by Jordan Rivet
Mica hurried forward to help. Before she reached him, he suddenly blinked and lifted aside the beam as if it were no more than a bundle of sticks.
He’s a Muscle now too? What is going on?
Mica halted in front of him. “You want to explain—?”
“Later,” Caleb said hoarsely. “Are you okay? Where’s Jessa?”
Mica looked around. The nobles were beginning to pick themselves up, or crouch over the fallen. The crackling flames didn’t drown out the cries of the injured. There was no sign of the princess.
“She was right behind me.”
“Come on.” Caleb grabbed Mica’s hand and pulled her through the smoke, still offering no explanation for the impossible feats she had just witnessed. No one was both unnaturally strong and impervious to injury. No one. It just wasn’t how Talents worked.
They found the princess in the bow, overseeing the evacuation from the barge. Other ships in the harbor had come to their aid, and the revelers were being ferried to safety on an assortment of fishing boats.
Caleb released a sigh. “I thought for sure they were here to kidnap her.”
“Me too,” Mica said. “What do you think they were after?”
“I don’t know. Maybe they wanted to show they can reach us in the heart of the empire.”
Mica wished Jessamyn hadn’t killed the captain of the barge. They might have been able to get him to talk. On the other hand, he might have choked Mica to death if she hadn’t. The princess had saved her life.
Jessamyn was clearly in her element as she directed the evacuation. “Hurry along now. We may not stay afloat for much longer. Don’t push, Lady Bellina. There is space for everyone.” She had disposed of her iron teapot in favor of a burning brand taken from the wreckage of the party barge, the torchlight flickering over her red hair like a fiery crown. The look suited her.
The Shield bodyguards arrived at last. The Obsidians had attacked their boats too, keeping them busy while they assaulted the party barge. Their clothes were ripped from knife slashes, but they were otherwise uninjured. Jessamyn waved off Banner’s apologies and ordered him to check the burning hold for survivors. Only a Shield could enter it safely now.
When Jessamyn spotted Mica and Caleb, her eyes immediately went to their clasped hands. They released each other at the same time.
“I cannot believe someone had the nerve to ruin my harbor cruise,” the princess said as they joined her. “Poor Brin has been planning it for months, and now no one will even talk about how delicious the food was or how perfect the decorations looked. And you’ve ruined my dress, Micathea. How inconsiderate of you.”
Mica didn’t bother to apologize, too busy thinking about what Jessamyn had just said. Brin had worked so hard to plan the harbor cruise. Brin, who had arranged for the Shield guards to be on separate boats from the nobility. Brin, who had been so excited to attend the cruise—right up until she fell so ill even Magic Q’s potions couldn’t help her rally.
Mica remembered what the Obsidian captain had said to her when she wore Brin’s face. “You know I won’t fail you. You will never forget this night.”
Mica sighed. Brin would be gone by the time they returned to the Silver Palace. The only question was how long it had been since she was replaced by an Obsidian Impersonator. Perhaps she had been one all along.
Speaking of secret Talents . . .
Caleb took up a post at Jessamyn’s side and remained there throughout the rescue operation. The princess refused to leave until all the injured were cared for. Caleb seemed determined to serve as the princess’s bodyguard while her Shield was busy, something none of the other lords emulated. He caught Mica’s eye once or twice but showed no further signs of remarkable speed or strength.
No one else seemed to have noticed the anomaly. A few of the nobles complimented Caleb on his fighting as they disembarked, though. He acknowledged their praise, offering no explanation for why he had escaped unscathed.
“Those Obsidian cowards were no match for you,” Lady Wendel said, her words a bit muffled thanks to a bloody nose.
