The Speaker

by Traci Chee

  She found him in the apothecary, measuring herbs with a weighted scale.

  Perfect. She needed him to concoct a draught for the Lonely King as well, in case Detano’s nerve failed him. A little something to add to the king’s melancholia and tip him over the edge into darkness.

  As ever, the Master Administrator was so impeccably dressed it was almost painful. Everything about him, from his pointed shoes to his narrow shoulders, was so well-balanced that you could have halved him with a mirror and you wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference.

  Except for his right eye, which had been damaged when Mareah had slammed his head into the table. Like a wisp of cloud against a starless sky, a milky scar obscured much of his iris, marring the perfect symmetry of his features.

  “Tanin,” he said, tapping herbs onto one side of the scale. A whiff of hemlock wafted through the room. “I’ve been expecting you.”

  She fought the urge to straighten her scarf. The Master Administrator had an eerie stillness about him that made you want to fidget, and ramble, and run. Even as his Apprentice she’d found it unnerving.

  Instead she gave him a little bow. “Master.”

  “Call me by name, or call me nothing,” Dotan said. “I haven’t been your Master since you surpassed me in rank.”

  “I have no rank anymore.”

  He said nothing. He didn’t even blink. Behind him, the scale swayed.

  “Will you help me be your Director again?”

  “What do you need?” he asked.

  “I need your loyalty, and I need your spies. Sefia and the boy have taken the Artax and I need to know where.”

  When he spoke, the Master Administrator barely moved his lips. “Stonegold may have his own plans for the children.”

  “Letting them loose with the Book isn’t a plan.” Inadvertently, Tanin began fretting with her scarf.

  Again, Dotan said nothing.

  “I also need to get a message to the First in Kelebrandt. I need—”

  “You need to give it a rest, dear,” a soft voice interrupted her.

  Tanin went almost as still as the Master Administrator. She didn’t even breathe as Darion Stonegold, King of Everica, swaggered into the apothecary.

  The Master Politician had the look of a fighter in his old age, a once-fit man swallowed by his own fat. Like gobs of clay, it stuck to his hands, his midsection, his jowls and cheeks. But his brown eyes were as keen as ever.

  “You’re a slippery little thing, aren’t you?” He smiled sourly. “Never where you’re supposed to be.”

  Dead, he meant. She was supposed to be dead. Tanin’s first instinct was to fight. Politicians had always been light on Illumination. She could have stuffed his own tongue down his throat in a matter of seconds.

  But the fact that he was here, now, eavesdropping on her conversation with her former Master, meant that she had been wrong. She didn’t have Dotan’s loyalty. Which meant she didn’t have access to the First.

  And three of the five Masters were against her.

  Behind Stonegold, the Master Administrator hadn’t moved at all. The gaze of his distorted eye seemed to bore into her.

  “Predictability is tiresome,” was all she said. At her sides, her fingers twitched. She might have been able to fight both of them at once. She’d been tutored by Lon and Mareah, after all.

  But then General Braca Terezina III, the Guard’s Master Soldier, settled, smirking, against the door frame. Her face was badly burned, as was much of her body—a tactic the Administrators had used decades ago to camouflage her features, so she could assume the identity of a soldier in Darion’s army—same age, same build, same coloring—who’d died in a fire. Since then, she’d risen through the ranks, and now her coat of blue suede winked with brass bars and silver stars—marks of her many victories.

  Tanin’s hands went limp. One, she could have dispatched. Two, she could have managed. Against three, she could not win.

  And unlike the others, Braca, who wore two gold-tipped guns at her sides, knew how to fight.

  “I said it when you were selected, and I’ll say it again: You’re rash. You’re compromised. You’re full of sentiment,” Stonegold said. “A sniveling sycophant to those traitors, and now to their witch of a daughter.” He licked his lips, as if savoring insults he’d been withholding for years.

  She swallowed a retort. She wouldn’t be baited. “Every one of us has a vice that will compromise the mission,” she said, measuring her words carefully.

