by Traci Chee
The next morning, Sefia revealed to the others what she’d learned: In a week, when the moon was a sideways crescent in the morning sky, Obiyagi and her crew would be riding north through the canyons on the Alissari coast. They’d pass a mountain like a kneeling giant—“The Rock Eater,” Griegi said, flipping the egg and scallion cake in its cast-iron pan, “that’s what we called it back home”—and ride out onto the cliffs beyond, where the plains of the Heartland fell steeply away into the sea.
Archer could almost hear the rhythm of hooves, the report of gunfire. His trigger finger twitched.
Across the campfire, Kaito looked like a little boy with an appetite for trouble. “You promised us impressors, brother. Looks like we’ve got ’em.”
Archer grinned. “Now all we need is a plan to stop them.”
The plan took shape as they headed east toward Alissar Province, riding through the last of the summer crops, thick and plentiful in the fields.
At night, Sefia read, and the Book revealed to her kaleidoscopic visions of the future: the cries of men and horses—Frey and the boys darting among the enemy—sprays of blood—dust—a splintering—boys, whose faces she didn’t recognize, squinting in the morning sun.
She recounted everything she read to Archer, who discussed the coming battle with Kaito as they searched for prey scampering through the orchards and fallow fields.
“Do we know how many there are?” Kaito asked, nocking an arrow to the bow Sefia had lent him for hunting.
“Twenty-six.”
“Against the eight of us?” The Gormani boy sighted on a rabbit dashing across the plains. “That’s three and a quarter impressors each.” He drew back, fired. The rabbit dropped.
Archer dismounted to retrieve their dinner. “Good odds.”
“Killer odds.” It was macabre. But coming from Kaito, it seemed funny.
They spent almost all their time together now. Except for when Archer was with Sefia, he and Kaito ate together, rode together, stood watch together, discussing battle plans, anticipating counterstrikes. When one of them panicked, or nightmared, or needed something thrilling and reckless to forget what had happened to him, the other was there with a comforting word or something to break or a plan to dive off a cliff into a lapis-blue stream so cold and deep they weren’t always sure if they’d come out again.
Kaito was like the brother Archer had never had. Even better, he was brilliant, a born tactician. It was his idea to take down Obiyagi and her crew like the highwaymen of old, running down supply wagons in the red Liccarine canyons. “Except we’re not out for gold,” he added.
Archer swept his hand across the ground, obliterating the map they’d sketched in the dirt. “Nah,” he said, “we’re out for blood.”
Kaito’s smile put a crook in the scar on his cheek. “You got that right, brother.”
• • •
On the morning of the ambush, they mounted their horses and entered the canyon, taking up posts behind bunches of saltbush and shrubs of flowering lupin: Archer with Sefia and the twins on the western slope; Kaito leading Scarza, Frey, and Griegi in the east. In the hills, Mako lay hidden with their supplies.
Beyond the Rock Eater, the grasslands waited.
As the Book had foretold, when the crescent moon rose above the canyon, a cloud of dust appeared in the distance.
The wind whipped past them, and Archer sat forward in his saddle, imagining he could smell axle grease and gunpowder on the air. He licked his lips.
“Hey, sorcerer,” Versil said, shifting uncomfortably on the back of his painted horse. “Think I’ll miss the battle if I take a minute? Nature’s calling.”
“If you don’t go, you won’t miss it.” Sefia didn’t take her eyes off the canyon, hawk-like in her focus.
Archer’s fingers tightened on the reins. They were going to win. They were going to stop Obiyagi and free the boys from their crates. With the Book to guide them, there was no way they could lose.
Versil shrugged. “All right, but if I wet myself in the middle of the battle, I’m blaming you.”
They watched the impressors draw near—four riders with the first cart, where Obiyagi sat with her shotgun and her driver, and the rest of the caravan following in their wake.
Across the canyon, a gunshot cleaved the air. An impressor toppled from his horse.
Scarza. Best rifleman they had.
Cries of alarm went up along the caravan as the impressors closed ranks around the carts.
