Assassin's Heart

by Sarah Ahiers

  I dug through the pouches and pockets in my leathers and cloak and through my sheaths and weapons bags, which held much of what he’d laid before me, but also included brass knuckles, multiple knives, daggers and stilettos of varying weight and length, a collapsible blow dart tube and darts, a set of bolos on the off chance my mark fled, my sword, and of course, my large pouch of poisons.

  “Why would I ever need all of this to drop a mark?”

  “Not all of this is for marks. Some of this is for other clippers.”

  His eyes flicked to mine. “Is that a common problem in Lovero? Clippers killing clippers?”

  I wiped a speck of dust off the blade of my sword. “I’m here in Yvain, aren’t I?”

  He nodded and returned to examining my weapons. “And this?” He pointed at the pouch.

  “My poisons. Where are yours?”

  He shook his head. “Master refused to teach me. He said I was more likely to poison myself or him than a mark.”

  “Hmm.” A lot of clippers disdained poison, thinking it weak, or requiring no skill. But the truth was the opposite. Poison took more skill and knowledge than any of my other weapons. And often it took much more skill to get close enough to a mark to poison them, unseen, and escape, than it did to, say, leap off a roof, land on a mark, and sink a needle into their heart. “Where’s your sword?”

  “I don’t have one. Just my cutter.” He tapped his knife affectionately.

  “Well, if we’re going to make a true clipper out of you, you’re going to need a sword at the least. Every other clipper will have one, and I don’t care how long your arms are, that cutter’s not going to pull it off against them.”

  He probed at the gap in his teeth with his tongue. “Master has a few in our weapons storage.”

  “Then I’ll expect you to bring one tomorrow.”

  He smirked, then turned away.

  “What?” I asked.

  He shook his head, hiding his smile. “It’s nothing.”

  I felt my cheeks redden beneath my mask. “Tell me!”

  “It’s only . . . look, it’s nothing. You just sounded like my master right then.”

  “Oh. Well, our Family’s training has been handed down through the generations, so I’m sure what I’m telling you is very similar to what he was told. He’s been stopping himself from teaching you too much. Which is stupid. Why would he teach you enough to get in trouble but not necessarily enough to get out of trouble?”

  His eyes narrowed. “I can get myself out of trouble.”

  I waved my hand. “That’s not what I meant and you know it. I simply mean, it seems sloppy to train someone without finishing them. It’s dangerous. And cruel, too.”

  “He’s an immovable rock when he wants to be. There was no changing his mind no matter how hard I pushed.”

  If Marcello was really so stubborn, then how would Alessio get the Da Vias’ location from him? How would I change his mind and convince him to join me?

  Les continued, “And then I’d start to worry he’d grow so angry that he’d leave me like he’d left his family in Lovero, and I . . . I couldn’t have that.”

  I had a hard time believing my uncle would abandon Alessio over an argument. “He didn’t leave his Family. He was banished. Didn’t he ever tell you?”

  Alessio shook his head. “No. He just said there was a falling-out with his Family and that he couldn’t ever go home again. Will you tell me?”

  “I don’t know.”

  His eyebrows creased. “How can you not know?”

  “It was before my time. All I know is he was forced out for killing the head of our Family, his uncle. I don’t know why he did it, what could have driven him to take his own Family’s blood, but we weren’t allowed to speak about him.”

  “Ever?”

  I shrugged. “Ever.”

  “That seems cruel.”

  “He killed his uncle, his own flesh and blood. There is cruelty in that, too.”

  We stared at each other. We had reached an impasse. This training session wasn’t starting as I’d imagined. One more thing I couldn’t do right.

  Rafeo would make a joke, but I didn’t know any jokes. Father and Matteo would’ve known better and wouldn’t have found themselves in this place of pregnant silence.

  “Can I see your mask?” Alessio’s question jostled me out of my rumination.

  “I suppose.” I lifted it off my face and handed it to him.

  He examined it closely in the fading light. “It’s cracked.”

