“I almost want you to try,” she said, cocking her head to the side. “I can only imagine what my parents would do in return. My father might be happy just taking your eyes, but I think my mother would be more creative.”
Gaz blanched at that, though he didn’t remove the knife.
“I’m Cassa Valera,” the girl said, turning to Alys and extending her hand. “I’ve been looking everywhere for you.”
“For me?” Alys shook her hand reflexively, though she still hadn’t figured out what was going on. The name sounded familiar, even though she was certain she’d never met Cassa before.
“You are Alys Sera, right?”
Alys nodded.
“Good, let’s go.” Cassa tightened her grip on Alys’s hand and tried to lead her away, but Alys pulled away from her.
“I can’t,” she said, glancing back toward Gaz. Her heart was racing like a jackrabbit. She didn’t want to stay, but she couldn’t leave empty-handed.
Gaz flashed his disgusting grin and leaned back in his chair again, the picture of leisure.
“You heard the lady,” he said to Cassa. “Why don’t you run along? Miss Sera has business with the Dream Merchant.”
“If you’re a merchant, then I’m the queen of Teruvia,” Cassa snapped. She looked at Alys. “He doesn’t trade fair. He buys dreams for a silver and then turns around and sells them to bluebloods for twenty silvers each.”
“Man’s gotta make a living,” said Gaz.
“Except I hear you also skim a few memories off the top.” Cassa stalked forward a few steps, even though that knife still gleamed between them. “Then you sell them to the council if you find anything worth their while.”
“You hear that from your scum parents?”
Cassa ignored him and pointed over Gaz’s head, toward the sign with the rook symbol.
“See the smaller symbol there?” she asked Alys. Alys squinted and saw that there was another symbol on the sign, carved roughly into the wood. An X with an extra horizontal line through the center. “It’s a warning. Means he can’t be trusted.” Cassa crossed her arms.
Gaz scowled at her.
“You filthy firebrands deserve everything you get,” he said. “I ought to rip down that sign and burn it.”
“Try it,” Cassa shot back. “We’ll carve the next one into your forehead.”
Alys was just remembering where she’d heard the name Valera before. Cassa’s brash confidence, despite her age and Gaz’s knife, was starting to make more sense. But why had Cassa Valera been looking for her?
Gaz had risen to his feet, resting his hand on the knife’s hilt. Alys touched Cassa’s shoulder.
“Let’s go.” She didn’t want things to escalate further, even though she had a strange feeling that Cassa would be able to hold her own.
“Finally,” Cassa said. “The stink around here is giving me a headache. I can smell the mirasma from here. Hitting it a little heavy these days, aren’t we, Gaz?”
“I’ll hit as much as I like. I can afford it,” Gaz replied, his lips suddenly curving into a smile. “The council pays prettily for the things I know.” He tapped his temple.
“In that case, it’s a wonder you didn’t starve to death years ago.”
“Oh, I know quite a lot about what goes on around here.” He was still smiling. “I see all sorts of folk come and go. Like a certain little redhead who doesn’t like to be seen but isn’t very good at hiding. I wonder how much the council would pay to know the company the high chancellor’s niece has been keeping.”
“Bastard.” Cassa surged forward, and Alys instinctively caught her arm. “If you so much as breathe her name, I’m going to ram that knife down your throat.”
The sudden fury that twisted her voice made Alys’s hair stand on end. She believed that Cassa meant every word. She knew she should just leave them to their feud and escape while she was still an innocent bystander. Instead, she found herself grabbing Cassa by both shoulders and propelling her down the street, away from Gaz Ritter and his shop.
Once they were a couple of streets away and Cassa’s stormy expression had calmed somewhat, Alys cleared her throat.
“Why were you looking for me?” She hoped her tone was passably nonchalant. Inside, her mind was roiling. What could the rebellion possibly want with her?
“You’re an apothecary, right?”
“I’m thirteen.”
“Good to know. Not what I asked.”
“My parents are apothecaries.”
“I hear you’re pretty handy at it too.” Cassa shot her a sideways glance.
