“What’s it say?” I asked. “The title?”
What had she loved so much she signed her name to it?
“An Incomplete List of Borrowed Words and Their Histories in Alonian and Erlenian.” Maud tilted the page back. “There’s a subtitle about Eredan and Lona, but your lady is very wordy and I don’t know all of the ones she used.”
Eredan was the original home of Erlend’s ancestors. They’d fled for some reason or another centuries ago along with hundreds of others from other lands. The Eredans had been welcomed into the nation of Aren, deemed the hospitality not enough, and taken over Aren in order to start over. And it had, over the years, become the land known as Erlend.
That had been my least shocking Erlend history lesson.
“She would write whole histories on only a handful of words.” I laughed and choked. “I know I didn’t send her there, but I’ve left her there. Every day I haven’t gone after her, every day I’ve abandoned her.”
Maud shook her head.
“I know.” I sniffed. “She’d say that’s nonsense.”
“Actually, she does say it.” Maud pulled a tattered piece of cloth from the side of the box. “Lady dal Abreu sent it to me. She said Lord del Contes is all right with you keeping it so long as you don’t tell anyone else.”
“What?” I held out my hand and didn’t try to stop its shaking.
Maud cleared her throat and read, “I am safe. Weylin has drafted civilians and sent his rangers to recruit in every town. The worst of the lot have been sent to the border. People are missing. My father knows something, but I do not know what. The deaths and disappearances are being blamed on Igna. They say Our Queen has shadows, that Rodolfo didn’t only kill Celso de Lex, but stole his work. There is talk of assassins living in Willowknot for years, waiting for word. Be wary. Do not send help. I will live. I’m sending Alonian-born citizens south. I don’t know if they will make it past the rangers, but the only people missing have non-Erlend names. Help them. I’ll find what I can and send word once I know more. Stay safe.”
The note was small, and Elise’s handwriting was scrunched together into thin, feathered lines where the ink had seeped through. She’d written it on a torn scrap of canvas.
“They don’t want it known she’s sending us news.” Maud pressed the note into my hands. “Lord del Contes is hoping they’ll tell her more if she seems fully in service to her father.”
I am safe.
“Of course,” I said, not really meaning to say it at all. Elise’s words blurred. I squeezed my eyes shut.
Do not send help.
I took a deep breath. My chest ached. A great, crushing weight had grown within me since Winter had stolen her away. I’d dreamed of Elise drowning in snow, skin frosted till it cracked, and the drifts wept red. I dreamed of shadows creeping across the land like ants, wave after wave of nothing, and not stopping till their rotting attempts at bodies touched the sea. Erlend was an avalanche, and Winter had kicked off the first snow this time. He’d see us all, soldier and civilian, Igna and Erlend, bowing to Weylin or dead. A king of corpses but still a king.
Just like ten years ago.
“Can you draw me a bath?” I asked, hugging the box to my chest and pressing my cheek to the edge of it. The dry burn of charcoal dust and old ink filled my nose. “I need to get ready to leave again.”
“Of course.” Maud brushed charcoal from her hands. “I’ll lay out some supper and bedclothes. Don’t worry about anything. I can deal with any mess once you’re gone.”
“Can you come back once I’m eating?” I shifted, trying to keep my blush at bay. “I want to know what’s in these, but there’s no way I’ll be able to read them all.”
“Of course.” She smiled, wide and open. “I’ll get some of those papers the archivists use too, to keep the older ones from smearing.”
“Thank you.”
Maud was the only person I’d entrusted with a key to my quarters—she was the most honest person I’d ever met. Not even Amethyst or Emerald could enter without my permission. Only Maud.
Be wary.
A lesson Elise and I had learned the same night. A lesson we were still paying for.
Chapter Six
Maud and I couldn’t read all of Elise’s notes. They were as flowery and fancy as her, the rhythm bouncy. I liked listening to Maud read them though, and I nodded off to a note about missing pages and inked-out words. The old Erlenian didn’t make a lick of sense to either of us. Maud left and I slept. I didn’t dream.
