by Traci Chee
“Please, sit down,” said the woman behind the desk. She gestured to the two leather armchairs across from her.
Sefia and Archer remained standing.
“Which one of you is Serakeen?” Sefia asked, her gaze flicking from the woman to the man and back again, not recognizing either of them from her Vision.
“My name is Tanin, and this is my associate Rajar.” As she spoke, the woman crossed to a gleaming silver tea set on the left wall, her passage between the desk and side table creating a curling wake of cold air that rippled the waves of her hair and the embroidered silk of her blouse. “The man you know as Serakeen—the bloodthirsty warlord, the Scourge of the East—is a fabrication, a useful myth we’ve concocted. But I’m afraid he doesn’t exist.”
“What do you mean ‘he doesn’t exist’? Who’s been attacking ships in the Ephygian Bay?” Sefia demanded. “Who’s been pillaging cities in Liccaro? Who’s been looking for boys with scars around their necks?”
“I have,” Rajar whispered. He pressed down the ends of his mustache with his thumb and forefinger, but he wouldn’t meet her gaze.
“Don’t tell me Serakeen isn’t real. Going by a different name doesn’t make you any less responsible for what you’ve done.”
“I didn’t want to.” He seemed to be pleading with her. “You have to believe I didn’t want to.”
“But you did.”
Rajar looked helplessly at Tanin, who said nothing as she tipped the teapot over the bone-white china. To Sefia it seemed as if everything the woman did altered the very air around her, and even that small movement, twisting the threads of steam that coiled from the fragrant cups of tea, might weeks later form hurricanes over some distant southern ocean.
“Rajar acts in the interest of the greater good. There are far more reprehensible reasons to take a life,” she said at last. “Base survival, for instance. Surely you’ve learned this lesson, in all your many travels.”
Sefia swayed, remembering the clearing, the orange light through the cabin windows, and Palo Kanta with the crooked lips, his life dribbling through her murderous hands.
“Now,” Tanin continued, “sit down.”
As the last two words struck her, Sefia’s knees buckled. Her pack slipped from her shoulders, and she sank into the chair behind her. Archer sat too, down and up again in an instant, visibly shaken.
That voice was powerful. Not magical, but irresistible and dangerous.
“Do you take cream or sugar with your tea?” the woman continued as if nothing unusual had occurred.
Sefia twisted the straps of the pack at her feet. “Who are you?” she asked.
Tanin dropped lumps of sugar in two of the cups and turned around. “I’m the Director of an organization known to a select few as the Guard.”
The Guard. Sefia mouthed the words. They fit her the way a key fits a lock, sinking into place, opening all sorts of doors deep inside her.
“And Serakeen works for you?” Sefia eyed the man by the sideboard. He crossed and uncrossed his arms. His leather coat creaked.
“Rajar is one of us,” Tanin said crisply. “He does what he must.”
“For the greater good.”
“Yes.”
As Tanin handed her a cup and saucer, she felt the woman’s cool, ink-stained fingers brush hers. Sefia shivered. The spoon rattled against the porcelain. “Which is?”
“Peace.” Tanin offered the second cup to Archer, but he didn’t take it.
Sefia laughed. It was absurd. Exterminators extolling the virtues of mercy. Butchers preaching restraint. Archer glanced down at her, surprised.
Unruffled, Tanin settled in behind the desk and blew across the surface of her tea. “War can lead to peace, if the right people are the victors,” she said.
“And you’re the right people?”
“We have to be.”
“That’s delusional.”
“Only to the uninformed.”
“So inform me.” Sefia put her cup on the table beside her chair and crossed her arms.
“You may not know us, but you know the results of our work. We ended the blood feud in Deliene. We broke Oxscini’s hold on Roku. We united Everica.”
“In war against Oxscini.”
“Yes, Oxscini’s always been a problem for us. But not for much longer.”
“How?”
“One cannot withstand the many.” Tanin smiled.
Sefia’s gaze darted to Archer, then back to Tanin. “The Red War,” she whispered, finally, truly understanding. “You’ve seen it in the book, haven’t you? That’s how you know a boy like Archer is involved. That’s why you want him to lead your army. That’s why you need the book back. You want to make sure it all comes to pass.”
“What is written always comes to pass,” Tanin said. “We don’t know everything, but we’ve seen enough to know the Red War is coming. A boy with a scar around his neck—a boy just like your friend here—will lead an army, and his foes will fall before him like wheat before a scythe. Lives will be lost, but at the end of the war, the kingdoms will finally cease their petty squabbling. With this war, we’ll create lasting peace for all the citizens of Kelanna.”
For a second the idea glittered before Sefia like one of her Visions: the Five Islands working together in concert, all the warring kingdoms united, their turbulent histories smoothed over in a single decisive victory. The cost would be high. But the peace would be worth it.
Archer touched the scar at his neck. He’d wear the cost of their peace the rest of his life.
