Dance of Thieves

by Mary E. Pearson

  “It’s not a poison and you know it! It’s only a sedative.”

  “Nash and Lydia are children! I don’t care what it is!”

  “We didn’t put it in their food!”

  “And yet, Beaufort and his men never even did that much to us.”

  “Yet.”

  “We’re an independent realm, the first country, and you violated our sovereignty. Who am I supposed to believe? A Rahtan soldier who dishonored my family’s trust? Who mocked me? Or the word of a queen I’ve never met who seized land that was ours?”

  “You have no borders, Jase. The land was in the Cam Lanteux. She chose it based on what the king told her. How was she to know?”

  “So that excuse works for her, but not for me? I didn’t know what Beaufort’s crimes were beyond a tattered bill that he refuted.”

  “All you had to do was ask.”

  “We did! My father asked the king’s magistrate, who said he had no information about him.”

  “Then you should have asked the queen!”

  “The queen who doesn’t answer our letters? The queen who doesn’t even know we exist?”

  “You hid him, Jase. That says everything.” She paused, her eyes drilling into mine. “You hid a lot of things.”

  “Which crime am I really here for, Kazi? Hiding Beaufort, or hiding Zane?”

  Her lip quivered. She turned and walked away, saying over her shoulder, “Wren and Synové will come back to get you.” I strained against the ropes, crazy thoughts running through my head, thoughts that made no sense.

  “Kazi, wait!” I called.

  She stopped and for long seconds looked down at the ground.

  “I was going to tell you about Zane,” I said. “I swear I was.”

  She spun to face me. “When, Jase? When I took your ring, I gave it back to you when it mattered. When it helped you save everything you cared about. You had the chance to tell me about Zane—when it mattered to me. But you didn’t.”

  She left, and I wished there had been anger in her voice or misery in her eyes or something. Instead, there was nothing, vast empty plains of nothing, and it hit me harder than if she had struck me in the jaw again.

  The wind, time,

  They circle, repeat,

  Teaching us to be ever watchful,

  For freedoms are never won,

  Once and for all,

  But must be won over and over again.

  —Song of Jezelia

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

  KAZI

  Take a good, long look and remember the lives lost. Real people that someone loved. Before you go about the task I have given you, see the devastation and remember what they did. What could happen again. Know what is at stake. Dragons eventually wake and crawl from their dark dens.

  We stood at the mouth of Sentinel Valley, and I knew. I had done at least one right thing. Even justice couldn’t erase scars—it only delivered on a promise to the living that evil would not go unpunished. And maybe it also delivered hope that evil could be stopped for good.

  That promise bloomed now, in the sky, the soil, the wind. The spirits whispered to me. My mother whispered to me. Shhh, Kazi. Listen. Hear the language that isn’t spoken, for everyone can hear spoken words, but only a few can hear the heart that beats behind them.

  I heard the heart of the valley, the beat that still swelled through it.

  “No!” Bahr cried. “I’m not going down there! No!” As soon as he spotted our destination, he began yanking against his chains.

  Sarva and Kardos blustered similar protests. Some soldiers believed deserters could be sucked into the underworld, the dead recognizing their footfalls and reaching up through the earth to pull them under.

  “You’ll go and you’ll walk the whole length—if you make it that far,” Synové said, wanting to add to his suffering. It would slow us down, but we’d promised Synové that the long ride would be the best torture she could inflict, and this much agony Bahr was owed.

  Even the captain, who had no such Vendan superstitions, seemed to pale at the prospect of returning to the site of the infamous battle he had helped orchestrate. Phineas bent over and puked, and he hadn’t even seen anything yet.

  Jase alone looked on with curiosity. He had never been here before. His eyes skimmed the towering cliffs, the ruins that sat upon them, and the peculiar green mounds of grass that rose up in the distance.

  Eben drove the wagon behind us, and Natiya and Wren rode beside him, ready to shoot or cut down anyone who made an errant move other than walking straight ahead. Synové and I walked on either side of the prisoners.