  He grabbed her arm. “My people never broke their vows. My people are dedicated to the cause.”

  There wasn’t a shred of doubt in his eyes. Detano hadn’t confessed his weakness for the Lonely King.

  Good. Another weakness to exploit when she regained her ground.

  If she regained her ground.

  Tanin glared at him as his fingers found pressure points between her muscles. Pain lanced up and down her arm. But he would not make her scream.

  “You’re lucky you still have friends here, or I would have done away with you long ago,” he said. “They’ve convinced me you’re more valuable alive than dead.”

  Friends. Erastis. Rajar.

  Over his shoulder, her gaze met her former Master’s.

  Dotan?

  “How?” she asked.

  “The First needs a new Apprentice.”

  The Second. Tanin wrenched her arm out of his grasp and took a step back, measuring the distances between herself and the others.

  For years, the position of the Second Assassin had been a constant reminder of the family she’d lost, of the hole in her life she could never seem to fill. And now she had the chance to fill it herself. She could take the place of the person she’d sent to her death on the Current. The place she’d wanted for Sefia.

  Everything under the sun came full circle, didn’t it? It was almost poetic.

  “You’d keep me alive?” she croaked.

  Stonegold smirked. “Usefulness will keep you alive. But if you won’t allow yourself to be used . . .” His sentence trailed off, as if he were too lazy to finish it.

  She’d already been stripped of her rank, and now she’d be stripped of her name too. She’d be a shadow of a person—deadly, feared—but nothing more than the whisper of a knife in the dark.

  Tanin would have liked to think she was the kind of person who didn’t need power, titles, renown, who believed in the cause so strongly she’d give up everything for it.

  But she wasn’t. And in that moment she knew it.

  She blinked, and motes of golden light exploded across her vision. She raised her arms.

  By the door, Braca tensed, her trigger fingers twitching. But Tanin didn’t want to fight. She wanted to live. On her own terms. Sifting through the currents of light as one would sift through sand, she searched for the only place she could turn to now, the only place that still felt like home.

  In the Illuminated world, she saw mountains rush past her, waves and islands and vast waters.

  There it was—a black point on a wide blue sea.

  With a flourish, she swept herself into the streams of light, out of the apothecary, out of the Administrator’s Office, through the rock of the mountain and into the bright clean air.

  But not before Stonegold’s lazy voice reached her: “Don’t take too long before you give me your answer, dear. I’m not a patient man.”

  CHAPTER 35

  Captain of the Black Beauty

  Captain Reed heard about the Black Beauty long before he laid eyes on her: a black ship with a charging horse for a figurehead and a speed matched only by the Current. While he was still swabbing decks, she was racing sea monsters, outpacing storms, and committing sundry acts of piracy in the southeast, robbing shipments of bullets and gunpowder coming out of Roku.

  She was the only ship w
ho’d sailed into the ever-present rains of Zhuelin Bay, raised a flag in the ruined, waterlogged city of Ashrim, and gotten out again.

  The day Reed met her captain, she was chasing dragons through the volcanic Rokuine islands, harpoons glinting at her prow. When he and the Current interrupted her hunt, she was livid. He remembered her standing on deck, her black hair all a-tangle, and her voice, furious, ordering the Beauty to fire on the Current.

  They’d crossed paths many times in the years since—during high-stakes games of chance and skirmishes between pirates; she’d even been the one to fish him off that island where Dimarion had abandoned him nearly six years ago—and to Reed, the Black Beauty was everything an outlaw should be: too wild to be tamed, too big in legend to be contained.

  Ships like that didn’t belong in a shrinking sea.

  After meeting with Adeline and Isabella, Captain Reed and the Current of Faith spent months scouring the Central Sea for other outlaws. Some refused Haven. Others, chased out of the east by the Alliance, gladly came. They brought in the Crux, Captain Bee and the One Bad Eye, mercenaries, treasure hunters, and merchant brigs that had taken one illegal job too many to remain among civilized folk.

