Isyllt’s face felt stiff and strange. It took a moment to realize she was grinning. She slipped back to her cabin before Adam or Siddir noticed her, to fetch a knife. Not her bone-hilted kukri—she wouldn’t risk losing that over the side—but a long curved blade of plainer make. She relied on magic in a fight far too often.
She returned to find Siddir on his back, Adam’s knee on his chest and knife at his throat. “You cheated,” Siddir said with a laugh.
“I didn’t think spies knew the meaning of the word.” Adam rocked back and pulled the other man up. Sweat sheened his face and his breath came sharply, but there was a light in his eyes Isyllt hadn’t seen since she walked into the Çirağan.
Siddir grinned. “It’s only cheating when the other side does it. Two falls out of three.”
“Wait.” They both turned as Isyllt spoke. The crowd fell back to let her through. “Let me have a dance.”
The second day of their voyage, Isyllt remembered her diamond’s new occupant. Siddir stopped her when she would have brought the ghost out and questioned him, however.
“Transporting foreign sorcerers is one thing, especially if you keep that ring out of sight, but the crew will never countenance necromancy on the ship. Summon a ghost here and we’ll find ourselves swimming home.”
Adam spent the days resting and practicing by turn, with Isyllt, Bashari, and Moth, and occasionally with the sailors. He lost as many rounds as he won, but his muscles firmed again and his hands peeled and toughened as salt and sun baked the lingering illness from his bones.
He’d joked with Xinai, years ago, about becoming pirates. Before she’d chosen revolution and the ghosts of her past over their partnership. The roll of the sea had called to him then, sun and wind and brilliant endless blue. A freedom he’d never felt on land. Now the ship was just another cage to pace.
As he measured the length of the weather deck one morning he felt eyes on him, and turned to find Moth perched on a coil of rope in the shadow of the forecastle. Still awake, he thought, not up early. She seemed completely nocturnal.
He stopped his circuit, shade sliding cool across his face. Moth blinked as he crouched beside her.
“Your eyes— I thought it was a mage trick at first, but it’s not.”
“No trick. I’m no mage.” He stretched his legs in front of him and waited for the inevitable question.
“How, then?” At least she didn’t ask What are you? Many weren’t so circumspect.
When he was Moth’s age, he’d lied as often as not, just to see the asker flinch. I drink demon’s blood. My father was a wolf. The truth had grown rote with time.
“My mother was Tier Danaan. Do you know what that means?”
Moth cocked her head. “I’ve heard stories. I didn’t think they were real.”
Adam chuckled humorlessly. “The stories likely aren’t. They’re not blue, or giants, or shapeshifters, or any sort of demon that I know.” Thought having met a few, he understood why Valls and Celanorans thought they were.
“So what are they?”
“I don’t know. Witches, maybe. They live in the high forests in the Aillerons and rarely venture south. They live with beasts—that much is true—and speak to them. The way mages speak to spirits or the dead, perhaps. I’ve never understood it.”
Moth watched him expectantly and he sighed. “Only my mother was Tier. I’ve always guessed my father was eastern, but I don’t know. However I came about, I didn’t pass muster when I was born. She left me with a Tzadani caravan when I was only a month or so old. They named me and raised me.”
“And?” Moth prompted when he fell silent.
“Isn’t that enough? Bandits attacked the caravan when I was twelve. Slaughtered nearly everyone. Some of the children—including me—they kept to sell. I escaped.” His voice was flat; the memories had lost the worst of their sting after twenty-six years. Except when nightmares found them. “I ended up in Selafai and eventually became a mercenary.”
“Did you ever find your mother again?”
“No.” He closed his eyes against rising images: white tattooed faces; shining yellow eyes; the smell of pine and snow and hot animal musk. Those memories could stay buried. “Blood only matters in the spilling. I made my own family after that.” And lost them again, one by one.
“Oh.” Moth hunched forward, elbows on her knees. Her teeth dented her lower lip. “I wish my mother would have given me to the Tzadanim,” she said at last. “That might have been easier.”
