by Traci Chee
Sefia looked from him to the rest of the bloodletters. “All of us.”
Before he departed with the others, Keon took her aside. Through the fringe of his wavy, sun-streaked hair, his eyes were hard. “He’d never tell you, but you broke Griegi’s heart when you left. Don’t get his hopes up if you’re just going to leave again.”
She swallowed. “I won’t.”
He left her in the cabin with the Book as she tried to figure out the safest way to get the information they needed, tried to foresee the tricks that were surely in store for her.
Questions about the future were perilous. She’d learned that the hard way, when they’d lost Versil and Kaito.
But a location would be innocuous enough. She hoped.
Outside, the downpour continued.
Taking a breath, she traced the edges of the cover, as she did every time she opened the Book. “Where is Tanin holding Frey and Aljan now?”
Then, taking another sip of Griegi’s coffee to sharpen her wits, she opened the Book and began to read.
Twice Betrayed
Tanin moved languidly along the fine wood-paneled corridor, her fingers trailing over the carved friezes of wild horses, hooves sharp and teeth exposed, manes and tails flying in a nonexistent wind. At either end of the short hallway stood a guard, each one alert and well-armed, their weight shifting easily with the gentle rocking of the ship.
“There’s an additional guard in each of the rooms,” said her lieutenant, Escalia, walking beside her. The woman was so tall and broad she seemed to strain the confines of the narrow corridor. Others might have shrunk from her presence, but Tanin had been forced to kneel before Stonegold, that pompous, overstuffed excuse for a king—for a Director—and she’d sworn she’d cut out her own spleen before she cowered in front of anyone again.
“One for each prisoner,” Escalia finished.
Wordlessly, Tanin opened the door to the nearest cabin and looked in. Already cramped with its bunk, wardrobe, and small basin for washing, the room seemed even smaller with the prisoner chained to a chair in the center of the floor and the guard standing behind him, blocking the light from the single porthole.
Face hidden beneath his black hood, the prisoner turned toward her. His chains clinked faintly.
Since his head was covered, even Tanin couldn’t tell if this was one of the two bloodletters or one of her decoys.
Perfect.
The guard flicked Tanin a salute, and she said nothing as she closed the door again.
“Satisfied?” Escalia asked. The woman’s gold teeth gleamed in the dim light filtering from the hatchway at one end of the hall.
“Hardly,” Tanin whispered. Hearing her ruined voice, she lifted her fingers to the scarf at her throat, the one that hid the scar Sefia had given her the first time they’d met.
She wouldn’t be satisfied until she had the Book in her possession.
Until she’d killed Stonegold, the bloated snake who’d displaced her.
Until she was Director of the Guard again.
“Now give them all the same clothing,” she said. “So they’ll look identical too.”
“Will do, ma’am.”
With the Book, Sefia was at an advantage. If she was clever—and she was clever, as clever as her father, if she’d mastered Teleportation, the highest tier of Illumination, simply by observing Tanin—she’d see the shipyard for the ambush it was. She’d detect Tanin’s tricks and see through her deceptions.
A flicker of admiration—or was that pride?—sputtered in Tanin’s chest, but she quashed it instantly.
Twice, she’d been betrayed by the girl and her family.
She would not be caught out again.
Sefia was her enemy—and her target—nothing more.
And for all her talents, she had a weakness that her parents didn’t. Lon and Mareah would never have gone back to rescue their captured friends. Lon and Mareah would have cut their losses and run.
But not Sefia. Sefia had come for the Locksmith. Sefia had come for the boy.
She was a girl of sentiment. She would come for her friends too.
Tanin checked on the next prisoner, heard the rattle of his chains, and smiled. She hadn’t held her own as Director of the Guard for over twenty years without cleverness and talent of her own.
She would outmaneuver both Sefia and the Book.
And then they would both be hers.
CHAPTER 6
The Shell Game
Sefia had never been more convinced that the Book had motives of its own. As Scarza had said, Tanin had laid a trap within a trap, but Tanin was not the only one trying to trap her.
The Book was an instrument of destiny. It wanted her to become the reader from the legends, destroyer of armies. It wanted Archer to become the boy who conquered all of Kelanna and died soon after. It would do anything to make that future come to pass.
And, she realized, it had been doing so for years. It hadn’t merely foretold her parents’ deaths—it had given them the exact information that would make them betray the Guard, so the Guard would, when Sefia was nine years old, torture and murder her father, leaving his body on the kitchen floor for her to find.
It hadn’t merely warned her about Archer’s future, either. It had led her to believe that if she left him, he’d return to his hometown, to his family, to a girl he used to love, and he’d be safe. But leaving him had led her here . . . to these traps.
It wanted something else now, something that would nudge her closer to destiny. She just didn’t know what.
And she didn’t have long to figure it out.
She wished she didn’t have to risk going, but she was the only hope Frey and Aljan had. The bloodletters couldn’t come with her. Tanin wasn’t in Epigloss—there’d been no sounds of rain outside her ship—and Sefia couldn’t teleport them all in and back out again without taking more time than they had.