  I nodded. “I think it happened in the fight. Or the fire. I’m not sure which.”

  He rubbed his thumb against the crack and across the eyeholes. I was glad of the darkening sky so he couldn’t see me blush.

  “Why did you pick these stripes?” He traced the black marks on the left side of the mask.

  “I didn’t.”

  “Don’t you choose the pattern? Or am I mixing it up with the color?”

  “No, you’re right. The color is signified by Family. Black for Saldana; red for Da Via; orange for the Accurso in the region of Brescio; gray for Bartolomeo, who cover Triesta to Parmo; purple for Caffarelli in the city of Lilyan; yellow for Maietta in Reggia, Calabario, and Modeni; brown for Addamo in Genoni; blue for Zarella in the farmlands; and green for Gallo in the far south. Sapienza, the royal line, has gold, though they don’t actually clip people. Their masks are for ceremony only.

  “The patterns are up to each individual, but the slashes aren’t mine. The mask isn’t mine.”

  “Do you often trade masks?”

  “No, we don’t trade masks. It’s my brother’s mask. Rafeo. I got them . . . confused.”

  My chest tightened at the memory of the dark tunnel, and my brother alone down there, my mask resting beside him. Maybe my mask comforted him the way his mask comforted me. I hoped Safraella had given him a fast rebirth. He had probably been reborn already and was being cradled warmly by his new mother. I hoped his new life offered more peace than his last one.

  Alessio looked at me. “He died in the fight?”

  “Yes,” I whispered, not trusting my voice any louder.

  He nodded. “I’m sorry. I understand what it’s like to lose your family. Someday it won’t be so hard, and you’ll be able to think of them without the pain.” He handed the mask to me.

  I held it in my lap. “When we were children, once travelers passed through Ravenna with their menagerie. They had caged tigers. I’d never seen anything like them before, and never since. No books or tapestries could convey the colors, and the way their muscles rippled beneath their fur and stripes, and how their gold eyes stared at me. They were so beautiful.

  “Rafeo . . . Rafeo could not stop talking about the tigers. I think they changed him, changed the way he saw the world, saw his place in it. He earned his mask two months later, and it was no surprise when he requested a tiger’s black slashes.” I rubbed my thumb over the black marks on the mask.

  “My family were travelers,” Alessio said.

  I raised my eyebrows. “Really?”

  He smiled and gestured to his face. “Can’t you tell from my handsome nose? My coloring?”

  I looked at him closer. Of course I had noticed his skin color, his nose, but I hadn’t known they were markers of some kind. I shrugged. “I haven’t met a lot of travelers.”

  Travelers were so called because they would travel across the dead plains without fear. One of their gods protected them from the ghosts. They were menagerie people, keeping dangerous animals and bringing them to cities for shows and viewings. Most of them hailed from Mornia, a country to the east, where they lived until they needed funds. Then they would gather and put on a tour until they made enough money to return home.

  He glanced at the mask again. “What did your mask look like?”

  “It had azalea flowers.”

  “Because they’re poisonous?”

  I nodded. “Truthfully, they never meant as much to me as Rafeo’s tiger s
tripes did to him.” I put it on and then slid it to the top of my head.

  “When will I get a mask?”

  I sighed. “I don’t know. You should’ve had one by now. As clippers, we’re given one before we go on our first solo job. In Lovero, there are tradesmen who craft the masks for the Families. They’re made from the bones of oxen that are raised on feed blessed and sprinkled with holy blood. It’s a secret craft only they practice. I don’t even know where to begin here in Rennes. Did you ever ask my uncle about it?”

  “He refused. You heard him. He doesn’t allow any masks around him. He wouldn’t even show me his. Sometimes, when he’s really drunk, I hear him cursing Safraella. Sometimes I hear him begging. I think the mask reminds him of Her and brings about dark thoughts.”

  I shook my head. “He does himself no favors in Her eyes.”

  “I don’t think he wants to. He punishes himself.”