She picked at the coiled rope, releasing the scent of hemp and brine. “I’m androgyne. Not exactly a boy or a girl.” She eyed him sideways, looking for a reaction.
Adam nodded. “I guessed as much. You don’t smell like a girl, exactly.”
She looked away, olive cheeks flushing scarlet. “In Erisín I would have joined the hijra when I turned sixteen.” Another sideways glance. “Do you know what that means?”
“Only stories.”
She snorted. “Whatever else is or isn’t true, it means I’d become a prostitute.” She shrugged, not quite succeeding at nonchalance. “I grew up in the Garden. I’ve seen flowers there get rich and retire. And I’ve seen them dead in an alley with their throats slit.” Her jaw tightened. “It’s not a worse life than any other, maybe, but I didn’t want it chosen for me.”
“So you found Isyllt.” Children with no families found their own; children with no opportunities made them. Sometimes those opportunities turned them into killers and spies, but there was always a worse fate.
Moth nodded, but her mouth flattened. “But now—” Her voice dropped. “I don’t think she wants me here. I’m a burden.”
Adam frowned. “It isn’t you. Her burdens are all in her head. She doesn’t know how to share them and it makes her prickly and skittish.” How many people had he driven away or fled from because of his own ghosts? “At least you’re not old and decrepit like me.”
“You’re not old!” Moth said, too quickly.
“Your eyes go wide when you lie. You should watch that.”
She blushed again.
“Don’t worry. Spend enough time with spies and you’ll learn.”
* * *
The restless boredom broke on the twelfth day with the sight of birds. The thirteenth brought the distant smudge of the Assari coast. Adam spent much of that afternoon on the forecastle, rolling a borrowed spyglass between his palms and trying to determine what particular smudge he was looking at. He’d seen plenty of maps of Khemia, but had never set foot on the southern continent.
He smelled Isyllt and heard the familiar rhythm of her steps before he felt her warmth beside him. “What can you see?” she asked, leaning against the rail to his right.
“I’m not sure. I think that blur”—he pointed—“is Sherazad.” The westernmost of Assar’s large ports.
Isyllt grinned, an unguarded happiness he hadn’t seen during their stay in Kehribar. Her nose was sun-reddened and pale freckles dusted her cheeks and shoulders. “I hope so. I’ve always wanted to see the library there.”
They stood in silence, sailors’ voices faint beneath the rush of waves. The pale glitter of Isyllt’s eyes warned him before she moved. She reached up—slow and careful, letting him see the motion—and stroked the side of his head. The rasp of stubble shivered to the roots of his teeth.
“It is a pity.”
He caught her left hand, turning it palm-up to study the scars. She tensed, but permitted the touch. An assassin’s blade had pierced her palm three years ago, severing tendon and cracking bone. He’d helped her bind the wound. “So is this. My hair will grow back.”
She glanced away. The sun caught the edge of her irises as her eyes narrowed, paling them like light through old ice; the tips of her lashes gleamed auburn. Too gaunt and cold to be beautiful, but she had the sharp elegance of a blade. Like any weapon, he hated to see her edges blunted.
She came to him that night, salt and wine clinging to her skin. Past midnight, but Ada
m lay awake on his cot, restless with the rhythm of the sea. Memories had chewed the corners of his mind since they left Kehribar, slipping away like quicksilver when he tried to pin them down. The familiar knock ended another round of chasing his tail.
Isyllt came inside when he called but lingered in the doorway, steadying herself against the ship’s sway. Through the warped glass of the porthole the moon silvered the waves, just enough light to show the pallor of her face in the gloom. Desire sharpened her scent, sharpened his pulse in turn.
It had nearly happened once before, as another ship had carried them away from the ruins of Symir. The same silence in the dark, the same awareness that might have led to more. But she’d been sick and injured, and Xinai had been a fresh wound, and nothing had come of it.
“Do you want me to go?” she said at last, her voice rough.
It was grief that brought her here, grief and loneliness. She didn’t need him to tell her that. The darkness left him longing for things he couldn’t name.
“No.”
