The Cruelest Mercy

by Natalie Mae

  I shove to my feet, and a Wraith leaps the flames with another Wraith clinging to his side—the first must be an Airweaver. They land beside me in a thud. The Airweaver blasts two oncoming bandits back with a flick of his hands; his Stormshrike partner strings lightning between her fingers and fries a bandit with an ax.

  “Dōmmel,” the Airweaver says, opening his arm. “Hold on to me. We’ll fly—”

  Another BOOM shatters the chaos, and the Wraiths dive on top of me as a cannonball streaks over our heads and smashes against the dining room’s reinforced glass. Shrapnel spins past in silver winks. The Airweaver pulls me to my feet, but though he jerks as if lifting from the ground, we don’t move. His gaze catches the Stormshrike’s. Their masks hide the lower halves of their faces, but more alarming than the panic in their eyes is that I can’t feel any of that emotion through the Airweaver’s touch.

  “Forsvine.” The Stormshrike turns her arm, where shrapnel glints like gruesome teeth. “We need to run. Now.”

  I fear some of it might have hit me too, until the Airweaver releases me, and my magic—and the hum of the guards’ nerves—flushes back through me. But I still feel helpless as I look toward the prow, where Hen is somewhere on the other side of the fire. I remind myself I can’t help her if I’m dead, and sprint with the guards for the back of the ship. More bandits follow. Two of them leap in our way; a man strikes at the Airweaver with a mace, and the guard yanks a saber from his belt, barely meeting him in time. The Stormshrike draws two three-pronged weapons and blocks another strike from the second bandit. I pull the dagger from inside my tunic, praying I don’t have to use it.

  Which is when I notice how clear the way is on the far side, the deck protected, for now, by its distance from the boats and the half-standing dining room. The fire won’t be on that side. I can go after Hen.

  I grip the dagger, and run. The Airweaver yells my name. A shadow moves over me, someone on the roof of the dining room, but I’m almost there, I don’t stop—

  Until this person, like a fist of the gods, smashes down onto the deck in front of me.

  A bandit with arms the size of my legs and a thick wooden club rises to her full height like a massive rogue wave. Her long brown hair braids over her shoulder; scars pock her pale skin. My dagger suddenly looks like a butter knife.

  She raises the club and swings.

  I leap back, out of reach, stumbling to keep my balance. More bandits circle my guards. The woman raises the club again, and eagerness flashes over my skin, white-hot—hers, not mine. I gasp and reach after it, but it feels like groping through the dark, and I definitely can’t focus. The emotion vanishes. The club swings; I yelp and plaster myself against the dining room glass.

  The dagger goes skidding across the deck. I bounce on my heels. I think I can get to it before she can, and I dive, but she strikes like a snake, twisting her hand through the front of my tunic and lifting me in the air.

  I pry at her fingers, and her eagerness sinks into my veins.

  My magic sharpens like a looking glass.

  She snickers. “I’m disappointed, little demon. They said you were dangerous.” She raises the club. “But you’ll still fetch us a pretty bit of gold, claws or not.”

  I take hold of her excitement like a lifeline. The emotion spikes, turning my stomach, blackening the sides of my vision, and I shove back on it, and the club comes down—and her eyes roll into her head. She drops me and crashes to the deck like a tree.

  I land hard and scramble away, grasping for the dagger, holding it close to my chest.

  Except I didn’t need it.

  I just stopped a woman four times my size from clobbering me, with my mind.

  “Dōmmel!”

  The Airweaver. He hauls me to my feet, the Stormshrike close behind and a dozen more bandits beyond.

  “Wait,” I say. “My friend—”

  “Other Wraiths are in charge of the crew. Jump!”

  He heaves me to the rail, and I have to follow. Wind whistles past my ears, and my feet break the river; cool water closes over my head. I twist and churn, surging for the surface, but I’m afraid I’ll cut one of the Wraiths with the dagger, so I sheath it beneath my tunic and come up gasping. The Stormshrike tugs me forward. Arrows zip into the water around us. I dive when the Wraiths say to, staying low until my lungs burn for breath, and this is how we make it to shore, diving and swimming and praying.

