The Iron Phoenix

by Rebecca Harwell

  Nadya bit her lip and ignored it. However, when another grabbed at her injured shoulder, she cuffed him slightly in the gut. He doubled over, wheezing and unable to speak. No one bothered her after that.

  From the fourth tier, Nadya could see the regiment that guarded the palace gates. It was a show of both strength and humility on the Duke’s part, conducting the meeting in the city, away from his palace.

  Nadya slipped in through the crowds of people. The gap between the races ran as wide as a river, down the center of the tier. At its head, the Duke stood with three dozen guards at his back, Marko at his side. Kesali was nowhere to be seen. Both royal men were dressed in their finest, their jewels sparkling in the faint sunlight let in through the clouds.

  “This city belongs to the Nomori as well as Erevans,” the Duke was saying. “If it wasn’t for them, if it wasn’t for the first Stormspeaker, the city would have been overrun by the sea twenty years ago. The deaths that sparked the violence our city has endured these past weeks were the work of wicked men, not gods that we have forgotten the names of.”

  Nadya let his voice fade into the chaos of the crowd as her gaze swept around. Her heart pounded in her ears. She didn’t know if she would even recognize the man, let alone if he was even here.

  There—on the rooftop of a nearby manor. Its doors and windows were bolted shut and hired guards stood outside just within the front gate, rapiers drawn. Balanced on the slanted, shingled rooftop stood a familiar figure with dark, bottomless eyes and a thin scar. He watched the proceedings with a slight smirk that Nadya could see across the distance. He was nivasi, and he was going to sabotage the Duke’s address.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Nadya kept her eyes on the strange man as she ducked back through the crowd until she could step into a culvert alley. The gray cloak, now bloodstained, smelled of iron and gun smoke. Nadya gagged, but she put it on. Her fingers found purchase in the wall of the manor, and she scrambled up, the gray scarf tight across her mouth. Her shoulder throbbed and cried with every upward motion her right arm made, but the tea and the bandages had worked wonders. Deep down, though, she knew it was more than her mother’s skill in healing. It was her abnormal gift, her unnatural strength.

  Her nivasi blood.

  Nadya crawled onto the top of the manor, slipping and sliding along its slanted shingles. She squinted. It was nearly two hundred paces across the cobblestoned square to the next manor where the mysterious man watched the proceedings and plotted. She slowly backed up until her boot heel hit the far edge of the roof. Her first few steps were long lopes until she found her footing on the slanted roof. Each time her boot struck, shingles were crushed, their pieces skittering down the roof to fall to the drain below. When she reached the edge, Nadya crouched and leapt in one fluid movement. She sailed over the crowd below, hearing their shouts and exclamations. She kept her arms tight at her sides, resisting the urge to thrash like a duck avoiding slaughter. Wind rushed at her, pulling wisps of hair from her braid.

  Nadya’s arms started flailing on their own accord. She was headed down, and the manor wasn’t quite there…

  Her hands hit the top edge of the roof. Nadya cried out as fiery pain raced through her shoulder. Grunting, she hauled herself up. Her body fell over the raised edge of the roof and onto hard stone.

  Wincing, she got to her feet. The mysterious man didn’t turn at her clumsy entry. He watched the Duke’s address, a smirk that reminded her unpleasantly of Levka pasted across his face—one that meant he knew something she did not.

  Nadya checked her mask and walked over to him with purposeful steps. She stopped fifteen paces from him, the fronds of a nearby potted plant brushing her arms and sending shivers down her spine.

  “You seem to like watching important events,” she said. “And those events almost always take a nasty turn.”

  He turned, and Nadya’s fists were up and clenched.

  “I was wondering when you were going to show up.” Her fighting stance didn’t seem to bother him. “I couldn’t make my presence much more obvious without commissioning a print shop for a sign.”

  His voice was deep, but smooth. He wore black, a simple tunic and breeches that no doubt allowed him to blend in anywhere. His hair was dark brown, his skin light for a Nomori, and his eyes…

  Nadya swallowed. She looked just above them, focusing on his forehead as if a target had been painted there. Something about their black depths unnerved her. Not solid black like his victims, but unnatural all the same.