“For all the citizens of Kelanna,” Sefia repeated slowly. “What about Archer? You call what you did to him peace? What you did to me? My family? The woman you sent to take the book from us, you think she got any peace when she—”
“Don’t speak of matters you don’t understand,” Tanin snapped, her voice lashing out at Sefia like a whip. “We all make sacrifices for the greater good. Your parents knew that, once.”
Sefia’s breath went out of her. It took her a moment to find her voice again, and when she did, her words were little more than a gasp. “You knew my parents?”
“Didn’t they tell you?” A tiny wrinkle of surprise appeared between Tanin’s brows as she set her cup aside. “They were members of the Guard.”
Sefia said nothing, but she felt the doubts cracking open inside her.
Her parents? They were heroes. They opposed people like Serakeen. They kept the book from him. They would never—
But how had they learned to read in the first place?
“Your father was my best friend,” Rajar added quietly, “a long time ago.”
Sefia’s mouth went dry. Was this the connection between the symbol and Serakeen, the assassin and the book?
“My father?” she whispered.
“He was the Apprentice Librarian,” Tanin said, her voice hardening. “It was his duty to protect the Book. But he broke every vow he ever made. He and your mother murdered Director Edmon and stole the Book from us.”
Sefia shook her head, but she couldn’t stop herself from wondering: What if she was wrong? What if her memories of her parents—her mother full of grace, bronze and dark and smelling of earth; her father cradling her chin when he dropped her off at Nin’s—were fabrications too? Some elaborate masquerade they had performed to keep their true identities a secret?
Had they been part of the Guard?
What had made them change their minds?
Why did they steal the book?
“So I became the Director,” Tanin continued, “tasked with recovering the Book and making up for a betrayal that set us back decades.”
“No, it can’t be. They would have told me.”
“Oh, Sefia, you really don’t know.” Tanin shook her head, turning each of the items on her desktop as if she were searching for the r
ight words with her fingers. “Mar— Your mother was an Assassin. She had more secrets than anyone.”
“My mother wouldn’t—”
“She certainly did. Your mother was extraordinary. She could choke the life out of someone from fifty feet away. She was so powerful she could have consumed entire cities.”
Sefia shook her head and stared at the floor. Beneath her feet, the designs in the carpet overlapped and intersected in an impossible lattice of connections and unfathomably complicated knots, but she couldn’t follow them any more than she could follow what Tanin was telling her.
It wasn’t true. It couldn’t be true.
But she couldn’t help but remember the scars on her mother’s hands. Her facility with a knife.
Tanin was still speaking, but only a few phrases reached Sefia through the haze of her confusion until, “Your father was no hack either—”
At the words, those two innocuous words, Sefia’s anger came into focus like a beam of light through a lens. My father. She narrowed her eyes. Something sparked inside of her.
“—with a snap of his fingers—”
Her skin burned. She was volcanic, blistering, riotous. An avalanche of blackrock ready to ignite. She’d been thrown off by Tanin’s nice manners, by Rajar’s morose contrition, by the truth about her parents. But she remembered what she was doing here now. She remembered why she had come.
“—bleed lakes dry in a matter of seconds—”
Slowly, Sefia raised her head. The rest of the room blurred, white and hot, until all she could see was Tanin, resting easily behind her desk, her lips meeting and parting, sending words into the air like sweet, toxic smoke. “They weren’t supposed to fall in love, you know, but they always did like breaking the rules.” For a moment, grief flicked across Tanin’s face like a cloud passing over the moon. “And then they broke their vows. They stole the Book. They betrayed everything we’d worked so hard for. Your mother passed away before we could get to her, but your father—”
Sefia stood. Her hand curled around the hilt of her knife. “You killed him,” she said.
“I would have given anything not to do what I did,” Tanin murmured. “But we needed the Book back.”
Like a bullet, like an explosion of gunpowder and grief and guilt and rage, Sefia launched herself across the desk. Her knife flashed. Sheets of paper scattered around them like startled birds.
Sefia knocked both of them to the floor and brought her blade to Tanin’s throat. “You tortured him. Just like you did Nin.” She dug the edge of her knife into the woman’s creamy skin. “Where is she? Is she even alive?”
Tanin smiled, but her voice shivered with regret. “You are your mother’s daughter, aren’t you?”
A noise behind her caused Sefia to look back. Her knife eased off Tanin’s neck as she caught sight of Rajar, his dark coat splaying out as he raised his arms, hands twisting and pulling at the air.
Magically, Archer’s weapons were wrenched from his grasp. The sword and revolver sailed across the room.
With a flick of his wrist, Rajar hurled Archer into a chair and scooped the weapons out of the air before they hit the ground.
Horrified, Sefia turned back to Tanin just in time to see her open her eyes. Her pupils contracted to points of black in two pools of silver.
The Vision.
“No!” Sefia cried.
But it was too late. With a wave of her hand, the woman flung Sefia aside. The knife flew from her fingers as her back struck the desk. Pain rippled along her spine and she fell to the floor, groaning.
Brushing herself off, Tanin stood. She raised her hand again, lifting Sefia from the carpet as if on invisible strings, and sent her crashing into the chair beside Archer.
Sefia struggled, but her arms and legs were pinned.