  I understood that. But for my atonement I’d rather do something, work toward killing the Da Vias instead of getting drunk and raging at the night.

  “Training me was a sort of penance,” Alessio said, “but he refused to train me all the way. Perhaps he looks at me and sees a path to redemption. Or maybe he was just a lonely man who found a lonely boy and figured they could find safety from the ghosts together.”

  I smiled. “You could be a poet, with words like that.”

  He returned my smile, and I felt it deep in my stomach. “Kalla Lea, I could be a lot of things, if I so chose. But I choose to be a clipper.”

  I climbed to my feet. “We’ll start with poisons.”

  He smiled even more brightly and leaned forward. “Anything you can teach me, Clipper Girl.”

  “As much as I can until we leave.”

  His eyes darkened, but he climbed to his feet and nodded. “Until we leave.”

  Behind him, a flash of white light appeared in the alley beside my safe house. The light moved, then vanished behind a building before reappearing.

  I walked to the edge of the roof for a better look. I tightened my arms around myself, my fists clenching. The ghost was so close this time.

  “Sometimes the streets are full of them,” Alessio said quietly as we watched the specter drift away, looking for a live body it could take as its own. “Even I don’t venture out on nights like that.”

  I remembered the horrible screams on the dead plain, the black emptiness of the ghost’s open mouth as she reached for me, the iciness of her fingers as they slipped through my flesh, trying to claim my body as her own. I remembered hiding in the boat on my first night here, the ghost waiting for me.

  I released a breath I hadn’t known I’d been holding.

  We watched the ghost together. Alessio began to hum a song under his breath. I glanced at him, but he didn’t seem to notice. I forced myself away from the edge.

  I thought I had conquered my fear of the ghosts, but when I opened my fists, my nails had dug grooves into my palms and I hadn’t even felt it. Not even on my burned hand, which ached from the pressure.

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

  ..................................................................

  ninteen

  THE NEXT MORNING I OPENED THE DOOR TO THE MAIL office, and the sound and smell of pigeons assaulted my senses. The front of the shop was small, no more than ten feet wide and fifteen feet deep. At the back was a wooden desk, kept clean but scratched by long years of use. Behind the desk were cages and cages of pigeons. White pigeons, blue, green, all of them cooing and bobbing and making a racket. Small feathers drifted out of their cages and floated to the floor. I covered my nose.

  I shook the handbell on the desk. A portly man with glasses and a balding crown stepped out from a side door. He pushed his glasses farther up his nose and broke into a grin.

  “Hello, milady. What can I do for you today?”

  “I’m expecting a letter.” Or at least Faraday had said he would send me a letter. I didn’t have an address here in Yvain, so I had been checking the post office every few days.

  “Of course, of course.” He pulled out a ledger book and dipped his quill into an inkwell before he flipped to a blank page in the middle of the book. He scratched something into the ledger. “Name?”

  I blinked rapidly. I couldn’t imagine Faraday using my full name to send a letter, on the off chance it was intercepted.

  “Miss?” the clerk asked, glancing over his glasses.

  “Oleander,” I said. Maybe it would be enough, since it wasn’t common.

  He lifted his eyebrow but said nothing. Postmen took an oath. Any letters remanded to them were kept secret, as were destinations and origins. “I do indeed have a letter for an Oleander. Delivered yesterday.”

  My stomach fluttered.

  “Do you need it read to you?” he asked.

  “No.”

  He turned and paged through envelopes and letters in a bin behind him. He grunted and pulled one free, setting it on the desk. “Will you be sending a reply?”

  I shook my head.

  “Two gold,” the postman said. I widened my eyes, and he lifted his eyebrow again. “Is something the matter?”

  “Two gold is a lot. Why is it so expensive?”

  He shrugged. “Postmaster owes a debt. I don’t set the prices, miss.”