  Some, they were too late to save, sailing in upon the wreckage of outlaws who had died fighting back. They collected the stories of survivors and the names of ships that had been lost.

  The Current went out again and again, but it wasn’t until mid-autumn that they finally found the Beauty.

  The fear that had been knotting in Reed’s gut since they’d started the search for outlaws eased. The Black Beauty was intact. She wasn’t moldering somewhere at the bottom of the sea.

  But when her captain boarded the Current, leaving her lieutenant Escalia aboard the Beauty, Reed almost didn’t recognize her. She was thinner, paler than he remembered, her silvery gaze wandering over the decks. She blinked too often to be sure of herself.

  For a moment she knelt, pressing her palm to the deck.

  Over her shoulder, the chief mate shrugged.

  When she stood again, she offered no explanation. That, at least, was familiar.

  In the great cabin, she paced along the shelves of relics Reed had spent his life collecting. She reminded him of an animal, probing the bars of her cage for weaknesses.

  While he poured her a few fingers of whiskey, she laid a slim hand against the case that held the Thunder Gong, which he’d fished out of that maelstrom nearly six years before.

  “You ever get this to work?” she whispered.

  “Nah.” He offered her a glass. “Reckon it’s broke.”

  Like your voice, he thought. Once smooth and strong as steel, now it was harsh as brushfire and quiet as ash.

  She ignored the proffered glass, relieving him of the crystal decanter instead. Prowling past him, she swigged directly from the bottle and flung herself into one of his armchairs, sprawling out in a way that was both perfectly poised and totally nonchalant at once.

  “The world’s broke, if you ask me,” she declared.

  Reed raised his glass. “That’s why I been lookin’ for you. Where you been, Tan? Dimarion and I expected you on our tails months ago.”

  Captain Tan removed the scarf at her throat, revealing a thin scar that curved across her throat like a scythe. “I ran into a couple problems in Oxscini,” she whispered. “And Jahara, once I got there.”

  In one smooth movement, Reed set his glass down and bent to examine her neck. “Who did this?”

  To his surprise, tears beaded at the corners of her eyes.

  He almost stepped back. The captain of the Black Beauty didn’t cry.

  “What happened out there?” he asked.

  “It’s a long story,” she said, pushing him away, “and not one I’m willin’ to tell.” She took another drink from the decanter.

  Reed took a seat opposite her on one of the benches. “Lemme spin you a yarn, then, unbelievable but true,” he said, and began to tell her about the Alliance between Everica and Liccaro, the Crux, Haven.

  Tan didn’t look impressed. Then again, he hadn’t thought she would be. He’d seen her load five bullets into a revolver and spin the chamber before turning the gun on herself. Folks like her didn’t play it safe.

  “That mean you found the Trove?” she asked. He felt her searching his skin for new tattoos.

  “This seemed more important.”

  She lifted from the chair so gracefully it was like she was floating. “That’s all well and noble of you, Cannek, but you don’t just give up a lifetime of chasin’ adventure to settle down and raise hogs. That isn’t—that ain’t you.” Hooking her finger into his collar, she tugged his shirt down so hard he nearly fell forward.

  “This is you,” she whispered. Her gaze traveled over his neck and down his tattooed chest. “You got more of these since I last saw you shirtless.”

  Heat flowered in his face. A long time ago, they’d been lovers for a night. When he awoke in the morning, Tan was gone and the rudder chain on his ship had been cut.

  “Lettin’ you get me naked is a mistake I’m never makin’ again,” he said, detaching her fingers from his shirt.

  Captain Tan scowled. “Don’t flatter yourself. Seein’ you naked was a mistake I ain’t fixin’ to repeat either.”

  He grinned as she flopped down beside him on the bench, her legs stretched out before her. For a few minutes, they drank in silence.

  Finally, she said, “You been workin’ your whole life to get yourself a little bit of immortality.” She waved the bottle of whiskey at his tattooed arms. “Don’t know why you’d give up when you were so close.”

