There Will Come a Darkness

by Katy Rose Pool

  Hassan hadn’t expected that. He thought about how deeply he wanted to spend more time here—with the refugees, of course, but also with Khepri. “I’d like that.”

  She smiled at him, and Hassan realized their hands were still joined. She seemed to realize it, too, but rather than letting go, she turned his hand over, running her fingers lightly along his palm. His skin prickled, and he could feel himself beginning to flush.

  “Still pretty soft,” she murmured. She looked up, lips curling. “You’ll have to build up those calluses if you want to beat me next time.”

  She dropped his hand and busied herself with picking up the practice swords, while Hassan stared after her. He shook himself, and as the sun sank into the sea, they set off together.

  The smell of smoke filled the air as they made their way to the other side of the agora, where the campfires were just beginning to glow. As they approached the campfire Khepri shared, Hassan saw familiar faces: Azizi, his mother, and his baby sister. They, as well as the older woman Hassan had spoken with the day before, welcomed Hassan readily and put him to work peeling and seeding squash.

  “You’re lucky,” said Azizi’s mother, who’d introduced herself as Halima. “This is only the second time we’ve had fresh vegetables since we came here.”

  Hassan frowned, thinking of the many rich meals he’d enjoyed at his aunt’s villa without even thinking about it. “Where does the food come from?”

  “The temple acolytes have donated much of it,” she said. “Enough to keep us all alive, for now. Some of the boys have gone into the surrounding hillsides to hunt for small game and birds. It’s summer now, but I fear what will happen when winter comes.”

  “That’s months from now,” Hassan said, surprised. He wondered how many of the other refugees thought it would be months before they returned home.

  Dinner seemed to be a communal affair—each campfire was shared by five or more families who all pooled resources and pitched in together while the children too young to help were corralled by one of the adults. Tonight, it was Khepri’s turn on child duty. Every so often Hassan would look up from peeling squash to watch the children clambering all over her—climbing onto her back and launching themselves at her knees, which Khepri bore with admirable patience.

  As the sky grew dark, they all gathered around the fire to eat. Though Hassan had only a few bites, leaving most of the food for the others, he could not remember the last time he’d enjoyed a meal so heartily—roasted squash and lentils seasoned with cracked pepper, served with sun-risen bread stuffed with nuts and figs. It was much simpler than the extravagant meals Hassan was used to in the royal palace, but everything smelled and tasted so much like home that his chest ached.

  Having this tiny piece of Herat made him want all of it—he wanted to smell the perfume of blue river lilies and fresh sun-risen bread, feel thick river silt between his fingers, taste sweet pomegranate wine, hear the clamorous bells and drums of the graduating scholars parading down Ozmandith Road.

  Over the course of the meal, Hassan learned more about what the lives of these families were like since they’d escaped Nazirah. The agora was already overcrowded, with two or three families sharing shelters built only for one. The fountainhouse near the Sacred Gate was the only source of fresh water for all of the camps, which meant much of the day was taken up by standing in long lines and there was never enough water for washing and cooking, which had led to an outbreak of lice early on. Most of the refugees had come to Pallas Athos with little more than the clothes on their backs, so even something as simple as soap or bowls was hard to come by.

  Yet despite these hardships, and despite how little the priests of Pallas Athos had done to welcome the refugees to the city, there remained a sense of perseverance and hope. Despair loomed like a storm around them, but there was an unmistakable love and care in how they treated one another.

  After they finished eating, Hassan and Khepri sat out by the glowing light of the fire. Azizi and the other Herati children chanted and ran circles around the glowing flames.

  “I know this game!” Hassan exclaimed, grateful that despite everything these kids had gone through, they could still play and tease and laugh as the children back home did.

  Beside him, Khepri let out a braying laugh. “Every Herati child plays this game.”

  “I didn’t,” Hassan said. “But I used to watch through the study window as the other children played it around the courtyard fountains.”

  “The study window?” she echoed incredulously. “Were you locked in a tower as a child?”