Mica chose that moment to slip away and examine the fallen attackers in case Lady Wendel recognized her clothes and realized who had punched her. There were only three Obsidian bodies apart from the captain. Two had died of their injuries. The final one had been wounded in the leg, and he’d been poisoned when he couldn’t escape. It was impossible to tell if he had taken the poison himself or if one of his comrades had forced it on him. The men wore humble clothes, as if they were sailors or farmers, their faces even paler in death. Mica rifled through their pockets, but they carried no identifying papers. They didn’t even have any money on them, which struck her as odd. She couldn’t tell if they had been paid in Obsidian crowns or Windfast marks. Whoever had hired them was extremely careful.
But what was their goal? The injured and deceased nobles had already been removed from the barge, and Mica didn’t yet know how many casualties there had been. Were the Obsidians simply trying to kill as many nobles as possible? Or maybe they had taken something?
Banner returned from the hold, his clothes blackened and smoking.
“No survivors,” he said shortly. “The Obsidian captain had this.”
He handed Mica an unmarked vial, similar to the one the captain had thrown at her. It was empty.
“This must be what he used on the oarsmen.”
Mica pocketed the vial, feeling a pang of sadness for the Muscles who had helped her earlier that day. Once again, simple Talents had been the victims of schemes that had nothing to do with them.
“I think it was Brin,” she said, watching Banner for a reaction. It had never been clear to her whether he returned Brin’s affections. For all she knew, that infatuation could have been part of an impersonation all along.
Banner’s eyebrows drooped as he considered the accusation. “She did oversee most of the arrangements for the cruise. It is possible.”
“Do you know where her mother lives?” Mica asked, remembering the handmaid’s mother’s illness. “Maybe someone was threatening her.”
“Brin’s mother died last year,” Banner said. “I sat with her at the memorial.”
“Oh.”
Little more needed to be said after that. Mica and Banner rejoined Jessamyn and Caleb and climbed into one of the rowboats sent to their rescue. They were the last to leave the vessel. No sooner had they disembarked than the party barge sank at last into the harbor, hissing and burbling as the fire was quenched.
“I am not paying for that,” Jessamyn said primly.
They were welcomed aboard a squid-fishing vessel and ushered into the cramped cabin, where the crew hurried to drape blankets smelling of fish guts around their shoulders. Jessamyn wore her blanket as if it were a fur mantle, holding court with regal poise as the sailors and nobles fussed over her. In the confusion, Mica managed to pull Caleb aside and bring her mouth close to his ear.
“Now will you answer my questions?”
Apparently expecting this, Caleb led her back out to the deck where they couldn’t be overheard. They had quite the escort now. Every sailboat and fishing vessel within a mile had gathered to chaperon their return to the city. Some of the nobles were continuing the party with their rescuers. Mica spotted Lord Riven swigging rum with the sailors on a flat-bottomed barge not far from their fishing boat, no doubt bragging about his performance during the fight.
Caleb strode to port and put both hands on the railing, as if bracing himself for Mica’s questions.
“Go ahead.”
“What are you?”
Caleb snorted. “And you wonder why I don’t talk about it.”
“You’re impervious,” Mica said. “You lifted that beam as if it weighed nothing, so you’re a Muscle. And I’m sure I saw you moving super-fast before, meaning you’re a Blur too!”
“I told you I’m not a Blur.”
Mica folded her arms, her fish-scented blanket slipping off her shoulders. “Can you
Mimic too?”
“I don’t know. That’s why I wanted to know so much about how impersonation works, how it feels.”
“So what’d you do? Kidnap some Talents and steal their abilities? Maybe you drained them dry in your warehouse?”
“Of course not.” Caleb turned to face her. “I don’t know how I got this way. Believe me, I wish I understood it.”
The weariness and resignation in his eyes gave her pause.
“Have you always been like this?”
“Since I was a kid.” He ran a hand through his hair, ash from the burnt ship sifting onto his shoulder. “I started noticing it when I was six or seven, which is normal for Talents. But there’s nothing normal about this. I can’t control any of the things I do.”
Mica wanted to believe him. His face was as kind and open as it had seemed back on the cliff top in Gullton. But that open face had obscured a huge secret.