  Reed shrugged. “I let that dream die when Jules did.”

  She lifted an eyebrow. “Dreams don’t die, Reed. Family, friends, lovers . . . they rot like anything else. But not dreams.”

  “I tried, Tan.” He sighed. “No one can say I didn’t try.”

  “Then why are you givin’ up when you’ve almost got it?”

  Low though it was, the tone of her voice made him sit a little straighter. “It?” he asked.

  “The Resurrection Amulet.”

  Resurrection. The word called to him. Immortality.

  “The what?”

  “The Resurrection Amulet.” Tan pronounced the words slowly, as if he’d misheard her. “It’s supposed to be hidden somewhere in the Trove. One of the king’s most precious treasures.”

  A treasure that could cheat death. The cursed diamonds of Lady Delune had been a bust. Just like everything else he’d ever tried. But maybe . . . Maybe he could escape the fate that awaited him—that awaited them all—at the edge of the world. Maybe he didn’t have to end up like that. Maybe he could live forever, and not just in name.

  Reed narrowed his eyes at her. “Why’re you tellin’ me this? What’s the catch?”

  “No catch.” She shrugged, though she couldn’t hide the bitterness in her voice. “But some of us oughta get what we always wanted.”

  Immortality.

  He’d told himself he didn’t need it.

  Didn’t want it.

  But Tan was right. Dreams didn’t die. Dreams were always there, deep inside you like a flame in the dark, waiting for fuel.

  “You ain’t kiddin’ me,” he said, still afraid to hope.

  Captain Tan plunked the crystal decanter on the table. “Do I look like I’m in a kidding mood?”

  And as she spun Reed a tale of death and ancient creatures made of stars, of desperate smiths and something called a soul, the flame inside him roared into a blazing fire. Hot enough to burn all thoughts of Haven to ash. Bright enough to light the way, no matter where this adventure took him.

  He was Captain Reed.

  He’d find a way to cheat death—or die, gloriously, trying.

  Account of the Impressor

  Dir
ector, my messengers heard this account directly from the impressor, a man named Arz, but the story is spreading quickly—it’s already in Jahara, and there’s no telling where it will go from there. The boys are on the Artax now. Please tell me there’s a plan to stop them.

  –A.D.

  I didn’t want to believe the stories. They were just boys, you understand? Boys we captured. Boys that were ours. Our prisoners. Our possessions. Our creations. How bad could they be?

  But these weren’t boys.

  They were bloodletters. Like something out of a nightmare. Can you imagine all your worst deeds made flesh? Your own monsters unleashed against you?

  I thought I recognized one of them. This boy with white markings on his face. He killed one of ours half a year past. He pissed himself when they added a burn to his count.

  But he wasn’t that boy anymore. He was fast. Skilled. He would’ve finished me if I hadn’t gotten off a lucky shot. That was all that saved me. Luck.

  And he wasn’t even the worst of them.

  No, that was their leader—Archer. That was his name. ARCHER.

  I’m telling you, Serakeen can stop looking. Someone’s already found his boy.

  I’ve never seen anyone fight like that, like it was second nature. Like he’d sooner stop breathing than stop fighting.

  He killed his own lieutenant—did anyone tell you that? Beat him to a bloody pulp then shot him between the eyes. You should’ve seen the lieutenant. He loved Archer. You should’ve seen the love in his eyes. And Archer put him down like a rabid dog.

  He’s the one, all right. The boy with the scar.

  And he’s coming for all of us.

  CHAPTER 36

  In the Lair of the Enemy

  The warehouse seemed smaller in daylight, not mysterious but ordinary, with a plain wooden facade and dingy salt-encrusted windows. Casting a glance over her shoulder, Sefia tested the door.

  Locked.

  Out of habit, her hand went to her pocket, although of course the lock picks were gone, probably carried away by the swift Callidian Strait by now. Ignoring the twinge of regret in her chest, she slid a hairpin and knife into the lock and, with a few twists of her fingers, opened the door.