“Tomorrow,” he said, picking burs out of his socks. “When most of them are away for that draft meeting.”
Bandits.
Rath exhaled, fingers digging into the dirt. These men were the worst sort, thieves without practice or trust. They’d leave as many coins behind as they’d leave corpses, and Rath and I had seen plenty of people dead by bandits’ hands after a robbery went wrong. They were taking advantage of fear and chaos.
And Erlend would blame any issues on Igna bandits, surely.
A soft, breathless sigh ruffled the leaves to my right. I froze. Held my breath.
A shadow too dark for the blue-green of night slipped into the corner of my sight. The heavy, stifling weight of knowing I wasn’t alone pressed into my lungs. I held perfectly still and laid a hand on Rath’s knee so he’d know to do the same. There was someone else here, someone else watching. The soft breaths hummed from the right. I didn’t turn my head. Only glanced.
An Erlend scout in dark browns and blacks too much for the deep purple of the shadow they were in, stared straight into the bandit camp. They must’ve just stepped up.
They’d crept in on a breath of air. Stealthy. Near impossible to notice. Rath hadn’t heard them at all.
Lady, they were good.
Rath and I stayed perfectly still, breathing with the breeze to cover the sound, and the scout at my side slunk away, vanishing into the thick woods to the right and away from the direction we’d come.
“Is this going to be fun-fun,” I asked, “or you-get-us-both-killed fun?”
He shrugged. “Fun.”
We circled far around to our little camp, going as slowly as possible and looking out for more scouts. We found nothing, but I kept watch first, staring into the darkness with one hand on Rath and the other on a knife. The sharp, fluttery panic in my chest stayed with me all night. I slept fitfully after Rath took over and woke up on edge.
“Something’s wrong,” Rath said soon as I opened my eyes. “They should be working, but it’s quiet.”
“Bandits?”
“No.” He shook his head and buried his plum pit.
I started walking, the unease in my stomach burning up my throat. “Come on.”
We didn’t get far.
The bandits, only three of them, were lined up on the edges of the homestead. They’d been stripped, faces turned to the rising sun. Each one wore a scrap of cloth as a mask—green, purple, white. The sigil of Our Queen of the Eastern Spires and Lady of Lightning Marianna da Ignasi was carved into each and every one of them. As if the Left Hand would kill like that.
We were assassins, not torturers.
Rath vomited behind me. I tossed him a handkerchief.
“Least we know there’s more than one scout,” I said, voice steadier than my hands. “Guess I know what their game is.”
Fear. Intimidation. Propaganda. They were killing their own—the troublemakers, the unwanted, the ones they didn’t want to waste time arresting—and using their corpses to make people think Our Queen had released new shadows.
“That’s—” Rath gagged again, and I patted his shoulder.
“Shadows.” My fingers tightened around his arm. “Not real ones. Erlend scouts are doing it.”
The grass beneath the dead was red but not nearly red enough. They’d done this elsewhere and moved them. I grabbed Rath’s arm and dragged him north, the direction of the well or river the homesteaders kept returning from with buckets full of water. We’d not needed to check it out, but the scouts would be bloody. They’d need to rinse off.
Not that the blood would bother them. No, trailing blood was as bad as trailing string when you were on the run. The homestead’s water source was a river, deep and fast and freezing, and I led Rath farther north, keeping our steps on the rocky shore and out of the mud. Heavy splashing sounds barely louder than the current pulled me down a side creek. Fish swarmed outside the mouth to a cave.
One scout—a boy with the scratched face of someone learning to shave and the determined look of someone trying to prove themselves—lurched from a shallow cave and tossed a bundle of red into the water. Rath stiffened.
Didn’t need him being sick again.
“I’ll handle it.” I pulled out my knife. “Wait—”
Rath sprinted forward, screamed, and drew the sword he didn’t know how to use.