  When we finally crawl into the safety of the reeds, mud squishing beneath my fingers, I whip around, searching for Hen, and also certain I’ll see at least ten bandits swimming after us with swords between their teeth.

  But the bandits have scattered from the railing. They converge on a swordsman in white instead, who moves between them like a dancer, cutting through them like weeds. Two of them he barely touches, and they drop screaming and writhing to the deck. The rest bolt like sheep, flying over the railings, shoving each other to get out of Kasta’s reach.

  Alone, Kasta glances out at me, and flicks blood off his sword as he walks calmly to the other side of the ship.

  “Dōmmel,” mutters the Airweaver, tugging my sleeve. I shake myself and follow him through the reeds, until we emerge behind a low, red boulder the size of a shack. Another Wraith waits here, masked and slender, her brown fingers drumming her wrapped arms.

  “Why are you crawling in the muck?” she asks.

  The Airweaver sighs. “Forsvine.” He lifts his arm to show her the embedded metal. “One of their cannonballs shattered near us.”

  “Rie.” The new Wraith turns her amber eyes to the boats. “Please follow me, dōmmel. Prince Kasta wants a sample of the attackers’ artillery, and then he will be along.”

  I look back at the smoking ship. “He’s just going to board their boats and get it? Alone? Doesn’t that seem overly risky?”

  Not that I’m actually surprised. Between the poisons Kasta’s clearly using again and his Shifter’s reflexes, the mercenaries don’t stand a chance. But maybe I can get the Wraiths to start finding his behavior suspicious, too.

  The new Wraith lifts a shoulder. “Does he look like he’s having trouble with it? And he has our best Dominator with him, anyway.” As if this second person finalizes it. “Come. The others will be glad to see you.”

  My heart jerks. “Do you know if my friend Hen is all right?”

  She nods. “For all the damage, we did not lose anyone. A few injuries that the Healers are tending to. But, dōmmel, I must inform you—we wrote to the Mestrah by listening scroll, and he has ordered a majority of the crew and your tutors to wait here for a new boat. He wants the rest of the expedition to go quickly. Only a few of us will be accompanying you and Kasta going forward.”

  I stop. “Wait. We’re still going?” I cry, as behind me, an explosion splits one of the mercenary boats in half. “What about this seems like a good idea? I was almost just clobbered and held for ransom!”

  “Yes. With the way things are changing, that is always a risk now. That’s why we are here. But these mercenaries Wyrim hires are still unorganized and untrained. And now we will have possession of Wyrim’s latest technology.” Her gaze shifts to the burning ships. “Their forsvine is advancing faster than we thought. It’s even more critical now that we finish our mission.”

  I pick at a rip in my tunic. “One of those ‘unorganized’ bandits was holding me up by the neck.”

  The Stormshrike pauses in plucking forsvine from her arm. “That was impressive, how you knocked her out. How did you get ahold of her club?”

  I sigh, because of course I’m not allowed to tell them the actual reason. “Just a lucky break.”

  “See?” the new Wraith says. “We had everything under control. And here you are, unharmed.”

  This is both difficult to argue with while feeling immensely untrue. But I let it go. Thank the Mestrah—of all the unlikely people I
thought I’d thank—for at least getting Kasta and me one Influence lesson before we left.

  But my gut still twists as we step through dry desert brush to meet the others. I’m glad Hen is safe. I’m glad she won’t have to go any farther on this reckless mission, where mercenary attacks are actually expected and sheer luck is considered under control. But whatever security I had in having her at my side, it’s gone now.

  And now I will be alone with the boy-monster who is almost single-handedly taking on two bandit crews.

  I close my hand around the dagger under my tunic.

  This is where the true test begins.

  XIII

  THE crew accompanying Kasta and me on the hunt is now nine: a Healer, a chef, five Wraiths, and two servants, including the boy I ran into in the storage room. Randomly, there are already horses when I arrive at the rendezvous point, because the Wraithguard seems to be able to conjure whatever they want out of thin air. In reality, I’m informed we have them on loan from a nearby ranch, which is not nearly as mysterious or impressive. I decide when I tell Jet about this later, they will be conjured horses. Possibly misty in nature, or made of soot. My story, my rules.

