“No?” Moira paused, face wrinkling as she tried to figure out what to say. She was only nineteen at most and already had a deep worry line between her black brows. “Could you?”
“Because if so I love it,” Adella said quickly. “I would love to put on a show for you before we die painful, traitor execution deaths.”
Maud glanced at me. I shook my head.
“Hold that thought until after we successfully murder the king, yes?” Moira nodded, the corners of her mouth barely tilting up. “Traditionally, citizens must be present for all shows of military advancement in order to make sure they know what their king is capable of, but Weylin has made sure to summon only a select, loyal few. We are inviting more. Back before we knew all the new rules to magic, Weylin did not bother to find Nacean children. He took Erlend citizens under the promise of physician treatment, and we’re going to invite their families.”
“Finally an Erlend tradition that isn’t garbage,” I muttered.
“The problems with Erlend aren’t their traditions. Tradition is not counter to progress,” Moira said. “Unfortunately, they have conflated their traditions with violence and erasure.” She glared at me, shaking her head. “Weylin has put this show off until midnight, so he will sleep beforehand, as will most others. I need you to kidnap him while he sleeps. We will start the show once everyone is there and we have him.”
“I’ll get him.” I pulled my pack into my lap and lifted my Opal mask to my face. “Which one do you think is scarier? This or the midnight one?”
“Your actual face,” Maud said without so much as blinking. “I can handle the guards. We can do that earlier, so they have time to drink, and after that, I’ll gather up servants to take care of it. They’ll think it’s a stomach sickness before anything else. You get Weylin while that’s happening, before they have a chance to warn him.”
Maud was turning into a strategist.
I loved it.
“Can you find Elise de Farone?” I pinched the ring on my finger to try and keep the blush at bay. “Maybe she can keep the nobles busy.”
“Yes, I can find your lady.” She smirked, nose crinkling. “What after all of that though?”
“Come to the square once you’re done.” Moira held up her hands. The runes slithered into place and settled. “I’ve been planning this for a very, very long time, and Gaspar del Weylin has been an excellent teacher on how to show off your power and how to make people believe you. Did you know Erlend thinks torture reveals only the truest of confessions?”
“So it’s settled.” I held out my hand to her. “Gaspar del Weylin—North Star and liar king of Erlend—dies tonight.”
Chapter Forty-Four
I slept in Moira’s laboratory until that evening. Maud was searching out Elise and the canteens, and I’d be no use until the cover of night. We couldn’t plant the poison too early.
They had to be dealing with it during the show.
Maud returned a while after dusk with a servant’s uniform in hand.
“It might not fit, but I wanted to have one just in case.” She tossed it onto the table and pulled a silver canteen out of her pocket. “They all carry one to drink on shift, and they pick them up from the kitchens right before. It’s crowded, but they leave them out to dry on a rack. I can just walk by and drop them in.”
“Good. That’ll make it easier on you.” I pulled on my gloves—no use making myself sick—and checked myself over. Mask, knives at my belt and in the sheaths on my ankle, and a set of lock picks. I’d not need rope or anything else. “With any luck, they’ll think it’s the pump first and recall the guards. That’ll take a whole third of them out of commission without any murder.”
Moira set a small packet of white balls before Maud. “One per person. Only one. And be careful—if you jostle them, they’ll all go back to being one handful of powder instead of balls.”
I pulled out one of the little balls. Soft. Easy to palm but easier to crush. “Maud, watch this.”
I laid one in my palm and closed my fist over it, catching the ball with my first and second finger. I opened my palm. The ball, tucked gently in the little divot between the bases of my fingers, was out of sight. Maud nodded.
“Do it ten times.” I handed the ball to her. She couldn’t wear gloves indoors without looking suspicious.
She got it on her fifth try and kept getting it right after that.
“A shadow will trail you.” Moira, nose deep in the copies of Riparian’s ledger, didn’t look up. I’d been sure she wasn’t paying attention any more. “If anything happens, it will help. Don’t be scared.”