Chapter Nine
The ranger clotheslined him. Rath went flying back, feet up in the air. I darted forward, knife at the ready, and lunged. The ranger backtracked, empty hands feeling for the sheaths not at his unbelted waist, and I aimed my knife for his neck. His hands came up between us, his left forearm knocking my hand away. He grabbed my collar and twisted. His foot hooked my left ankle.
I crashed into the ground. He fell on top of me, knees on either side of my chest. I yanked my legs up and toward my head, body bent in half, and wrapped one around his neck. He went flying back. I rolled on top of him, leg holding him down across his chest. My knife scratched his throat.
“Stop moving,” I said, breathing too fast to say more.
Rath, sword in hand, knelt near the ranger’s head. He angled his blade against the ranger’s cheek. Blood beaded across his skin.
“That’s Cam’s.” Rath’s gaze was stuck on a cheap silver cuff cut to look like leaves curled around the ranger’s bloodied ear. “Where is he?”
Nothing.
Rath shuddered, tensed, but couldn’t make another cut.
I shifted my grip on the ranger. “I can deal with him.”
I was Opal because people like Rath couldn’t be. We might not have to kill this boy, but if we had to, if he’d the upper hand, Rath was too kind to do it.
Or he would, and it would kill some beautiful part of him, the gentle part that had brought me tea when I was sick or told me jokes while he stitched me up or gave the younger kids birthday presents even when Grell’s quota was bearing down on us.
“Where is he?” Rath didn’t move. His eyes were wet and his lips bloody, but his voice didn’t waver. He sniffed. “You took a boy named Cam. That’s his cuff. Where is he?”
This ranger didn’t even blink. I felt my kills. I carried them with me, in my blood and in my fears. This boy felt nothing at all.
No wonder North Star loved his rangers—they were dead and dangerous as the shadows, forcing themselves to feel nothing, to care about no one, to only follow orders.
They were worse than the shadows.
They’d chosen this.
Rath dropped his sword and carefully unhooked the cuff. When our old, dead gang leader Grell had taken Rath’s littlest finger, he’d taken the grip of that hand too. Rath couldn’t make a fist with that hand. Couldn’t hold on to things tightly.
But he could’ve ripped out the cuff.
And even now, facing Cam’s kidnappers, he couldn’t commit such harm.
The ranger was young, anyway, barely out of childhood, and Rath was too soft softhearted for pure hate.
We tied up the ranger and gagged him, staking his knotted hands into the ground behind him. He’d not be going anywhere soon, and I rifled through his belongings and pockets while Rath cleaned off Cam’s ear cuff. A map, crudely drawn and labeled in Erlenian, was tucked into the ranger’s boots. The ranger said nothing no matter how many questions I asked. He’d an old Igna guard coat though. I took the map to Rath.
He pressed the silver edges of the cuff back together where the ranger had stretched them out. “Cam didn’t like blood.” He traced the pattern of three leaves cut into the cuff. “Didn’t want to pierce his ear, so I got him this.”
“He’ll be happy to have it back when we find him. They definitely took him. They’ve got Igna uniform pieces.” I handed the map to Rath. “Can you read this?”
He nodded. “Just names—Hinter, Norventry, Reeds, Brist.”
I am safe. Do not send help. Be wary.
“What’s the circled one?” They were headed there, probably, and had left this new recruit to
clean up.
“Hinter.”
Good. Wasn’t sending help if I was there for other things.
“What we going to do with him?” Rath nodded to the ranger.
I couldn’t look at the red blur in the back of the cave, but Rath had to see if the fourth bandit was alive.
He wasn’t.
“I’m going to talk to him,” I said. “If he doesn’t talk back, you’ll figure out what I mean to do.”
The ranger had been trying to break free of his bonds. I sat down in front of him and sheathed my knife. He stared through me.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” I said to the ranger, mind clear as spring water and just as cold. He was younger than me, and he wasn’t shaking, but his blue eyes had that same dead look Five had during the audition. “I’m not even going to kill you.”