With a roar, Kaito charged from his hiding place with Frey and Griegi quick behind him, racing down the mountain at breakneck speed. Gunfire flashed at their fingertips, and enemies fell to their bullets like tin cans from a fence line.
But the caravan didn’t stop. Ducking shots and returning fire, the impressors charged around the Rock Eater, heading for the grasslands.
Archer bared his teeth—a hunter ready for the chase.
Then they were off, galloping downhill, into the ranks of the enemy. Bullets pinged off rocks, spitting gravel.
As Archer entered the fray, his fighting instincts took over. There was so much to see: the charging horses, manes and tails flying—trigger fingers pulling—bullet cases bouncing in the dust. He could see the whole battle: the trajectory of the caravan—the movements of Frey and the boys—the amount of time they had before they hit the cliffs.
It was loud and awful, and it was glorious.
He rode in among the enemy, pulling impressors from their saddles, plugging them with bullets. He was a bolt of light. He was the crack of thunder.
Then Kaito was beside him—there was a feral light in his green eyes, like he didn’t care if he lived or died as long as he went out fighting—and they were a terror to behold: riding, shooting, whooping like wild little boys playing outlaws in their backyard, taking one life after another with careless brutality.
Gunfire skimmed Kaito’s horse. She startled, eyes white with fear and pain. The boy struggled to keep her in line as a second shot grazed his thigh.
Whirling, Archer put a bullet between the impressor’s eyes. She tipped from her cart, reins slipping from her lifeless fingers.
Sefia flung out her hand, catching the reins in her invisible grip, and the cart came skidding to a stop.
Thank you, Archer mouthed.
In the dust, she held up two crossed fingers.
They rode hard as they entered the grasslands, pinning the impressors against the edge of the cliffs. Explosions of gunpowder and blasts of heat surrounded them, and one by one, the enemy fell. Horses escaped. Ahead of them all, Obiyagi and the lead cart rattled on.
Grinning, Kaito gestured to the front of the caravan. “You and me, brother.”
They urged their mounts forward. The wind screamed. They were so close.
Turning in her seat, Obiyagi let off a round from her shotgun.
Kaito shot back, his bullet skimming the side of her neck.
She ducked.
Cursing, the Gormani boy jerked his head at Archer. “I’ll cover you.”
Archer sensed Frey riding up behind him. Letting the reins fall, he stood in the stirrups. He felt his mare adjust as his weight shifted, but she didn’t break stride.
He jumped—Frey caught the reins before his horse could bolt—and landed in the back of the cart, rolling to avoid a blast from Obiyagi’s shotgun. The boards split beneath him.
Behind him, Kaito’s six-guns popped, catching the impressor in the shoulder, the ear. She dove back undercover.
As Archer stood, the wheels bucked and skidded on the rough terrain, throwing him into the crates. Clambering over them, he reared over the front of the cart and knocked the driver unconscious with the butt of his gun.
Obiyagi lunged for the reins, then froze. Archer’s revolver was pressed to the back of her head. The cart slowed. “All right, boy,” she mu
ttered. “You win.”
Breath rushed in and out of Archer’s lungs. His chest heaved.
He could kill her. A twitch of his finger and she’d be gone. He wanted it. He could almost taste the spray of blood on his lips. His hand shook. No. He wouldn’t be that boy.
Behind him, Kaito crowed. The boy was standing in his stirrups, arms pumping, head thrown back in an exultant roar. “Rotten hulls, Archer, you did it! You promised us impressors, and you delivered! I’ll follow you anywhere, brother, anywhere—”
His cries were cut short by the sound of a blunt object on bone. A puff of dust rose as two figures fell to the ground, grappling, flailing. Then Aljan’s lanky figure appeared on top of an impressor, lying on his stomach, trying to cover his head with his hands. Over and over the boy’s fists struck him, hard, relentless.
Archer leapt from the cart. “Kaito. Kaito! Secure the prisoners.”
