by Traci Chee
“Look,” Lac said. “I happen to have a nose for important situations, and I believe this, unlikely as it may seem now, is an important situation. If you come with us, I promise you won’t be disappointed . . . although, for the time being, all we can offer is friendship.”
“And banter,” Hobs added helpfully.
“And later, perhaps even a bit of glory fighting the Alliance, if that interests you.”
Knowing he wouldn’t see the lights of Corabel on the horizon, Ed didn’t bother looking north. Instead, he shook Lac’s hand. “Glory is for more important people than me.” Then, with a grin, he added, “But I’ll take the friendship. And the banter.”
CHAPTER 5
Epigloss
The Current of Faith was a vortex of activity as the outlaws flew into action, loading sacks of rice and bricks of butter wrapped in paper, amphorae of oil, boxes of bullets and barrels of gunpowder, glass bottles of vinegar stoppered with wax, bundles of bamboo, bolts of sailcloth, kegs of water, and all the other provisions Dimarion had arranged to be delivered that morning. They had to leave for the Trove before Dotan and the Guard found them.
Marmalade, their fastest runner now that Jules was gone, raced over to the next berth to tell the Crux what had happened at the messengers’ post, while Doc spirited Archer belowdecks to the sick bay to see to his wounds.
Without a moment to lose, Sefia said her good-byes to Reed and the crew. Meeks told her to come back with a good story. With a wide, dimpled smile that always gave her heart, Horse slipped her a new packet of lock picks to replace the ones she’d lost and lifted her off the ground in a rib-cracking hug. “Take care of yourself, Sef.”
Climbing down the hatchway, she dug her hand into her rucksack, pressing her palm to the hard surface of the Book.
A part of her knew she couldn’t rely on it as she used to. The Book may have been a record of all time, from the beginning of the world to its distant end, but it had manipulated the truth before—manipulated her—promising safety and protection, and delivering only heartache.
Because of the Book, they’d lost Versil—Aljan’s loud, laughing brother—to the impressors.
And Kaito shortly after.
Because of the Book, she’d abandoned Archer and the bloodletters, thinking that it would stop him from becoming the boy from the legends. Thinking that it would save him.
But that had gotten Archer injured and Frey and Aljan captured, and now, with the Red War closing in on them and the Guard on her heels, it felt like they were nearer to destiny than ever.
But she couldn’t give it up either. The Book had been the only constant in her life for nearly eight years. It had been there when she lost her father. It had been there when she lost Nin. It had been a source of comfort and knowledge and power. For all it had betrayed her, she couldn’t help but treasure it.
In the corridor, she halted when she heard Archer’s voice from the sick bay: “But, Doc—”
“No, Archer.” The surgeon’s voice was firm. “I know you. If you go, you’ll end up leading that rescue, and in your state, you’ll end up getting yourself or someone else killed. Is that what you want?”
“You know it’s not.”
“Then stop acting like it, and sit this one out.”
Clutching the strap of her rucksack, Sefia pressed herself against the wall as Doc swept into the hallway. Tall and severe, she looked over the rims of her spectacles, leveling Sefia with a stare, and snapped her black bag closed with a crisp click.
“I’m confining him to the sick bay until his stitches are removed. If you want him to remain in one piece, you’ll leave him here when you go.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I mean it, Sefia.”
“Do you think I’d do anything to hurt him?” Sefia asked. “I’d give up the world for him.”
Doc’s expression softened. “I know. And he’d do the same for you. Sometimes I think the two of you are competing to see who will sacrifice the most to save the other.” Squeezing Sefia’s shoulder with one of her slim brown hands, she strode down the hallway and climbed up to the deck to finish cataloguing supplies.
Archer was sitting on the end of the bunk when Sefia entered the sick bay. He was shirtless, his side swaddled in a clean bandage. “Did Doc tell you?” he asked.
“Yes.” She began loading her rucksack with her knives and the new lock picks. “I’m sorry.”
“We were all going to go to Haven together.” He toyed with the piece of quartz at his neck. “Me, you, the bloodletters.”
“And we will. But we can’t wait for you to get better. The Guard has had Frey and Aljan for over a week already.”
Archer continued fretting with the worry stone. “What if they need me?”
“I need you. In one piece. That’s why you need to stay here.” She laid her hands on his shoulders. “Once we’ve rescued them, I’ll come back to get you, and soon we’ll be at Haven with nothing to do but lie on the beach until the war is over.”
Swiftly, he caught her by the waist and pulled her into his arms, murmuring, “I hope we have more to do than that.”
She inhaled his smell—like trail dust and thundershowers—and let him kiss her from the open collar of her shirt to her chin, his hands roving up her back and into her hair.
“We’ll have as long as we want to do whatever we want,” she said. “We could probably stay at Haven forever, if the outlaws would let us.”
Archer’s hands stilled. “Say that again.”
“If the outlaws would let us?”
“Forever,” he breathed, like the word was a magic spell.
“Forever,” Sefia repeated and, as if they were in a bedtime story, sealed the incantation by pressing her lips to his.
