And a dozen more arrows flew. Adella fell, too fast to see. I couldn’t tell if any hit her, but I couldn’t stay.
I darted forward, key in hand, and unlocked the door.
“Lady, let her live.” I shoved open the door. “If only one of us leaves here alive tonight, let it be her.”
The door locked behind me.
Good. The guards couldn’t get in.
Let North Star understand true loneliness for the first time.
There was no one in the entrance way. A hallway with four side doors and a set of double doors at the end flickered with low light and rumbled with hushed conversations from the room at the end of the hall. Only one side door was open.
Empty.
A thick letter laid on the desk. Our Queen’s blue seal was broken and crumbling, and North Star’s signature shone in the flickering candle light. Wet, red ink boxed in by two bloody thumbprints. I picked it up.
“A pyre fit for a king.” I held the signed treaty over a candle and set fire to every paper and cloth in sight.
The room burned slowly, and I left my bag in the hallway. I locked the doors to each room in turn. No windows. They’d killed themselves.
“The last star of Erlend!” I undid the chain on the double doors at the end of the hall, and threw them open. “About to burn out.”
The room stilled. North Star, the exact same as when I’d last seen him, sat at the head of a large table, and the others flanked him. They glanced from him to me. North Star only sighed.
“We made a—”
“I don’t care.” I paced the length of the room, dragging my knife across the wall, shredding tapestries and maps. A sawtoothed hilt was mounted to the wall and I ripped it off. “You’re all going to die tonight. The only question is what we do until then.”
The door to the office I’d set on fire collapsed. The other nobles panicked, pushing each other out of the way to escape. North Star pulled a sword from his belt, the thin-bladed standard of Erlend. I laughed, the sound echoing in my mask, and switched my knife to my left hand. The sawtoothed hilt bit into my right palm.
Smoke poured in through the open double doors. Screams, choked and dying, roared over the sound of flames. Footsteps pounded down the hall. Fists hammered against the door leading out.
“My guards outside will break through the door before the fire spreads.” North Star rose to first position, his shoulders relaxed, his hands steady. Only his jaw tensed. “You’ve failed to kill me. Again.”
“I’ll kill you before that happens.” I glanced back once to make sure the front door wasn’t open and guards weren’t coming. “You’re not leaving this room.”
He lunged. A shudder rolled down my arm, raising gooseflesh across my skin, prickling against the back of my throat like smoke, until it settled in my ears. It sang. Like the wind. Like my mother had. I clenched the hilt, splitting my palm open.
“Let the blade run red if you want me to kill him,” I prayed in my head. “My soul to the Lady’s open arms.”
My blood sunk into the runes of the sawtooth hilt, red to black to boiling, and burned away to ash. The pain peaked and sharpened to a single point of contact in the center of my palm, and I raised my hand.
A sword of blood and ash, mottled red dripping into solid, serrated edges, lengthened.
North Star would rule no one else. He would hurt no one else.
For all that we had done, neither of us deserved to live.
I swung. My blade ripped through his, sending steel clattering to the floor. North Star stared at my sword, eyes wide and hands trembling for the first time. He dropped his ruined sword to the ground.
“Does it infuriate you?” I slashed my runed sword across his chest. Blood dripped across the table and shivered, reaching for the sword. His blood seeped into mine. His debt became my blade. “You killed us only to find out you needed us—the people you didn’t even think twice about killing.”
He stumbled back. I let the mage’s sword fall and raised the knife in my other hand. I didn’t need magic to kill him. I drove the knife into the flesh beneath his right shoulder, through and through and through till he was on his back against the floor and I was kneeling on his chest. He coughed, blood on his teeth.
“Nacea’s dead whether you kill me or not,” he said in Nacean.
He tried to punch me, and I ripped the knife from his shoulder. He shuddered and screamed. I pinned his other arm to the floor, knife through his hand.
“Don’t you remember?” I whispered. “You made Nacea learn magic. You made Nacea make shadows. You gave Nacea the means to beat you. No one’s dead or dying but you.”