He said nothing.
“I know you didn’t see the shadows because those bandits you flayed look like a poacher did it. The shadows were quick. Quiet. Most didn’t even know they were hurt till they looked.” I swallowed, knife clacking against my leg in time with my shaking hands. “And what came after was worse…but you’ve never seen it,” I whispered. “You’ve never heard it.”
The wet, sucking gasp of skin sloughing off in the rain.
“You’re going to. You’re going to understand what you did.”
The whispers of carrion beetles crawling through the dirt, of dry skin flaking off in the wind, of souls ripped from their place on this earth and calling out to find it. The only sounds for days.
Death was not quiet, and I could hear it even now.
“Rath.” I set the water and rations close enough for the ranger to bend over and eat, and he followed my movement, mouth open, face finally showing something. “I need you to do this for me.”
The ranger hadn’t been born with this apathetic stoicism, not like some whose faces never revealed what they were thinking. He’d been taught it. All those rangers lined up like soulless knives on a butchers table, but they never stuck around to see what they’d carved. This one though would not be found for days, and he would see it. He would smell it. He would hear it.
Drip.
I would make death his everything like Erlend had made it mine.
“You’re going to look at your work and know what you’ve done, not only to the dead but to the rest of them, the ones who saw. The ones who remember, like I do, the true fear Erlend caused. You might get nothing out of it.”
He stared beyond me, to the shuffling drip of Rath carrying the dead, and I closed my eyes.
Drip.
My too-quick breaths, too short, too shallow, too full of this cave and death and memories, echoed around us.
Rath set the body down. It slipped and squished, and the ranger whimpered.
He said, “Please.”
“I hope you get something out of it.” I opened my eyes and stared up at the setting sun, rust red behind the thick pine trees. “Or I’ll be killing you soon.”
Drip.
Chapter Ten
Rath didn’t speak much after we left. I didn’t either. The world felt separate, like I was walking down another road than the one I was on, and the corpse was dripping behind me. It was louder in my memories.
I was too alive. Too aware. My skin was too tight and too hot and my ribs too cinched to contain my heart. How could I be too here and so far away at once?
“Sal?” Rath coughed—loud—and waved his hand in front of my face. “You good?”
No.
“Why? What’s wrong?” I asked.
“Nothing, you’re stumbling.” He didn’t touch me. He knew not to. “We heard about, you know, the murders. Most folks thought them rumors.”
“Wish they were.” I sipped from my canteen and swished water between my teeth. I could taste the blood, the rot, the steel of the knives. “I’m here to take care of the rangers doing it.”
Caden de Bain—a man who took boys and raised them to be monsters, told them it was for the greater good.
Rath nodded. “Good. They need to be stopped.”
The rest of the day was silent. We passed fleeing families and merchants and soldiers on the road but stayed far away from all of them, taking to the woods along the path when anyone neared. There was no time to go back to the homestead and help those kids, but maybe defeating North Star would be all the help they needed. Most of the families heading south hid too. The soldiers didn’t hide.
Erlend’s military was fueled by a draft, and most of the uniformed travelers looked better suited for farming or bookkeeping than war. Some looked uncertain. How much had the lives of all these folks changed between being Erlend and being Igna?
Least Our Queen didn’t make them fight her wars. They talked of protecting traditions and Erlend’s great history, but tradition wasn’t tradition when it erased and killed thousands.
Why go back to the traditions that colored you killers?
Most of the soldiers we saw were young. All were male. Or at least, their leaders referred to them as men.
Lark del Evra had told me once that Erlend’s inheritance laws were based on older things, ideas Alona and Nacea didn’t share about men and women. It was why Erlend saw Elise’s attraction to anyone not male as unseemly. Why Lark del Evra had pledged allegiance to Our Queen as soon as they’d heard about her court’s goal to end such violent ideas in all parts of the continent. It was why there were no female soldiers.