Then they parted, and she pulled the Book from her rucksack, folding back the waterproof casing. Bit by bit, she exposed the gilt-edged pages, the burnished gold clasps, and the on the cracked leather cover.
The symbol of their enemy.
The symbol that had led her to Archer.
And Archer to the bloodletters.
She sank onto the bunk beside him. The worst and best things in her life were inextricably linked to that symbol. To the Book. And to destiny.
She ran her hands along the edges of the cover, whispering, “Show me where the bloodletters are now.”
The gold clasps clicked as she popped them open, spreading the Book in her lap. The pages seemed to stick together, almost uncooperatively, as if the Book knew she no longer trusted it.
Looking down, Sefia skimmed the paragraphs, searching for the bloodletters’ location among the black sentences. The ink seemed to swirl under her gaze, re-forming into pointed masts, hard decks, a red ship with white trim—the Brother.
“Found them,” she whispered.
And with a deep breath, she closed the Book. She had what she needed. She couldn’t risk reading on, couldn’t risk the Book showing her something that might make her want to keep reading, couldn’t risk getting trapped again.
She traced the once. Two curves for Frey and Aljan, a curve for the bloodletters. The straight line for herself. The circle for what she had to do: Beat the Book. Beat fate. The way her parents had never been able to.
Because destiny was conditional. If Archer amassed a following and conquered the Five Islands during the Red War, he would die.
If he didn’t do either of those things, he’d live.
“Time to go,” she said.
As she stuffed the Book back into her rucksack, just in case, Archer kissed her. “Come back,” he said.
“Always,” she replied.
Then, standing, she blinked. The Illuminated world came surging up around her as she lifted her arms, making a path through the sea of light, and with a wave of her hands, she teleported from the sick bay and onto the
deck of the Brother . . . where she found herself standing in a downpour.
It was torrential. It was apocalyptic. A monumental twisting of the skies until they were wrung dry again. She was definitely back in Oxscini; only the Forest Kingdom had rains like this.
As the water soaked into her clothing, she wondered sourly if the Book would have warned her if she’d read on a little longer.
She wondered if not warning her was a sort of revenge for distrusting it.
Blinking water from her eyelashes, she studied the shoreline of brightly colored buildings. This had to be Epigloss, Epidram’s twin city on the northwestern tip of Oxscini, a month’s voyage from Jahara. That she’d traveled so far in less than a breath was still a marvel to her.
“Sorcerer?”
Sefia turned to find a boy peering at her from beneath his hood. His red curls were damp, clinging to the edges of his pale, freckled face. “Hi, Griegi,” she said.
She’d given them no warning when she left—she’d just left. For Archer. To save Archer. Two months on the road with them, and she hadn’t given them an explanation, hadn’t even said good-bye. Would they forgive her for that?
“You’re really here!” He pulled her into a large, wet hug. “Where’d you come from?”
With a relieved grin, Sefia threw her arms around him. Griegi gave the best hugs—he’d wrap you up and wouldn’t let go even when you thought you should lean away, and for a full minute it would be like you were the only person who existed to him.
Griegi drew back suddenly, his hazel eyes wide. “Archer’s gone! He—”
But before he could finish, the other bloodletters surrounded them, descending from their watch posts or emerging from belowdecks. Like Griegi, some of them seemed glad to see her, touching her arm or squeezing her hand, but others hung back, glowering at her from beneath their rain gear.
“What are you doing here?”
“Where have you been?”
Why had she come back, after all these weeks? How had she come back?
“Sefia.” Scarza’s soft voice reached her over the noise, and a hush fell over the bloodletters as they let him pass. With the rain trailing out of his short silver hair and down the handsome lines of his face, he seemed tired, older than his twenty-odd years, but his weariness seemed to melt away when he smiled, dimpling the corners of his mouth. “We’ve got a lot to catch up on.”
* * *
• • •
Soon they were all ensconced in the great cabin, which had become a workshop of sorts, crammed with scraps of leather and paper, spools of thread and bottles of glue. Griegi doled out steaming cups that filled the room with the scents of coffee, cardamom, and cinnamon. Some of the boys were muttering to each other. Others watched her warily from their seats. Closing her eyes, Sefia inhaled deeply; the smell of Griegi’s coffee and the sounds of the boys’ voices made her think of smoky mornings around the campfire, with the mist rising from the hills of the Delienean Heartland.
Home’s what you make it, Nin had told her once. For a long time, Sefia had thought home was lost to her—a house on a hill overlooking the sea, a woman with hands like miracles—but looking around the great cabin, she realized now that she had not one home but many.
Archer. The Current. The bloodletters.
She hoped they’d forgive her, eventually.
While they took seats around the cast-iron stove, she asked if they still had the wand that had been among Archer’s things. The chief mate had given it to her a season ago, to contact the Current of Faith if she ever needed. Magic bound the mate to the trees that made up the Current, and he could use the timbers as his eyes, though he was blind, and as his ears. The wand had come from the same trees, and with it, she could speak to him as if he were right beside her.
At Scarza’s command, Keon, the skinny boy from the south coast of Deliene, ducked out to fetch it, though not before shooting a glare in Sefia’s direction.