“What you know about rangers?” I said as I pulled on my pants and coat the next day. Hair slicked back and mask in place, I looked like Ruby sapped of red. Bone white.
Ash white.
I yanked it off.
“Very little,” Maud muttered behind me, “and certainly less about killing them than you. If you would like me to help you plan a robbery, however, I will be of more help.”
“How many robberies you planned?” I spun, scowling hard so she’d know it was fake, and waved my gloves under her nose. “Which one of us better at it?”
“Historically, me.” She grinned. “I am the one who got you that nightshade extract.”
I laughed.
It was nice. Sometimes, even when the world seemed all right, I didn’t know if we’d all ever laugh again.
“You just wanted to watch me jump out a window.” I tucked the gloves into my pocket, soft leather sliding from my hands like rain. They were poison proof and perfect, Emerald’s gift to me the day I’d left the infirmary.
Course, she’d made them because I “didn’t know poison from punch and was likely to die before midnight,” but they were nice. And they were mine.
Leather work was time consuming, but she’d put that time in. Barely anyone ever did that for me.
“The others at breakfast yet?” I needed to ask Emerald about the rangers. She’d dealt with them before, and Amethyst would know how soldiers were trained.
Maud nodded. “Go eat. I’ll take care of packing the basics, and we can deal with the other things after.”
It was the simplest exchange we’d had in a while. Giving orders without sounding rude—Maud was always ready to say when I was—was harder than Nicolas’s fencing lessons.
Least eating was easy. Our dining room was the only thing connecting each Left Hand member’s rooms. Low, flat ceilings and brightly lit lanterns made everything feel safer. Even the table, carved with the true names of every member of the Left Hand, felt smooth and comforting under my hands. There weren’t many names, but I loved them, memories of people I’d never meet. People who’d understand the bloodiest parts of me in some small way.
“I’d forgotten how long his signature was.” Emerald sat across from me, mask gone and face crinkled in a grin.
Green was her favorite color, and she knew she looked good in it. I’d caught her crying once, after talking to Our Queen, and she’d spent the day prying up the metal covers of her nails so she could replace them with green ones. Made her feel more like herself, it had to. I’d drawn my own name and orange blossoms on my skin enough to stain it forever.
But it made me feel like me.
She reached out and touched the end of Ruby’s name. “Such arrogance for someone so young. You’re very similar.”
Rodolfo da Abreu.
“Thank you.” I spread too much butter and pepper jam over a potato cake and shrugged. “Your compliments mean the world to me.”
She laughed.
Amethyst, next to me and dripping from her after-training bath, chuckled. “Very alike.”
I’d have liked to know him longer.
“I’m sure.” I stole back the honey from Emerald—she always used too much to be tasty—and stirred a spoonful into my tea. “I heard about Elise.”
“Good,” said Emerald, gaze stuck on the steam rising from her tea. “We should talk about the rangers and their propaganda. Elise’s note provided context and certainty that she is, for now, safe.�
��
I am safe. Do not send help.
Propaganda: Weylin’s only constant export. Surely, if Winter had forced Elise to write the note, it would have been more kind, but Elise was a star among fireflies. She was valuable, and Erlend liked value. So long as her value outweighed whatever trouble she gave Winter, she’d be safe.
“She’ll be fine,” I said. “She’s clever.”
“Exactly.” Emerald peeled open an egg. “And if you don’t do your job right, you’ll put her and all of us in danger.”
Lady save me.
“You could just tell me to get to work.” I sipped my tea, staring at her over the rim and thinking of the way Elise had glared at me over the edge of her spectacles. “I was going to ask you about the rangers anyway.”
“If he’s still alive, there will be a group of eleven and a man named Caden de Bain.” Emerald pulled the little slate we used for secret things into her lap and dipped her finger in the water pitcher. She drew as she spoke. “He’s been fighting as long as I’ve been shooting, so imagine how good he is. You won’t beat him in a fist fight. You won’t beat him in a sword fight. You won’t beat him at all if he sees you coming. I have a map for you to memorize, but don’t expect exactness. It’s as close as our scouts could get before returning.”