He’d stolen everything—my language, my family, my innocence.
I pried the hilt out from the skin of my hand. The blade attached to it shuddered and froze, red turning black. It drifted away piece by piece like ash, leaving only the hilt behind.
“My name is Sallot Leon.”
I shoved the hilt of the sword between his teeth, working them open, till the pommel dug into his soft flesh at the roof of his mouth and he groaned. His lips split.
“My family—Leon, Perrin, Shea, Hia—were good people. You killed them.” I pressed down harder. “And I’ve been told good people find it within themselves to forgive. If my family was good, am I? I showed mercy once. I was going to let Winter live. He threw me out a window and started a war. But you’d just do it again, wouldn’t you? To some other land and some other kid? That’s what you do—flee when you lose and declare yourself king of wherever you run out of breath? For all the years I looked up at night, to the stars I should’ve known names for, to the Lady I should’ve known how to pray to, to the world I should’ve felt a part of, you should have to feel that loss, that lack, of knowing so much that the sky might swallow you up and the world won’t even notice. You made me feel singular and small, a speck of leftovers clinging on long after I should’ve been gone. And I couldn’t even properly explain the pain, the loneliness, the wait, because you took those words too.”
His teeth cracked. Scattered.
He howled, blood splattered from his flailing tongue, breaths bubbling in the back of his throat. I let him escape. Let him crawl away from me.
“I can explain it now.” I followed him, the sawtooth hilt falling from my hand. “But I don’t think you’d understand, North Star, because you’ve always had a name and language and family to return to in your mind. You had safety. You’ve never wanted like I have.”
The yellow-gray flecks of broken teeth crunched beneath my boots, and North Star, bloody hands clutching bloody mouth, dragged himself toward the door. I stumbled after him, head hazy from smoke. I pulled off my mask.
“You’ll die!” He laughed, blood splattering against his paling face. The words were garbled, but I knew them. I knew that laugh. “You’ll die.”
Like it was the funniest thing in the whole damned world.
Like I cared about Opal dying.
“I know.” I coughed, more ash in my mouth than words. “We’ll die.”
The screaming behind us softened into coughs and gags. Wooden beams crashed to the ground. Guards shouted through the burning cracks in the building.
I could not ask for forgiveness—there was none to give for all that I had done—and I could not carry on as though my soul weren’t a deep, red river overflowing with a dozen names. My life wasn’t worth all the lives I’d save tonight. Igna needed me dead to keep the truth-deprived Erlends at bay until the long, hard work of undoing North Star’s lies was done. They’d never trust Our Queen if she let Gaspar del Weylin’s killer and Lena de Arian’s executioner walk free. This was the only way no one would turn out like me again.
I had not become Opal because I was Nacean, because I was displaced, because I was Sal.
This was my choice, and North Star would take no more choices from me. From anyone.
But for every reassurance, every sorrow, I’d still killed more people than I’d ever loved.
&
nbsp; And death was final; my hand in it was a mess of blurred, uneven moral lines and questions no one could straighten out.
Complexity.
I was infinite and understandable, a dozen inaccuracies and uneven edges held together by gentle memories—my mother cutting my hair and letting me wear her earrings on my birthday; stealing a tray of smoked venison with Rath and having to toss it to the dogs giving chase till we were left with nothing but sweaty clothes and laughter; the swish of wool over wool beneath the hum of words as Maud, knowing I hated the quiet but never wanting to presume, moved her chores into my quarters and read Elise’s history books aloud to me; Elise, a smear of charcoal along her jaw and a twister-tight curl bouncing with each breath, staring at me from across the pages of a book and translating lines of poetry faster than I could think while teaching me Erlenian; the soft sounds of Nacean in my ears as Moira read off the names of all the living from my country just to prove it survived and calm the fear inside of me.
Beneath all the grit and love and blood, I was and always would be Sallot Leon.
And Sallot Leon I would always be whether the rest of the world liked it or not.
