by Cayla Keenan
—And reached Kaddah. The wall stretched all the way to Kaddah. Om’s birthplace, the sworn enemy of Vandel, and whose anti-sahir practices made the sahirla look like amateurs. Some people said any witches found within their borders they were enslaved for their magic. Collared and tortured until they couldn’t remember their own names. Others disagreed, describing the dungeons as massive experimental chambers, and said that the Kaddahn were trying to steal the sahir’s abilities and bottle them.
“Burning skies,” Jayin murmured.
“What was that?” the man asked. His voice was small and far away, unimportant. Something caught her attention as she drew her power back in. A blank space where there should have been something. Panic settled behind her heart, slithering through her blood like tar. Even with the stone, Jayin had only felt malevolence like that from one person.
“Well, well.” Jayin froze at the sneering voice. “I wondered when you were going to show up.”
Hale. Even in the rain, the sahirla was dressed in all white, and his milky blue eyes fixed on her. His thin mouth was twisted into a smile, and Jayin could see a white gem glittering at his throat.
“Sir?” the man asked, snapping a salute. He wasn’t a witchhunter, but he deferred to Hale. “Do you know this girl?”
“Know her?” Hale purred. “She’s the witch we’ve all been trying to catch.”
“Imprisonment didn’t take before.” Her voice trembled slightly, but she was more concerned with cobbling together an escape plan than putting on a brave face. She was alone, outnumbered, and fifty feet up. The last time she jumped from this height it had almost killed her, and even then she’d jumped into the ocean. There was nothing but unyielding stone below her now.
“You were more resourceful than I anticipated,” Hale admitted with a shrug. “And you had help. Where is Maddix Kell? I thought he’d want to keep you close, what with the bond and all. Don’t think I didn’t notice when those cuffs went missing. Clever, tying you to him in order to compel your help. But I take comfort in the knowledge that he’ll feel everything I have planned for you.”
“I’ll be sure to tell him you send your love.”
Hale signaled and the soldier’s hand clasped around Jayin’s arm. She didn’t hesitate, bringing her knife up in one fluid motion. The hand hit the ground with a wet thump. The man screamed, clutching the bleeding stump to his chest as he went to his knees.
“You do like those knives,” Hale said, stepping around his bleeding comrade. “I’ll be sure to remember that when we get you back to the stronghold.”
“Not going to happen,” Jayin hissed. All eyes were on them now, and she knew she only had a second before the soldiers converged. Jayin threw her arms wide, gathering as much magic to her as she could and hurling it away from her.
Bright green flames erupted on the far side of the wall. The glamor was sloppy and imperfect but it was enough. The cry spread to all of the workers, and the wall shook under the weight of dozens of booted feet. Jayin used the chaos as cover, diving into the panicked crowd.
“The witch!” someone shouted as Jayin shoved past him. She ran until the rickety platform gave way, leaving a gaping hole with nothing to catch her but the empty air. She’d have to climb.
You can do this, Ijaad, she told herself, peering over the edge of the wall. You’ve been captured, tortured, shot, drowned, and saddled with the biggest idiot in Aestos on a suicide mission. You’re not going to fall to your death. It wasn’t much by way of a pep talk, but it was enough to get her moving.
“Ah, ah, valyach,” Hale said, appearing at the top of the wall. He was holding a crossbow, the same kind that had put a bolt through her chest at the witchhunter’s compound. “You didn’t think it would be that easy, did you?”
“And I didn’t think you were that stupid,” Jayin said. Her voice was tight, and she could already feel the muscles in her arms cramping from clinging to the side of the wall. Hale’s head cocked in benign confusion, still aiming the crossbow at her. “If you shoot me now, I won’t survive the fall and you’ll kill Kell along with me. We both know that you need to use him as an example of how sahirla traitors are handled.”
