Night Spinner

by Addie Thorley

  Several Shoniin sprint up the hill to retrieve the medicine. The rest press closer, wiping tears or staring, stone-faced. Beside me, Oyunna’s shoulders silently tremble.

  The need to strengthen Inkar and protect her, as she’s always done for me, plagues me like an insatiable itch. When I can’t stand it any longer, I stagger forward. But a ferocious look from Chanar sends me slinking back.

  He lays Temujin beside Inkar, who has finally stopped shaking. Now she lies still. Too still. The difference between her and Temujin makes my breath catch. Neither of them looks well, but a tiny bit of color has returned to Temujin’s cheeks and his breath is shallow but steady. Other than the terrible rope burns ringing his neck, he looks nowhere near death. Inkar, on the other hand, is as pale as a Zemyan and she’s seized by another fit.

  Chanar crawls to her side and waits for her to still. “Don’t you dare leave me here alone.” He takes Inkar’s hand and holds it to his face. His tears rush over their interlaced fingers. “Everything we’ve worked for is finally happening.”

  “Haven’t … much of a … choice,” she chokes out.

  “We always have a choice. Fight! Live! If you die, who will boss me around?”

  “You’ve always wanted to be head of the family. You can finally lead yourself.” Her voice is a puff of smoke, a whisper on the wind.

  “Not like this.” Chanar’s voice cracks. “I’ll have no family to lead.”

  “Help the children.” Inkar smiles up at the sky. “I’ll tell Taimar you say hello.” Another spasm grips her, and as she thrashes and moans, the eternal sunlight seems to dim. The vibrant colors of the tents fade to muted pastels.

  My body feels heavy. So heavy.

  Inkar was the best of us, the brightest and kindest. And she’s dead because of me. Vomit rises in my throat, and I have to look away from her glassy eyes.

  “The Loridium will heal you. They’ll be here any second!” Chanar folds himself over his sister. “I can’t do this alone.”

  The Shoniin fall back to give him space. Everyone except Oyunna, who weeps into her hands, and Kartok, who slowly rises, his face a mask of brutal resolve.

  The Shoniin return with the Loridium a few minutes later, but their pace slows when they survey the somber scene. With a nod of thanks, Kartok takes the small leather chest and steps gravely around Inkar. He kneels at Temujin’s side, mixes the elixir with nimble fingers, and flicks it over his form. Then Kartok bows his head and mumbles a prayer.

  After a few silent minutes, Kartok gains his feet and addresses the gathered warriors. “By the grace of the Goddess, Temujin will survive! Which means our plans live on.”

  The Bone Reader and Oyunna share a sniffling hug, and the warriors cheer and pump their fists—none more loudly than our newest recruits. I lift my hands, but I can’t bring myself to clap. Not because I’m ungrateful Temujin lives, but because our plan is useless until Ghoa and the Sky King agree to unite with us. Nothing has changed.

  I tap Oyunna, but she shushes me and points to Kartok, who resumes talking.

  “We will win this war for our fallen brothers and sisters!” He gestures reverently at Inkar. “To claim what’s rightfully ours!”

  The cheers become deafening and the throng stomps their feet, making the ground shake even harder. The healers bring forward a sled, and Kartok ceremoniously lowers Temujin into the bed. Temujin winces but manages to raise a hand in salute.

  The Shoniin go wild for it. Their cries quite literally split the sky. Tiny, dark fractures splinter the unearthly blue like lightning.

  What in the skies?

  I scrunch my eyes shut, and count to three. When I look back up, the sky is as pristine as a freshly lacquered bowl.

  Unease whooshes down my spine like winter wind.

  “Oyunna,” I whisper again, but her hands are splayed heavenward and her head is tilted back in communion with the Lady of the Sky. Her hair sways across her shoulders, and as it does, the rich black waves bend and shift. For a moment, certain strands appear almost white.

  “Ready yourselves for battle. We march in two days!” Kartok shouts.

  I stare at the back of his pockmarked head in disbelief. That’s impossible. Even if Ghoa just sent word, we have yet to meet with the Imperial Army to organize an attack. And we can’t engage the Zemyans on our own. Our numbers are impressive, but not that impressive.