Maud smiled. Close-mouthed and tense. “Great.”
I rounded on Moira soon as Maud left.
Moira waved me off. “There won’t be one with you. Don’t worry.”
“Thank you.” I nodded to her, resisting the urge to bow as Ruby would’ve made me, and pulled up my hood. “See you in the square.”
I retraced my steps up to the mountain path, through the window of Elise’s room, and into the garden courtyard where I’d spied on supper the night before. Elise was there with a whole herd of young Erlend nobles dressed to impress in muted, militaristic outfits of pine green and mountain-clay brown, and she had cornered a young Erlend lord against a wall while his friends all watched. Elise gestured wildly, upset. Or at least pretending to be upset. He cowered.
Good look for him.
I cracked open the window.
“—harmless comment.”
“You don’t get to decide that.” Elise spun away from him and pinched her nose as though she were holding back tears. “So many of our subjects have Alonian heritage now. You are more than happy to accept the taxes of your Alonian-born citizens, but you’re not happy to offer them the same protections? You cannot see the issue with that? How will you decide who is Erlend enough? How do you know who’s Alonian?”
“Again.” The young lord raised his hands in defeat, answering none of her questions. “It was only a comment. I meant nothing by it.”
A few more nobles and a handful of servants slipped inside to watch.
I laughed.
“A pity, you said the other night, that I was half Alonian.” She turned away from him, gaze falling on the windowpane, opened so I could hear, and smiled. “I want you to understand very clearly that I am not a balance of two opposing sides. I am a person forced to balance your expectations—how Erlend, how Alonian, how those expectations make me neither and both and completely separate all at once. I know who I am and it’s not my fault if that threatens you. I am here to make Erlend a better place. All of Erlend. Even you.”
And that wasn’t even a lie.
My cue to leave. She was nodding me to go while they were distracted.
“Do you understand me?” she asked softly. “Or should I say it in Alonian since you think the language is better at sounding angry? I would say it in old Erlenian, but you wouldn’t understand.”
Righteous. Fury.
And some of the other nobles were nodding, not all of them and not a lot, but enough to keep Elise safe. There had to be others—like me, like Elise, like Nicolas and Emerald—who Erlend had hurt. They’d be the first ones to believe Riparian, Winter, and North Star were bad. They’d see the problems.
They’d believe Moira tonight.
They ushered her outside to the balcony I was on, and I darted behind the door. The door shut. Elise laughed.
“I think I’m distracting them fairly well.” She looked down at me, smiling softly but cheeks still dimpling.
I glanced back into the room in time to catch one of the servants leaving in a rush. “You and Maud really don’t need me, do you?”
“Well, no,” she said, stepping into the shadow behind the door and taking my hand. “But I know that I want you.”
“Do you?” I held back a shiver that settled low at the base of my spine. “I’m glad.”
She squeezed my hand. “Don’t die. Tonight or any night.�
��
“I can’t refuse an order from a lady of the court.” I wrapped my arms around her shoulders and pressed my forehead to hers. “Don’t you die either.”
“Sal?” Her nose brushed mine. “May I kiss you?”
Life was too short. Love to brief. Fickle.
I nodded.
She pressed her lips to mine—hot, bitter like too-long-steeped tea, and cracked by the winter wind—and pulled away. I followed.
“I’ll be fine. What trouble could I get into?” She hugged me tight and let me go, gesturing to the room behind her. Riparian, wearing the closest things to trousers I’d ever seen her in, had entered the room. “She wants to talk to me about navigating Weylin’s court as a woman.”
Her eyes rolled up and she sighed.
Such strict rules on how to appear feminine and masculine. How to be whoever you were.
I grinned. “I’ll see you after.”
“I know who’s on your list, Sal,” she said as she left. “I’ve made my peace with that, but remember—death isn’t the end result of justice.”
