Dance of Thieves

by Mary E. Pearson

  When did you become so stupid, Jase?

  She invaded my family, my home.

  With every mile we traveled, my anger grew, not just at Kazi and her crew but also at the queen herself, for ordering soldiers into my realm, on my land, behind my walls. It was an invasion into my territory. If I had done the same, it would be considered an act of war, and I would be facing a noose.

  “You were pretty slow-footed back there, weren’t you Patrei?”

  I looked at Wren. She eyed me with that lethal stare of hers. “Go torment someone else.”

  Surprisingly she did. She rode ahead with Synové. No doubt it was she who’d be keeping a close eye on me next. It wasn’t as if I could go anywhere. My team of horses could never outrun them, and if I tried my back would be a sure target for one of Synové’s arrows.

  “We can take them,” Beaufort said when he realized no one was there to hear.

  I looked back at him over my shoulder. “No,” I answered. “They’re armed and they’re Rahtan.”

  Sarva’s lip lifted in a snarl. “But they still have soft skulls like anyone else.”

  Bahr lifted his shackled wrists. “Next time they unchain us to leak our lizards, we grab a rock and bash in their heads—”

  “We’re not bashing in heads,” I said.

  “Easy for you to say,” Kardos jeered. “You don’t know their queen. She’ll have all our heads on pikes before we can say hello—including yours.”

  “He’s right,” Beaufort said. “She has a vicious streak, and a vendetta against anyone who defied her.”

  “You all fought against her?”

  “Except for the scholars,” Sarva answered. As usual, the scholars remained silent. They both seemed terrified.

  “The rest of us fought with the Komizar,” Bahr said. “Now, that man was a real leader.”

  The man who chopped off children’s fingers?

  I had heard rumors about him. That he was twelve feet tall. That his sword was made from the teeth of dragons. That he was an Ancient who had survived the centuries. That he wasn’t really slain because it was impossible to slay a man who was part god. The stories surrounding him were as embellished as the ones that explained the stars in the sky. By the time information reached Hell’s Mouth, it was hard to tell fact from myth. Even Bahr’s firsthand account seemed more myth than truth. No one disobeyed his commands. He could silence the devil with a whisper.

  His cruel punishment of children was the only story that didn’t feel like myth. I remembered Kazi’s eyes when she flung her fingers up in front of me. Look at my fingers, Jase! Take a good long look. In that moment, her eyes told me everything. I saw the desperate life she’d been forced to live.

  * * *

  Synové had caught some game—a small antelope—and its split carcass sizzled over a spit. We were camped in a copse of spirit trees that sprouted up among ruins. Trees walked up circular staircases and perched in windows like thin ghosts. Bahr didn’t seem so brave about bashing in heads now. His head turned at every rustle, and I doubted he’d want to step alone into the dark to leak anything now.

  I was chained to a tree. We all were. I had a shackle around my ankle once again.

  Kazi was off tending Mije. She managed to avoid me all day, which took some effort since we were headed in the same direction.

  Natiya reached over the fire and split the ribs of the antelope to help it cook faster.

  “Hungry?” I asked. “Are you still eating for two? Or maybe it’s eight by now? Your lies seem to multiply like maggots.”

  “Watch your mouth, Patrei,” Eben warned, brandishing his knife. At least that much of what Natiya had said was true, he was good with a knife.

  “Just eating for myself,” she answered, cheerfully patting her flat stomach.

  “Your queen never intended to come, did she? She’s not just an invader but a liar too.”

  “I said, watch your mouth!” Eben snapped.

  “Her letter was a farce,” I snarled.

  “My letter to her was a farce,” Kazi answered. All our heads turned. She stepped out of the shadows into the light of the fire. “And the queen knew it. I gave her ample clues—ones you and your brothers didn’t see. Golden thannis? It’s poison. I asked her to bring you a gift of poison.” Her tone was thick with sarcasm. “I would never have asked her to come to Tor’s Watch.”