Jayin didn’t wait to gage his reaction. She threw all of her weight off of the wall, hands grasping for a rope dangling just out of reach. The air shifted by her arm, and the crossbow bolt lodged in the wall, missing her head by a hairsbreadth. Her palms burned as the cable slid through her hands. She landed hard, the impact reverberating all the way to her hips.
As soon as her feet touched the ground she was running, sprinting headlong away from the wall. Jayin weaved as arrows sailed past her head, not stopping until she was well out of range. She couldn’t go back to the barn without leading them straight to Maddix. Instead, Jayin found a place to hide, slipping into an old barn that had been reclaimed by the elements. It was half-collapsed, barely big enough to squeeze into.
The wall seethed like a disturbed anthill, but Jayin didn’t dare to move. People—soldiers, worker, sahirla—ran around everywhere, searching for her. Twice she could feel the blank space where Hale’s aura should be, too close for comfort. Jayin buried her head in her arms, barely breathing until he moved on.
Finally, just as the sun was starting to rise, Jayin dared to move from her makeshift hiding spot.
“Where the hell have you been?” Kell demanded the minute Jayin staggered inside. He took a step towards her as if to crowd her into a corner before thinking better of it. Smart boy. “I thought you, that you—”
“If I’d been hurt, you would’ve felt it,” Jayin said, not bothering to keep the bite out of her voice. She’d been up all night after barely getting away from Kell’s sadistic witchhunter mentor; she didn’t have a lot of patience to spare. “And you’d better be careful, convict, or someone might think that you care.”
“I—”
“Remember how you said we’d been jinxed?” Jayin said, cutting him off. She didn’t have time for half-baked apologies. “I found the jinx.”
Chapter Twenty-Three:
Maddix
A wall. A great, big, skyforsaken wall. In the time it had taken them to get this close to Pavaal, fifty feet of wood and stone had been constructed to stop them.
Skies.
“Then let’s go around,” Maddix offered once she’d finished with her explanation. Jayin shook her head, her movements jerky and stiff.
“If we go around,” she said slowly, “then we have to go through Kaddah, and if I go to Kaddah, I won’t make it out. And you need me, remember?” Maddix bit his lip to keep from using those words to reassure her. The last time he tried she’d nearly carved him a second smile.
He should have gone after her. He should have proved she was wrong—she had to be wrong. But Maddix let her go, and he kept the bracelet on. He was still using her. Shame bubbled up inside him, and Maddix tasted the acid of it on the back of his throat. Maybe he was worse than Hale.
“So what, magic is outlawed in Kaddah. It’s practically outlawed here. How will they even know you’re there?” Maddix’s patience was waning, worn thin from the stress of the night.
“I don’t know,” Jayin answered, the words sharp and bitter. “Witches who go into that place don’t come out.”
“So you have no proof? Nothing that says we won’t be able to just waltz in. How do you—”
“Because Om told me!” Jayin shouted. She glared at him like she meant to say more before something splintered in her gaze. Her hands trembled, and she slid down the wall as if her legs couldn’t support her any longer. Maddix could only watch, horrified, as she collapsed in on herself. He didn’t know what to do, what to say, and settled for pacing, his hands flapping uselessly by his sides.
“He survived half of his life in that skyforsaken queendom, and then I got him killed.” The words were so soft that Maddix wasn’t sure he heard her correctly. Jayin lifted her head and he tensed, readying himself for an attack.
“You were there,” she s
aid, not looking at him. “He was trying to protect me.” Maddix struggled to stand his ground as he recalled the firewitch from the docks.
He waited for her to turn the blame on him, to call him sahirla, traitor, any number of names before threatening to gut him like a carp. But the words didn’t come, and Jayin simply stared through him, trapped somewhere he couldn’t reach.
“I killed him,” she said finally. Tears glittered on her cheeks. “He survived Kaddah and he survived the Palace, but he didn’t survive me.”
“It wasn’t—” Maddix started, but she cut him off before he could finish. He wished he’d let her say the words. He was glad she stopped him.