In Archer’s absence, Scarza had clearly become their leader. The silver-haired boy had always been self-possessed and levelheaded, but quiet, outshone by Archer’s skill in combat and Kaito’s brash personality. Watching him lead the bloodletters now, Sefia wondered if all this time Scarza should have been their chief. If he’d been the one leading them, maybe Archer wouldn’t have been consumed by his desire to hunt impressors. Maybe Kaito would’ve still been alive.
When Keon returned, he bowed before her, extending the wand as if on a satin pillow instead of his callused hands. “Sorcerer.” He made the title sound like an insult.
“Stop that,” Griegi said, tugging him back.
“She left us.”
“But she came back.”
Begrudgingly, Keon allowed himself to be pulled down next to Griegi, but he continued scowling at Sefia as he put his arm protectively around the curly-haired cook.
In her fingers, the smooth length of wood felt familiar, still smelling of mint and medicine. Feeling the bloodletters’ eyes on her, she lifted the wand and whispered, “I hope you can hear me. Please tell Archer I made it to the bloodletters, and we’ll all be together again soon.”
She half-expected the wand to warm in her hands. To shiver. Something. But it gave no sign that the chief mate had received her message.
With a shrug, Sefia handed the wand to Scarza, who laid it carefully in his lap. “So,” he said, nodding at her, “start at the beginning.”
She told them everything: how she’d left to save Archer, how she’d bargained with Tanin to keep him out of the war, how her parents had betrayed the Guard to change her destiny, how she’d teleported to Archer and fought off his captors—
“So that’s what happened,” said Scarza, rubbing his left arm where he was missing his left hand and the lower part of his forearm. “When Frey and Aljan didn’t return, we organized an assault on the tavern.”
They’d seen evidence of a fight—a splintered door, clay floors soaked with blood, the sour scent of spilled wine.
“Yeah,” Sefia said. They must have arrived after she’d taken Archer. “That was me.”
“But you left Frey and Aljan?” Keon snapped.
“Shh.” Griegi took his hand. “Let her tell her side of the story.”
Flexing her fingers around her mug, she explained that she didn’t know Frey and Aljan had been captured until it was too late. She couldn’t teleport back without the Book to guide her, just like she’d needed the Book to teleport to the bloodletters. But now she was back. She wanted to help them rescue Frey and Aljan. Then she’d get Archer from the Current, and they could all sail to Haven, the hidden island in the Central Sea, home to over seventy outlaw ships that had been driven off the ocean by the Alliance.
“The chief,” someone whispered. “We’d have our chief back.”
“We can all live there,” she said, “while the Red War passes us by.”
The bloodletters were silent.
“What?” she asked.
“There’s a problem. The tavern was deserted when we got there, but we found a note.” Scarza handed her a scrap of paper. “Keon deciphered it for us.”
The skinny boy nodded. “Aljan was teaching me, after you abandoned us.”
Guiltily, she bit her lip. She’d taught all of the bloodletters something about reading—every one of them could recognize the mantras tattooed on their forearms—but Aljan had been her most diligent student. And now he’d been captured.
The parchment crinkled under her fingers as she unfolded it.
The Book for the bloodletters.
Viridian Shipyard. Half-moon. Midnight.
—2
Two—the Second Assassin—Tanin’s new title.
Tanin, who’d promised Sefia that Archer would remain untouched. Tanin, who’d lied. Despite her assurances, the Guard had gone after Archer anyway.
But it was Sefia w
ho’d trusted her, who’d wanted to believe that Tanin respected her—loved her, even—enough to keep her word.
“Half-moon is tomorrow night,” Sefia said.
Scarza rubbed his eyes. “We know.”
They’d already scouted Viridian Shipyard, hoping to break out their friends before the exchange, but they could find no trace of their fellow bloodletters anywhere.
Sefia folded the note again. “Tanin will probably teleport them in at the last second, if she brings them at all.”
Sheepishly, Keon brought out the decoy book he’d been constructing in his makeshift workshop, but the leather wasn’t quite the right color, the stains weren’t in quite the right places, the metal they’d used to cap the corners wasn’t quite the same tarnished gold. It might have fooled Tanin for a minute, in the dark, but a minute wouldn’t have been enough for them to escape.
“The whole thing will be a trap anyway,” Sefia said, shaking her head.
“A trap within a trap,” Scarza agreed. “But without you, without the Book, what could we do?”
She fingered the strap of her rucksack, which sat on the floor beside her, dripping water. Giving up the Book would mean giving up Archer—with the Book, the Guard would be able to find him, no matter where he was, and drag him into their war. Not giving it up would mean giving up Frey and Aljan.
But Sefia could use the Book. With it, she could find Frey and Aljan, wherever Tanin was keeping them, and evade all the snares the woman must have set for her.
The problem was that the Book was a trap too, and Sefia had already failed many times trying to escape it. Even now, she felt like she’d been trapped again . . . but a small part of her was glad for the excuse to open it again.
“Well,” she said, “you have me now, and we have the Book. We’ll get them back.”
The shadow of a smile touched Scarza’s lips. Some of the others cheered.
“And then we’ll go to Haven?” Keon asked warily. “All of us?”