  Hassan laughed, a little uneasy. “Something like that.”

  “All right, then,” Khepri said, getting to her feet abruptly.

  Hassan blinked as she held a hand out to him.

  “Get up,” she said. “We’re playing.”

  He laughed, and Khepri pulled him to his feet. Cupping a hand around her mouth, she cried, “Ibis and heron, beware of me!”

  “Crocodile, crocodile, let us be!” the children chorused back.

  Khepri grinned at Hassan, and the two of them rushed toward the children, who shrieked with laughter and ran around the campfire. Khepri seized one little girl and lifted her to the sky. The girl cried out in delight. When Khepri set her back down, the girl cried, “Ibis and heron, beware of me!”

  Hassan let himself get carried away in the childish game, the exhilaration of running, the thrill of being caught. Somehow, ten minutes later, every single child was chasing after him. They swarmed him at once, tackling him to the ground and piling on top.

  “I yield, I yield!” Hassan cried, tears of laughter leaking from his eyes as Azizi ran a triumphant lap around him.

  “Let him up, crocodiles,” Khepri said, wading into the pile to drag Hassan out. She couldn’t keep the laughter from her voice as she asked, “You all right?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Here, you’ve got a—” Khepri reached up to Hassan’s hair, plucking a twig from it. “There.”

  He could feel himself flushing again. “You didn’t warn me that this game is more grueling than a Legionnaire’s training.”

  Khepri laughed, hooking her arm through his and steering him away from the kids. A chorus of ooooohs followed them as they headed toward a grass-covered outcropping.

  “Are you going to kiss?” one girl demanded.

  “Eww!” Azizi bellowed.

  Hassan laughed helplessly, the children’s jeers fading away as he and Khepri climbed the outcropping. It overlooked the agora on one side, and the entire city of Pallas Athos on the other.

  “Those kids are worse than my brothers, I swear,” Khepri grumbled, flopping down in the grass.

  “Your brothers tease you?” Hassan asked, settling beside her.

  “Relentlessly.” She huffed out a breath, and then Hassan saw it—the tiny shift in her expression that told him her thoughts had turned to Nazirah.

  Impulsively, he reached for her hand. “They’re still in Nazirah, aren’t they?”

  Her eyes clouded with grief. “My whole family is.”

  He wanted to know everything that lay behind that look in her eyes. “How did you get out?”

  She looked down at his hand but didn’t move away. “My brothers were enlisted in the Legionnaires, like me. We found a merchant ship from Endarrion, who’d agreed to smuggle us. But on the night we were to leave, the Witnesses were at the harbor. They searched the ship while we hid inside. We knew they would find us, so my brothers surrendered. They managed to keep the Witnesses from finding me. They sacrificed themselves so that I could be free.” She looked at Hassan with the same fierce gleam in her eyes that he’d seen when they’d first met. “Every day I wake up to that truth.”

  Hassan thought of his own family, his mother and father who were still prisoners, at the mercy of people who thought they were a corruption of nature. He knew the burden of being safe while those you loved were not. He knew how fear and anger choked you at every waking momen
t. How even as you slept, your mind never tired of torturing you with all the terrible things that could be happening, and all the things you should have done differently to stop them.

  He wished there were a way to tell her all of that without revealing to her who he was. This grief was something they shared, and keeping it hidden from her pitted Hassan’s gut with guilt.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, hating how inadequate those words were. He looked over her shoulder at the campsite and the children who were still running and laughing, evading their parents’ half-hearted attempts to get them settled for bed.

  “It’s why I came here,” Khepri said after a long moment. “They’re taking refugees in Charis, too, but I came here. Where Prince Hassan is.”

  For a moment, Hassan couldn’t speak. “How—how do you know that?”

  “His aunt was wife to the late Archon Basileus,” Khepri replied. “And if Prince Hassan really survived the coup like everyone said, he would have come here, where he had family and allies. I know it.”

