The band around her chest tightened and she let herself sink. It wasn't very deep here, maybe five feet, but when she landed on the bottom and the silt rose around her from the impact, it was easy for her to imagine she was somewhere else.
Through the murky water, she saw Merek's face—his big, brown eyes and close-cropped brown hair, a bowed mouth framed by his stubbly half-beard. She felt his lips on hers, stealing her breath. There were his hands on her hips, his legs trapping hers, pressing her down, holding her beneath the current. He was as he had always been, at once both gentle and demanding. Kind and fierce. Stoic and passionate.
Her air was running out but she knew that if she surfaced, he would be gone.
“Stay,” she said, the sound muffled in her ears, bubbles escaping her mouth and rising without her.
The apparition held a finger up to its lips, signaling her to be quiet, and then pointed to the surface.
“What?” she asked. But he was already disappearing, melting into the dirt and the water, taking a small piece of her with him.
Even as her lungs threatened to burst, she remembered his warning and surfaced slowly, careful not to make any noise, sticking only enough of her face above the water so that she could see and breathe. The sun was going down and at first, she couldn't see anything, but then the dull light of a sinking winter sun fell across two figures walking along the riverbank. Instead of calling out, Rayne sliced through the water as quiet as a sea serpent, her toes sinking into the silt and pushing her forward. Her progress was painfully slow, but when she got close enough to see who it was, she was glad she hadn't been noticed.
Wido and Imeyna walked side-by-side. He was tall, even taller than Imeyna, and his wide eyes stood out in his face like two round moons. He had long, lanky limbs and held his hands clasped behind his back with his black cloak formally buttoned to his neck. He was Imeyna but more somehow—taller, bigger, darker, sharper. He was the face of the rebellion, the president of Shade who had kept Rayne's father at bay for the past twenty years.
“It was not as easy as you had perhaps anticipated, then?” Wido was saying.
Imeyna's voice was no less confident than usual. “The crown princess is guarded by an elemental wielder, not just a spellwielder, and the Ashsky prince, no less.”
Wido held up a hand to silence her. “His heritage is of no concern to me,” Wido said without taking his eyes from Imeyna. Even out of his line of sight, Rayne felt the intensity of his gaze, though of course, Imeyna held strong. “What I want to know is, can it still be done? You assured me she was ready—”
“We hadn't trained—”
“I don't want excuses,” Wido interrupted. Their rapid back and forth stretched the tension so tight that Rayne fought the urge to submerge herself again to avoid the recoil when it snapped. Wido was the leader, but Imeyna was the one in the trenches. This was her home, her plan. “I want results.”
“We all do,” Imeyna snapped back. “And we'll get them, now that we know what we're dealing with.” They were moving as they walked and Rayne was trailing along behind them, aware that beneath the water, she wore no clothes. What would be worse? Being found out as an eavesdropper, or meeting the rebel leader naked as the day she was born?
“Even though the Crows now know what they're dealing with, too?” Wido stopped walking and gripped his daughter's shoulders. “How much did they see? Did she give herself away?”
“No,” Imeyna answered, shaking her head. “I do not think so.”
“Are you sure that the lost are dead?”
Imeyna dropped her eyes from his for the first time. “Yes,” she answered. “They cannot betray us.”
“But they know we have someone who can get past the barriers. They'll know we have a weapon.”
“Perhaps they'll think her dead in the collapse,” Imeyna said.
Wido paused, his face softening and his grip loosening into something resembling a hug. “If I could go back and change anything,” he said, “it would be to go back in time and more fiercely protect my daughters.” His words immediately brought Madlin to the front of Rayne's mind. Her laugh that sounded like the clinking of silver coins. The way that her hugs always left the recipient breathless.
But Madlin didn’t belong just to her. Madlin was Wido’s youngest daughter, stolen from them when she was just five and taken to Flagend, where King Innis had bought her on a whim and given her to the royal children as a gift. It was strange to Rayne that Wido and Imeyna would have different memories of the same girl. Memories of a cooing baby, maybe, and a stumbling toddler. Of a curious and smiling child.