  Two gold would make a significant dent in my remaining funds. Most of the gold I’d brought with me from our stashes I’d left in Dorian’s saddle packs. I had the Saldana stamped coins, but I couldn’t use them. For one thing, they were holy coins, not meant for spending. And I couldn’t take the chance of anyone seeing them. Since Lefevre had found the coin I’d left on that murdered boy, I’d hidden the coins in my hideaway for safekeeping.

  But Faraday might have information regarding the hunt for me. I couldn’t risk not hearing from him. No. I had to bite my lip and accept the cost.

  “If you can’t pay now, you can open a tab,” the clerk said. “Pay your debt later.”

  Debts again. It had to be exhausting being Yvanese and having to juggle debts left and right. How anyone remained in good graces with their god was beyond me.

  I sighed and poured two gold coins into my palm before passing them to the postman.

  “Thank you so much for your business, and stay safe from the ghosts.”

  I took the letter and slipped out to the streets. The flecks of quartz and mica in the mail office’s walls sparkled in the light of the afternoon sun. I took back ways and alleys to my safe house and slipped inside. It was almost too dark to read inside, but I felt safer.

  The letter was from Faraday, of course, and I exhaled slowly as I opened the seal. His precise handwriting spilled across the page. I read his greeting:

  They know.

  My stomach sank. I scanned the rest of the letter, then realized I hadn’t absorbed any of it, so fully had my fear overwhelmed me. I took a deep breath and read the letter carefully again.

  They know.

  I don’t think they know who they’re chasing, but they know someone survived their fire. Word is they’re scurrying around the city like terriers tracking a rat and that they’re considering a bounty on you. It’s only a matter of time before they catch your trail. I would recommend you finish whatever business it is you’re conducting as soon as possible and flee before they find you. Or someone finds you for them.

  Expect another letter from me soon, with more information.

  I will remind you it is not too late to return home, live a new life. I fear, though, that window will soon close and you will be committed whether you are ready or not.

  I will pray for you, though I do not think She deals in the kind of mercy I’ll ask for.

  Yours in faith,

  F

  I crumpled the paper in my hands.

  So the Da Vias knew I’d survived their attack. They must have spoken to the Addamos. But maybe the Da Vias didn’t suspect it was me. Maybe the Addamos conf
used the situation and told them I was Rafeo. If they had counted and identified bodies, they wouldn’t have found Rafeo’s or mine.

  But even if they thought I was Rafeo, that didn’t give me much of an advantage. Perhaps they would be surprised when they discovered the truth, as Alexi Addamo had been, but it wouldn’t change anything. They’d have to kill me no matter who I turned out to be, and I’d be easier to kill than Rafeo, who had been the best of us.

  I was running out of time.

  I leaned back against the wall of my space, trying to calm the fear and anxiety that had crept over me after Faraday’s letter.

  A thump came from above. I jerked my stiletto from my boot and scrambled to my feet.

  Alessio peered down at me from the hole in the ceiling, an amused expression on his face. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”

  I resheathed my stiletto, trying to decide if I was embarrassed. Clearly I was on edge from Faraday’s letter, but I’d rather overact to nothing than underreact to an actual threat.

  He dropped through the hole, dust puffing around his boots. He was dressed in green trousers and a matching vest covering a loose-fitting linen shirt, his pendant resting against his chest. He looked clean, freshly washed, with his hair pulled back tightly in a tail and the short beard on his chin neatly trimmed.

  Alessio looked me up and down, taking in the same stained dress I’d been wearing, and tried to hide a grin. He turned and examined my space, the empty floors, my saddle-blanket bed, my bags of weapons and supplies. Everything I owned, except for Butters stabled at the monastery.

  “Is this where you’ve been staying?” he asked.

  “And?” I snapped.

  “Nothing. Four walls are always better than none once the ghosts come out.”

  “What are you doing here, Alessio?”

  “Les,” he corrected. “I want to show you something. And we can get some food on the way. My treat.”

  This was the second time he was giving me food. Third if I counted the stolen fruit. “Are you courting me?”

  He smiled, that ridiculous crooked smile of his. “Do you want me to court you?”

  I stiffened. “Les . . .”