She waved away the roll. “I should’ve told you, but it never really came up. I didn’t think it was important.”
We’d both played each other.
“I should’ve told you when you said you were lying to me.” Elise glanced over, staring through cracked spectacles. “That would’ve been best.”
“It would’ve.” I shrugged and sat next to her. “Course, I was lying to you forever.”
“That really didn’t bother you, did it? The lying?” she asked. Her left side pressed against my right. Not a lot. Not side to side. Just enough that the warmth of her thigh seeped into mine through her dress. “It was Lena.”
“She was a monster,” I whispered. “And you were defending her.”
Elise nodded. “Lena didn’t raise me, but she was part of my life for a very long time. Like my father. I trusted them both, and in just one year, all that trust has been broken.”
“Elise.” I held out my hand, palm up, not wanting to grab her with the words I was about to stay stuck in my mouth. “I know they’re dead and that’s a lot to think about, but—”
“I’ll mourn after I’ve cleaned up the mess they made.” Elise, eyes glazed with tears, turned to me and laced our fingers together. “I spent all day with Moira. I met Namrata. Gaspar del Weylin is a man made monstrous by his arrogance, Lena de Arian was a woman made monstrous by her cunning—there is shrewdness and then there is the careful execution of people by devaluing them to numbers—and my father was a man made monstrous by greed. We could have lived happily. We could have lived as we had been, but he wanted more. They would kill thousands and start a war just to reclaim power they don’t deserve. We cannot have peace because they continually destroy it. Igna was doing well, and they had to do this? There’s no excuse for it. Others might not see it that way, but I remember Hinter. There is no amount of power or wealth or personal gain that can justify returning to that.”
She laid her cheek against my shoulder. Her nose brushed my ear, breath shivering along the shell, and I wrapped my other arm around her waist.
“Will you stay with me till I leave?”
Then, at least, the unease of waiting within me would be stifled. She hummed into my neck.
“I’m probably going to die,” I said softly. “I liked knowing you though. That was good. There were a lot of good parts, but I’m glad at least a part of the world’s in your hands.”
Rath.
Maud. Who’d be pissed enough to bring me back to life only to yell at me for not saying goodbye.
Emerald and Amethyst. I’d never figured out how to shoot properly. One of ten arrows? Sure. Anything more than three was a crapshoot.
Moira and Nacea. Hal and the others I didn’t know. All the little things I’d not asked yet, the little details I didn’t know. But Moira would do right by me.
By Nacea.
Elise whispered, “We could still make good memories.”
Oh.
“Do you want to?” I said quickly. My breaths came faster, nothing to do with the warmth of her hand or gust of her laughter against my neck. “You’re so many things I wish I were, not now, not after all I’ve done, but when I was a kid. You’re clever and nice, and you care. You care about so many people you’ve never even met. You’re a good person. You’ll be a good leader. And I know it’s selfish of me, but I want to show you how much just knowing someone like you meant to me. You deserve good things, better things than all this.”
Elise lifted her head. “Are you asking my permission to kiss me?”
“I’m asking your permission to do a bit more than kiss you.” I turned so I could look at her, meet her eyes, and she shifted against my side. Her right leg crossed over my lap. “I mean, we could just kiss. That’d be fine too. You’re just…good.”
She laughed, neck arching. “Sallot, if you want to kiss me, kiss me, but please stop second-guessing.”
“You’re real bossy.” I touched her chin, tracing a line up the rounded corners of her jaw, and pushed her braids behind her shoulders.
She pressed her lips to mine. Warmth and safety and affection I wasn’t sure I fully deserved crept over my skin, the point between her thigh and mine, my hand and her neck, and sunk into my bones. Peace. Nothing. Everything. So she’d surprised me once. She still felt safe.
“Is that a complaint?” she muttered against my mouth, tongue flicking against mine, hands dragging up to my face and down, down, to the very bottom edges of my hips. Her hands found the skin beneath my dress.