“Why have you been hiding your abilities?” she asked.
Caleb tapped his fingers on the railing, taking his time before answering. But she knew he was going to answer. There was little use in hiding things from her now.
“My family was embarrassed,” he said at last. “They thought having faulty offspring would reflect poorly on them.” He shook his head, as if brushing away an old injury. “Now, keeping it quiet is easier than trying to explain.” He glanced down at her. “Otherwise, people accuse you of drinking the blood of Talents.”
She winced. “I’m sorry about that.”
“It’s all right, Mica.”
Caleb caught her gaze and held it. Her skin tingled under his stare. How could he always make her feel so . . . seen? And this was the first time he’d called her Mica.
She adjusted the blanket looped around her elbows, attempting to recapture the conversation. “So you thought understanding impersonation would help? That’s why you were asking me so many questions.”
“You can control every inch of your body.” Caleb looked her up and down, and Mica felt a blush creeping through her. “I can never predict when one of the abilities will manifest. They’ve saved my neck a few times, like you saw today, but sometimes I try to use one of the Talents, and it doesn’t come through for me.” Caleb pulled up the edge of his shirt, revealing a nasty scar across his abdomen. “That’s from when I was young and stupid and picked a fight with the wrong person.”
Mica reached out to touch the scar, feeling the rough lines with her fingertips. His skin was warm beneath her hands, and she distinctly heard his breath catch at her touch. Then he dropped his shirt with a glance at the boats around them. With so many blazing lights, it wouldn’t be hard for someone to see them.
Caleb leaned on the railing, and when he spoke again his voice was brisk. “So now you know about my curse, making you one of the few.”
“I wouldn’t call it a curse,” Mica said. “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve wished my ability came with speed or strength.” She thought of when she received her assignment, how she feared she hadn’t been sent to Obsidian because she wasn’t good enough at fighting. Blur speed would help with that. And if she had been strong enough to overpower her Obsidian attacker, she could have held him for information instead of nearly being choked to death.
“You don’t understand,” Caleb said. “It is a curse when you can’t guarantee whether the ability will show up in any given scenario. It’s inconvenient if you suddenly use Blur speed without realizing people are watching, but think about being in a fight where there’s a possibility you can take a hit without injury. When there’s a fifty-fifty chance the blade won’t go in at all, it’s a tempting gamble. Or think if you see someone in trouble and try to use your super strength to save them, but the power doesn’t come and you have to watch them—” He broke off, not needing to complete the sentence, and looked out at the lights on the water.
There was a story there—a painful one. Mica rested a hand on Caleb’s arm. They were well past the point of propriety by now anyway.
His skin was hot to the touch, much hotter than it had been a moment ago.
“You’re feverish.”
“And that’s the other problem with my little bursts of power.” Caleb looked down at her again. His eyes had gone a little glassy.
“You get sick afterwards,” Mica said. “That night I found you—”
“Correct. Uncle Ober theorizes that I’m not supposed to be a Talent, so anything I do burns through a ton of energy at once. My body can’t handle it.”
Mica frowned. Something about that didn’t quite add up, but she wasn’t sure why.
“I’ll probably be fairly useless shortly,” Caleb said. “Can I trust you to—?”
“I’ll make sure you get home safely.”
Caleb smiled softly. “Thank you. I meant to ask if I can trust you not to mention this to anyone, even in your official reports?”
Mica hesitated. This was the sort of thing she should relay to Master Kiev, especially since she’d already named Lord Caleb as a suspect in the Talent disappearances. She wanted to trust Caleb more than ever, but nothing he had said tonight absolved him of suspicion. It would be a betrayal of her duties not to say something.
“Why don’t you want anyone to know?” Mica said. “You could be something new—a fifth Talent. Maybe people at the Academy could help you.”