On the table in the great cabin, she sketched out a rough diagram of the corridor for the others to study: closed doors, hooded prisoners, heavily armed guards.
“It’s a shell game,” Scarza said, tapping each of the six cabins—three on the port side, three on the starboard. “If I were her, I’d shuffle them every few hours.”
“It’ll be total guesswork if they’re gagged,” said Keon as he placed a set of sleeping darts into a cuff for Sefia to hide up her sleeve.
“Not total guesswork.” She slid a sharpened knife into a sheath at her waist. “I’ll have Illumination.”
“You’d better hope they’re gagged, sorcerer,” Griegi added as he brought them a plate of fried, sugared dough, “or, if you guess wrong, they’ll bring the whole ship down on you.”
While they tried to predict what other traps Tanin had laid for her, Keon cobbled together a rig from bottles of acid and a revolver’s firing pin—for destroying the Book if Sefia was caught.
Whatever happened, the Guard could not get the Book.
Tanin couldn’t get the Book. Carefully, Sefia packed the Book and the bottles of acid into her rucksack, nestling them in wads of cotton batting so they wouldn’t break by accident.
Taking Scarza aside, she told him Captain Reed’s directions to Haven—the positions of the sun and stars, the colors of the water, the signs that would show them the way. If something went wrong, they still had to get to safety.
Outside, the sky darkened. Rain continued to hammer the ship.
When Sefia was finally ready, Scarza bowed his head and crossed his forearms—the bloodletter salute. It had been Kaito’s idea, originally, copied from his old Gormani customs.
The others mirrored him.
The words inked on their arms seemed to taunt her now: We were dead, but now we rise—the way they described themselves, having survived the impressors’ training and fighting rings. What is written comes to pass—th
e way they used to throw themselves into battle, believing the Book guided their blades.
Which it did, Sefia thought. Only it was also guiding them toward something else—the Red War, Archer’s death.
“Come back safe,” said Scarza.
“Come back,” Keon added meaningfully. Griegi elbowed him, but the skinny boy just shrugged. “With Frey and Aljan.”
Sefia didn’t respond. She and Scarza had already discussed the possibility that Frey and Aljan were dead, and the whole shell game was only to support the illusion that they were still alive.
She blinked, and the Illuminated world sprang to life before her eyes—a sparkling, ever-shifting landscape of light and time and power. Narrowing her eyes, she swept her hands through the golden particles, which curled and eddied around her fingers like motes of dust.
Where was the corridor she had seen in the Book?
Ships, oceans, jungle fronds, and night-blooming flowers seemed to fly past her . . . and then she saw it: a narrow, darkened hall, its walls carved with wild horses, with six doors and two guards at either end.
“Good-bye,” she whispered to the bloodletters, and, lifting her arms, she teleported herself from the Brother and into the corridor.
She landed in a crouch, flinging two sleeping darts from her sleeve.
The barbs made no sound as they flew through the air.
For a startling moment, she felt like her mother, the Assassin.
One struck the guard in the hatchway. The second embedded itself in the other guard’s calf.
They fell immediately, so quick, Sefia almost didn’t throw out her magic in time to catch them before they hit the ground.
She paused, listening for sounds from above.
Nothing. The ship was quiet but for the footsteps of the watch.
Now for the shell game. Inhaling deeply, Sefia stood and faced the doors: three on one side of the corridor, three on the other.
As the Illuminated world ebbed and flowed around her, time appeared to run in reverse, the prisoners shuffling backward out of their cabins and into others, again and again, their paths crossing and re-crossing so many times in the past day she couldn’t track even one of them, much less all six.
The seconds she hesitated felt like eons. Maybe Frey and Aljan weren’t here at all.
No, wait. There.
Two days ago, one of the prisoners had made an escape attempt, bowling into the guards, his hood pulled up to his chin.
Brown skin and a neck blistered with burns.
Aljan.
Sefia grinned.
The ocean of light washed through the hall as she tracked him over the next two days, being prodded from one room to another.
At last she blinked again, dismissing her magic. He was in the middle port-side cabin.
Cracking the door, she sent a dart flying into the room, where it struck the woman standing behind the chair. She slumped.
Behind her, in the porthole, Sefia caught a glimpse of moonlight on turquoise waters, a nearly perfect crescent of white sand, and the old cone of a volcano rising in the distance. She allowed herself a smile. She’d been right—Tanin’s ship wasn’t in Epigloss.
Creeping forward with the soundless stalking steps she’d cultivated as a hunter, Sefia approached the chair.
“Aljan?” she whispered.
He didn’t speak. Perhaps he was gagged after all.
Gingerly, she lifted the hood from the prisoner’s face. “Aljan, it’s m—”
But it was not Aljan.
He was a boy, yes. He was branded, yes.
But he launched himself at her so fast she barely had time to dodge out of the way. He caught her by the leg, slamming her to the floor.
She winced, thinking of the Book in her rucksack. Was the padding enough to keep the bottles of acid from breaking?
She lashed out with her knife, cutting his sleeve, the scarred skin beneath.
His arm had fifteen parallel burns, like Archer’s. He’d killed fifteen other boys for the impressors, like Archer. He’d made it to the Cage, like Archer.
