The Cruelest Mercy

by Natalie Mae

  Rest, they think to each other. Shade. Grass.

  Yashi moves his bay gelding between Kasta and me and tugs his mask down. “The scouts just wrote me,” he says, his focus only on Kasta. “They’ve found evidence of Odelig near the Pe border. They think he’s in the mountains.”

  “Apos,” Kasta says. “We’ll have to wait for him to come down. How far is the border?”

  “Just an hour more. If we camp near it, your magic may lure him back over.”

  I loudly clear my throat. “Then that’s what we’ll do. Thank you for consulting us.”

  They both look over, Kasta with something unreadable, Yashi with a raised brow. But I see the pattern forming already. This is how it went with Gallus, too, my pompous Firespinning ex—anytime he had important company over, I went silent, which often took a great amount of willpower and a prayer, all because I was afraid of appearing out of place. It got to the point that one of his friends, who I saw weekly, asked three moons in what my name was. I do not want Wraiths, at the end of this trip, asking the Mestrah what my name is.

  “Dōmmella,” Yashi mumbles, using the plural of our titles. He presses quick fingers to his forehead and pulls his horse to the back of the group.

  We set up camp an hour later, under a copse of trees tucked away in a hillside, just past a decrepit log cabin built in the Pe style, its floor strewn with cracked hickory diningware and the remnants of a dusty bearskin rug. A relic left over from before the Ending Drought, probably, when Orkena’s borders last expanded. The Wraiths again defer to Kasta, asking him where to put the tents and what he’d like for dinner, each of which I answer first, and with the sassy kind of look Mora would be proud of. At first this seems to make no difference, because the servants still raise Kasta’s tent before mine and bring him water and a map without so much as looking at me. Yashi keeps going on about Kasta’s impressive fighting skills, which is starting to press on my last nerve.

  “A boulder of a man tackled him from behind,” he says. “Had him in a headlock, but Kasta stood up and threw him overboard like he was nothing. And you know what it takes to impress me, dōmmel or not.”

  Kasta gives this a quiet smile, but while the Wraiths murmur their appreciation, I log this one in the back of my mind. Unusual strength, noted.

  “I knocked out a woman four times my size while she held me by the neck,” I say, not wanting to be left out.

  This is greeted with uncomfortable, but impressed, silence.

  The chef still makes Kasta’s plate first. But they serve mine at nearly the same time.

  Later, when the campfire burns high and the darkness shrinks the world to our hollow of trees, the Wraiths settle on logs with their waterskins, and I move in the shadows to my tent. I’ve already worked out a plan to drop the sleeping potion into Kasta’s drink, which involves switching out his waterskin and telling a small white lie to one of the servants. All I need now is the potion.

  I dig through my satchel, the light potion around my neck casting a liquidy silver glow on the fabric. The tents, too, are uneasy reminders of the Crossing, though not all in a bad way. This model reminds me of Jet’s, with a low slope of a roof and a rainbow-striped sleeping mat. My heart tugs, imagining him stretched out on that mat, his chest rising gently in sleep. How he’d smile if I reached out to wake him, brushing his cheek with my thumb. How he might lift his hand to my face—until he saw the sleeping potion in my hand.

  “Stop it,” I whisper to imaginary Jet. “Kasta needs to sleep anyway.”

  My daydream vanishes. I lift the little black bottle from the bag, thumbing the wax seal. It doesn’t mean anything that I’m resorting to drugs to search through my nemesis’s personal effects. Compared to physically knocking him out, or using a potion that would make him ill, it’s arguable that I’m even being too nice.

  It doesn’t mean I’m changing. I’m just . . . more resourceful.

  I shake the little bottle, moving to tuck it into my cloak—and pause. Nothing sloshed when I did that. I raise the light potion beside it to see how full it is, and my stomach dives.

  It’s empty.

  The seal flips off easily when I shove it. Only a single drop remains, falling sadly to the sand. I toss the bottle back into the bag and dig out the two other potions, but their seals are loose too, their contents dumped. I know these were full when we left.