  “Kartok!” I grab his sleeve and tug until he looks back at me. “How can you make such proclamations? We’re unprepared. We need to coordinate—”

  “No, Enebish. They are unprepared.”

  I point at our leader, sprawled in the healers’ sled. “Temujin can barely sit upright. Even with Loridium, he’ll be in no condition to lead a march to the war front in two days.”

  “Which is why he won’t be leading us.”

  “Who will be?”

  Kartok places a hand on my arm. During the dark, frigid nights we sat together in the snow, I always drew strength from his touch, but now it’s uncomfortably tight. “Our Night Spinner, of course.”

  “What are you talking about?” I try to pry him off, but my hands pause. His fingers are so pale next to mine. So long and spindly. I glance up at his face, and my vision swims again—as it did with the globeflowers and the sky and Oyunna’s hair. For a split second, I see not my friend, Maggot, but a stranger with a sharp nose, cheeks covered with white-blond stubble, and pale blue eyes the color of frost. A color wholly unnatural to Ashkar. A color common only in the lands near the sea.

  In less time than it takes to blink, Kartok’s usual visage returns, but now I see it for the mask it is. His other face, his true face, burns like a lamp beneath his skin.

  “Y-you … you’re—” My lips won’t form the word.

  Because it’s too horrible.

  Because I should have seen it sooner.

  Kartok is Zemyan.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  I GAPE AT HIS TOWERING HEIGHT, REPLAY HIS SLURRED speech, which has nothing to do with a mangled tongue and everything to do with a Zemyan accent. I recall how he dispatched the guards who spotted us at the fort with such lethal ease. How my darkness shied away from him that first night in the Boneyard. I’d thought it was due to my own exhaustion, but the night knew better. It had recoiled from his Zemyan magic.

  Suppressing a scream, I swing around to rouse the rest of the Shoniin. “We’ve been infiltrated!” I point at Kartok. “Other Zemyans could be hidden among us.”

  The warriors gaze at me from the bottom of the hill—an expanse of familiar faces and gray uniforms—and the longer we stare at one another, the more dread tiptoes across my skin like a spider. Not one of them gasps or points or rushes toward Kartok with their sabers raised.

  The ground pulses again and another crack marbles the sky. For the space of a heartbeat, the world flickers. Like Oyunna and Kartok, more than half of the faces change. Their bones lengthen and reform. Their skin and hair shift to the palest of creams and the whitest of blonds.

  Burning skies.

  My knees wobble. My mouth tastes of sick.

  “Something the matter, Destroyer?” Kartok goads.

  I can’t answer. Because everything is the matter. My thoughts race faster than starfire as I fit the deceitful pieces together, one after the next. The injured “recruits” I ferried across the grasslands in tattered, bloodstained uniforms were actually Zemyans. Zemyans who had killed our warriors, donned their clothes, and disguised their faces with their devil magic. Our “scouts” who reported the fall of Ivolga surely had a hand in bringing it down. And all of the cannons and munitions the Shoniin stole were undoubtedly turned upon our own troops.

  Sometimes we’re so focused on a greater goal, we miss the truth hidden in plain sight. Inkar’s observation from so long ago blares like a horn in my brain.

  It’s all about showing one thing, then serving something else. Something wholly unexpected. Temujin’s words from our first meeting in the Ram’s Head slap me across
the cheek.

  Kartok steps closer.

  The recruits do too.

  Hemming me in.

  I fling my hand skyward, begging heat to sear my palms. But nothing comes. Because there’s no darkness here to call.

  I raise my other hand and press harder. Sweat soaks my hairline. My arms tremble. The night came in Ashkar when the sun had all but risen over Temujin’s execution. And Tuva held the darkness for a hundred days of battle. I’ve been training so tirelessly, pushing so relentlessly. Surely, I should be able to extract a few threads from the Temple of Serenity. It’s so close.

  I struggle until I’m dizzy and gasping. All the while Kartok looks on with a smug grin. “Rage all you want, little Night Spinner. It will only benefit us.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Anytime you summon your Kalima power in this realm, your darkness and starfire are siphoned to the Temple of Serenity.”