I pushed her back till she sunk into the bed and tugged me down with her. I kissed the hollow of her throat, pressed my ear against her chest and listened to her heart through the thick layers of her dress, lowered myself to the round hill of her stomach and kissed the spot above her navel, and settled against the softness of one thigh. My fingers skimmed her sides, and she laughed. My head bounced against her leg.
“You’re ticklish.” I crawled up and laid my cheek against her stomach.
She grabbed the hair at the nape of my neck. “Don’t you dare tickle me.”
“I think I might love you.” I pulled her up a bit and pried apart the knots at the back of her dress. “Or could have. Or might. You’re clever and kind, and sometimes when you’re thinking, you rub your nose and get all inky or do the glasses glare, and your eyebrow hooks up just right, and you look like you can’t believe you’re stuck there and I love all of it. I want to love you. I want to know you. All the little parts I don’t know yet.”
That I might never know.
She yanked, and her dress went flying over her head in a wave of wool and cotton. Her underdress bunched under my hands, pulling tight across the curves of her stomach and breasts. She pulled my hands free of the fabric at her sides and placed them low on her hips. My breath caught in my throat.
“I would like for you to know me.” She unbuttoned the top part of my shirt and shoved it back, baring my shoulders and half of my chest. “Really know me.”
I shuddered. “Yes?”
“Oh, yes.”
I ducked to taste the skin at her throat, ribs, hips, her breath escaping in a little gasp, her hands grasping at my hair. I kissed the soft skin of her inner thigh.
And I broke as she broke, my name shivering from her lips.
“Sal,” Elise whispered in the dark of the night when we were half-asleep in the warmth between our tangled bodies. “I think I might have loved you too.”
The words followed me into sleep, filling my dreams with soft skin laid over frozen grass and the gentle taste of honeyed tea on worried lips. Elise’s arms kept finding me in the night, curling around my shoulders, my hips, my stomach until I woke up with her nose buried in my armpit and the whole of the bedding bundled up at my feet. She snored softly, and each point of warmth between us ached in my chest. She could have loved me.
If I stayed.
If I lived.
If the world were unjust enough to let killers walk free.
I slipped from bed and draped the quilts over Elise, gooseflesh rising up her legs. Her toes peeked out of the edge.
“It’s sideways.” Elise tugged the quilt edge, curling up her legs until they were safe beneath it. She blinked at me. “Sal?”
“Yes?” I straightened out the quilt, tucked it under her feet, and braced myself against the edge of the bed. I was sneaking out without so much as saying goodbye. I was a coward, leaving while it was still dark and she still slept.
I was sure of what I needed to do, but the sacrifice that came with it hurt.
Feeling her shift and sigh in bed next to me had sang in my bones. The brush of her hip against my thigh, my arm against her breast in the soft movement of the afterglow still prickled over my skin, but the knowledge of what was to come muted the memories. I dredged up the feeling of her fingers tracing “Opal” along my arm. The press of her lips against my palm.
A hand cupped my chin. “You were going to leave without saying goodbye.”
“Sorry.
” I crawled back into bed and sat tailor-style before her. Tense. Waiting. “I’ve been told I don’t handle emotions well.”
“Whoever told you that is brilliant.” Elise, bundled in the quilt like a hooded cape, leaned forward till her nose pressed against mine. “You overthink things.”
Maud was brilliant.
I wished I’d said goodbye properly.
“I know what you have done and what you are going to do,” Elise said, voice unwavering despite the bright sheen of sleep still over her eyes.
I touched the little bruise at the curve of her throat. “If you tell me to stay, I might not be able to leave.”
“You can and you will, and I’m not holding that against you. You should’ve woken me up though.” She leaned into my touch. “Live through it. If they’ve already signed the treaty and made the deal, just come back. If Opal kills them, you’ll be committing war crimes. You’ve got so much left to do.”
“All right.” I kissed her—old tea, me, sweat, morning breath—and savored every breath I lost between her lips.