“My uncle thinks—whoa, I’m getting a little lightheaded.” Caleb slid down to sit on the deck, and Mica remembered how she’d found him on that stoop, flitting in and out of consciousness. “He thinks . . .”
Caleb trailed off, eyelids flickering, and Mica never learned what his uncle thought. She wasn’t convinced Ober’s attempts to help Caleb self-medicate with energy potions were good enough anyway. He needed help from a real expert.
“Let’s talk it over when you’re well,” she said. “I won’t say anything until then.”
Caleb mumbled something incoherent as his head dropped onto his knees. Mica settled in beside him, pressing her arm against his as the boat glided back toward the city.
Chapter Eighteen
The palace was already on alert when they returned a few hours after midnight. Emperor Styl oversaw the crisis from the throne room with the severity of a thunderstorm. He kept his Blurs running around delivering orders almost as quickly as he could write them. He deployed both the City Watch and the Old Kings garrison to search for the attackers, who seemed to have vanished after escaping the barge.
Meanwhile, the nobles were working themselves into a frenzy, especially when they learned that five of their number, two lords, one lady, and two servants, had died in the attack. Jessamyn spent a sleepless night calming the fears of the survivors and urging them not to blow the incident out of proportion. But rumors spread through the city like spilt wine, and by daybreak, half of Jewel Harbor believed the empire was at war.
Mica spent the small hours of the morning interviewing the maids, Alea and Ruby, about Brin. The handmaid was indeed missing from her sickbed.
“She’s been busy,” Alea said. “But we all are.” She looked Mica up and down. “Maybe if you pulled your weight and helped with the cleaning more often . . .”
Mica resisted the urge to remind Alea that she was not, in fact, a maid. “Has she met with anyone strange?”
“Not sure what counts as strange by your standards.”
Mica was too tired to address the implication, just wanting to get through the interviews. But Ruby wasn’t much more help than Alea.
“I’ve barely seen her in the past few weeks,” Ruby said. “I swear I could go days without so much as passing her in the corridor.”
“Doesn’t that strike you as odd?”
“Her mother is ill,” Ruby whispered, scandalized. “Show a little heart.”
“How long has her mother been ill?”
Ruby pursed her lips. “Since this winter, I’m sure.”
“She ought to be more considerate, really,” Alea put in. “We’ve got mothers too.”
<
br /> In the end, the others had simply been too busy with the princess’s usual tasks to shed much light on how Brin had orchestrated the attack. But if she’d been using her mother’s illness to excuse her absences since the winter, Mica had probably never met the real Brin at all.
As the sun rose over Jewel Harbor, Jessamyn enlisted Mica’s help containing the outrage among the nobility. She sent her to reassure the ladies who’d been on the boat that the culprits would soon be found. Mica hurried from sitting room to sitting room in the north wing while Jessamyn worked her way through the east, taking full advantage of her ability to be in two places at once. Mica wanted to check in with Peet and see if he’d heard anything from Master Kiev, but she didn’t have a chance until the afternoon when the princess was called to her father’s private chambers for a rare meeting. Mica hadn’t yet figured out how close Jessamyn and her father were, and the emperor remained an enigma. Still, word traveled quickly that he had summoned his daughter, so Mica was able to suspend her impersonation duties and sneak away.
Peet had spent the morning darting around the city, collecting information for his own reports. The Blur was in communication with many of the spies in Master Kiev’s network, and they had all been blindsided by the attack on the nobles.
“We keep tabs on Obsidians in the city,” Peet explained to Mica as he offered her some grapes from a wooden bowl. “Most are just trying to live their lives. I can’t see what they’d gain by stirring up trouble.”
“People up at the palace are already talking about reopening hostilities.”
Peet grimaced. “I got a feeling it’ll get worse before it gets better.”
The prospect of conflict with Obsidian made Mica even more nervous for her family than the disappearances. Talent soldiers were always the ones on the front lines. She hoped it wouldn’t come to that.
“Did Master Kiev reply to my last report?”