she was watching him, her body still. For once, though, her face was not expressionless. It was tight with pain, her lips pinched and nose scrunched. Aeduan swallowed. Perhaps he had hurt her. Grass stains covered her shoulders, her knees, and a bruise purpled on her cheekbone.
But no. The longer he held her hazel gaze, the more he discerned. This wasn’t pain—this was grief. For the second time that morning, he wished he had said nothing about the Cahr Awen.
He angled away, returning the spyglass to his baldric, and cleared his throat. “They will have to disembark before the Falls, Threadwitch. We need to be gone before that happens.”
&nbs
p; “Then let us leave,” she said, voice flat.
“We will need to move fast. Are you up for that?”
She snorted, and when Aeduan glanced back, he found her face had softened. The slightest—almost imperceptible—glint of mischief hovered there now.
“I think we both know the answer to that, Bloodwitch.” She stalked past him, her chin high. Challenging. “The question will be if you can keep up.”
Then she broke into a run, Aeduan broke into a run after her.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Cam hadn’t returned by morning of the next day. Merik had combed the streets of Old Town and the streets beyond—even the Cisterns too—but had found no trace of her.
Stop seeing what you want to see, Merik Nihar, and start seeing what’s really here! Her last words grated within his eardrums. Over and over. Laughing. Taunting. A ghost that wanted release. Stop seeing what you want to see!
What Merik wanted to see was Cam, the friend who had stood by him through floods and hell-waters. Over Shite Street and back.
Before he’d pushed her away.
All Merik could figure was that Cam had gone out to search for answers on the dead man in the storerooms … And then she had stumbled upon something she couldn’t fight. Like the shadow man.
Merik heaved his hood lower, streaking faster down Hawk’s Way. Stop seeing what you want to see! The attack pounded in his chest, in his eardrums. Inescapable and all too true.
Merik had seen potential trade for Nubrevna where there was none. He’d seen a navy that had “needed his leadership” when it hadn’t. He’d seen a selfish domna in Safiya fon Hasstrel, a frustrating Threadwitch in Iseult det Midenzi, and then an inconsequential ship’s boy in Cam—yet none of those presumptions had proved true.
Worst of all, in all of his holiest of holy conceit, Merik had seen a throne he thought he should sit upon—that Kullen had implied he should one day claim, even though that “greatness” was his sister’s right by birth.
Merik jostled forward, slow. Too slow. Carts and refugees and thrice-damned mules everywhere he tried to step.
A man stumbled against Merik’s back, and when Merik didn’t budge, the man shoved. “Stand aside—”
Merik had the man’s wrist in an instant, twisting until he felt the ligaments and bone strain. Another inch, and they would snap. “I will kill you,” was all Merik said.
“Please,” the man stammered.
Merik released him. Flung him away. He wanted to roar. I am dangerous!
But the words never came, for at that moment, a cool wind spiraled against Merik’s flesh. A breeze that sang to his witchery.
Death. Shadows. It called him … south. Farther down Hawk’s Way. The same icy darkness that had spoken to him in the storerooms—the same frozen curse that he feared might have claimed Cam.
Merik abandoned the quay, hurtling into a dark alley. There, he sprang up, foot by foot. Leaping one wall to the other, a wind to punt him higher. Side to side, until finally he hit a shingled roof.
Sunlight burned down. He dropped to a crouch and flexed his fingers, watching as dust coiled outward, carried by his winds. He reached for anything his charged air connected with.
There. Straight ahead.
Merik set off, cloak flying around him. His hood fell back. His boots slammed onto shingles, knocking them. Cracking them. Shattering more than a few.
He reached the end of the building. Gathering his breath and his power, Merik bounded over a strip of black alley. Rooftop after rooftop, the gap between Merik and this darkness—a shadow that sang to his blood—shrank with each gusting bound.
Until the rooftops ended, forcing him to stop. The Southern Wharf spanned before him, and beyond it, the water-bridge thrust across the clouded valley toward the Sentries.
So crowded. Boats crammed bow to stern, leaving no water visible. No gap in the people arriving.
Merik sank flat against the sloped shale and snaked to the edge. Instinct sent him grabbing for a spyglass in his admiral’s coat …
But of course, he had no coat. No spyglass. No weapon.
No matter. He didn’t need that—not when his blood hungered for that shadow wind.
A quick scan of the wharf showed ethnicities as varied as ages, as voices, as degrees of desperation. These were not only Nubrevnans but people from outside the borders as well. People from the Contested Lands or the unstable Sirmayans.
Merik’s eyes snagged on a bald man hovering where the docks jutted into the man-made harbor. He was as badly scarred as Merik, at least on his scalp—as well as on the hand he now lifted overhead.
A hand with no pinkie.
Chills lifted across Merik’s neck and arms as he wondered if it could be another man like the one from the storerooms. Then the man turned, and it was Garren. The assassin from the Jana.