She shivered, fingers skimming my ribs. “All right?”
“All right,” I said and kissed her once more. “I’ll see you after. If they’ve signed it, I’ll leave.”
Elise did know me, understand me better than most.
“Yes.” She wiped the tears from her cheeks and pulled away. “After.”
And Elise knew I was and would always be a liar.
Chapter Fifty-Three
Maybe I wasn’t in the right. Maybe nothing was worth it. Maybe the treaty was justice and the people they’d lied to would break out of the lies just fine without seeing them punished.
Maybe I didn’t care.
I wore my opal mask out of the city. It was cold, the stinging sort that burned until you sweated it out and then chilled you all over again. They’d offered me a horse, but I’d no clue how to ride, and stomping through the snow was faster than a cart. I’d not stop till I had to.
I’d not stop till I reached Weylin’s safe house in Hinter.
Ice cracked behind me. Someone shrieked.
I spun, knife out, and the blob struggling on a sheet of ice so thick the earth might’ve died and turned white glanced up at me.
“I’ve been following you—loudly—since you left.” Adella grinned, smile just peeking through the tightly cinched hood over her face. “You need company?”
“You need a hand up?” I waited for her to nod and slid back to her. “So.”
We walked for a bit, neither of us mentioning what we were doing, and she nudged me.
“So,” she drew out. “You want to hear about how Four got bit on the nose by a grass snake?”
“Please.”
We talked about a lot of things—Four and Two and Adella’s slow breaking after their deaths, her mother’s reaction to her joining the carnival, her apprentice’s crush on the carnival physician. We’d days and days of nothing to do but talk.
I didn’t remember much of it.
Adella understood.
“I don’t like silence,” she said our fourth night, the lights of Hinter too far to see but the closeness of it looming. “I don’t think you do either. It lets you dwell.”
“Look, we’re all good at something, and I’ve got dwelling.” I downed my last canteen of cold soup—no fires, no warm food, no dry cloaks—and fell back against my tree.
Adella threw a snowball at me. Missed. “Don’t sleep there. Snow’ll fall and you’ll die.”
“Maybe that’s how I’ll kill Weylin.”
“We could write a ballad about it.” Adella swallowed, head falling back against her bag. “How are you going to kill him?”
Good question.
I only knew where they were because of Weylin’s slighted heir, the lord who’d been told to flirt with Elise the other night at dinner. Weylin hadn’t taken the lord with him, picking instead his oldest, most trusted advisors. Weylin had left him to die by our hands.
Erlends didn’t handle losing power well, and the lord had told us of Weylin’s hideout as soon as we promised him his life and home.
Roland had confirmed the story—five nobles and a handful of rangers heading where the lord said. He hadn’t seen that it was Weylin.
I would kill five people to stop them from killing five thousand. I was fighting fire with fire, but forest fires were necessary things, clearing the underbrush from the land when the time was right and regrowth was necessary. The nobles of Erlend had been left to rot for far too long.
I could rationalize any way I liked, but they were still dead and I still a killer. There was no coming back from this. For any of us except those who would come after.
And I’d made my peace with the dark parts of my soul. I’d made my peace with being dark so the rest of the world wouldn’t have to be.
“Tomorrow’s my nineteenth birthday,” Adella said softly. “Myra and I shared one. It gets better.”
The empty drop of grief opened up in my chest.
“No, it just gets different, sometimes easier, sometimes worse. Grief’s a mixed bag of different kinds of shit.” I tossed a handful of snow at her. “I thought you were older.”
“And I thought you were better looking when you wore a mask, but we all make mistakes.” She was quiet for a while after that, and then, when the clouds overtook the moon and I could barely see the glint of her earring it was so dark, she muttered, “I finished my list.”
“What list?” I asked.
She’d not wanted to kill anyone. Had she already?
“We made a list. The three of us each picked things we wanted to do no matter what—things we couldn’t live without, and our plan was to do them all. I did. What do I do now?”