Alys gnawed her lip for a few seconds.
“So?”
“So, if you want to earn some real coin, I’ve got a job for you.”
“My parents—” Alys cut off, thinking about the scars burned into her parents’ faces, the mark the council gave rebels whose crimes didn’t warrant a death sentence. But her parents weren’t rebels, and they never had been. Their only crime had been giving a dying man comfort. For that, the council had taken everything.
Maybe Cassa knew what she was thinking, because she stopped walking and tugged Alys to face her.
“Your parents have done enough,” she said, her brown eyes solemn. “Don’t you think it’s your turn now?”
Alys stared down at her wet, filthy shoes. Her parents were wasting away—she could see it in their sunken cheeks and their tired eyes. Her brother was far gone and going further every day. It occurred to her that maybe she didn’t have much of a choice. Her chest had constricted so tightly that she could barely breathe, but she looked Cassa Valera in the eye and nodded.
EIGHTEEN
VESPER
After a few hours of restless sleep, filled with visions of infinite burning candles and the sound of that woman’s screams, Vesper pulled herself out of bed and into her clerk’s uniform. The black pants, collared shirt, and buttoned vest were crisp and neat but comfortable. By the time she’d laced on her leather sleeve-guards and pulled on her light half-cape, she felt more like herself than she had all night.
She left the clerks’ barracks and made her way through the citadel streets, which were much quieter now, at dawn, though workers still scurried about their duties. All the wealthy patrons of the chapels had returned to the upper echelon, where most of them had probably just finished drinking themselves unconscious. Memorial services for the Slain God were as good a reason as any to celebrate in excess.
Vesper had just turned onto the main street that ran past the Central Keep when she heard the rumble of hooves and wheels from the direction of the front gates. She stopped and waited for the slick black carriage to near. When the driver saw her, he eased the horses to a halt. Almost immediately, the carriage door popped open and the high chancellor stepped down. He moved more slowly these days, but he still had a spryness about him, as if he were a much younger man trapped in an aged body.
“Ah, Vesper,” he said, squinting at his pocket watch. “Right on time.”
Vesper hadn’t intended to meet him, but apparently she was meant to anyway. Her uncle Ansel had access to the best diviners in the city. She had long since grown accustomed to him knowing where she was headed before even she did. There were very few secrets in the citadel—that was part of the reason her uncle had hired her.
“Did you find—did everything go well?” she asked. The passersby gave the chancellor and his clerk a wide berth out of respect, but that didn’t mean their ears weren’t perked.
Ansel probably had the same thought, because he shook his head.
“Not here.” He gestured toward the keep and dismissed his driver. Vesper walked beside him in silence, wishing she’d at least had time for breakfast before the day’s intrigue began.
“How was the service?” asked her uncle, his face a pleasant mask. There might be very few secrets in the citadel, but she and her uncle had mastered the art of keeping them. It was especially dire now, as they reached the crux of their carefully laid plans.<
br />
“There was another incident,” she said.
“What? Who?” He looked at her, and the frown lines were sharp in his face, eviscerating the mask.
“I didn’t recognize her,” Vesper said. “A lady. Her husband was there. I’m sorry, I should have stayed and found out their names.”
She had been so eager to escape the chapel that she’d forgotten how important it was to her uncle to have every possible scrap of information. Vesper felt most like herself in her uniform, but the truth was that she wasn’t really a clerk at all. Her appointment was a smokescreen. Her uncle didn’t need a clerk; he needed an extra pair of eyes and ears. He needed someone he could trust in the shifting sands of the citadel’s politics. Filling the role of clerk just assuaged any suspicion—from his enemies in the citadel and from Vesper’s parents, who lived in the upper echelon and were exceedingly pleased that their daughter had received such a high placement, nepotism or no. In her clerk’s uniform, she had access to areas of the citadel that most people didn’t, and as the clerk to the high chancellor, there were very few places she couldn’t go, as long as she could invent a good enough reason for being there.