  She said it with scorn, like my home was beneath the queen. I stared at her. From the very beginning, everything was a lie. “Was there ever anything truthful about you?”

  She met my gaze. “You will not lecture me about truth. Ever.”

  “I was under no obligation to tell you about family business.”

  “Business? That’s what you call it? Stockpiling an arsenal of weapons?”

  “Yes! That is our business! And we had every right—”

  “To put all the kingdoms under your thumb? To put a rope around the queen’s neck?”

  “There you go with your Vendan embellishments again!”

  “You were hiding known fugitives!”

  “And you were—”

  “Back, both of you!” Eben came between us, pushing us apart, our chests still heaving. I hadn’t realized I had stood up or that she had stepped so close we were screaming inches from each other.

  She glared at me, her breaths still coming in gasps. “The queen is not a liar. She couldn’t submit to your thinly veiled demand to come to Tor’s Watch because she’s confined to her bed. She can’t travel. Or I promise you she would be here to take this scum back to face justice herself!”

  Her eyes glistened. “Don’t ever talk to me about truth again.” Her voice was broken, shaky. She turned on her heel and disappeared back into the shadows.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

  KAZI

  I stooped at the creek’s edge, filling the last water skin. Broken stone walls jutted up from the landscape around me. I had been grateful for the ruins last night and the dark cave they gave me to sleep in away from everyone else. It was likely the last shelter we would have for a while.

  I corked the full water skin, and when I stood and turned Eben was there watching me.

  “I’ll help you with those,” he said. He gathered five skins up in his arms, paused and looked at me again. “You all right?”

  It wasn’t like Eben to ask a question like that. You had to be all right, always. “What do you mean?”

  He looked at me hesitantly. “That was him back there?”

  Him. My blood rushed a little faster. Now I understood. Of all his secrets, how could Jase have not told me this? He knew what Zane had done. “Yes,” I answered. “That was him.”

  Eben’s lip lifted in disgust. “The bastard. But you did the right thing, Kazi. I know it wasn’t easy for you to leave him behind. There will be another chance. We’ll go back.”

  I shook my head. “No, Eben. We both know he won’t be there. By then he’ll be long gone, hiding in some other faraway hole. I can’t spend another eleven years looking for him.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “No need to be sorry,” I said, trying to force cheer into my voice. Instead my words came out wooden. “Look at the other bastards we caught. The one we set out for and a bonus of five.”

  “Six,” he corrected. “What about the Patrei?”

  I swallowed. “Yes. Six. The Patrei too.”

  But there was something I needed to tell Eben.

  Something I had to tell them all, including Jase.

  * * *

  It was the laughter.

  It had always been the laughter that needled through me, a repeated stitch that surfaced over and over again.

  Laughter reveals in the same way a sigh or a glance does. It’s an unintentional language. Worry, fear, deceit—they hide in the things unsaid.

  Something about the laughter hadn’t felt right that first night I discovered the captain and the others in the enclave, but the shock of their words had overshadowed it.

&n
bsp; Last night when I had disappeared into the shadows I heard it again, all of them laughing, thinking Jase had gotten the better of me. That he had driven me away.

  It wasn’t laughter filled with merriment. It was filled with smug derision. The kind I remembered hearing from merchants when they tricked someone into paying more than they should, the kind of laughter that always came later, after their sucker was gone.

  It was that kind of laughter I’d heard that first night when I heard them discussing the Ballengers. It wasn’t a laughter of mirth but of mockery. The captain and his cohorts had been laughing at the Ballengers.

  Was it a double-cross?

  A betrayal?

  Thanks to the Ballengers, our riches will only become greater.

  Was Illarion using them?

  The queen had said he was an average swordsman and commander, but he’s an above average deceiver. His skill is in his patience.

  Just as he had played two roles at the citadelle in Morrighan, had he played two roles at Tor’s Watch? The role he wanted Jase’s family to see, and his hidden role to benefit himself? I was certain the Ballengers had been duped.