She handed me the slate and tapped the dark, thick scar running across Caden de Bain’s nose.
“All right.” I wiped the slate clean. He’d three facial scars and a boxer’s crooked jaw. “I’m not good with a bow, but I’ve fought plenty of people before—”
“No, you’ve fought untrained boxers and people with decade-old training they can’t remember.” Emerald set down her cup and fixed me with a spine-shuddering stare. “Erlend’s rangers aren’t soldiers. They’re the men the Erlend army thought too brutal for warfare, and this is the closest many of them have been to Igna in years. I fought in a war. I fought against the shadows. I served as Our Queen’s Emerald.” She leaned across the table, holding her spoon to me like a blade. “The fights I had with the rangers I killed were the messiest, hardest things I’ve ever done. You’re the enemy, not a person, to them.”
As if Erlend had ever seen Naceans as people.
“If you fail, if you are caught, they will use it as an excuse to march on Igna, to say, ‘Here is what your enemy looks like; here is who they are.’ If not you, they will find someone else, which is why you must kill them first.” Amethyst drew a line through Ruby’s name with her finger. “All the other Sals and Emeralds and Elises, the poor, the ill, those with an Alonian name or even only the looks of the Sun-Drenched Coast as Erlend sees it—how soon before Erlend declares them the enemy and only thing standing in the way of Erlend prosperity? Weylin’s lands are floundering. He will not admit defeat. He will point at us and say we are the cause of their suffering.”
“It’s why Erlend destroyed all of Aren’s and Lona’s old texts,” Emerald said. “It absolved them of their guilt and let them point at history and go, ‘That’s not what happened; this is what happened.’ Aren’s nobles took offense at Aren, Nacean, and Lonian society not subscribing to their ideas of personhood or inheritance or government, so they decided Eredan would be the only society. Our existence”—she gestured to herself and to me—“tempers Erlend greatness and prevents them from achieving their obvious destiny.”
I curled my fingers tighter around my cup, skin burning. Sometimes, when I was out with Rath and a bit of Erlenian caught my ears, I flinched before I even knew if they were talking to me. I was so used to their ideas about space and debt, who didn’t want me around them, and who I owed answered about myself, my body was always in a low panic.
I whispered, “They’d kill all of us if it got them what they wanted.”
Lady, they might kill us to prove they could.
“And we’re here to prevent that with the least amount of deaths. We are killers to keep the worse killers at bay.” Emerald sighed and closed her eyes, fingers still against the table. “Language and information are dangerous weapons, and Weylin controls both when dealing with his people. They know only what he wants them to know, and they know only the words he wants them to know. Erlend’s old ideals, the Eredan traditions, are incompatible with many people’s existence. How do we end a system designed to kill us when we are also within it?”
“Don’t give them questions no one can answer.” Amethyst tossed a spoon at Emerald.
She knocked it away and lunged across the table, shoving everything between us out of the way. Her nose bumped mine. “Our entire world and the worlds of so many others rest on our duties as Our Queen’s Left Hand. We cannot fail, or Weylin will see everyone like us, everyone like Our Queen and Nicolas and Elise, lessened and abused and killed to uplift unachievable ideals. Do you understand? This isn’t only your revenge anymore. They will keep doing what they did to Nacea to everyone else if they get the chance. We wouldn’t have survived the last decade without their resources and we thought they’d changed, but the leaders, the ones with a dependency on power, have not. We must succeed.”
I nodded again.
“Good.” She patted my cheek and sat back down. “Your list though, you’ll get. They’re bound to be on our list eventually whether we know it now or not.”
Amethyst leaned over to me and said in my ear, “She does that to all of us new ones. Don’t worry.”
“I certainly did not say any of that to you.” Emerald sucked her tongue against her front teeth, the little sound muffled by her tea. “I just told you to do your job because the ones of us Erlend hates shouldn’t be the only ones doing all the work.”