  The man laughed. “So, the Iron Phoenix is a girl, a Nomori girl. I was told, but now I see it. Not exactly what I was expecting, especially after watching your performance in the Duke’s throne room yesterday. So, what’s your name?”

  Nadya didn’t answer, and for some reason, the man found that incredibly amusing. “I’m called Gedeon. We should get to know one another.”

  Her ears burned. “You’re behind this. You were at the manor when Duren killed Jurek. You were in the throne room when those five men attacked the Duke. I don’t know how you are doing it, taking control and changing their eyes to black, but it’s happening by your hand.”

  “What is?”

  She swept a hand over the tense conference below. “The murders. The tension between Nomori and Erevans. The whispers of civil war. Have you been living here for the past two months? If it isn’t resolved by tomorrow, the city will run out of food and demand the Stormspeaker’s head.”

  He shrugged and turned back to the scene below. “It seems to me like most of that is the Stormspeaker’s doing. She shouldn’t make a false prediction. People get angry at that kind of thing.”

  Nadya bit back a curse, quelling her instinct to defend Kesali. Gedeon was like those sleek black panthers they imported for circuses and rich courtiers, slippery and cunning. She didn’t know where his powers lay or how much, or little, of an upper hand she had. Until she did, she had to treat him like the wild animal he was.

  “You’re nivasi, aren’t you?” Nadya took a step closer. “I learned of Durriken the Butcher’s true nature. I know what you are capable of. You are nivasi.” She tried to say it with conviction, but the last syllable still turned up like an unasked question.

  The edge of Gedeon’s mouth twitched. “You should not ask questions that you already know the answer to.”

  In front of her, Nadya’s hands began to tremble with energy. She had come here for straight answers, and so far, Gedeon was not forthcoming. Her eyes narrowed. That would change, one way or another.

  “Doesn’t matter. I know what you are capable of, and I am going to stop you from hurting anyone again.”

  Gedeon turned back, and the slight smile, the knowing curl to his lips, made Nadya shiver. “If you knew what I was capable of, you would not be standing on this roof with me.”

  Nadya swallowed. It was an empty threat. The man looked as if he had never picked up a weapon in his life. Even his fingernails were perfectly clean. He might be a Nomori man, but since he was nivasi, he lacked the preternatural fighting skills her father and all the others had. She would be able to handle him in a fight.

  Her matter-of-fact attitude toward fighting someone made her stomach squirm, but Nadya pushed it away for another time.

  She had one more question before she knocked him out and delivered him to the Duke’s Guard, before all this could end and the ultimatum of the zealot would be thwarted and Kesali would be safe.

  “I need to know something,” she began.

  He raised an eyebrow.

  “How do you know if you are nivasi? I mean, am…am I one, too?” The question almost got stuck in her throat.

  Gedeon’s smile vanished, and his face looked almost pleasant for a moment. He looked her up and down, Nadya struggling not to fidget under his gaze, until he finally said again, “You should not ask questions to which you already know the answer.”

  She nodded numbly. She knew it. She had known it, deep down, since her grandmother’s whispere
d words in that alley: the work of one of the nivasi.

  Nadya swallowed down a Great Storm of emotion before it could overwhelm and drown her. There would be time for that later. Now, she had to deal with Gedeon and stop him before he did something to destroy the Duke’s address.

  “None of that matters. You are coming with me. To the Duke’s Guard. You need to answer for what you’ve done.”

  Gedeon’s expression was unreadable. “Is that so? And what exactly have I done?”

  “Why do you ask questions to which you already know the answer?” she said, meeting his eyes squarely for the first time.

  “Humor me. What do you think I’ve done?”

  “You took control of innocent people and made them kill, all to create strife and light a fire between the Nomori and Erevans.”

  He shook his head. “You are foolish.”

  “Doesn’t matter. Either come with me willingly, or I’ll drag you to the Duke’s Guard myself.” Nadya’s fists tightened in front of her. “You won’t be able to get away. I am far stronger than I look.”