Ansel looked ahead again as they passed through the gate into the outer courtyard of the keep. A man in a fine gray suit on his way out traded brief pleasantries with him. Crispin Cavar. He was one of the more well-established sentients in the citadel, and his services were utilized by several council members. Vesper averted her eyes in what she hoped was a demure fashion. Ansel scratched his forehead during the exchange. A casual enough gesture. She wondered if the sentient had noticed. Surely people often tried to conceal their full faces from his unnaturally discerning gaze.
Technically it was illegal for sentients to read people without their consent, though there was no easy way to prove it. Laws governing rooks were even stricter. Any rook caught taking someone’s memories against their will received an automatic death sentence, which Vesper had always found morbidly ironic, considering that the traditional death rites of the Slain God depended on a rook taking all of a person’s memories. Context was everything, especially in the citadel. Sentients and rooks working for the council never seemed to find themselves on the wrong side of the law.
“The attacks are getting more frequent,” Vesper said, once they had cleared the courtyard and were winding their way through the great halls of the Central Keep. Ansel just nodded.
Though the rest of Eldra had progressed with the times, the decor in the citadel’s keeps was as it had ever been. Immense, fading tapestries hung from the stone walls, depicting various prophecies and scenes from the Slain God’s history. Gaslights were mounted at intervals, casting wavering light and shadow. The richly colored rugs, once plush velvet, were threadbare under Vesper’s feet. A century of stalemate with the rebellion had drained the citadel’s resources to almost nothing, trapping it in time. That was part of the reason fewer and fewer citizens were allowed past the walls. The council didn’t want the public catching on to the fact that their steadily rising taxes were barely keeping the citadel solvent. That, and the fact that more and more people were collapsing in agony within the walls, waking up utterly senseless, if they even woke up at all.
She glanced at Ansel’s profile and could see the careful concentration there as they walked. She didn’t speak again until they had reached the southeast tower—the chancellor’s private quarters. They mounted the steps past his sitting room and study doors, past his bedchamber, all the way to the top of the battlement. Vesper was used to the climb, but her uncle needed to stop and rest periodically.
The sunrise was breaking across the horizon by the time they were in the open air. The chill was more pronounced above the narrow confines of the streets. Their vantage point was higher even than the citadel walls, and Vesper could see all of Eldra stretched out, bathed in the burgeoning sunlight. There was the pristine brick and whitewash of the upper echelon, where the nobility lived alongside the wealthier merchants and families of council members. The next tier down held the finest establishments the city had to offer, the museums and public gardens and gambling halls for people with money to lose. Next were the more prominent tradesmen with their modest shops and the people who were neither wealthy nor poor.
On and on it went, each class neatly divided from the others, with few exceptions. From Vesper’s bird’s-eye view, it was deceptively neat and simple. Beyond the curved city walls was the great glistening ribbon of the river, the bright spires of the Merchants’ Bridge, the golden expanse of Aurelia Valley, and the dark green smudge that was Eldrin Wood. If she squinted, she could make out a lazy stream of smoke from a clearing in the wood, where the Blacksmith lived. The mountains beyond were shrouded in a murky mist.
They were safe nestled in their far corner of Teruvia, distant from the machinations of the world, but they were also trapped in a future that had been handed to them hundreds of years before. Trapped with the monster that lurked beneath the citadel. A monster of their own making.
“I think your friends will help us,” Ansel said into the silence.
Vesper’s heart clenched in her chest, though she knew she should be relieved.
“Were they—did they seem—” Vesper swallowed her words, uncertain of exactly what she wanted to ask.
Ansel smiled at her, a soft, sad smile.
“They were as well as could be expected. No broken bones at least.”
Vesper didn’t ask what she really wanted to know. They wouldn’t have asked about her. In the days of the rebellion, traitors to the cause were killed and their bodies burned—the same fate that the council dealt captured rebels. But though rebels were granted death rites by the council, albeit at the hands of the executioner beneath the citadel, the rebels didn’t extend the same courtesy to their enemies. Traitors to the rebellion were granted no good-byes, no death rites. They died with the poison of their guilt still inside them, their ashes given to the wind and forgotten.