“No one knows how the Kaddahn can sense magic, but they can. And the moment a witch steps over their border, they send in kill squads. However they do it, it’s real.”
“So we go through,” Maddix said, scrambling for some kind of solution. Anything to erase the terrible, glassy-eyed look from her face. “You said that the wall is only half finished. It shouldn’t be too hard to get through.”
“Hale is there,” Jayin said. Maddix’s blood turned to ice. “I think he’s working with Ayrie to get the wall built. There’s no other way that he’d have the authority or manpower to get it done so quickly.”
“And you didn’t think to lead with that?”
He found it hard to believe she could forget the man who’d tried to kill them both. Maddix had thought Hale was going to be his mentor, that he and the other helwyr were the keys to his vengeance. Stars, he really was a stupid, naïve boy, thinking that he would be able to carve a place out for himself in the world after everything he’d been through, everything he’d done.
“I was a little preoccupied,” Jayin replied. She shifted and it was only then Maddix saw something dark dripping from her fingers.
“You’re bleeding,” he said. He hadn’t felt her get hurt. How was that possible?
“I’m fine,” Jayin insisted, but Maddix felt the throbbing pain as she finally noticed it herself. Slowly, she shucked off her duster and he could see the long gash on the inside of her arm. Shock was a powerful numbing agent, but that looked like it hurt.
It felt like it hurt.
“Let me,” Maddix started. “I mean…” He knew better than to try to order her to do anything.
Jayin nodded and stretched out her arm so he could look at it. The cut was bloody but shallow. It didn’t need stitches.
“How didn’t you feel this?” Maddix wondered aloud as he cleaned her arm. They winced at the bite of antiseptic.
“I was trying to climb down a wall and convince Hale not to shoot me in the head. Forgive me if I didn’t have time to worry about a graze.”
“This is more than a graze,” Maddix insisted. Blood seeped through the bandage faster than he could wrap it.
“I’ve had worse,” Jayin said. Maddix didn’t doubt it. He’d seen the mess of scars on her abdomen, souvenirs of the witchhunters and whatever she had done for the Palace. Her arms and back bore evidence of violence too, thin pale slashes and punctures that had long since healed. Maddix wondered why she kept them, when a Palace healer could simply magick them away.
“I’m sorry about your friend,” Maddix said after a few moments of tense silence.
“You didn’t kill him,” Jayin said. “If you did, we wouldn’t be having this conversation, and I’d probably still be a sahirla captive.” She paused before laughing to herself. Maddix couldn’t tell if it was the stress of the night, blood loss, or a mixture of the two. Perhaps she was just mad. “Stars, he would’ve hated you.”
“Why?”
“You’re crazier than I am,” she said with a small, unlikely smile.
“No one’s crazier than you,” Maddix said.
“Says the convict dragging us back to Pavaal.” She sat back, leaning her head against the barn wall. “Where we will be captured or killed.” The small smile was still there, but Maddix’s heart twisted at the exhausted bleakness in her voice.
“We’re not going to die,” Maddix insisted, but he didn’t sound sure, even to himself. With the wall and Hale’s reappearance, their odds of survival had gone from unlikely to dismal.
“See?” she said. “Crazy.”
“I’ll break the link,” Maddix said. Jayin’s eyes found his, and he saw his own surprise reflected there. “If anything happens, I’ll break it. You’re not going to die on my behalf, I promise.” He didn’t know why it was so important that he say it. Maybe he was trying to convince her he wasn’t the same as the other hunters.
Maybe he was trying to convince himself. It was amazing how quickly allegiances shifted when the people he’d broken out of prison to find were the ones trying their best to kill him.
“Don’t make promises you can’t keep.”
“I don’t intend to.”
“He really would’ve hated you,” Jayin said.
“Smart man.”
“Smarter than me,” she agreed. “Smart enough to keep his head down and stay put when he had the full force of Ayrie Palace bearing down on him.”