Her hands were cold, her lips flecked with brine. Her weight against him was warm, though, and it had been longer than a year since a woman kissed him. Her tongue moved against his, bitter with wine. Tentative at first, then demanding; her teeth caught his lip and he tasted the bright heat of blood. His hands knotted in her hair, pulling her closer. She made a soft noise against his mouth and he felt it in the pit of his stomach. His hands moved under her shirt, tracing the ridges of her shoulder blades, the smooth slope of her back and the furrows of her ribs. Her hands were callused, but the rest of her skin was silken over bone and too-lean flesh.
Her nails left welts down his back and his teeth carved crescents in her shoulders. Both of them bruised knees and elbows against the wall. Her hipbones were as sharp as he’d imagined.
Afterward, they lay tangled together, not speaking. His breath, not fully recovered from the fever and cough, rasped loud in the tiny cabin. Isyllt’s hair fell free of its knot, and oily, salt-stiff strands wrapped his fingers and tickled his cheek. She traced idle patterns across his stomach and chest, following the lines of old scars. Her touch tingled—her magic reading all the brushes with death written on his skin.
“What is it?” she asked eventually. Her fingers brushed his jaw and he realized his teeth were clenched.
“Xinai.” It was, he thought a heartbeat later, a stupid thing to say. Isyllt snorted. “Not just her.” He rolled onto his side, tucking his left arm under him awkwardly. If either of them had been a healthy weight, they wouldn’t fit together on the bed. “Something about the assassin in Kehribar was familiar, but I can’t place it.”
“Do you know many women who kill with plumbatae?”
His chuckle pressed his chest to hers. “No. I do seem to have a fondness for dangerous women, though.”
Isyllt, Xinai, Sorcha: the only women in the past twelve years who had been more than an evening’s distraction, and all of them deadly. And Brenna—laughing, black-eyed Brenna, who had been worse than dangerous. Treacherous. The thought of her still made his hands ache. For years he’d thought of her only as a thief and a traitor; now he realized she had probably been a spy.
Isyllt pried open the fist he hadn’t noticed making. “You could try meeting nice women. It might be more restful.”
“I wouldn’t know where to look.” He moved closer and ran his palm over her flank. She laughed and lay back on the thin mattress. Laughter became a muffled curse as her elbow cracked against the wall again. Skinny and a spy, but she was warm and close and he trusted her enough to fall asleep in her arms. He lowered his mouth to hers.
He dreamed of black hair enfolding him like raven wings. Teasing smiles and laughing eyes. Not Isyllt—the scent was different, the texture of skin. He couldn’t see her face, and every time he reached she slipped away.
He woke reaching still, tangled in the bedclothes. Dawn rose over the water, and Isyllt was gone.
CHAPTER 10
Nerium woke from unquiet dreams to the sound of screaming. She was halfway to the window, nightdress tangled sweaty around her legs, before she realized the sound didn’t come from a human throat. Instead it was the shrill reverberation of her wards.
Startled panic turned to dread. She ran barefoot from the Chanterie and into the street, ignoring the knife-edged pain in her joints and lungs. Darkness blotted the stars and thickened the air; the few streetlamps guttered in the choking shadow. All around her the wind rose, flinging grit into her eyes. Sand scoured her feet as she ran toward the temple; slivers of glass tore her skin. Light blossomed in windows, dimming again as the watchers flung their shutters closed. No one emerged—Nerium couldn’t blame them.
Once she could have run the length and breadth of Qais. Now her breath gave out halfway through the hypostyle, and she leaned against a column to get it back. Each gasp felt like briars ripping through her lungs and tightening around her heart. And what was the point of haste, anyway? The damage was done, the storm freed. What point in anything but returning to bed and letting it devour the world?
She pinched her arm, hard and savage. The sudden pain cleared the dulling miasma from her head. She was sworn to stop Al-Jodâ’im. Death might free her from the vow, but age and misery did not.
Besides, she thought, forcing her aching feet on, she ran quite well for a woman of one hundred and two.