Opal would die as Opal had been.
Brilliant and bloody and short-lived.
North Star laughed through all of it, choking on his blood and spit. “You’ll die!”
As if that were the worst fate that could befall someone.
“I’ll die.” I kneeled next to him, dipping my mask into the pool of blood at my feet, and I let the ash in the air catch hold of it. Speckle it. Bury it. “You’ll die.”
An uncomfortable, seeping pain crawled up my throat and tightened around each word. Beams cracked. He tried to speak again and gagged. I tossed my mask into the flames.
“Maybe of smoke. Maybe of fire. Maybe the roof will collapse and crush us side by side, but no matter what, we’re dying tonight, North Star. We’ve debts to pay.”
Epilogue
“Where are the bodies?” Emerald asked.
She still wore mourning gray, wools dark as storm clouds and light as frost clinging to grass blades. The Left Hand weren’t assassins any longer—publicly at least—but they still wore masks. A “scare tactic,” Our Queen had called it.
Igna was trying to be more truthful.
Which meant no more assassins employed by the court. The Left had transitioned to elite guards, protectors of those still in danger—Our Queen, Moira Namrata, and the other leaders all scrambling to figure out what to do with Gaspar del Weylin’s old holdings up north. Wasn’t a hard transition.
Emerald and Amethyst were the only Left Hand members alive, and the audition for the new Ruby had been sparse.
“Wherever they walked off to, I’d imagine.” I wasn’t used to wearing the thick, black mask they’d given me at the gate. It itched. The stitches holding the red ribbon of 4 to the front unraveled against my mouth. “Probably eating breakfast.”
Amethyst cleared the table in one smooth jump. She reached for my hood.
I flinched.
She froze with her fingers against my cheek, breath catching. I knew that sound, I knew that masked look. I’d known her for only the better part of a year, but the familiarity of her knocked the air from me too.
“Hello,” I said. “Again.”
“For Triad’s sake,” Emerald muttered. She ripped my mask off. “Sal?”
“Nice to see you too.” I smiled. I’d more scars since the fire but looked the same. Adella and I had spent months building up the strength to travel back north and join Moira. Maud and Elise had left by then, returned to Willowknot for peace talks and truth telling. “Sallot Leon and Opal are dead. I thought this’d be fitting.”
My mask slipped from her hands. She didn’t move.
I swallowed. They could arrest me.
The assassination of Gaspar del Weylin—North Star—and the others at the house in Hinter had been a high crime since they’d been due for court. The old Opal had died with them, treasonous and disgraced.
Opal was dead. Forever.
At least until they’d time to hold auditions for Opal.
“Or, since I’m Ruby, I should be saying this is poetic.”
Emerald crushed me into a hug. The edge of her mask nipped my shoulder till she ripped the metal off and tucked her cheek against my crown. A puddle of tears pooled between us.
I patted her back. “I thought I’d be the crying one, not you.”
“I could make you cry,” Emerald said, voice hushed and heavy. “I should. You were dead. You were very dead and very out of line.”
She pulled back, letting her hands linger on my shoulders. The brass nails cut into my skin.
“How have you so spectacularly mastered infuriating me?” She touched my cheek. “And now you think you can be Ruby? After your dismal performance as Opal?”
Dismal?
“Wasn’t a dismal thing about it. You’re the ones who—”
“You did nothing right. Ever. At all.” Emerald smacked my arm—not hard but not gentle either—with each word. “Whoever Four was, whoever Ruby is, cannot be tied to Opal.”
I swallowed. “Opal is dead. How could anything be tied to them?”
“Good.” She grinned and wiped the tears from her neck. “Right answer, Honorable Ruby.”
I could not be Sal again. Not in public.
But when Elise had returned to Lynd to take her place as the heir of Hinter and help rebuild Erlend and Nacea, I’d been Sal with her in private.