“Innis has lost one daughter,” Wido continued, “he will not lose another.”
“You mean he won't let his guard down on a simple perhaps,” Imeyna said thoughtfully.
“And I will not risk exposure because of a maybe.”
He meant Rayne. He would not let the fate of the Shadderns lie with Rayne. During her first year training with the Knights of Shade, death had loomed over her as a constant threat. What could be scarier to a twelve-year-old girl, after all? Imeyna had used it as a weapon, a tool to instill fear in her and make her obedient. But she had slowly become one of them, part of the group—of the family. She had thought the time for those threats had passed, but she was still just a piece of the larger puzzle. If she did not fit, she would be thrown away. Alone, she was nobody. It was only with the rebels that she had a place, a purpose. This was the only place she belonged, and even they didn't want her.
“You raised me,” Imeyna said, her voice stern. “And I raised her. I raised her up from a weakling princess into a rebel, an assassin.” Imeyna put a hand on her own chest, letting Wido's arms fall back to his sides. This was the woman who had saved her. Together, they had risen up out of grief to find solace in each other, peace in the middle of a rebellion. “She will complete her mission, no matter the cost.”
They resumed their walk but Rayne stayed behind, her stomach roiling. They had all paid so much already, and now, Rayne was expected to pay the ultimate price. It was why she had come to Shade, wasn't it? For revenge? They wanted her to be a rebel and nothing else. They didn't want her to be a sister or a daughter, and especially not a Crowheart.
But when she had been face-to-face with her sister, she hadn't felt the anger she had expected. Of the three Crowheart children, Rayne had been closest to Edlyn. Their brother, Rinnan, was the heir, the princeling, the future king of Dusk, and because of it, had never fit in with his sisters. He spent his days in training behind closed doors, while his sisters were free to roam the castle grounds. It had always been Edlyn and Rayne, and later Madlin. Madlin, who had been Imeyna's little sister and who had been lost to the violence of a king. Madlin, whose death had brought Rayne to this place, to this very moment, in fact.
When Wido and Imeyna were out of sight, Rayne waded out of the water and pulled on her shift dress that had thankfully gone unnoticed where it lay on a rock on the shore. As she was tying her boots, a black crow alighted on a branch just above her head. She couldn’t remember if one crow was a good or bad sign, but she felt uneasy as it cocked its head to watch her with one beady, black eye.
“I'm scared,” Rayne said to the bird. She wouldn't have admitted it to anyone else. She knew better than that. Knights were not afraid, and if she wasn’t a Knight, and she wasn’t a princess, she was nothing at all.
CHAPTER NINE
Rayne
Rayne had been shaken by what she'd heard and dreaded what the night might bring, so she took her time dressing, and Tamsin did not rush her for once. It was refreshing to know that even amicable Tamsin, who was kind to everybody, did not like her own father-in-law.
“It's not that I do not like him,” she insisted as she ran the comb through Rayne's still-wet hair. “He is just a difficult man to read.”
“Do you get one of your feelings?” Rayne asked, tugging at her sleeves. They had put her in a deep green velvet dress with long sleeves to hide her bruises,
and even though she had spent the first twelve years of her life in elaborate dresses, she was never comfortable in them. She preferred her training garb—earth-tone trousers and loose tops that let her breathe. Tamsin had at least let her wear her daggers in their thigh sheaths beneath her skirt.
Tamsin grunted in response, then quickly said, “We don't talk about that, remember?” Just as Rayne could feel a person's magic, Tamsin could sense untrustworthy or dangerous people just by being near them. It could almost be chalked up to intuition, but it seemed to be more precise than that. Rayne remembered how she had felt the wielder prince tugging at the magic in the tunnel. But women weren't supposed to wield; they weren't touched by Enos. Imeyna had told her, though, about the savage land across the sea and the women who lived in those lost fields. Women who had connections to the elements and the ability to prophesize. Women who had a power all their own.
“Done,” Tamsin said, rising and surveying her work. Rayne's curls were combed into submission and braided flat back from her head, forming a band from ear to ear that held back the shorter strands from her eyes. With her face exposed, she noticed her delicate features and plump, pink lips. With that and the dress, she looked almost like a lady. Almost.