  For at least a mile in, no one spoke. For some of us, the valley demanded reverence, but for others, like Bahr, I was sure they feared a noise might wake the dead. A shadow passed overhead and Bahr fell to the ground, frantically looking up, his nerves unraveling. Circling high above us were two racaa, probably wishing we were antelope. Synové smiled when she saw them. “Move along,” she ordered, motioning with her sword. Kardos eyed a decaying wagon, looking desperate, ready to pry anything loose to use as a weapon. Maybe he heard the voices too, or maybe he felt the dead clawing at his feet.

  The wind rustled, the grass moving in waves, like a message being passed. They’re coming.

  Jase stopped at the bones of a brezalot, its giant bleached ribs pointing like spears to the sky. “What is it?” he asked.

  Brezalots were not found on this part of the continent. “Similar to horses,” I explained. “Majestic, giant creatures, for the most part wild and unstoppable, but the Komizar managed to subvert their beauty and turn them into weapons. Hundreds of them died here too.”

  Halfway in, we saw a rock memorial, a tattered white shirt on top of it, waving in the breeze. I watched Jase take it all in, the mass graves, the scattered human bones dug up by beasts, the rusted and abandoned weapons thick with grass, the occasional skull, grinning up at the cliffs. His eyes were dark clouds, sweeping from one side to the other. “How many died?” he asked.

  “Twenty thousand. In one day. But as Sarva mentioned, this was just a spring picnic compared with what they had planned.”

  He didn’t say anything, but his jaw was rigid. He turned, looking long and hard at Sarva, the same kind of hunger in his eyes as I saw in Synové’s when she looked at Bahr.

  Kardos suddenly screamed, his foot falling into the soil up to his knee. He scrambled away and looked back. It was only a collapsed burrow, but they all looked at it with horror, even the captain, waiting for a bony hand to emerge. Yes, this was a torture of their own making.

  As we neared the end of the valley, we spotted riders coming toward us. I noticed the captain visibly brighten, but then he cursed. They were Morrighese troops. A low shudder rolled through Torback.

  “It began with the stars,” Phineas suddenly blurted out. I turned and looked at him. His eyes were glazed, his expression lost. “It was the tembris that showed us. The stars brought a—”

  “Shut up!” the captain ordered.

  “Why?” Phineas asked. “What difference does it make now? We’re all going to die anyway.”

  “What do you mean, It began with the stars?” I asked.

  “Quiet!” Torback yelled.

  “We’re not going to die!” Bahr growled. “There’s still time!”

  “It’s too late,” Phineas said. “It’s too late for all of us.” He looked at Jase. “I’m sorry. There never was a fever cure. He knew what would make you listen. I tried to—”

  “Stupid bastard—” Sarva lunged toward him. A warning arrow hissed through the air but at the same time, Bahr lunged toward Phineas too, his fist jamming into his gut. Wren, Synové, and I moved swiftly, knocking Bahr and Sarva to their stomachs and pressing swords to their backs. Eben and Natiya nocked arrows, ordering Jase, Torback, Kardos, and the captain down on their knees.

  Phineas stood frozen, his mouth open, his eyes wide as if terrified by the sudden swirl of commotion. But then I saw a trickle of blood on
the front of his shirt. He dropped to his knees, still unable to speak. I left Bahr facedown, ordering him not to move and went to Phineas just as he fell forward. A giant brezalot rib protruded from his back. I looked over at the captain, who had been directly behind Phineas. His expression was smug and remorseless.

  We were prepared for them to attack us, but not one another.

  I rolled Phineas to his side and pulled him up into my arms. His face was splotched with tears. “I’m sorry,” he gasped, every word an effort. “The olives. The casks.” He coughed, blood seeping from his mouth. “The room. Where you found me. The papers.” He let out a long, wheezing breath.

  “What about the papers?” I said.

  “Destroy them. Make sure—”

  His lips stilled. His chest stilled. But his eyes remained frozen on me, still afraid.