As she reached the last row of columns, a grotesque shape appeared out of the haze, nearly startling her out of life she could ill afford to spare. It was only Khalil, bent double over his cane. Behind him was Salah, captain of Qais’s guards; his dark face was grey with strain, but he braved the storm.
Nerium led the way up the stairs, buffeted by the scouring wind. Stepping inside the shelter of the temple should have been a relief—instead her stomach cramped at the misery welling up the stairs.
She descended into darkness absolute. Her witchlight died as soon as she summoned it and she wasted no strength on another. One hand on the wall, the other outstretched for balance, she climbed blind, one groping toe-curled step at a time. She miscounted somewhere down the spiral, and bloodied her knees missing the final stair. Sticky warmth trickled down her left shin, and she wanted to cry like a child.
The salt door was cool to the touch, the latch rough and clogged with fresh corrosion. Hinges shrieked as she tugged it open and their cry mingled with the cacophony pouring from the oubliette. She knew she should wait for Khalil but she couldn’t hear him over the wail, nor stand long before its onslaught.
Two strides into the chamber she realized her mistake: She was walking straight into the oubliette. Her legs folded like a discarded puppet and she sat down hard on the floor. Where was Khalil? Where was Shirin? She didn’t dare take her attention away from Al-Jodâ’im long enough to search for them.
“Kash!”
He fought the summons—not his usual reluctance, but a real struggle. Under other circumstance she might have indulged him, but she couldn’t afford the distraction now. The clouded diamond on her left hand flared. Her grandfather’s diamond. She granted Kash what freedom she could, but part of him was always bound to the stone. She tightened the leash, reeling him back into his faceted cage. Leaving her alone once more to face the fury of Al-Jodâ’im.
Nerium began to sing.
Evening has fallen like the first evening
Nightjar has spoken like the first bird
Her voice cracked at first, and the howling storm warped all her notes out of true. But she kept on, and her throat relaxed and warmed, and the pain in her lungs subsided to make room for words.
Praise for the singing, praise for the gloaming
Praise for the light fading soft from the world
One of the church’s sunset hymns, one of the hundreds of songs that some ancient member of Quietus had helped to write. A hundred little wards set to music and spread across the continent, to weaken the night, weaken the Fata, and strengthen the seals against the darkness. Nerium had never invo
lved herself in ecclesiastical matters, but some of the hymns were pretty. She had sung this one to her daughter in the cradle—it always calmed her, even through the worst colic.
And part of that child lived forever in the oubliette.
Nerium sat in the darkness, singing and weeping, for what felt like an eternity. If there was a hell of punishment, of atonement, this would be hers. The thought that even death might not bring peace terrified her.
It wasn’t until someone called her name that she realized she could hear again. The howling had subsided once more into a sleepy dirge and magelight glowed against the darkness. Blinking back tears, she saw Shirin pacing the circumference of the pit, tracing numbers on the dusty stone.
“Lady Kerah.” Salah knelt beside her, chafing her cold hand in his broad callused palms. “Are you all right?”
Her laugh was a harsh, ugly sound. Her legs were numb, and when she straightened them her scabbed knees cracked and bled fresh. Her left hip ached from landing on the stones. She’d lost vocal discipline—her throat felt scraped raw.
“I’m alive,” she croaked. “That will have to suffice.”
Salah smiled crookedly. “It will. Can you stand?”
She could, with help. Across the oubliette, Shirin met her eyes and gave a strained nod. The diamonds in the walls sparked with rainbow fire as her light bobbed above her shoulder.
Salah hesitated as he helped Nerium through the door. “Lady, I hate to burden you further after all you’ve done tonight—”
She closed her eyes. “What is it?”
“Lord Ramadi. He tried to help you, but he fell.” His voice lowered. “I think it’s his heart.”
Looking up, she saw Khalil slumped on the spiral stairs, one fist pressed against his chest. His breath came loud and harsh and his face had drained a sickly grey. His cane lay discarded and useless at the bottom of the stair. Nerium threw off Salah’s supporting arm and stumbled up the steps to his side.
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