Tamsin, who had not changed yet and still wore a drab smock dress with her hair wrapped in a kerchief, fluffed Rayne’s skirts and smiled at her in the glass. “You are beautiful. Everything will turn out just fine. You’ll see.” She was Imeyna’s counterpart, the positive enthusiasm to Imeyna’s cynical realism. That didn’t mean that she hadn’t known tragedy.
Hail had once been under the rule of the Malstrom family, the only of the five original families that could rival the Crowhearts in power. The Malstrom alliance with the Cliffbanes in Shade had been the turning point in the War of the Five Families and the destruction of the Casuin Empire, and the Crowhearts had never forgotten it. They suffered for a century in the small landlocked country that the families had deigned to grant them before making their move.
Tamsin’s family had been torn apart in the Malstrom Massacre that had catapulted Rayne’s father into power. Tamsin’s own father, a royal guard, had been killed on the palace steps trying to save one of the Malstrom princesses, and her mother, a palace servant, had just had time to stuff Tamsin in a boat going upriver to Shade before being run through by a Crowheart blade. Tamsin had as much reason to hate Rayne and her family as anyone, but she never let it show. Rayne appreciated Imeyna’s strength and honesty but had always found comfort in Tamsin’s kind embraces.
Rayne turned into one now, burying her face in the crook of the woman’s neck. She smelled as she always did—of fresh-baked bread and smoldering embers. If Imeyna had been like Rayne’s sister, Tamsin had been like her mother, and that smell—that smell meant home and safety.
“Thank you,” Rayne said to Tamsin, hoping that Tamsin knew it was for more than that afternoon’s bath. If she did, though, she gave no indication of it, jovially patting Rayne on the arm and smiling in the way that she did to hide her crooked front teeth, lips pressed together, her eyes crinkling in the corners.
That night, the Shadderns lit the ceremonial funeral pyres. Rayne watched from the meeting hall's gabled rooftop, another of her hiding places. She had a lot of them because as much as the Knights had mistrusted her, her twelve-year-old self had been equally as scared of them. She had become skilled at finding the small, dark corners.
Tugging her knees to her chest, she watched a hooded man take a torch to the pyre containing Merek's items. Everything he owned was there—his clothes, his papers, his treasured map book—and would be burned to accompany him to Elanos, where he would feast with Enos and the others that died a hero's death. Shade was the last country to recognize what her father viewed as an antiquated practice. Dusk had a massive crypt beneath the mountains where her ancestors were buried, and where he would be buried. Rayne didn't know where she would end up. In turmoil beneath the weight of the Silver Hills, or perhaps reduced to ashes and smoke and sent into the sky? Even worse would be the traitor's burial, dumped in a mass grave with other criminals or tipped into the river with a rock tied to her ankles. There would be no rest for her then.
There were other fires burning for Emma and Rolf and Giles, scattered throughout Bricboro wherever their families had prepared them, but Rayne only had eyes for the one in front of her. Flames licked at the sky, smoke wafting into the darkness. Rayne shifted forward, sliding against the rough roofing tiles as Merek's pyre began to burn, trying to imagine Merek's fingers in her hair, brushing her face as he ascended.
But she felt nothing.
No, that wasn't true. Almost as soon as she realized she wasn't alone, a voice cut through her silence.
“Can this be our little Crow?”
Of all people, Rayne had not expected to see Wido on her rooftop. She began to scramble to her feet but he stopped her with a hand on her shoulder.
“No, don't,” he said. “Let an old man rest.” He sat slowly beside her, and she found herself reaching out to steady him until he was situated. His long legs dangled at least a foot below hers, and he leaned back on his arms, tilting his head to the night sky.
Silence stretched between them until she was squirming uncomfortably. “I'm sorry,” she finally said just to have something to say. “I won't fail again.”
He licked his lips and closed his eyes. Overhead, a cloud moved in front of the sea of stars. “I knew the Malstrom sisters,” he said. “Your father could have married Carys if he hadn't been so obedient.”