  * * *

  The captain didn’t look smug now. I saw the sweat bead on his upper lip as the king approached. We had arrived at the encampment just outside the southern entrance to the valley. The queen’s brother, Bryn, was the newly crowned King of Morrighan, his father having passed last year. He walked toward us leaning heavily on his cane. He was a young man, robust and healthy, but he’d lost his lower right leg in the attempt on his life. With every labored step, the king had a reminder of the captain’s treachery. We had the prisoners lined up for inspection, but the king approached me first.

  “Your Majesty,” I said, bowing. Wren and Synové did the same. He stopped us mid-bow, reaching out and touching my shoulder.

  “No,” he said. “I should be the one bending a knee to all of you. I would, but I might not get up again.” He was without pretense, much like his sister.

  He smiled. I knew he was trying to pretend this moment wasn’t affecting him as much as it was. He was a handsome man, but old for his years. The queen said he had once been her humorous brother, the prankster she often got into trouble with as a child. There was no humor in his eyes anymore. His family had been decimated.

  He told me he would be leaving twenty soldiers with us as escort and support, and then walked with me down the line of prisoners, looking at each one as I told him who they were and what they had done. First Kardos, Sarva, and Bahr, and then we came to Torback. He had actually been one of the king’s tutors when he was a child.

  “You found a full snake’s nest. We didn’t know about him.” He stared at Torback for a long while, and when Torback buckled under the heat of his scrutiny, babbling for his life, the king silenced him.

  “There was another scholar,” I explained. “The captain murdered him on the way here.”

  “So I heard,” he said. “Phineas was hardly more than a boy himself when he disappeared from Morrighan. The conspiracy was a long time in the planning.” He stepped in front of the captain, his scrutiny searing. “As you well know, Captain Illarion. The one thing you will get that my brothers and thousands of others didn’t is justice. Since you aligned yourself with the Komizar, you’ll face Vendan judgement. My sister has a court waiting for you.”

  The captain stared back, silent, maybe seeing the boy king he had betrayed, maybe retracing the choices he could have made. I saw Death standing behind him, waiting to take him. Maybe not here. Not today. Maybe on a windy turret in Venda justice would be served, when the Watch Captain’s neck snapped and it was time to move on to his final judgement.

  “And who is this?” the king asked, stepping in front of Jase.

  “The Patrei of Hell’s Mouth,” Jase answered, glaring at the king, “and I demand to be released.”

  The king turned toward me. “And he’s here because?”

  “Tell him, Kazi,” Jase said. “Explain to him why I’m here and not home protecting my family and empire.”

  I swallowed, the answer trapped in my throat.

  Griz stepped forward and answered before I could. “He gave the fugitives sanctuary and the supplies to build an arsenal of weapons.”

  “Then he’ll face a noose too.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

  JASE

  Over and over again as I had walked through the valley I thought to myself, Our weapons were not meant for this. Never for this. I stared at Sarva, remembering when he tried to take the launcher from me, remembering all their promises, We’ll have the cure soon. They had shown my father the ledgers of the Ancients, the magic of cures in formulas we couldn’t understand, but they promised that the scholars were deciphering them and we bought it. The months were peppered with false breakthroughs and progress whenever our patience wore thin.

  Sarva and Beaufort both looked far too cocky, as if there was still a chance of escape. Twenty Morrighese troops were escorting us back to Venda—not to mention the fellow named Griz, who was three men in one. There was bad blood between him and the Vendans, and he would never let them out of his sight. There’d be no slipping away, though it was still on my mind. I had to get home. Whatever league was trying to displace us, it wouldn’t be long before they regrouped and came after us again. Had Beaufort been conspiring with one of them? It seemed unlikely. He’d been holed up at Tor’s Watch for almost a year with no outside contact. Except for Zane. He was Beaufort’s lone contact with the outside world.

  Somewhere deep down, I had known they couldn’t be trusted. My father knew. That’s why he had sent a letter to the king’s magistrate. Yet in spite of the vague reply, he still let them into Tor’s Watch.