For several booming heartbeats, the wharf seemed to fall away. All Merik saw was the assassin, and all he heard was his blood thumping in his ears. No wind reached his cheeks, no voices hit his ears.
The entire world was a dead man walking.
That night, in the darkness of his cabin, Merik had thrust a cutlass through Garren’s gut. Blood had sprayed; innards had fallen. Yet here the man now stood.
Merik squinted. Sunspots speckled his vision, but he could still make out the jagged black lines throbbing down the man’s neck.
Marks like Merik’s.
Marks that called to him.
He hadn’t known what those lines meant earlier. He didn’t know what they meant now. He simply knew that Cam was right: they were bad.
And Merik knew that if following Garren might lead him to Cam, then he couldn’t stop now.
Garren shuffled away from Merik, pushing steadily through the chaos. He aimed for a bar called the Cleaved Man that hugged the canal. A large stone building filled with sailors and soldiers and those who needed a cheap drink.
In moments, Merik was off the roof and approaching the ramshackle tavern. The crowds settled into cursory background noise, vague colors of no import.
Then he was there, at the Cleaved Man and staring at the sign creaking on the breeze. The blackened eyeball painted on the wood felt a little too familiar. A little too … real.
The door swung wide. Merik ducked his head as two sailors staggered into the day, drunk even at this hour. Behind them, though—that was what interested Merik. For somewhere within, darkness slithered and dead men walked.
Merik found the entryway just as he remembered from past visits, half the lamps unlit, the blue rugs muddied to brown, and everything coated in the sheen of ox tea. The Cleaved Man brewed many varieties of alcohol in the basement, but their most famous was ox tea, which was neither tea nor related to an ox.
But it got a man drunk. Fast. And in a world torn apart by enemies and empty stomachs, patrons wanted to get drunk. Fast.
Merik reached the bar’s main space. It spread before him, candles flickering from fat chandeliers. Wax dripped onto people at the dozens of rickety tables. Merik was halfway to a door in the back corner, when he realized a hush had wrapped around the room. The revelers had stopped reveling, and at the nearest table, a sailor sat immobile with a flagon of ox tea halfway to his lips.
A nudge from his neighbor. A cough from nearby. Then all at once, wood groaned, vibrating through the floor as every person who sat abruptly decided to stand.
“I told you he would come.” A man’s voice, greasy and familiar, snaked through the silence.
Merik whirled toward the bar, to where a sweaty Serrit Linday held his arm outstretched.
For the briefest fraction of a moment, the world slowed. Stopped entirely. I saw you die, Merik thought. Yet here Linday stood, a second dead man walking—and now speaking too, with almost giddy delight, “Arrest him, soldiers. Arrest the Fury.”
* * *
Safi, Vaness, and the Hell-Bards burst out of the inn mere minutes before it crashed to the ground in a cacophony of black seafire. They bolted through the ba
thhouse, using plumes of smoke to hide themselves, before tumbling into a scalding midday that had no business being so sunny, so blue.
Zander led the way, though as far as Safi could tell, every street looked the same. More buildings cradled in ruins from a forgotten past. The blood from Vaness’s nose gushed at a rate that no body could sustain, much less while sprinting at top speed through a hostile city. With Lev on one side and Safi on the other, the empress managed to maintain at least a stumbling jog onward.
Caden kept the rear, an iron longsword—created by Vaness from the two rapiers—in hand.
As Zander led them into a five-way intersection, elm guttered and Baedyed bannered like every other in the district, Vaness planted her heels. “Must … stop,” she panted, doubling over.
Safi circled back with Lev, and horror pummeled through her. Blood from Vaness’s nose streaked behind them, a trail that any idiot could follow. Think like Iseult, think like Iseult. First things first: the blood. They had to stop it from falling.
But Lev was already tearing fabric from her sleeve. “Here.” Crouching, Lev pressed it to the empress’s nose. “We have to keep moving.”
“I know.” Her voice was thick beneath the dark cotton. “I’ll manage. Just let me breathe … for … a moment—”
“We don’t have a moment!” Caden rushed in. He pushed Lev aside and hooked his much larger, much stronger arm behind the empress. “The Baedyeds are right on our tail. We need to move.” As Safi released Vaness, he lugged the empress back into a jog.
Just in time, for a man wearing Baedyed gold was most assuredly sprinting their way. Fast.
But Caden was already gone, already ducking low and wrenching Vaness down the narrowest of the five streets. “Meet you around!” he shouted, leaving Safi with no choice but to ratchet her legs faster after Lev and Zander.
Except that they were gone too, lost in the crowds, and now a second Baedyed was barreling right for her.
“Muck-eating bastards!” Safi screeched, running for the only route left to her: straight ahead. As her heels pounded hard on the packed earth, her temper flared straight up from her toes. The shit noggins had left her! And meet you around where, precisely?
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