Aljan was crying, wailing, saliva flying from his lips, blood flying from his fists. But he didn’t stop. It was like he couldn’t stop. Every time he struck, the impressor’s head rocked violently from one side to the other, like a ship’s bell in a storm.
Archer raced past Sefia, holding the reins of two of the carts with her magic, but Frey was faster. She ducked one of Aljan’s blows and caught his arm, hauling him off the impressor, who lay, unmoving, in the blood-spattered dust. The mapmaker buried his face in her hair, shuddering.
For a moment, everything was still. Archer locked eyes with Sefia.
They’d won.
In the stunned silence, they could hear Aljan sobbing.
Two down, two to go.
CHAPTER 13
The Dead Arise
The impressor Aljan had attacked didn’t make it, bringing the death toll to sixteen. Sixteen bodies swaddled in blankets. Sixteen corpses for the flames.
Sefia watched as Frey and all fourteen of the boys took turns touching a torch to the kindling, their faces solemn and hard. Kaito was the last, and he hesitated a long moment, watching the smoke billow from the porous mound of blackrock, before he thrust the torch deep among the logs and returned to Archer’s side.
The flames grew higher. The acrid stink of burning hair enveloped them.
Shackled at the wrists and ankles, Obiyagi and the other prisoners stood by. One by one, they repeated the names of the dead.
Sefia knew those names, had read them in the Book. One of them had joined the impressors to prevent her own son from being taken. Another had been a gardener. One had been on the crew of the Current, long before Reed became captain. Others were cruel and had reveled in abuse since they were children, plucking the legs off of insects one at a time like flower petals.
None of the boys spoke. There were no speeches, no stories. Quietly, Kaito and Scarza escorted the captives back into their crates.
When they returned, Archer addressed the group: “I know what they’ve done to us, but when they surrender, we have to stop.” There was gravel in his voice, some emotion ground against another deep inside him. His gaze went to Aljan, who had that dull, confused look in his eyes again. “We have to stop, or we become what they wanted. We stop, or they win.”
The mapmaker nodded miserably. The others, even Kaito, murmured their agreement.
In the silence that followed, one of the new boys, Keon, a scrawny sixteen-year-old with the sun-streaked hair of a south-coaster, cleared his throat. “We didn’t get the chance to thank you, for what you did. When all the commotion started, we—we thought for sure we were dead.”
“You were dead.” Archer gestured to the others, who touched the scars at their throats. “We all were.”
“We were dead,” Kaito agreed, saluting with his crossed arms. “But thanks to our chief and our sorcerer, now we rise.”
Chief?
Startled, Sefia glanced up at Archer, whose gold eyes flickered with worry—and a darker reaction, like hunger. Until now, the group had been leaderless. Informal. A band of lost boys. But now they’d become something different, something more—a following.
Archer gripped her hand tighter as the others repeated Kaito’s words like a rallying cry, to be invoked before some distant battle: “We were dead, but now we rise.”
The air crackled. The hair rose on Sefia’s arms.
They’d done it again—stopped the impressors, freed the boys—because of the Book. The Guard’s greatest weapon turned against them. But what if it was a weapon with a hidden edge? What if, somehow, Sefia was doing exactly what they’d wanted all along?
• • •
That night, there was a celebration. Frey and Archer built a bonfire that dwarfed even the twins in height, and when they’d all finished feasting on roasted seabirds and skewers of onions, they took the burning brands of Griegi’s cookfire and thrust them into the heap of kindling and driftwood.
The flames leapt skyward, and the boys let out a cheer, their bodies seeming to flicker in the red light. Moving among them, Kaito and Scarza doled out bottles of liquor they’d raided from the impressors’ supplies and flasks they’d filched from the bodies of the dead.
On the edge of the firelight, Frey sat with Aljan while he sketched in the dirt. The battle, the beating, had finally gotten him to talk to her. From a distance, Sefia watched their heads tilt toward each other when they spoke, like reeds bowing in the wind.