  Hassan’s heart was beating so hard he was sure that Khepri must have heard it. But she didn’t seem to notice. Her eyes gleamed as they looked out at the city below, from the Sentry citadel and the Akademos in the second tier, to the sea of tiled roofs that covered the slope of the bottom tier, to the domed roof of the train station, in the Low City, beyond the gates.

  “It feels right to be here,” she said. “This is the City of Faith, after all. That’s what led me here. Faith. When the Hierophant and the Witnesses took Nazirah, I wanted to tear them apart, and I didn’t care what I had to sacrifice to do it. I let my hatred take over.”

  Hassan knew exactly what she meant. He had felt the hot pull of hatred outside the temple, facing down the Witnesses. And still, in the darkest part of his heart, he felt it when he thought of the Hierophant and his followers.

  “But when I heard that Prince Hassan had survived the coup, my rage suddenly had a new purpose. I can’t explain it, but … I knew I needed to come here. I came to the City of Faith to find the prince and help him retake our country.”

  “You think he can?” Hassan asked. He felt like a helpless scarab, pinned by her gaze, overwhelmed by the desire to tell her who he was. If anyone could have understood the way he felt, the way he longed for a home that had been violently wrenched from him, it was Khepri. This brave girl who’d come seeking him from his homeland.

  She nodded. “I know it. The captain of my regiment in the Herati Legionnaires met him once. He said the prince has the best parts of his parents. The strength and courage of the queen, and the wisdom and compassion of the king.”

  Hassan closed his eyes briefly. The prince she described felt like another person entirely. What would she think when she found out the prince she believed could save his people was hiding in his aunt’s villa, without a plan or any hope of freeing his country?

  “What if he isn’t here?” he asked. He swallowed. “What if you came all this way for nothing?”

  The look she gave him was fleeting but bright, like the flash of a lightning bug over the banks of the Herat River. “It wouldn’t have been for nothing.”

  Hassan felt her calloused palm over his hand as she leaned toward him. He stuttered in a breath, his eyes sliding shut.

  “Cirion,” she said softly.

  Hassan squeezed his eyes shut and, hating himself, pulled away from her. As much as he wanted to let himself have this moment, unfettered by worry, he knew he couldn’t. Not when it would be a lie. But he couldn’t tell her the truth. Not now. The person she’d come looking for, the wise, courageous Prince of Herat who could lead his people to freedom—that wasn’t Hassan. He was just another lost refugee, afraid and desperately hoping that there was someone who could show him the way.

  6

  ANTON

  Anton woke up drowning. Chest bursting, stars behind his eyes, a call ringing through his head—

  His eyes flew open.

  A gust of breath. Not water, but air. The stale air of his tiny tenement flat. It flooded his lungs as Anton lay twisted in sweat-damp sheets. He lifted trembling fingers to his throat and then pressed, counting each tap of his pulse against his fingertips.

  It had been years since he’d dreamed of the lake. In the months after he left home, the bad dream had been a nightly visitor. The gray sky, the snow, the dark shape behind him as his feet carried him over the frozen lake. Ice cracking beneath him, cruel hands forcing him down as he thrashed in the freezing water.

  Now, as he pushed himself up on his narrow bed, Anton felt as small and helpless as he had in that cold, biting water. He was restless, unmoored, feeling like at any moment the world could slide out from under him, plunging him back into the deep and the dark.

  Warm wind shuddered in from the tiny window, lifting the edges of the curtain. Moonlight slanted into the room, casting rippling shadows on the wall.

  And then Anton realized two things. He hadn’t left his window open before he fell asleep.

  And someone was in the room with him.

  He felt their esha first, like the muted flutter of a moth’s wings. It was unfamiliar—not the one he feared, the one belonging to the man that sought him. He drew in a sharp breath as his eyes fell on the shadow the stranger cast in the pale moonlight.

  “I’m not here to hurt you.”

  It was a girl’s voice—low and rough-edged. As Anton blinked at her in the dark, he saw that a silk mask covered the lower half of her face, leaving only two bright eyes peering at him from across the room.