  I think the increasing stress of my situation is making me snappy.

  Kasta and the infamous Dominator, a Wraith whose name is Yashi, join us soon after splattered in blood and ash. From the certain way the Wraith spoke of him, I expected Yashi to be a mountain of a man, someone even more muscular than Marcus. But he’s a boy probably a year my younger, slender and shorter than me, with sandy beige skin and sleek black hair that falls over one eye. His arms are toned, but not outrageously so. But then I have to remind myself it’s his Dominator magic, not muscle, that makes him capable of lifting small houses.

  Not that he’s showing off any kind of impressive skill at the moment. He and Kasta are each carrying one of the bandits’ heavy shrapnel cannonballs, but with the forsvine in them blocking Yashi’s power, he’s winded, and sweating, and cursing up a storm. The other Wraiths tease him, the Airweaver nudges him so he stumbles, and Yashi heaves the cannonball away, though it doesn’t go far. This elicits rampant laughter, until Yashi raises his arms, forsvine-free, and asks someone to try it again.

  The laughter stops. Everyone steps back.

  Yashi takes first pick of the horses after Kasta and me, but there’s still snickering as we set out with the cannonballs loaded onto wooden slats behind one of the servants’ geldings.

  The too-familiar sight of passing desert and brush from horseback sends beetles down my spine. The heat is like the breath of a creature, slinking down the neck of my cooling cloak, thickening the air. I keep my hood low over my eyes. Brown oxen watch us from clumps of grass, and white cranes fly overhead on their way to the river, to which we move parallel, though well out of sight of the boats. The servants chat quietly. The Healer draws out a scroll to read.

  And Kasta rides wordlessly beside me, the hilt of his sword still crusted in blood.

  This is the uneasy arrangement I’ve forced on us, because I refuse to follow him, as if yielding to his charge. And so I keep my gray mare beside his, a carriage-width of distance away, and pretend he’s Jet, or Melia, or any number of delightful people I would rather be on this journey with. It’s made slightly easier that he’s changed into forest colors of deep green and black, for I’m just now realizing I’ve never seen him in anything but white. But the kilometers pass. All the Wraiths except Yashi move to patrol out of view, and the silence shifts and thickens.

  The trust I once put in Kasta, the trust he shattered, moves like broken glass through my veins.

  I bite my tongue. I won’t say anything, I won’t cause a scene. I need to be thinking about my next move to find his animal pelts. I need to be thinking about Odelig. For a while, this works. I decide I’ll use one of Mora’s potions in Kasta’s drink later—the note Mora left with them assured me the black vial is only a sleeping potion—so I can slip into his tent after he’s out and search him. I decide I will definitely follow Melia’s advice to insist on capturing Odelig alive. This is excellent progress. Except that Numet’s lantern has barely moved overhead by the time I’m done.

  And then there are only memories.

  Kasta’s hands low on my spine, his confession on my lips. Give me some time, he’d said. I don’t know what this is. The certainty that I’d reached him. That I meant something to him, for risking my own freedom to save his life, for believing he was better—and then everything he did after, from abandoning Sakira to standing on that altar, the knife tip on my skin.

  And then Maia.

  And my care for not making a scene thins until it cracks.

  “So,” I say, my voice tight as a snare. “Is being dōmmel everything you dreamed of?”

  A muscle twitches in Kasta’s jaw. His gaze stays on the distant hills.

  “Your father’s attention,” I press. “A god’s power. You finally have everything you wanted. Worth killing me again, you’d say?”

  He presses a breath through his teeth. “You know it wasn’t that easy.”

  “Oh, wasn’t it? You didn’t seem that torn. You don’t seem that sorry.”

  “That’s because you can’t even imagine what I—” He bites down on the words, but whatever calmness he’s striving for, he can’t quite smooth his face. “It was my life or yours. I couldn’t trust you to help me. You and Jet would have turned on me the moment we returned to the palace, and you would have told them . . .”