  He smiled again. “So I have seen. You took a bullet from five paces away yesterday, and yet today you are leaping from building to building. You withstood a roaring fire and carried out grown men twice your size. Not to mention, you faced down five armed men and knocked them out in under a minute, killing two of them.” He slowly walked away from the edge of the roof and toward her. Nadya held her ground. “Your abilities are incredible. You should be thankful. Although, turning me in to the Duke’s Guard might be difficult, as some of them are pretty hungry for the blood of the Iron Phoenix. You shouldn’t bother with the likes of them.”

  It was her turn for a patronizing smile. “Are you going to ask me to join you in tearing this city apart? Because I will tell you now, I have no interest in working with scum like you.” She bridged the gap between them with one step, her fists hovering a hair from his chest.

  “You are already a murderer.” He shrugged. “It’s not exactly a huge jump from where you’re sitting to where I am. After all, we are both nivasi.”

  She stared up into those bottomless black eyes. “That was an accident. I am nothing like you, and I would never help you destroy the people I love.”

  “My dear, who said anything about giving you a choice?”

  Before Nadya could take a step back at the horrible matter-of-factness in his voice, his black eyes expanded until they were everything she saw. She was drowning in a dark well of ink, her voice choked off by an invisible hand. She tried to move, to thrust one of her fists up and into where she knew Gedeon’s chin had been a moment before. But the black torrent that surrounded her closed in, and Nadya could not move. The blackness rose, bound itself around her, as images of the teenage boy she’d killed two years ago mingled with the wide eyes and pleas and prone forms of the men who attacked the Duke yesterday. She didn’t have to look down to know her hands were the only pinprick of color in this black, brilliantly red and stained forever with blood. Nadya tried to scream, but even her voice was cut off by the hammering of her own heart. She closed her eyes against it all.

  The black contracted and snapped back into Gedeon’s eyes. It took a moment for Nadya to realize she was no longer drowning. Faint sunlight filtered in through the clouds, and Gedeon’s eyes were nothing more than the dark eyes of a killer.

  He was smiling again. “Like I said, you shouldn’t have come here. You are not as strong as you think.”

  Nadya was ready to show him just how strong she was, but when she tried to move her arm up to punch him square in the chest, it wouldn’t go. Panic seized her throat. She tried again, but nothing. She tried to speak. Her mouth didn’t work. She tried to walk, to back away from this man—she was just starting to realize she really had no idea of who he was or what he could do—but her legs remained calmly rooted to the roof as if bolted there.

  “You’re starting to panic right about now.” Gedeon turned back toward the peace conference. Shouting had broken out in the crowd, and the curt orders of guardsmen tried to bring peace once more.

  Nadya struggled against her invisible bonds. Why wouldn’t her body work? What had this man done to her? He had frozen her somehow, probably to keep her from interfering with his plans for this conference. Nadya cursed her stupidity of jumping in to confront him without better information.

  She jerked. Her body had started walking toward Gedeon. Nadya ordered it to stop, but she kept moving. She couldn’t even turn her head to look from side to side as her body came to a rest beside Gedeon. The movements weren’t spasmodic either, but smooth, as if she commanded them.

  She, or someone else.

  A terrible thought occurred to her, so awful that Nadya forced it back down. Gedeon started speaking again, his eyes on the Duke as he passionately made a case for the future of the city and Kesali. “When I first saw the Iron Phoenix, I could hardly believe my fortune. Not only did you direct the attention of the entire city and the Guard to yourself, but you presented me with a weapon to throw at them.

  Nadya screamed silently as she struggled to rip herself free.

  Gedeon looked her over as if he had heard. “Don’t worry. I won’t keep you forever. I rather like the reactions of my puppets once their strings have been cut and they see what they’ve done. And because you’re nivasi, you will get to remember it all.”

  She cried as her body jumped off the roof and down into the crowd of people listening to the Duke’s address.