The others might have believed that a diviner saw their plan and warned the council, but Vesper knew how Cassa’s mind worked. Cassa would know the truth. And though the rebellion was over, Cassa had never left it behind.
Vesper had betrayed their plans to her uncle because she thought it was the only way to save them in the end. There was so much more at stake than even she had ever imagined. They wouldn’t understand though. They wouldn’t forgive. Maybe her friends hadn’t asked about her because she was already forgotten. Ashes in their memories.
“I think it’s time,” her uncle said into her silence. “You can see the rest for yourself.”
“Already?” Vesper asked.
“I have to meet with the council within the hour,” he said. “We can’t risk anything. Not now.”
Vesper nodded, wishing she felt more like the capable clerk that everyone else saw, like the clever confidante her uncle thought she was. Less like a girl still clinging to the simplicities of childhood faith while she grew more and more lost in the world that faith had forged.
“Should we go inside?” she asked.
“No, here is better,” he said. “It’s the only place we can be sure we’re alone.”
Vesper nodded again. She was shivering with the cold. The sunlight was still timid and new. Ansel’s features were pockets of shadow as he turned to face her. She was shorter than him, but they were more closely matched now than they had been the first time she’d ever done this.
“Vesper,” he said gravely, “some of the memories I have to give you, they’re . . . well, they’re not memories I would wish on anyone else. I can’t take any chances though. I’m sorry.”
Vesper had a feeling she knew at least one of the memories he meant. The grief lining his face was impossible to miss. She’d grown used to it over the years. Some days she didn’t even notice it at all. But it was always there. In reply, she lifted her hands and pressed her fingers against his temples. He closed his eyes, but she kept hers open.
“Take good care of them
for me,” he said, a ghost of a laugh in his tone.
Vesper knew her face was set in a grimace. She concentrated on the cold of her fingertips and the warmth of his head, then drove her focus deeper. She saw his proffered memories in her mind’s eye, erratic and dreamlike. The streets of the lower ward, rolling past. The interior of the Seras’ apothecary shop. Lenore Sera arguing, her cheeks in high color. Edric Sera shaking his head, a mournful look in his eyes. Then Evander was there, smirking. Alys clutched a teacup, not quite hiding the shaking of her hands. Newt, ever watchful, ever careful. Cassa said something, her eyes hard with anger, but Vesper couldn’t make it out, not yet. Seeing them all so near made her stomach somersault, but she kept her focus. If she’d wanted, she could have reached further back. She could have seen anything the high chancellor remembered, but she would never do that to him.
Ansel offered the relevant memories, and she reached out to take them. Then she pulled. They were thin threads, dangling from her fingertips like gossamer webs, iridescent even in the dim light. Rooks had to be patient and gentle, so very gentle. Memories were fragile. They could be torn or teased out too thin. With methodical movements, she drew the threads in, wrapping them around her fingers. Some were frayed or nearly invisible. Others were thick and bright, wrapped with smaller threads like vines around a tree. If her uncle had opened his eyes, he would have seen nothing out of the ordinary, but for Vesper the morning was aglow.
Once she’d found her rhythm, the memories flowed more freely. They twined up her arms and around her torso, shimmering and humming softly with music only she could hear. When she was sure she had the last of them—every memory her uncle had of their scheme and a few other key memories he had entrusted—she broke off the last threads. Instantly the cocoon tightened. For a brief moment, she felt the warmth of it on her skin, deliciously delicate. Then the light died away, the threads melded into her body, and the memories were her own.
NINETEEN
NEWT
Newt’s dreams were a horrifying stream of panic, frustration, and mortification, though neither the citadel dungeons nor the labyrinthine crypts made an appearance. He dreamed he was home again, sitting at the kitchen table. His mother wasn’t there; but then, she never was in these dreams. His father sat across from him, twisting a piece of steel in his hands like putty. We bend, but we don’t break, he said. We never break. Then the metal was a dagger, and he thrust it into Newt’s hand, pinning his flesh to the wood.
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