  Someone’s been in my bag.

  That these might have been used on me makes panic climb my throat—except that potions work within minutes, so I would have felt the effects by now. Whoever it was only emptied them. And then put them back, so I’d know the bottles hadn’t simply been lost.

  I look over my shoulder, through the slit of the tent, where Kasta leans back on a log with his waterskin, his head tilted toward Yashi. Smiling, laughing, like he has no cares in the world.

  His gaze flickers, firelit, to my tent.

  My blood simmers.

  This, I think, is how I’ll learn about war.

  XIV

  I sleep terribly.

  Half the night I spend fuming that Kasta got ahead of me, and the other half I lie listening, my hand on the hilt of my dagger, jumping at every crackle of the enchanted campfire. The Wraiths assured me the tent is warded against animals, but I have trust issues. Unlikely things happen to me all the time. And I don’t know if the protection spells would consider a Shifter an animal.

  But if Kasta leaves his tent, I don’t see it happen through the slit I’ve left open. And nothing comes to kill me.

  Morning brings very little relief. I nurse a mug of melted chocolate before the fire, my cloak pulled around me for warmth, since the night’s chill holds stronger here to the grass than the sand. But surviving the night was only the first step. If Kasta plans to get rid of me, his best chance to do it will be on this hunt. The Wraiths can’t come with us for the start. Their lesser magic, strange as that is for me to say, will repel Odelig instead of attracting him, so they’re not to come until we summon them on our listening scrolls. Meaning Kasta and I will be very alone.

  At least today, in addition to my dagger, I’ll have a hunting knife enchanted with lightning. For Odelig, of course. I nudge the hilt of it strapped around my thigh, and keep drinking.

  Stay alive, take Odelig alive. The theme for the day is live.

  Kasta emerges from his tent, his black hair mussed and curling at his ears, his hunting cloak dark and pressed. Stitched golden lanterns hem his tunic; a white rope hangs at his belt. Maybe it’s my glare, or that he knows I can’t ask about the potions he emptied without the Wraiths overhearing, but I swear the corners of his mouth twitch. Amused.

  “Let’s go.” He starts for the horses, but I don’t move.

  “In a minute,” I say.

  I actually don’t have a reason to wait. My drink is nearly gone, I’m dressed, there’s nothing else to do. Except to remind him that I don’t answer to him anymore.

  It’s my turn to smirk when I finally saunter to the horses, ignoring Kasta’s glower, and swing into the saddle, my riding cloak spilling golden down my arm. The Wraiths give us a nod, I check that the listening scroll to summon them is clasped tight to my belt, and we start off.

  Me and the Shifter, on our own in the woods.

  The forest is loud. A dozen animal conversations buzz in my ears, from songbirds to squirrels to yellow snakes, all otherwise hidden in the branches and the tall grass. Though I imagine anyone from Pe would laugh to hear me call this a forest, since the trees don’t grow nearly as thick here as they will in the mountains. Here, where the desert heat still bears down but the mountain streams trickle, the trees grow in sporadic clumps, long feathers of shade followed by wide stretches of grass. My gray mare sloshes through a tiny creek, lipping the pink flowers at its edge.

  Treat, she thinks. Good.

  We walk a kilometer, nearly two, our horses the di
stance of a house apart. I keep my hand near my hidden knife, but Kasta hardly looks at me. His attention flits to the trees, to the ground. Once in a while he stops, listening, and though I don’t hear anything, he heads off in a slightly different direction. I don’t think Shifters have any better sight or hearing than normal, but it’s starting to feel like it.

  After he does this the fourth time, I shift uneasily. “You’re supposed to be teaching me.”

  To track, I mean. Kasta looks over from where he’s stopped and shrugs. “You’d have to be closer.”

  I don’t like this answer at all, especially because it makes sense, so long as he doesn’t add so I can kill you to the end of it. I edge the mare nearer. Until we’re two strides away, then one.