“People will know.” I wasn’t killing them to kill them. Not anymore. They’d debts to pay to Nacea and Igna, and I was collecting. “It’s an execution waiting for them, not assassination.”
“Still, be wary.”
The door shut. The cold returned.
“No more,” I whispered to the dark above Lynd. “No more kids growing up in Erlend and thinking they’re wrong. No more Erlend ideas seeping down south and ruining that safe haven too.”
Weylin had used ill and injured folks as readily as he’d used Naceans. Anyone outside of his narrow Erlend view wasn’t worth anything to him, and he’d no right to weigh worths. Our lives weren’t defined by how useful we were to him.
Elise looped her arm through Riparian’s and left under the stares of every person in the room.
North Star. Riparian. Winter.
Weylin. Arian. Farone.
Soon, only two to go.
Chapter Forty-Five
There were no servants in the halls and only two guards crossed my path. They patrolled the hall near North Star’s room in rounds, and I timed my way around them. There was plenty of time for me to pick the three tumbler locks on his door, top to bottom. That was always the order, and tumbler locks required so little skill after a while. It was shocking how trusting people were of buildings to keep out danger.
An uneasy, trembling fear awoke within me the moment my foot crossed the threshold. I shoved it away, feet sliding over the stones, and the prickling in the back of my mind snapped. I glanced down.
A trio of runes burned with power beneath me.
“It’s about willpower,” Moira had muttered to Adella and I during one of the only quiet moments in her lab. Adella had asked how magic worked. “It takes effort to walk, to not fall, to talk. You can feel it, can’t you, moving over you like wind? It wants to move. It wants to be used. Like a river dammed must break free, magic stifled seeks to be used. You’ll feel it now I’ve introduced you. You have to know exactly what you want, or the runes will eat you alive. Your want has to be absolute.”
So this was magic.
“Lady take you,” I whispered and stepped over it.
The runes dulled and died.
I didn’t like it, not the shuddering tiredness it left in me or the way it urged me to want more, to do more. No wonder North Star loved it.
I could use magic, but I wouldn’t. Not to fight him.
He would take no more of Nacea from me.
North Star’s quarters weren’t as lush as I’d expected. He’d plenty of fur rugs, the bear heads glaring at me in the dark. Old swords and spears and tapestries hung from the walls, and even the lantern holders hanging from the ceiling were gilded antlers and molded-together helmets from Alonian uniforms. I shuddered and pulled my lock picks free. The double doors to his bedroom had three tumblers too, each sporting a separate key by the looks of them. I knelt before the door.
Maybe, if North Star’s ancestor had just accepted their loss of leadership ages ago, if North Star hadn’t sunk his teeth in and let those old ideas fester, we’d have all been different. But he’d split me and all the other kids.
I was torn—part of me thinking of the life Sallot Leon might’ve lived had shadows never crossed the land. The Sal that grew up with parents and siblings, neighbors and Nacean culture so ingrained I knew I was Nacean no matter how far I wandered and didn’t wake up asking who I was. The Sal who knew all the folks too dead to teach me things I could never learn now, my family’s history, my mother’s dreams, my father’s favorite memories. I’d been robbed of so many things but none so cruel as the what-could-have-been part of me.
The part that didn’t wake up screaming or scratch at raw skin just to know I felt something. The part of me that couldn’t pick three locks in the time it took to a normal person to use the key.
The part of me that didn’t know the aching want of North Star’s thieving blood on my hands.
There wasn’t anything wrong with it, one foot in two worlds, but I wanted both, and he’d no right to deny me myself.
“I am as I am,” I whispered. “I know who I am.”
And North Star would know me too.
I pushed open the doors and stepped inside.
Winter—Elise’s father, Nevierno del Farone—sat in a chair across from the large desk. He was in his old uniform, a green-and-gold set fitted to look good, not move well, and his sword was at his side. North Star wasn’t here.
He knew.
“Nice of you to show up here.” I shut the doors behind me and locked them. “That window’s a lot higher than the one you pushed me out of.”