At her feet, her pack was unbuckling as if opened by invisible hands. Out tumbled her belongings—pans and candles and the biscuits Cooky had given them—and then the book rose from its depths, shedding its leather wrapping as it floated toward Tanin’s outstretched arms.
The woman gathered it to her chest like a lost child and sighed with deep satisfaction. “What is written always comes to pass,” she whispered.
Runners
Before they became parents, Lon and Mareah were runners. They were running when they stole the Book. When they escaped that complex of mirrors and marbled halls in an eruption of fire and rubble and charred scraps of paper. One was clutching the Book to his chest, under his crossed arms, as if trying to press it into his ribs, until his lungs filled with letters and his heart became a pulsing paragraph. The other was holding on to his elbow, so she could catch him if he stumbled, so she could keep him going, urging him forward, forward, forward.
When they crossed the threshold, breaking into the night and the fresh air, they were running.
Chased through the water and the woods by men and women and hounds, they were running.
They ran across kingdoms, mountains, shorelines. Even forced into hiding, they were quick. Restive. They breathed fast. They were wild and furtive with the chase. And when they slept—if they slept—they did so fitfully, in turns, with the Book between them, always ready to go. To run again.
And then one day, when they thought perhaps they had run far enough, for long enough, because they could no longer hear the sounds of the hunters or feel the chase at their heels, they built the house on the hill overlooking the sea.
Chapter 38
The Boy with the Scar
Archer strained against his invisible bonds, testing his feet and each of his fingers, but he couldn’t move anything but his head and neck. He was trapped.
It had happened so fast.
“Are you okay?” Sefia asked. A few stray locks of hair had come loose from their ties, and her clothing was rumpled, but she seemed unhurt. The green feather glinted behind her ear.
He nodded. As he watched, Rajar set Harison’s sword and revolver on the sideboard and hugged his arms miserably. Archer knew that look. Guilt. Self-loathing. He’d felt it too, time and time again.
Whatever he’d expected of Serakeen, it wasn’t this. It wasn’t kinship.
Pulling open a drawer, Tanin plucked out some blotting paper and dabbed it against her neck, but there was little blood. With a sniff, she crumpled the paper and tossed it aside. She laid the book on the desktop and stroked the worn cover, her elegant inky fingers tracing the discolored leather. To Archer, she seemed sad . . . and angry.
After a moment, she sat down and crossed her hands. “Let’s get this over with, then. Examine him.”
Archer’s eyes widened as Rajar crossed the room. The man circled the armchair, pulling again at the corners of his mustache. He hunkered down, placing a hand on Archer’s knee.
“I’m sorry,” he said. His breath smelled faintly of smoke and cloves and liquor. Standing, he flicked open a pocketknife.
Archer struggled against his invisible restraints. His hunting knife was sheathed in the shoulder strap of his pack, so close but so impossibly far.
“Leave him alone!” Sefia cried.
Rajar shook his head. “We have to know.” Then, taking hold of Archer’s sleeve, he cut away the fabric, exposing the fifteen burns on his arm, and stared down at the scars with lopsided blue eyes. His pupils shrank to pinpoints.
Archer cringed, but no blows came.
After a moment, Rajar folded the knife away and slipped it back in his pocket. “He’s a skilled enough killer, though he didn’t complete the final test at the Cage.”
“You’ve no right to do that,” Sefia snapped.
Rajar ignored her. He circled Archer again. “Who are you, boy?” he whispered. “Are you the one we’ve been searching for?”
Archer felt as if the man were scooping him up and shaking him, so all the things he’d blocked out for so long, all the things he’
d tried to forget, would come tumbling out.
“Well? What do you think?” Tanin toyed with a silver penknife, twirling it impatiently between her fingers. “Fit for the Academy?”
“He was going to be a lighthouse keeper.” Rajar rubbed his cheek. “He was going to protect people.”
Archer felt faint.
The memories rose out of him like floes of ice.
A lighthouse poised on a rocky promontory.
The notes of a mandolin drifting like soap bubbles from an illuminated window.
A girl with curls the color of sunlight through yellow leaves.
He was remembering. After all this time.
Archer’s head spun. It felt like he was breaking open on the inside, all the mental blocks he’d put up to protect himself rupturing one after another, flooding him with blood and bile.
All of a sudden, the ceiling felt too low, the walls too close. He was back in the crate again. The sour stench of his own urine. Claw marks. He felt the prick of splinters under his fingernails. Darkness. There would be no light until the crate was opened, and then there would be fear and pain. Ugly laughter and killing and then food, once someone was dead.
Every time he was unleashed there was fear and pain.
The boy Hatchet executed in front of him just to get him to pick up a weapon.
Training with Hatchet’s other boys—the splitting of skin over knuckles, the heft of a sword—until he was the only one left.
Then the fights.
He shut his eyes, but he saw them all, felt every blow, heard every last gasp, saw every dead boy empty-eyed on the ground. Every one.
He slumped against his invisible restraints, panting. The piece of quartz was resting solidly at the bottom of his pocket, but he couldn’t reach it. His hands wouldn’t move.