I wasn’t sure what to say to it. I wasn’t one of those people who’d make her feel at home.
“Well, we got five folks, a whole bunch of guards, and one house to destroy. Think you can figure out something you want to do with them?”
“Burn it.” She cackled, mouth open beneath the sky like she was trying to swallow it up, taste the stars and laugh them up. “Weylin deserves to die, so let’s give him a kingly funeral pyre.”
He would die. Course, I wanted him to know why I was killing him. Fire was too quiet, too passive.
“We can’t both be the reckless one,” I said. I played with the edges of my Opal mask, the proper one, the blank one, the one so white it was as suffocating as the endless drifts of Erlend snow. Maybe he’d think he was looking in a mirror.
Adella shrugged. “Ma always said I’d more scars than sense.”
It would make sure the rangers didn’t come running in. I touched the names on the inside of my mask, the warmth of Ruby’s funeral pyre a distant memory even though it hadn’t even been a year. I wasn’t scared of fire—I’d been to too many funerals—and it would be fitting. A pyre fit for a king. Nothing left of us but ghost.
And he’d die afraid.
“It’s not bad though, but how we going to get in?”
“How’d you normally rob a place?”
“I’ll need a distraction—a good one.” I sat up, leaned my elbows on my knees, and waited for her to look at me. “I’ll need to steal the key to the door. My bet is it’ll be on whoever’s in charge outside just in case something happens, and lifting stuff from soldiers is only a good idea when they’re new or distracted.”
Adella pulled my bag to her with a foot hooked through the strap and dug through it. “You got another mask?”
“Very bottom.”
She yanked free my second Opal mask and held it up. “What’re they going to do to two of you?”
Chapter Fifty-Four
The guards never looked up. Adella crawled from giant pine to pine to pine, stringing a series of wires far above their heads while I found the leader. She’d put on a show, half-threats and half-carnival, falling from wire to wire in the dark like a shadow, too fast to be human. I circled the building—a squat wooden house built to blend in
to the woods with no windows and a wooden lock on the wooden door, each piece painted to match the trees crowding it. Fifteen guards, two of them in fancier coats. One never went far from the door.
I settled against the trunk of a fir near him, hidden in the thick branches. A thin chain ran from his belt to a pocket low on his pants leg. I covered my mouth to keep from laughing, branches shaking around me. Not even a secret one. Just stuffed into the pocket above his belt and attached to a chain hooked to his buckle.
I had wire clippers for just this reason. Rath had always laughed at me for carrying them.
“Who’s laughing now?” I whispered.
Him, probably. He was always laughing.
A torch flared high within the trees. No, not a torch—Adella. She’d soaked a sword blade in oil and set it aflame. The guards at the door looked up.
The white mask covering her face flickered like the moon waning and waxing in quick succession. She raised her arms and shouted, “Who here hides the damned?”
The soldiers drew crossbows and longbows and spears, each staring straight at her.
“Our Lady demands retribution.” She turned and walked along the wire, a midair stroll on nothing for all it looked, and one of the men beneath her gasped. “Erlend made more shadows of the surviving Naceans, and for this indiscretion, Erlend owes Our Lady a debt of blood. Who will pay this debt?”
She ran her other hand along the blade, extinguishing the light, and around me, the dozen guards lit their torches. They held them as high as they could to her old spot.
Nothing there.
I crept forward till I was in arm’s reach of the guard, and he started loading his crossbow, shuffling all about. Another light appeared above us. He spun round.
“No one?” Adella pitched her voice low, dragging out each word and making her words carry farther than I thought possible. She stood atop a fir on the other side of the house. The light cupped in her hands didn’t smoke, didn’t burn her skin. “Shall I call the shadows you made of my family and friends?”
The guard took aim. I clipped the chain dangling from his leg, fingers steady. His bolt flew, the snap of his crossbow loud between the low rumbles of the other guards and Adella’s drawn out cries, and I pulled the key from his pocket. He whistled.
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