Giddy with freedom, the others played Ship of Fools and tossed up shards of broken crockery, which Scarza shot out of the air with a myriad of dazzling one-handed tricks. They told stories and dared each other to stand by the fire, counting the seconds before they danced away from the heat.
And at the center of it all was Archer. Beaming. Beloved. Everywhere he went, the others bowed and crossed their arms, gripped his hand and offered their gratitude.
Eyes bright with excitement, Kaito swaggered up to him. “Why’s your cup empty?” He scowled at the others. “Who allowed the chief’s cup to go empty? Was it you, Griegi?”
The cook giggled and hid his pink cheeks behind his hands. Laughing, Keon, the skinny south-coaster, pulled his arms down. For a moment, they stared at each other, grinning foolishly, before their lips met in a clumsy kiss. The others whistled.
When they parted, Griegi’s face was even redder than before, his smile brighter.
Slinging his arm around Archer’s shoulders, Kaito poured a stream of liquor into his cup. “Brother, where I’m from, the first one to stop drinking dishonors his name.”
“Your face is a dishonor.” Archer clinked their glasses.
Soon they were regaling the others with highlights of their battle. “The way you jumped onto that cart! I thought for sure you were gonna . . . and then Obiyagi—” Kaito mimicked the sound of a shotgun, pretending to jerk back at the recoil. “But that leap! That’s the stuff of legends.”
Archer shook his head a little too vigorously. “You could’ve done it, same as me,” he said. “You are the best of us, Kaito Kemura.” He drew back and raised his cup again. “To Kaito!”
“To Kaito!” the other boys echoed.
The Gormani boy shrugged. “My only regret is not killing more of them before they surrendered.”
“No, no, we did good,” Archer mumbled. “We did good.”
Kaito pressed their foreheads together. “You’re a far better person than I, brother.”
Through it all, Sefia passed among them mostly unseen—with them, but not one of them. Everywhere she looked, she saw her parents’ legacy—in the brands, the scars. She heard her father’s words in every story of torture and mistreatment they recounted.
We need a boy with a scar around his throat? Let’s go find him.
All this, for one boy. Without meaning to, she found Archer in the crowd. Had it worked? Was she somehow playing right into the Guard’s hands? Could you, as Lon had claimed, make destiny?
Her thoughts w
ere interrupted as Versil, seeing her approach, beckoned some of the new boys closer and told them in a theatrical whisper how she’d once turned him into a moth for falling asleep on watch. “She restored me to my handsome self by morning, obviously, but see this?” He pointed to the white patches on his face. “Parts of me stayed permanently white.”
Sefia rolled her eyes. “I did no such thing.”
With an exaggerated wail, Versil prostrated himself at her feet. “Please, sorcerer, don’t turn me again!”
She stalked away while he got up again, laughing.
Farther away from the bonfire, she found the remnants of Aljan’s letters in the dirt, a mesmerizing pattern of loops and spirals, half-erased. Here and there she picked out a T, an Ė, or an Ņ—but on the whole they looked more like the necks of some mythic, multiheaded creature than writing as she knew it.
From the other side of the fire, she could hear Kaito’s rough tenor leading the others in old Gormani battle songs from his home up north. Grand, haunting melodies for ancient warriors made new and urgent by the boys’ untrained voices.
Sunrise in the northern sky
Stains the ice and snow with light.
Kiss your children. Raise your weapons.
Through the waves, we ride.
To our deaths, we ride.
Our foes will not forget how we fight.
They will know our names,
Our valor, and our blades.
They will tell the world
How we fought this day.
She could hear Archer trying to follow, but he was always a note off, a word behind, trailing after the melody. But he was from Oxscini. He wouldn’t have known these songs.
And he wasn’t a warrior. A fighter, yes. A hunter, maybe. But not a leader of men like the generals from the north or even Captain Reed, with his band of outlaws. At least he hadn’t been, before today.
She smoothed away the rest of Aljan’s letters, lingering at last on a C before wiping it out, trying to ignore the twinge of guilt she felt at ruining something so beautiful.