  He weighed his options. She was positioned beside the window, near the foot of the bed and across from the door. There was very little chance he could reach it before she did.

  He would have to take her at her word.

  “What do you want?” he asked.

  She tilted her head. “You don’t know who I am?”

  “Should I?”

  “The priest at Thalassa Gardens didn’t, either.”

  Anton sucked in a breath. Of all the horrors he had ever imagined visiting him in the middle of the night, the Pale Hand was not one of them.

  He made himself speak. “Are you here to kill me?”

  Something like amusement flashed in her eyes. “Would you deserve it?”

  Anton shook his head slowly.

  “Then you’ve nothing to fear.”

  He thought back to his dream, to the warning about who was looking for him, and wondered if the Pale Hand’s words would ever be true.

  “If you’re not here to kill me, then what are you doing in my room?”

  “I’m looking for Mrs. Tappan,” she replied. “And I think perhaps you can help me find her.”

  Anton blinked in surprise. It wasn’t hard to believe that somehow Mrs. Tappan was mixed up with a notorious killer—but usually, she was the one looking for someone.

  “I don’t know who that is,” he lied, swinging his legs down to plant them on the floor beside his bed.

  “This letter she left you at Thalassa Gardens says differently.” In the dim light of the room, Anton saw her hold out an envelope. He could only guess that it bore the compass-rose seal of Mrs. Tappan’s Scrying Agency. She must have left it for him after he’d fled.

  “How did you get that?”

  The Pale Hand drew nearer to the bed, still holding out the letter. “This is you, right? Anton?”

  He reached for it, but she tugged it away. “Tell me where she is, and you get your letter.”

  “I don’t know where she is.”

  “But you spoke with her last night.”

  Had it only been last night? The past day had gone by in a blur of nightmare and memory, so tightly woven in Anton’s mind that he could scarcely pick them apart.

  “How do you know that?”

  He couldn’t see her mouth beneath the mask, but he had the sense she might be smiling. “I met a few of your friends at Thalassa. They said a woman dined there last night with whom you had a very interesting-looking conver
sation. And that you disappeared not long after that.”

  He cursed Cosima for her insatiable nosiness and her inability to keep her mouth shut.

  “So,” the Pale Hand pressed, “what did you talk about?”

  Anton lifted one shoulder. “She just likes to check up on me. See how I’m doing.”

  “You’re not a very good liar.”

  “I’m not a liar.”

  “Then what are you?” she asked. “Mrs. Tappan doesn’t do grunt work herself. She doesn’t even show her face to most people. Why you?”

  Instead of answering, he said, “That’s not her real name, you know.”

  Names had a particular resonance with the esha of the person they belonged to. That was how scryers found their targets. For Anton, the sense was more acute. He couldn’t exactly tell a person’s name just from sensing their esha, but he could tell when a name didn’t match. The name Mrs. Tappan had never resonated with her distinctive, bell-like esha.

  “Then what is it?”

  “I don’t know,” Anton replied. “But it’s not that.”

  “How would you know that?” Her whole demeanor had changed, her eyes widening. “It’s you, isn’t it? The scryer she told us about. You’re him. She said you could help me. That no other scryer can do what you can.”

  In a flash, it all began to make sense. The job the Nameless Woman had tried to offer him last night—it had come from the Pale Hand.

  “Well, she lied,” Anton said flatly. “I’m no one. I can’t help you, so get out before I tell the Sentry exactly where they can find you.”

  She didn’t move.

  “I’m serious,” he said, pushing past her to the door. “You have two minutes to get out.”

  Even if he felt a glimmer of curiosity—what did the Pale Hand want with him?—he wouldn’t give in to it. The nightmares had already returned, and using his Grace would make them unbearable, he knew. It wasn’t a road he was willing to go down, no matter what threats or promises the Pale Hand made.

  But what she said next was not a threat or a promise. It was a question. “Who’s Illya Aliyev?”