Just like that, Maddix understood. She must have convinced Om to leave whatever hole he’d dug and leave with her, and that’s why he was on the docks when the helwyr ambushed them. He was never meant to be there.
“If I ask why he was a fugitive are you going to threaten to stab me?” Maddix tried.
Jayin took an uneven breath. “He came for sanctuary, but the King was going to give him back to Kaddah, so he ran. I was ordered to find him, and then I let him go.”
“Why would you do that?”
“Because he was scared, and you can’t fake that kind of fear.” Her mouth turned down and she closed her eyes. “Your sahirla friends would’ve loved him. A witch afraid of his own magic.”
“They’re not my friends,” he insisted. “They’re trying to kill me too, remember?”
“But you wanted to be one of them,” Jayin said. She didn’t sound angry anymore, just tired. Somehow, that was worse. “You use their bastard language, abide by their prejudices, and have no problem using my people to get what you want.” Absently, she ran her fingers over the silver cuff, tracing swirling designs on the metal. Maddix was starting to hate the sight of it. More than that, he hated that he wouldn’t take it off. He wasn’t willing to give up his vengeance so easily.
“I just…” Maddix stood. Guilt and shame roiled inside of him. This rabid need for justice had sustained him in the Pit, but now— “I never wanted any of this. Do you think that if I hadn’t been attacked, I would give a damn about witchhunters and runaway sahir and a war that most people don’t even know exists? Witches ruined my life, and all I want is to prove that I’m innocent.”
“Dayri don’t have a monopoly on suffering,” she said. “I’ve suffered plenty at the hands of my own people, and you don’t see me joining up with lunatics.”
“No, you just ran away,” Maddix snapped. If they’d destroyed her life just like they’d done to him, he couldn’t understand why she wouldn’t want to fight back. “At least I’m trying to do something about it.”
Slowly, Jayin stood up, fixing him with a dark green stare.
“Then we’ll find a way through.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
Jayin
They left the barn at sunset. Jayin wanted to leave earlier, loath to stay in one place with Hale searching for them, but Kell insisted. He took watch as she slept, his eyes on the door and his sword held in his lap.
“You know,” Kell said, kneeling to pick the lock on an abandoned farmhouse. Heading into the town beside the wall was a risk, but they needed information and this was the closest crossing for miles. “When I set out to clear my name, I didn’t think it would involve adding to my criminal resume.”
“You’re a regular carrion,” Jayin said, wishing he’d move faster.
“What would you know about it?” Kell asked, pushing into the house. Jayin didn’t bother telling him that she probably knew the
Gull better than most Guards. She followed him inside and searched around to see if the previous owners had left anything behind. The activity at the wall had brought this town back to life for the moment, but it wasn’t enough to stave off the degradation of the countryside in its entirety.
“This’ll do,” she said finally. The windows were boarded up and the door locked. It would be a fine place to plan their next move. Hopefully, Hale wouldn’t be looking for them in the town anymore. Coming here so soon after she’d been seen was absolutely mad. No one would expect it.
Or so she hoped.
She was bandaging the wound on her arm when something flared in her second sight. For a moment the aura was Om’s, red and scorching, before reality reasserted itself. Whoever the energy belonged to, they were terrified—and they had magic.
Jayin was moving before she could think it through, leaving her arm half-unbound as she ran out the door.
“Jayin!” Kell hissed behind her. His voice was an inconsequential buzzing in her ears, easy to ignore. Jayin wound her way through a tangled warren of alleyways and roads, trying to catch up to the witch.
“Jayin!” Kell’s voice came again, this time accompanied by a sharp tug on her sleeve.
“Let go,” she snarled, whirling on him. She didn’t have time to explain herself, not when Jayin could feel the witch’s fear in her blood.
“What under the stars are you doing?” Kell demanded.
“There’s someone out there,” Jayin said, ripping free of his grip. The witch’s aura was getting further away, and now Jayin could sense the dead space of sahirla in pursuit.
“I don’t know if you’ve forgotten, but those someones want us dead.”