North Star knew we were coming for him tonight, and he’d left Winter in his place. Just like Nacea.
He was throwing Nevierno del Farone at me in hopes he could escape.
Had to do this fast.
The room was large. Lantern light flickered in every corner of the room, glinting off sawtoothed hilts and time-worn swords mounted to the walls. A set of three shields hung behind North Star’s desk, the sigils scratched away by the civil war, and Winter leapt to his feet. His boots creaked against the hard stone floors, and he unsheathed his short sword. I pulled out two knives.
“You’re supposed to be dead.” His lip pulled back in a sneer. He’d the same eyes as Elise. “Twice over according to Lena.”
I pulled the opal mask from my belt and fastened it to my face. “Please, Winter, you killed me in Nacea ten years ago. I can’t die by your hands ever again.”
I couldn’t bring Moira North Star, but I could give her the Erlend Winter. I could save this mess of a plan.
I lunged. Winter stepped back, sword slicing up. It ripped through the air at my left, tip nicking the lantern hanging above us, and the light bounced around the room. Shadows flickered across his face and light burned in my eyes. I blinked.
He flung a coat over my head. I stumbled back, caught in the cloth and cursing. A pair of arms grabbed my middle and rammed me into the wall. Metal hooks and wooden frames cracked beneath my back. A fist slammed into my stomach. I gagged.
“I would throw you out the window,” he said, ripping the coat from me and pinning me to the wall with a forearm to the throat, “but I thinking I’ve earned watching the life leave your eyes, don’t you?”
I tried to swallow, buy time for my aching head, and his muscles tensed. My throat closed.
He dropped me, hauled back, and punched me straight in the nose.
I came to a second later, facedown on the floor. Blood pooled in the back of my throat and dripped out my nose. I rose to my knees.
If Winter was here and North Star knew Nacea was coming for him, Riparian knew.
And Riparian had Elise. I had to end this fast.
“Kill me then.” He’d stab me in the gut, surely. A slow death. A painful death, and I spread my arms wide to give him a clear shot. “See what Elise thinks of you then.”
He jabbed his sword toward my stomach. I lurched right, catching it in my shirt, and the blade skimmed over the leather vest beneath. I twisted.
The flat side of his blade smacked into my ribs. The hilt flew out of his hands. He reached for another weapon.
I raised my leg and kicked him in the chest, heel connecting with the soft squish of flesh right beneath his ribs. He doubled over. I kicked him again, heel to temple.
Wasn’t a safe hit, but I wasn’t looking to live through tonight.
He fell to his knees. I sniffed and spat, all the blood he’d stolen from me splattered between us. I yanked an extra knife from the sheath in my boot and pressed the point into the thick muscle of his shoulder, right where his neck met his arm. He hissed, shuddered. I pushed harder.
“Move and I’ll pull this out,” I said. “You’ll bleed to death before you get out that door.”
“Mercy, please.” He grasped at his impaled shoulder. “Please, Elise would—”
“She’d hate you dragging her name through the list of wrongs you’ve committed. She knows you’re on my list, Winter. She knows all about you.” I ripped the knife from his shoulder and waited for his screams to stop. “And don’t you remember?”
He groaned.
“Mercy’s dead,” I whispered. “Thrown from a window into the Caracol. You killed mercy, but vengeance remains.”
He’d stolen everything—my family, my language, my innocence.
And I couldn’t kill him. Not yet.
“An Erlend winter is nothing. Beware me.”
I let go of the knife and slammed my fist into his head hard enough to knock him out for a few breaths at least. I didn’t have the strength to carry him, but with no one around, how would I get him out?
And how would I get to Elise?
I dropped him on the floor, grabbed my knives, ran to the door—ears ringing with the ache of his hits—and peeked outside. Maud stared back at me.
“You’re much shorter than everyone here,” she said, shoving a laundry cart through the door. “I figured you would need help.”
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