And in the crowds of Naceans traveling south to search for long-lost family and friends, no one spoke of Sallot Leon. They knew not to, and Moira helped all those looking find me. My father’s northern family had been more than happy to keep my secret. I wasn’t so scattered anymore. So lost.
It was nice knowing the deal though. The Left Hand made me wait. Amethyst and Emerald didn’t press for all the details while we talked all day, but they waited all evening to announce their selection. It had only been one night.
Not even that if I was being arrogant.
I’d been welcomed into Willowknot by Roland—he’d lived, thank the Lady—and his new scars, and he’d paused before letting me in, gaze lingering on my knives. I’d told him I’d forgotten the hand.
He’d have found out who was I was sooner or later.
There’d only been four of us auditioning. The Left Hand wasn’t what it used to be. We were to be protectors and aides. If Our Queen needed protection, we were her shield. If Erlend’s soldier holdouts, few and far between, rebelled, we arrested them. If Nacea needed help with the harvest, we picked up a sickle and figured it out. We existed to keep the peace and Our Queen safe.
Course, Marianna da Ignasi wasn’t my queen anymore.
I followed a new star.
Marianna da Ignasi wouldn’t be queen for long either. Her search for an heir was underway, and the new Left Hand would be the heir’s personal guards. I’d chased the other three auditioners for Ruby off, but Amethyst sent a messenger to give them invitations for Opal’s mask. There’d be a party that night, and the memory of my last one shuddered through me. I had nothing now, no vengeance and names, and Ruby was all I was. A new name. A new job. A new chance to start cleaning the blood from my soul. Moira, at least, would understand. Growing up in Igna, doing what I’d done, not all the Naceans I talked to got it. Moira did.
Her letters had been nice.
After enough hugging for years, Amethyst and Emerald let me retreat to my old quarters. They’d been cleared out, my things moved to storage or garbage somewhere, and Maud’s careful touch was gone.
I traced the smooth angles of my coat, nails catching over each stitch. Ruby’s old mask felt odd and uneven against my face—too cold, too sharp, too confining.
“You asked for me, Honorable Ruby?” Maud, the same, the exact same, bowed in the doorway, and I braced myself against a chair to keep from tackling her. The voice she used for folks she didn’t want to talk to but had to because they we
re ordering her around sang in my ears.
Dimas and Maud had been the only familiar faces absent from auditions. Dimas was in prison, punishment for his treason and attempted assassination. When Our Queen or Moira had need of him, he was escorted out to act as a mage or healer or whatever people needed, but otherwise, his future for now was a cell overlooking nothing, near nothing and no one. His sister, Moira said, had visited once. He’d turned her away. The only runes he used now were for healing.
I could’ve been a mage, but the sight of runes still made me shudder.
Cam was having fun with it though. He and the other kids taken north were inseparable now. They’d made a new family, tight-knit and loving. New beginnings.
“Your honor?” Maud frowned. She’d held a funeral for me, and it had nearly killed me all over again, but it and her reaction to my death had been the final pieces of evidence to make the world think Opal was dead. “You called for me?”
Nicolas had offered her a job working with him, but she’d not taken it. Too dangerous. Too much time away from her siblings.
“Yes,” I said, “I had a question for you.”
“Of course.” She nodded her head, but her eyes flicked up to get a look at me. “What was it you wanted to ask?”
I pulled Ruby’s mask from my face. “Do you think I look good in red?”
She froze. A tense shudder rolled her shoulders and upset her neat bow. Her fingers grasped at nothing, opening and closing at her side, and an odd, unwelcome panic settled over my skin like cold sweat. I’d let Maud think I was dead, and she’d mourned me. She stepped forward. She didn’t cry.
Thank the Lady.
If Maud cried, I’d break.
“Sal?”
I nodded.
Maud yanked her arm back and punched me in the face.
I shrieked and stumbled. She let me fall, flinging her hand around.
“Triad, that hurt.” She clutched her hand to her chest. “You utter ass.”
I moved my nose around to make sure it was still in one piece. “That was good. How’s your thumb?”
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