  His secret. My blood boils. “Because I’d proven to be so two-faced and merciless before that, yes?”

  “You’d just poisoned me and left me to die in a tent. Would you have trusted you?”

  “If you’ll recall,” I seethe, “I left because I asked if you were still planning to kill me, and the answer was not no.”

  “Do you know what it took for me to even say maybe?” He jerks on the reins, and his brown horse startles. “Do you know how long I lived in fear of—” He glances at the servants, and I know he almost said something about his father throwing him into the streets, making him join the magicless Forsaken. He lowers his voice. “By asking me to spare your life, you were asking me to risk my own. To throw away what was certain escape from a fate worse than death, for the slim possibility that mercy might work. And I—” He glares at the horizon, his brow pinched. “I was considering it.”

  A quiet falls between us. I watch him, unsettled, wishing he’d just say he’s glad he did it. This other side of him is too confusing, a trickster moving a coin between his hands.

  “I did what I had to to survive,” he says, the cold returning to his words. “No different than you.”

  “No different?” I exclaim, laughing. “Let’s see. You cut a symbol into my wrist and dragged me into an ancient contest, and I poisoned you to get away. Fine, on some twisted level, I guess that would make us even. Except then, I handed you a knife and begged you to side with me, and you literally tried to kill me!” An unexpected twist of despair drowns my anger, and my throat clenches. I won’t cry. I won’t let him see how much that failure haunts me, how much I believed he wouldn’t do it.

  I tighten my grip on the reins. “I trusted you with my life, Kasta. And you couldn’t even trust me to keep my word.”

  He’s quiet for a long while. I hate that even more, like my words are sinking in, like he’s wondering if he made a mistake. My fingers shake; I press my hands into the gray mare’s neck to hide it. It doesn’t matter if he’s sorry. It doesn’t change what he did.

  When Kasta speaks again, his tone is careful. “You would have betrayed your dear Jet, then? If I’d chosen you, you’d have done everything in your power to see me crowned?”

  My gut twists. Kasta watches me a moment, and a slow, bitter smile pulls his lips. “I thought not.”

  I scrape a line of sand on my hand. “If you had trusted me,” I say, each wor
d like admitting a dark secret, “there would have been nothing I wouldn’t have done to help you.”

  He closes his eyes. “Don’t lie to me.”

  “It’s not a lie,” I say, aching. “Jet wanted a simpler life. He came back for the crown because of me . . . because of you. But if you had spared me, you would have proven yourself to be someone else. I can’t say exactly what would have happened. But if I asked him to, I know Jet would have given you another chance.”

  Kasta’s shoulders tense, but he says nothing more. The horses walk on, and I try to get ahold of myself, of the shame and disappointment threatening to rip me apart. This was so much easier to handle when I thought he was dead. Then, I could rationalize that he got what he deserved and move on. I don’t know how to move on from this. From seeing him every day, from remembering, from agonizing over what he could have been, in another life.

  I shake my nerves out, reminding myself it doesn’t matter—and suddenly realize how silent it is, aside from the horses’ steps. When I look over my shoulder, the servants startle and comment on the weather, and the Healer flips his reading scroll back up. Even Yashi quickly looks out into the desert. Great. By this time next week, half the country will know how much Orkena’s future Mestrahs loathe each other.

  We say nothing more the rest of the day.

  But when Kasta glances at me now, the fire in his eyes is gone.

  * * *

  We reach the forest at dusk.

  It’s unfair how beautiful it is. I’m in the kind of mood right now where I want everything to be dismal and ugly just so I can be irritated about that, too, but the hills of western Orkena are rolling and green, as if the gods rushed to paint the desert and spent the rest of their time here. Color bursts from yellow and purple flowers within the grasses, and the hills roll like blanket folds, slight and round against the mountains jutting high behind them. Trees with white trunks stand solitary where the sand gives way to soil, growing thicker as they stretch to the horizon. Their leafy arms grow wider than they are tall, and the horses sigh in contentment when we move under their shade.