  Chapter Twenty

  Nadya kept screaming, but her mouth was a tight line of indifference. Her feet slammed into the cobblestones after the five-story jump. Stone flew away from her, and she stood up in a deep circular depression. The people around her edged away uneasily.

  I am wearing the scarf, she thought with the tiniest bit of relief. Her body calmly walked out of the hole and into the crowd. No one will recognize me.

  Nadya willed herself to stop, but she was powerless. The world flashed before her like a painting, and she was only an audience to it, not a participant within the frame. For a hopeful moment, she thought that Gedeon merely wanted the Iron Phoenix to make an appearance, to disrupt the Duke’s address.

  She hung on to that thought until her fist shot out and through the chest of a frail, old woman. Nadya shrieked as she withdrew a blood-soaked hand, and the woman crumpled to the ground, a gaping hole in her chest.

  Before she could comprehend what she had just done, her leg flashed out and snapped the neck of the man who went to his elderly mother’s rescue. The sickening crunch of her boot colliding with bone filled Nadya’s being. She railed against her invisible bonds, trying to take back control of her body, but she might as well have been trying to hit air.

  She watched as the realization of the deaths spread through the crowds. Some people already had run away in terror, but most hadn’t yet realized the danger. Her ears picked up whispers of the Iron Phoenix, and she tried to scream at them all to run, to escape before the automaton that was her body destroyed them all. Her voice didn’t work, but Nadya continued to yell until her spirit was exhausted. Then she yelled some more.

  Her body, outside of her control, waged war on the citizens of Storm’s Quarry. Both races died under her hands. Men. Women. The elderly. The newborn. Nadya wanted to throw up as her body wrenched a baby away from its mother.

  Her disguise, gray cloak billowing unmistakably in the wind, was drenched in the blood of Erevans and Nomori alike. When she came upon a group of Nomori youth, boys who were almost men, at first, their expressions were hopeful. This was their hero after all, one of their people who had saved their fathers from the fire and the Duke from bullets. Those looks of wide-eyed adoration slowly changed to confusion when she grabbed the first of them, a tall boy Nadya recognized as a trainee for the Duke’s Guard. Her fingers dug into his back and snapped his spine. He didn’t have time to even whimper before the life left his body, and she dropped his corpse to the ground. The four other faces turned fr
om confused to terrified.

  Run! Nadya shouted at them.

  As if they had heard her voice through her body’s sealed lips, they took off. But her cursed gift made her far faster than them, and two died with uncompromising blows to the head before they took three steps. The others shrieked and begged for their lives. Nadya cried internally as her hands crushed the light out of their eyes.

  The address was in complete uproar. People were running left and right, trying to escape the deadly rampage of the Iron Phoenix. She did not have to chase after them. Her body walked, almost strolled, through the chaos and death, reaching out and snuffing the life out of the unfortunates who crossed her path.

  Nadya wished for death. She prayed to the Protectress that some stray bullet would strike her between the eyes and end it all before another life could be taken. Perhaps this was a prayer the Protectress could answer. But then there was the final cry of a father desperately protecting his children. Then the silence of those children, then the shriek of a man who ran to their aid who was nearly torn in half by the calm-faced automaton that was once Nadya.

  She tried to close her eyes, to even blink to get a moment’s respite from the nightmare she now walked through. But any control was beyond her grasp, and Nadya had no choice but to watch and memorize every face screwed up in horror as they died.

  Shouts that weren’t screams of panic came to Nadya’s ears. The Duke’s Guard had arrived. Her body turned. Several hundred paces ahead, a regiment of guardsmen closed in around the Duke and his son, hustling them up the marble stairs and to the safety of the palace. Nadya prayed that she would not pursue them. If she killed the Duke, the city would fall. If she went into the palace, she might kill Marko.

  She might kill Kesali.

  Dozens of guardsmen, their uniforms as bright as the blood that coated her arms and fists, closed in around her in a clawlike pattern. Muskets aimed at her heart, steady in the hands of the Erevans. Rapiers were drawn by the Nomori. Nadya did not see her father, and she prayed she wouldn’t.