  He regards this distance with narrowed eyes, then drops to the ground. “To find your target’s prints, you can also track their prey.” He pushes his fingers into the soft mud, beside which small hoofprints sink, two small lines near each other that must belong to an antelope. “These are fresh. If we follow them, we’ll find where they feed. And eventually Odelig’s own tracks.” He slides his fingers over the earth, and taps a much larger, round-toed print. “Like this. We’ll go on foot from here.”

  He moves on without waiting for a reply, and I curse under my breath as I dismount and tell the horses to wait for us, not wanting to tether them in case Odelig finds them before we find him. And there goes my fastest escape route. But even if I can’t use Influence against Kasta, I still have the Wraith’s scroll, and my knife. Let him try.

  “Wait,” he whispers. He pulls his hood down, a breeze catching the sleek ends of his hair. “Do you feel that?”

  Gooseflesh rises on my arms as I look over the field, but the only thing I feel is an intense dislike of this entire situation.

  When I don’t answer, he starts off again. “We’re close. Be ready.”

  I cross my arms. “You realize we haven’t talked strategy yet.”

  “Yes, because there’s only one strategy here that’s going to work: I hunt him, and you stay out of my way.”

  “That wasn’t your father’s instruction. We’re supposed to work together.” I finally catch up to him, though I still leave distance between us.

  “I already know you’re not going to kill him,” Kasta says. “What else is there to decide?”

  “If we’re going to kill him at all. It’s a waste if his magic isn’t immune to the metal. I want him captured alive.”

  “Odelig is not a housecat, Zahru. He’ll be curious about our magic, and then he’ll see us as food. I’m already limited to using a rope, because a crossbow won’t work on him, and I’d rather make sure he’s gone than give him an opening to make me a meal.”

  My blood flashes. “And that’s always how it has to be, isn’t it? Everything or nothing. Death or life.”

  “Death and life.” Kasta shakes his head. “That’s what you’ve never understood. Someone dies, but many more live because of it. It’s a ruler’s burden to decide who.”

  “Really? And when will you decide, again, that my life is worth the trade?”

  Kasta stops. It’s a moment before he looks at me, but when he does, I swear he grimaces. “Once was enough.”

  He starts off. I stand there, irritated, wondering if that means he felt it justified and he just doesn’t need to again, because I can’t fathom what else it could be.

  “What does that mean?” I say.

  No answer. I press a frustrated growl through my teeth. “Gods help me, Kasta, if you have any intention of this partnership actually working, you will answer that question.”

  I realize this is an ironic thing to say, since I have no intention of this ruling partnership working, but it stops him.

  He turns, and his shoulders drop. “It means I could never do it again, so if that’s what you’re waiting for, you can stop.”

  He glances meaningfully at the place I’ve hidden the dagger under my cloak and moves on. I clench my fists, both hating how transparent he always makes me feel and confused by his answer. It wasn’t an apology. But he could have ignored me and made clear that working with me was not his intention in the least.

  I decide it doesn’t matter. This is how he is, calm and thoughtful when things are going his way, when he believes he’s safe. He wants me to realize how alone we are. That he knows where the knife is; that he could stage my death, with lion prints all around, and no one would be the wiser. But even if he doesn’t want me dead right now, it doesn’t mean that won’t change. He was like this before, too, when he thought I was no threat to him. This is only the eye of a storm. A reminder of why I must be so careful in getting the pelts from him.

  I follow in silence.

  The leaves burn a deeper green as the sun rises, and butterflies, small and blue, flit around the crimson ties of my cooling cloak. I shove Kasta from my mind. I need to be focusing on Odelig, on how we can spare him, on how I can convince Kasta to consider it. I wish I knew more about the science behind magic. If I’d had more lessons, I’m sure there would be some clever formula I could convince Kasta with, some scientific theory. But he’s done this years longer, and—

  I snap my head up. Not only because of the idea that just came to me, but because of the actual tug in my gut.

  Kasta jerks to a stop. “What? Do you feel something?”

  Birds break from the nearest branches in a spray of red, and the meadow grows eerily silent. And I do feel something. An odd sense of familiarity, as if I’ve been here before, as if I’ve lived this moment a hundred times. Somewhere ahead of us, something is watching.