What would Erlend have done with Lark? Roland? Me? Drafted half? Made me serve every other day? Forced me to pick one or the other?
It was always one or the other.
As if Erlend could only count by twos.
We never saw scouts though. Not a sight of them anywhere.
Rath and I reached Hinter at dawn. The city proper was sprawling, buildings and fields splayed out like ribs around the towering spine of Winter’s hilltop estate. Snowcapped mountains on the horizon crowned the castle roofs with spiked shadows, and what little warmth I’d gathered in my shaking hands, that drip still trailing behind me, escaped with every movement. A river spilling down from the mountains had been redirected through the city into four shallow trenches, splitting the land into curving pieces, and the shops and houses closest to the stone wall separating Winter and Elise from the common folk were crowded together like crooked teeth in a too-small mouth. They spread out the farther from the wall they got, and the roads got wider. Carts and crowds were lining up near the wall.
“They’re rationing.” Rath pointed to a group of people pressed against a gate in the wall, their hands pounding against the wooden door. “We used to do the same when they were late passing out rations at the end of the war.”
“Shouldn’t be rationing yet,” I said. “They’ve got plenty of land and food.”
Where was it going if not to the people?
Rath and I picked our way over the hills, peeking into barns and homes. Rath pulled a poster from a gnathic’s door and mumbled to himself before shoving the paper at me. A blond soldier with a square jaw and broad shoulders carried a kid to safety across a river. I shrugged.
“You read what it says?” I asked him.
Rath waved one hand. “Fuel the war. Fuel your saviors. Something like that. ‘Saving children, not a child army.’”
So Erlend was telling people Igna was stealing kids.
Why’d Erlend need children though? And what were they doing with ears? They had to be related, but even in the darkest days of the war ten years ago, no one had stooped so low as to hurt children. Erlend would not suddenly start kidnapping children and cutting off their ears for no reason. They’d never avoided hurting children, but they’d not cross that line twice. The ear had to belong to a missing kid.
But I could barely stomach the thought.
“Least we know why Hinter’s distributing rations if nothing else.” Winter must’ve been sending all the high-value food north and keeping Hinter on a strict regimen. “Saves money too.”
And if your civilians were scared of the shadows creeping closer, they’d be desperate to help the army that protected them.
“I think it’s telling people who can’t supply the required amount to see Lady Elise de Farone. Looks like ‘donations,’ except those aren’t usually required.” He glanced at me. “Someone added that bit after. It’s not printed.”
I nodded. Elise would handwrite a hundred pleas for those who needed help to come to her.
Like I was coming for her now.
I needed her calmness, her cleverness, her confidence. I knew she was alive, but I’d lost so many the thought of losing her too froze me. She might not be dead yet, but the world was changing. I couldn’t let my last memory of her be so bloody.
“Reports of deserters will be rewarded,” Rath whispered. “I don’t see what any of this has got with Cam.”
“Nothing, hopefully.” I’d have stuck out if I went strolling through town, so I pulled Rath toward the wall till we hit the gap where the river ran through it. “The other rangers might be here though, and we need to know where they’re heading. I’ll find them if you keep a look out for Cam or any other kids that look like they’re from the Alona bits of Igna.”
“Deal.” He glanced around. “What we doing out here?”
“Finding a way in.” I nodded to the waterway and pulled out a set of lock picks. “No guards, cheap gate. It’ll be easy.”
Rath held up one hand, walked toward the woods, and rolled an old tree trunk near the edge. “You’ll be shaking too much.” I gave him a look. “From the cold,” he said. “Just ram it.”
He meant from fear. I’d had bouts of it all night and day, the odd, breathless, little moments when a bird called too loud too close or the surprise of a fallen leaf brushing down the back of my arm.
“Coastal cities got gates on their waterways too” he continued, “but they’re usually pretty flimsy. Not many fish going to bother to pick or break a lock.”
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