Unlike Archer, he’d been taken by the Guard.
The boy was a candidate.
Her stomach twisted. How many did the Guard have?
He wrenched her ankle so viciously she cried out in pain. Her grip on the knife loosened, and the boy tore it from her grasp, slashing her across the hand before she blinked, throwing him back with a sweep of her arm.
He struck the edge of the bunk. There was a sharp crack and a grunt.
“Who’s out there?” someone cried from the next cabin over. “What’s going on?”
Sefia scrambled to her feet. She knew that voice.
It was Frey.
Standing, the boy lunged at her again. She tried to send him flying, but he ducked her magic and came at her, her own blade flashing in his hand.
She threw a dart from her sleeve.
The candidate dodged. It didn’t even come close to him, he was so fast. Almost as fast as Archer.
But the dart distracted him long enough for her to dash from the cabin into the corridor, slamming the door behind her.
Footsteps pounded on the deck above as she ran to Frey’s cabin. The guard inside was already opening the door, but Sefia hurled him back, into the tiny wardrobe, and rammed his head against the wall.
“Frey?”
“Sefia!”
Sefia ran to the chair, pulling off Frey’s hood as she swept the guard’s unconscious body in front of the door seconds before someone else struck it from the other side.
“There’s a lock on my chains,” said Frey, nodding over her shoulder. Her high-cheekboned face was stubbled and bruised, and her black hair was coming loose from its braids.
“Did they hurt you?” Sefia asked quickly.
“A few cuts and bruises.” The girl’s brown eyes gleamed, showing she hadn’t been defeated. Not by a long shot. “Honestly, the worst thing was not being able to shave, but look at me and tell me this face isn’t as pretty with stubble as it is without.”
That brought a smile to Sefia’s lips. Drawing her picks from the inner pocket of her vest, she knelt behind her friend and took hold of the padlock. “Do you know where Aljan is?”
The iron felt tacky in her palm, as if it had been slathered with tar. But it was a simple contraption, easy enough for her to undo.
“No, they’ve kept us separate. And Archer—”
“Archer’s fine. I’m sorry I didn’t come sooner. I—”
“You came.” As the lock popped and the chains loosened, Frey stood, squeezing Sefia’s hands once. “That’s what matters.”
Another thud sounded on the door as Sefia pressed two bone-handled knives into Frey’s hands. “I’m sorry they’re not switchblades,” she said.
With a wicked grin, the girl spun them in her hands. “They’ll do.”
“There’s a candidate out there,” Sefia said. “Maybe more.”
“A candidate?” The bloodletters never used that word to refer to themselves.
“He has the brand, but he’s not one of ours. I think the Guard got him before we—”
Frey’s eyes narrowed. “Leave him to me.”
The door buckled inward, pushing the guard’s unconscious body farther into the room.
Sefia blinked, readying her magic. But there was something wrong with her vision. The currents of gold seemed to halt and stutter, winking in and out as if they were electric bulbs about to burn out.
What did Tanin do to that lock?
“Ready?” Frey asked.
Sefia nodded and swept open the door moments before the candidate rammed through it. Frey was on him in an instant, the knives wicked and deadly in her hands. Behind him, more boys with scarred throats were in the corridor, the doors of the shell game a
ll thrown open.
Sefia ducked into the hall as Frey and the first candidate fought, slamming into the cabin walls, their blades finding bare patches of skin. Sefia closed her fists, catching two of the guards in her magical grip.
She could kill them.
They’d kill her, if they got the chance.
While she hesitated, her Illumination weakened. The candidates slipped from her grasp and sprang at her.
She caught them again, mid-leap, and this time she didn’t hesitate.
She snapped their necks.
Behind her, Frey jammed one of her knives into the first boy’s side and hit him so hard in the jaw he dropped.
For a moment, her expression was tinged with regret.
Then she retrieved her blade and joined Sefia in the hall with the rest of their enemies. “Aljan!” Frey cried.
“Frey!” Aljan’s voice reached them from the middle starboard cabin.
More guards were crowding in from the hatchway at the opposite end of the corridor. With one heave, Sefia flung them all away.
Then her magic winked out entirely. The world, once alight with tides of gold, went dark.
Sefia blinked, trying to summon her sense of the Illuminated world. It flickered to life just long enough for her to send another batch of guards flying out of their way.
Then it went black again.
She and Frey raced into Aljan’s cabin, where Frey quickly dispatched the guard and began barricading the door as Sefia whipped off Aljan’s hood. He squinted up at her—a gash, deep and wide, had bled down the left side of his face, over the flaking white paint he applied to the corners of his eyebrows in honor of his dead brother.
“Sorcerer,” he said. “Where’s Fr—”
“Here,” said Frey, leaving the barricade to cup his cheek with her palm. Closing his eyes, he leaned into her touch and kissed her hand.
Behind him, Sefia examined the lock on his chains. The metal glistened slickly in the light from the porthole. Poisoned. Something that would interfere with Sefia’s ability to use Illumination . . . and her ability to escape.
A trap within a trap.