  “Let’s be honest, Kazi,” Natiya said when I gathered them at the creek’s edge to tell them my suspicion. “Are you sure you’re not just seeing the things you want to see because you still care for Jase?”

  “That’s over,” I answered. “Some betrayals run too deep.” His lie about Zane left me raw, and I saw the bitterness in his eyes too, when he caught me at the enclave. Our mutual betrayals had shattered anything we once had. I shook my head. “This isn’t about Jase and me. It’s about knowing the truth. Setting a trap for the queen? Jase’s dismissal of the accusation was swift and genuine. I know that much about him.”

  “You thought other things about him were genuine too,” Wren said.

  I sat down on the tumbled wall at the creek’s edge trying to sort it out, what was real and what was false, but I knew what I’d heard and the thirst for revenge against the queen had been thick in Illarion’s voice. Jase would have nothing to gain from it. “Putting a noose around the queen’s neck was the captain’s agenda,” I said. “For him, it’s as much about revenge as riches. When he joined forces with the Komizar, he’d hoped to become a wealthy man, and instead the queen made him a hunted one. And putting all the kingdoms under his thumb? Jase’s world is Hell’s Mouth, Tor’s Watch, the arena, and that’s it. He doesn’t want more than that.” I looked to Wren, Synové for confirmation. “You both know.”

  They nodded.

  “Even if it was a double cross, that still doesn’t exonerate the Ballengers,” Natiya countered.

  Eben agreed. “They were hiding known fugitives for what they thought were their own purposes. Weapons.”

  And that was the crux of it, the one thing we couldn’t ignore.

  “To be accurate, the Ballengers only hid one fugitive,” Wren corrected. “Even we didn’t know the others were alive, and there was no warrant for them.”

  “Harboring just one fugitive is enough to charge him with conspiracy,” Natiya said. “The Alliance of Kingdoms is very clear on that. It’s in the treaties. We’ll have to leave it to the queen to decide his fate.”

  Eben and Natiya left to start loading the prisoners back in the wagon. Today we would rendezvous with Griz and the troops who would escort us the rest of the way.

  “When are you going to tell Jase?” Wren asked.

  “Before we leave. I want him to know before we reach Sentinel Valley.”

  Synové frowned, swishing her bare feet through the shallow water. “You can’t let him drive the wagon once he knows. He might drive the whole bunch of them off into a gorge. Bahr will not be going that way.”

  Wren and I both eyed her suspiciously. I had seen her watching Bahr, hunger in her expression. She had taunted him to make a run for it more than once. “How will he be going, Synové?” I asked.

  She hopped out of the water, splashing us both. “However the queen chooses, of course,” she answered and walked away, saying she was going to help with the prisoners.

  “She’s right about the wagon,” Wren said. “He’ll try something. The Ballengers don’t take betrayal well.”

  How well I knew that. Priya had already pledged her revenge on me in multiple ugly ways. I was probably the number-one criminal listed on a warrant in Hell’s Mouth by now.

  “We’ll chain his leg to the footbed,” I said. “Jase takes his role of Patrei too seriously to take his own life.” And that way he wouldn’t be able to jump over the seat and attack them either. I had seen what his fist was capable of.

  “He wouldn’t be here at all if he’d stepped aside like you ordered. And then he all but let you take him down to use as a shield. I’m not sure we’d have gotten out of there otherwise. Every one of those Ballengers had blood in their eyes.”

  “What? That’s crazy. I took him by surprise.”

  “He knows your tricks by now. I don’t think he was surprised. And I saw him at the settlement, wrestling with his brothers. He’s quick.”

  “Even so, I know what happened, and you were behind me where you couldn’t see as well.”

  She shrugged. “Maybe so. But some things you can see better from a distance.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

  JASE

  “Is this the point where I’m supposed to plead for my life?”

  While Eben and Natiya loaded the other prisoners into a wagon, Wren and Synové led me into the forest, then tied me to a tree.

  “Could be,” Wren said. “Just be quiet and listen.”

  Listen to what?