  “What?” My hands fall to my sides. “That’s impossible.”

  “Is it?” His accent draws the words into a hiss, and he lifts his long fingers in a dazzling flourish. When I curse, Kartok laughs. “Didn’t you ever wonder why you were only able to access the night within the temple? Or why your darkness couldn’t breach those delicate pillars? Why you were encouraged to practice so often?”

  “No.” I grip my forehead and close my eyes. “The temple is safe because it’s a direct conduit to the Lady of the Sky. And there’s no darkness here because it’s the realm of the Eternal Blue. Home to the Goddess. A land of endless sunshine. Everyone knows the legends.” I try to remain calm, but I can hear my voice growing shriller with each word.

  “Yes, your heathen legends proved most useful when I wove this place into existence. The perfect excuse to lure you to the temple and the holding tanks.”

  “Holding tanks?” Dread knots in my belly when I realize he means the massive urns. After Temujin threw ash from the black one during my initiation, I never thought to look inside the others. Why would I? They were a burial ground for fallen Shoniin. I never dreamed the other urns could be filled with my darkness and starfire.

  “I must thank you, Enebish. Our invasion of Sagaan will be effortless with so many of our warriors hidden within the city and the power of the night at our disposal,” Kartok says. Then he turns to Chanar. “Tie her up in the temple.”

  “Chanar, please,” I beg, “think of Inkar. She wouldn’t want this. Think of how far we’ve come. We were—” Nearly friends. You had finally accepted me. Maybe even trusted me.

  “We’ve never been anything but enemies,” he growls, “and you have no idea who Inkar was or what she wanted.” He looks down at his hands, stained with the blood of his sister—his last remaining family member. Swifter than a mountain cat, he rises from Inkar’s side, wrenches my arms behind my back, and binds them with brutal efficiency. Then he drags me up the hill to the Temple of Serenity.

  I fight him every step, squirming and kicking. I whistle for Orbai and shout her name, but she doesn’t come to my rescue. I start to hyperventilate as worst-case scenarios pile up in my mind: They hurt her, imprisoned her. Killed her.

  “Why are you doing this?” I ask as Chanar shoves me up the steps. “You are Ashkarian, yet you’re in league with Kartok and the Zemyans. Why?”

  Chanar slams my head against the floor so viciously, it creates fissures in the mosaic sky identical to the chasms overhead. Gray dots explode across my vision and blood wets the back of my hair.

  “Because this is justice.”

  “I know the Sky King wronged you, but you realize you’re condemning an entire country, not one wicked king.”

  “You know nothing of it,” Chanar spits out. “This will be better for everyone. The hope of this revolution is the only thing that kept me and Inkar alive those five years in prison. This is what she died for.” He slams my head against the ground again, even harder, and vanishes in the haze of darkness that falls over my eyes like a curtain.

  I lie belly up for what feels like hours. Days. Haunted by nightmares. Hounded by memories. Taunted by a deception I was too blind and stubborn to see.

  Something feels off.

  Serik warned me so many times. Even without a Kalima power, and despite never having worshiped the Lady of the Sky, he could feel it.

  As I should have.

  As I did.

  This damnable buzzing and constant scraping at my energy feels like leeches wriggling beneath my skin. It has from the moment I crossed into this realm. As soon as I touched this cursed stone altar, I knew in my bones it didn’t feel right. But I was so desperate to save Orbai and Serik, and eager to be in the realm of the Eternal Blue among others who believed as I did. I was so desperate to be a warrior, I was willing to overlook the signs.

  Serik was right to leave. To question my judgment.

  And Ghoa may have been wrong about many things, but she was right about this—as much as it pains me to admit.

  Ashkar will fall because of him.

  And I didn’t listen because I didn’t think anyone else could betray me so completely. By the time our battalions at the war front learn Sagaan is under attack, the city will be lost. Because I brought these termites into our home.

  I gaze across the ever-shifting landscape—the sky split with spiderwebs of black and the fields blooming one second then wilting the next—and scream for Orbai. But still she doesn’t come. I suppose I don’t blame her.

  I do, however, blame the Lady of the Sky.