  I’m sorry. There never was a fever cure. He knew what would make you listen.

  How? How did an on-the-run fugitive know about my sister and brother? Sylvey and Micah died four years ago, years before Beaufort arrived at Tor’s Watch. It wasn’t news anymore. Somehow he’d done his research. He found the chink in our armor—the one thing that would open the door to Tor’s Watch and the Ballenger purse, a wound that still wept.

  I had been first among my father’s sons to agree to it. The guilt of Sylvey had stayed with me, including the things I did after she died. I’d been haunted by her pleas, her fear of being trapped in a cold dark tomb, the simple promise I wouldn’t give her in her last moments. Two days after her funeral, I stole her body. I did the unthinkable and desecrated her tomb in the middle of the night. No one ever knew. Everyone thought I had disappeared from grief, but I had taken her wrapped body high into the Moro mountains and buried it in the most beautiful place I could find, the kind of place she would love, at the base of Breda’s Tears, just below the seventh waterfall where ferns and flowers bloomed, where the sun shone in the day and the moon glowed at night. I marked it with a single stone and the tears that wet it were not Breda’s but my own.

  Beaufort’s false promise had hit its mark with resounding accuracy. It sickened me how well he had strung us along, how perfectly he explained one delay after another, how the others had backed him up. How humble and earnest they had all been—until the end. When they were close to getting what they wanted, their arrogance started showing.

  I looked over at them, sitting together, eating their dinner. The rage in me rose. We were forced to eat with our hands shackled—a trencher of bread and meat only—no plates, no utensils, nothing that might be used as a weapon against one another. Our keepers didn’t want any more prisoners dying en route.

  What had they all been trying to keep Phineas from saying? The few words he said were only babble. Stars? The tembris showing him? He’d been shaken by the staggering death and destruction in the valley. I had been too. But something else ate at him. It was just a spring picnic compared to what they had planned.

  What was it they had planned? Kazi had mentioned domination of the kingdoms. What had seemed ludicrous when she first told me didn’t seem implausible now. I’m guessing they planned to kill your whole family once you gave them everything they needed.

  I eyed Sarva, shoving the last of his dinner into his mouth. You can’t take that. He had tried to stop me from taking the launcher because he didn’t want me to be armed. Why? Because I might be able to stop him from kill
ing my family? After seeing a whole valley swollen with dead, I knew one family was nothing to him. He licked his fingers and looked up at me. A smirk crossed his lip, fool, and that was all it took.

  I flew across the expanse, grabbed him with both shackled hands and threw him across the clearing. He tumbled over the dirt, jumped to his feet, and I came at him again, both chained hands swinging into his gut, doubling him over. I heard the yelling, someone saying, Let them fight. I doubted anyone could have stopped us. He returned my blows, his shackles not diminishing the impact of his fists as they slammed into my stomach. Another powerful strike to my shoulder knocked me to the ground, but it was the words he hissed between blows when our grips strained against each other—mocking my father, my family, the things he would do to them—that blinded me with fury. I couldn’t believe we’d let this monster into our home.

  I jammed my elbow into his side, my forearm into his face, and when he stumbled to the side I swooped my chained hands over his head, pulling the chain tight against his neck. He choked and gasped, his fingers struggling to pull it away. “Now, let me tell you what I’m going to do to you, Sarva—”

  I felt a sword at my back. “That’s enough, Patrei. He’ll die by Vendan justice, not yours.” Eben ordered me to let him go. I hesitated, and he pushed the sword harder. “Now.” I loosened my hold, slipping the chain free, and Sarva dropped to the ground, gasping for air.

  I looked over at Beaufort with a clear message, You’re next, before a guard hauled me away.

  * * *

  The Lost Horses streaked across the sky in their endless quest to find their mistress. Usually, spotting them made me think of loyalty and determination, but now they only filled me with a sense of futility, a quest that would never be realized. It made me think of my father and his deathbed wish, Make her come. I should appreciate the irony—I was going to meet the queen, but not in the way he had envisioned.