  Kasta crouches and slides the rope from his arm.

  “Wait,” I whisper, dropping beside him. Gods, I hope this idea works. “If Odelig’s magic really can help us, then fine, I’ll agree the sacrifice is necessary. But you’re a scientist. Don’t you have ways to test the magical properties of things?”

  “Of non-living things, yes,” he mutters.

  “And you’re telling me that after years of study, you can’t think of one solution to this that doesn’t involve killing Odelig first?”

  He shoots me a glare, and it’s oddly reassuring to see a glimpse of his old defiance. “I told you. It’s too dangerous to do this any other way.”

  “Too difficult, you mean.” I shrug. “I understand. Killing him is the easiest way.”

  “It’s not—” A branch snaps in the distance, and we both look up. The pull in my gut grows stronger.

  “I will agree to this,” Kasta hisses. “If you can make him yield without a fight, we’ll do things your way. If he attacks, we do things mine.”

  He moves off at a crouch, and I don’t think I imagine the strange silence of his footsteps or the unnatural ease with which he moves. But I can hardly focus on that for how stunned I am at what he just said. He’s not going to help subdue Odelig peacefully, but he’s going to let me try.

  I would consider this as strange as him saying he has no plans to kill me, but then I remember the Mestrah’s expectations extend to both of us. Kasta knows that if he doesn’t listen to me, I’ll tell his father, and he’ll risk being demoted. Now I’ll have to admit Kasta gave me a chance, however slim.

  I bristle and follow, determined not to give him the opening. I will be there when he finds Odelig, and I’ll know if he’s acting in self-defense. Please, I beg the gods. If you are still watching, please allow me this.

  We blend with the bushes; our dark trousers match the shadows, our green tunics the grass. We pass under branches and through bushes that come to our waists. Over a small stream, where the knot in my stomach tightens again. We turn west. The pull intensifies as we step through weeds as tall as my shoulders—

  Into a boneyard.

  Mercifully, Odelig is not here, but this still feels like a very bad place to be. Antelope rib cages, hog skulls, and a hundred leg bone
s and vertebrae litter the large clearing, half-sunk into the mud. The shredded remnants of a saddlebag trail over the decaying corpse of a camel, and near it, a pair of human skulls grin atop tattered tunics.

  The tug in my core pulls backward.

  “Back,” Kasta says, his voice tight. “Move slowly.”

  I do, though each of my careful footsteps sounds like a crack. Back into the weeds we go. Away from the bones. Out into fresh air again, where we turn—

  And come face-to-face with Odelig.

  XV

  THE lion is the size of a horse. His mane is a deep orange, and his pelt glistens like liquid gold, shot through with lightning-white stripes. More stripes line his face, rimming yellow eyes. His jaw could easily fit my entire head inside of it.

  Paws the size of plates, and the claws hidden inside them, stand one leap away.

  Kasta’s hand moves to the rope.

  “Easy,” I whisper, though I’m not sure who I’m talking to.

  Odelig growls, his ears flattening. My pulse quickens. I’d forgotten wild animals find it alarming to suddenly be able to understand a human, unlike domestic animals who’ve been raised around Whisperers. But Odelig only shifts his great gaze between us, his lip slowly dropping. I glance at Kasta, who stands stiff, and exhale as the lion’s fear lightens with curiosity.

  You speak? Odelig thinks. His voice is deep, and like Ashra, he sounds far older than he looks.

  “I do,” I say, the words thick in my throat.

  His lip rises in a sneer as his gaze moves to Kasta. You hunt.

  “No,” I say, though this is half a lie. “We seek. We need your help.”

  A snort, like a laugh. Odelig’s lips reveal canines the size of my finger. Help?

  “Our king desires your magic,” I admit, as Kasta’s hand tightens on the rope. “But if you come with us peacefully, I think I can save your life. You’ll be returned home as soon as possible, and treated as a god until then.” I swallow. I don’t want to admit this next part, but I can’t risk him attacking without understanding what’s at stake. “If you don’t, they will kill you.”