  “Why would you allow this to happen?” I mutter up at the insidious blue. I know this isn’t Her realm. The true realm of the Eternal Blue is probably worlds away—if it exists at all. But I shout anyway, just in case She can hear. “I was going about your work. You confirmed this was the right course, but it clearly isn’t. Am I nothing but a mockery to you?

  “Or are you a liar?” I say in a quiet, accusatory voice. “Or maybe you’re not there at all. Maybe the Sky King is right and you never have been.”

  Part of me wants it to be true. But my pathetic, loyal heart cries out at the wrongness of these claims. The core of who I am, the innermost essence of Enebish, has always been and will always be intrinsically tied to the sky. As much as I want to deny every last shred of my faith, I can’t. Because the Lady of the Sky lives inside me. Denying Her would be denying myself. One cannot exist without the other. This probably makes me foolish and naïve, but it also makes me me.

  “Why?” I shout again. “If you’re with me, why?”

  Footsteps crunch through the grass.

  I stifle my cries and incline my head. Temujin makes his way slowly up the hill. Livid bruises still encircle his neck like a collar, and he walks with a limp that resembles mine. But he’s walking. And he’s clad in a fresh gray tunic and breeches, his boots polished to a high shine.

  “You’re looking remarkably well for someone who nearly died,” I snap.

  He trudges up the stone steps and leans against a jade pillar. “Allying with sorcerers has its benefits,” he says quietly, staring at his boots.

  “The first truthful words from your lips. Have you come to gloat? To laugh at the poor, stupid girl you tricked into aiding you?”

  “Does it look like I’m gloating?” He drags a hand through his damp hair and I hack to expel the cloying scent of tea soap. I hate that smell. Almost as much as I hate the imploring look in his golden eyes. And the fact that I once relished our shared heritage. And how I wrote with him in his Book of Whisperings and shivered at the feel of his fingertips on my scars.

  “It wasn’t all a lie,” he continues. “I really was abandoned at Novesti. My battalion left me bleeding in the snow.”

  “Do you expect me to feel sorry for you?”

  “The Lady of the Sky didn’t heal me.”

  I snort and glower at him. “I gathered as much.”

  “Kartok did. He was healing his warriors with Loridium and executing the wounded—stabbing an enchanted spear through each Ashkarian
gut—but I cried out. Vowed to do anything they asked if he would spare me. So we struck a bargain. He and the other Zemyan sorcerers had invented a xanav—that’s what they call this place: a pocket world in which to hide their armies—but they couldn’t venture far enough across Ashkar’s border to plant it. And sorcerers cannot enter a realm of their own creation or the weft of the magic frays and collapses—as you’re witnessing now. I agreed to plant the xanav, to raise a rebel army and ferry soldiers across the border, in exchange for my life—and a better life once the Zemyans are in command. I am to be governor of Sagaan.”

  “Again, do you expect me to congratulate you? Why are you wasting your breath telling me this?”

  He steps into the temple and crouches beside me. Too close. I lurch away from the terrible warmth of his skin.

  He has the gall to look hurt. “It doesn’t have to be like this, En. You don’t have to be a prisoner. We don’t have to leech your Kalima power from you. You could help us of your own accord. Use your darkness and starfire to help us take Ashkar, and together we can restore peace and prosperity to Verdenet and Chotgor and Namaag. We can help the starving refugees and children sent like chaff to the war front. This is the only way to end the conflict and help our people. To restore our way of life.”

  I laugh so hard, I choke. “Restore our way of life? Last I checked, you have little autonomy when you’re enslaved. There will be nothing left of any nation, other than Zemya, once Empress Danashti is finished with us.”

  “You’re wrong. Her Noble Excellency doesn’t share the greed and conquering mentality of the Sky King. She simply wants us to stop battering her border. We have always been the aggressors. The Zemyans are only defending what’s rightfully theirs. Empress Danashti plans to give us full independence in exchange for a small tax. Not only that, she is a rigorous supporter of religious freedom and cultural expression. We won’t have to live in fear of losing ourselves and our ways of life.” He gestures to the rings in his ears and the ink on his calves. “We will finally be able to worship the Lady of the Sky in peace.”