Rayne’s father and his brother, Wynn, had grown up with the Malstrom sisters, and though he never spoke of them, she knew enough to know that Carys had been the middle sister and that she—like the others—had died in the Malstrom Massacre on the steps of the palace. All but one, the youngest, the one that their father the king had named as his descendant. For a long time, Innis had searched for her on Casuin, following false leads and hanging those thought to be in cahoots with her. The bodies of dock workers and ladies' maids decorated the palace walls for years. Now it was believed that she had been whisked away on a boat in the middle of the night before the massacre had even begun.
“Jamisen would have been a magnificent queen,” Wido said, naming the oldest sister, the one who had stabbed Rayne's uncle and started the whole thing. “She would have saved Hail and Shade. All of Casuin, in fact. Innis would have cowered beneath her rule. But Darcey—” He paused, letting the name sink in between them. No one had seen the mysterious Darcey Malstrom since the night before the massacre. Her father had sent countless ships loaded with assassins across the Impassable Strait, and none had returned, lost either to storms, the sea monsters that patrolled the waters, or to the savages that lived in the Fields.
“Well,” Wido continued, “if she ever returns, I will be waiting, with her country in my hands.”
Wido sat up then and reached inside his high-necked cloak. “I nearly forgot,” he said, handing her a small, familiar book. “I saved this for you. I thought it might serve you better than a dead man.”
The feel of the book was familiar in her hands, and when she looked down at it, she saw that it was Merek's map book, the one that he had treasured and studied constantly. Without thinking, she held it to her nose and breathed in the smell of the crinkled pages. They still held the scent of freshly-cut wood that had always followed Merek.
“Thank you,” Rayne whispered to Wido, not able to look up at him.
Wido stood, gave her a mock salute, and then leaped from the roof before Rayne could make a sound. She gasped, scrambling to look over the edge. He was gone, the book in her hand the only evidence that he had even been there at all.
Rayne hugged it to her chest, letting her eyes drift past the pyres, over the walls of Bricboro, to the river that passed nearby. There was a boat drifting down the river, a hulking black mass in the night. Lost in her thoughts, it took her too long to realize how wrong that was. No boats would travel down this leg of the T
or River at night unless they were approaching in secret. Then another light moved, this one in the trees along the riverbank. Slowly, she pulled herself into a crouch, the roof groaning beneath her. The longer she stared into the darkness, the more obvious the movement in the shadows became. Finally, a flag on the mast of the ship turned with a change in the breeze and she saw it, black on white, the outline of a crow in flight.
She leaped down as Wido had done, the ground jarring her knees and sending her stumbling and crashing into a tall woman in black robes. Imeyna.
“They're coming!” Rayne yelled before she had even fully regained her feet. “They're coming!” Others were turning to look at her.
Imeyna was the first to react, drawing her sword. “Who?” she asked.
Rayne tried to swallow her panic, to bite back the tremble in her voice. “My father.” Her father was coming, but was he coming for her or the rebel assassin that had tried to kill his daughter? And did he realize yet that they were one and the same?
✽ ✽ ✽
It didn't take long for the enemy soldiers to crest the hill and for the watchmen in the towers to sound the alarm, but by then, it was too late. The Knights were woefully unprepared, reeling from a failure, grieving their dead. Any other day, the Shaddern fighting force would have risen to the occasion, but when Rayne looked around, she saw only stunned, confused faces. Rayne watched from Imeyna's side, saw how the moonlight made her father's men seem like haunts, creatures of the night. In the midst of the chaos, Wido stood completely still, his eyes reflecting the distant moonlight, his face impassive.
“Princess,” Imeyna said, her hand suddenly heavy on Rayne's shoulder. “You must hide.”
There was a crawlspace beneath the wooden floors of one of the storehouses, and it was there that Imeyna led her at a hurried walk. Though the face she displayed to the Knights around her was the very portrait of calm, the too-tight grip she kept on Rayne's arm betrayed her nerves. Shouts behind them signaled the first wave of the attack. Arrows, Rayne thought, hearing the thunk of metal on wood, the gargled cry of a man down.
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