  They turned and left, and I wondered if the plan was to leave me here to rot—or be eaten by a Candok. Minutes later, I heard rustling behind me. Human footsteps. Not Candok. I wasn’t sure it worried me any less.

  Kazi came into view. She stood in front of me and told me she wanted me to listen and not say a single word. There were things I needed to hear. She’d gag me if she had to.

  “You can spare me another lecture on being a thief—”

  “I said not a word.”

  I fumed. Strained against the rope that held me. “You have a true captive audience.”

  I didn’t say another word. She paced in front of me as she spoke, trying to convince me I had been played by Beaufort. Her voice held no emotion, and her eyes were just as detached.

  “Let me give you the particulars of his crimes.” She told me Beaufort had been a trusted member of the Morrighese cabinet—a man of wealth and position, but he wanted more, and conspired with the Komizar to get it. She went into great detail, his crimes ranging from infiltrating the Morrighese citadelle with enemy soldiers, to poisoning the king, to planning an attack that killed the crown prince.

  My mind ticked over the details she threw at me, taking in her version and Beaufort’s, two scenarios, two possible lies, two possible truths. She continued to pace, her demeanor void of emotion—except for her hands tapping a tense dance against her thighs.

  “Did I mention the thirty-two young soldiers who also died in the massacre he orchestrated? He was only warming up at that point. His crimes go on from there. You’ll see soon enough.

  “I realize you didn’t know about the other men,” she continued. “Torback and Phineas are Morrighese scholars who are able to decipher the secrets of the Ancients and bring them to life again. They’re traitors too. They made vows to serve the gods, but instead they serve themselves.”

  She told me that Sarva, Kardos, and Bahr were Vendan. “Everyone thought they died on the battlefield. There were so many charred bodies it was hard to tell, but some of their personal effects were found. They obviously staged their deaths before they ran.” She said Kardos was a general in the Komizar’s army who used children as young as Lydia and Nash on his front lines. It was his method of unnerving enemy soldiers before he moved his cavalry forward.

  “Sarva was the governor of a Vendan province, and Bahr a Sanctum guard.” She said
they led an attack against unarmed citizens, butchering them on the streets. Whole families died. Children, parents, grandparents. One of those families was Wren’s. She held her father as he died in her arms. “And Synové watched Bahr behead both of her parents. She had no choice but to run, because he came after her too. She was ten years old.”

  She turned to face me. “These are the men you gave sanctuary to, the ones who promised to make you weapons. What did you want them for, Jase? To protect Hell’s Mouth? The arena? I can assure you, they had much bigger plans. You’ll see just how big later today. I heard them reveling in the fact that they would have the kingdoms under their thumbs soon. That the Great Battle would look like a spring picnic. The captain’s plans were for domination. The Ballengers were a lucky stepping stone for them, their means to an end.

  “They laughed about it. They mocked you. I’m guessing they planned to kill your whole family once you gave them everything they needed—which apparently was supplies for weapons. Who better to acquire the raw materials than a wealthy family who has access to everything through the arena? I heard them laugh about the arsenal that they’d soon have. Them, not you. It wouldn’t be the first time Captain Illarion has done something like this—but you knew when you hid a fugitive in order to get what you wanted that you were taking a risk.”

  She stopped pacing and stared at me as if she was waiting for something. “Well?”

  “Oh? I have permission to speak now?”

  She nodded.

  My gaze locked onto hers and I spoke slowly, so each word had time to sink in. “Let me see if I have this straight. What you’re telling me is they infiltrated Tor’s Watch under false pretenses. They violated my family’s trust. They put them at risk. Ate our food. Slept in our beds. They used us. They made promises they had no intention of keeping. They betrayed us.”

  She swallowed, my point made.

  “So tell me, how are they different from you?”

  She looked at me like I had slapped her face. “I wouldn’t have killed you, Jase. I wouldn’t have butchered your family. Can you say the same for them?”

  “You intended to poison my family! You thought you were putting birchwings in our food!”