“I meant terrifying the new ones,” Amethyst said with a laugh.
“I’m clearly not terrifying enough. All of you keep doing foolish things and dying on me when we are supposed to be the ones doing the killing,” she muttered. “I’d never killed anyone before the war and had never entertained the idea until Weylin sent his killers after Marianna.”
I swallowed and set my cup down, appetite fading. Marianna da Ignasi, Our Queen, was beloved by so many and once by me, but no one loved her more than Emerald.
I felt that sometimes. That deep ache of wanting to do right by someone so badly it hurt.
“There were four of us—all mages, all angry—and we decided that we were strong enough, that we loved Igna and all of its people enough, that the rest of the nation should not have to take on the darkest of jobs in order to live in peace, to do it this service. People shouldn’t have to fight for the right to live. People shouldn’t feel bad if they can’t fight. People should be people, and Weylin hates that Igna sees him as a person just like anyone else. We’re killing a few killers to save many.”
This was our debt, and I would honor it. I would bear it. There was hate in my reason, but she was right. I would not have gone after the Erlend nobles on my list so strongly if I had not loved everyone they’d killed and everyone they would kill. People deserved a chance to live, not because of who they were, but because they were.
“I get it.” I nodded and traced Ruby’s name again. He’d been prepared to die for sparing us the threat of shadows coming back. I had to prepare myself. “Can I ask you something?”
“Was the monologue I gave not enough?” Emerald glanced at Amethyst and grinned. “Young people are so demanding. In my day—”
“You walked up hills both ways through snow with no shoes and only one single wick to keep you warm all winter?” Amethyst asked.
I laughed.
“I grew up in the south.” Emerald waved us off. “We had a single leaf among one thousand to use as a fan.”
I groaned.
Amethyst laughed. “Roland here? Thought I heard him getting drinks earlier?”
“Last night.” Emerald refilled her tea and glanced at me. “Roland is my friend and will join us for breakfast whenever he’s done being lazy. He is familiar enough with the room, so don’t worry about the blindfold.”
Emerald hadn’t bothered to
explain the rules about guests to me other than all of them had to be blindfolded so they couldn’t see us or the way to Our Queen’s quarters.
“That’s part of what I want to ask,” I said and tugged the plate of fried, sausage-stuffed peppers to me. “You kept saying ‘people like us.’”
Emerald had told me romance wasn’t her style, and I’d had the little prickling in my soul that went off when I was talking to someone who got it.
“Let’s wait for Roland.” She twisted to the door to her quarters and waited. “He’s a scout, and he’s very good, but if you ever run into him, pretend you don’t him. It’s better that way.”
Amethyst, stirring a bowl of porridge instead of eating it, cracked her neck.
“That man could sleep through anything,” she whispered to me. “It’s very impressive.”
Emerald’s door opened, and a guard from ages ago—one who’d led me to auditions and tripped me in the forest, one I’d been all set to kill—stepped into the room and adjusted his blindfold. It slipped down his broad nose. Emerald pulled out the chair next to her.
“It’s been three days,” Amethyst said. “What happened?”
“Hilarious.” He folded his long legs into the chair. “That will only work once. Tea, please.”
Emerald poured him a cup, stirred three spoonfuls of honey in it, and set it next to his right hand. They’d the same disgusting tea habits.
“That one? Really?” I gestured at Roland and frowned. “Why’s he working the city gates if he’s such a good scout?”
Roland grinned. “Oh, that voice. You’re Opal?”
He was good looking in a happy way—a wide smile with slightly crooked teeth, huge brown eyes beneath straight brows and a crisp, newly done line up. And like Four had, he knew it.
No one smiled like that and didn’t know it.
“Not a word,” Emerald said. “Ham’s on your left and hash is next to it.”
“Thank you.” His mouth went even wider, teeth too big and making the smile all that much worse. “Gate duty’s usually a nice vacation, but auditions upped the intensity. You have a mean fighting style, knives and a hand.”
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