by Sara Wolf
I smile. “When do we get started?”
Fione tells each of us what to bring and where to meet tonight. She is a mastermind—she already has four polymath tool belts, each distinct and each used as a badge of passage within the Crimson Lady. How she got them I can only guess at—but I’m willing to bet it involves blackmail and abusing much of her uncle’s connections. Lucien will provide the robes, and as long as we keep our hoods up, no one should be any the wiser. Malachite is the muscle, and I’m—according to Fione—the excuse.
“If something goes wrong and we get caught,” she’d said, “you are to pretend you were curious about the Crimson Lady, and begged Prince Lucien to bring you here. He will say he agreed because he ‘loves you so,’ begging the guard’s silence and forgiveness.”
At that Lucien had gone stock-still, his proud jaw tightening, and Malachite chortled to himself like a choking snowhyena.
“You don’t think that’ll actually work?” I’d managed through my dry throat. Fione grinned at me—not falsely saccharine, but wide and confident.
“He’s their prince. Their future king. My uncle might not hesitate to punish the prince, but everyone else in Vetris surely will.”
As I ride home in the carriage, Fisher leading us slowly through a spate of traffic in the market, I realize with blinding clarity that Fione is using us. Lucien agrees to it out of his need to know his sister’s true fate, Malachite agrees for Lucien, and I agree for my own heart. A pipe system, shadows, edges of the noble quarter, splitting up to cover ground—all things that could line up perfectly to take his heart.
A spasm of ravenous hunger runs through me, stabbing between my every breath. I clutch at my chest, praying for the pain to stop. My wounded forearm begins to ooze blood, the bandages crimson all at once.
All of Fione’s smiles, all her insistences on getting us together—it’s not to be friendly, or to get to know us as people. It’s to use us, like pawns in a game. I suppose when you want something badly enough, when you lose the thing most precious to you, people just become toys, puppets to move around to achieve your goals.
I’m using Lucien the same way Fione is. He’s just a puppet to me. A stepping stone.
LiAr, the hunger shrieks with a thousand glass-crash voices. YoU’rE a tErriBle liAr.
Shouts tear me out of my own head. I watch outside the carriage window as the market crowd points at something in the sky—no, something settled on a building high up. Crows. Their shiny black feathers catch the sunlight, all except one. One crow, stark white.
“A witch!”
“Someone get the lawguards!”
“Shoot it down!”
A fruit merchant with a small crossbow does the honors. He shakes as he lines up the shot, but when the bird hits the ground the market erupts into cheers. The lawguards quickly congregate and take the bird’s body away, and I watch them pass my carriage window. Blood drips from between the lawguard’s hands. White feathers work free of the bird’s lifeless body, swirling in the crowd’s wake. The glassy pink eyes watch me, unblinking. Not a witch—witch-crows have no color at all on them. An animal. An albino.
A beautiful thing born in the wrong era.
14
Sin
and Shadow
It’s been only two weeks and Y’shennria can already tell when I’m up to something. That’s the double-bladed peril of getting to know someone—you learn them, but they learn you.
Y’shennria narrows her eyes at me. “You’re preparing for something.”
“Is it that obvious?” I chirp, throwing steel hairpins into the belt pouch on my bed. When she doesn’t say anything, I add in some medical gauze, travel rations, and emergency gold coins.
“Yes,” she deadpans. “Did Lady Himintell forget to tell me about whatever illegal scheme she’s borrowed you for this time?”
“Scheme?” I gasp. “Auntie, please. It’s just a night of innocent drinking among terribly rich and bored young adults.”
She raises a fine eyebrow at the steel hairpins hanging out of the pouch. I clear my throat.
“All right, you got me—there may be some mild breaking and entering. But that’s it.” She stares pointedly at me. I add, “Unless you count smooching as an illegal scheme. Which, just between you and me, I think it should be.”
“Zera.” She sweeps over and upends the pouch on the bed. “You must tell me what’s going on.”
“If I do, you’ll try to stop me.”
“I’m stopping you regardless—we are so close to the Hunt. I won’t have you ruin everything we’ve been working for on one night of crusading for Lady Himintell’s cause.”
“I thought you liked her,” I say. “Weren’t you the one who asked me to get along with her? You said she’d help me.”
“That was before I—” Y’shennria swallows. “That was before I realized what a clean opportunity the Hunt is. It’s the ideal setting.”
“For you,” I fire back. “I was fine with it, too, for a while. But then the hunger—it just keeps getting worse and worse.”
“Zera…” Her eyes soften.
“I can barely hear myself think anymore,” I interject. “Eating helps, but for only a few minutes. Every time I look at you, or Maeve, or anyone with human blood in them, the hunger shows me perfect images of ripping them to shreds. It’s gotten so loud. It’s loud right now, screaming at me to kill you.”
—teaR tHe sKIn frOm hEr faCe and dRink yOur fiLL—
Y’shennria’s dark complexion pales, tingeing greenish. “Zera, you mustn’t—”
“I know I mustn’t. I’ve always known. But ever since Lucien’s sword cut me, it’s been unending hunger. Do you know what it’s like? To want to rip the world to shreds?”
The Red Twins peek through the windows, over the Tollmount-Kilstead mountains in the distance, like two crimson eyes watching us unblinkingly. Finally, Y’shennria nods.
“I do. And it’s an awful thing.”
She slides one hand toward my own on the bed. She hesitates, pulling back once before forcing herself the rest of the way. Her hand over mine is cool, slender.
“You must not put yourself in unnecessary danger.”
“That’s the whole reason I’m here,” I argue.
“No,” she says, stone in her voice. “Danger, certainly. But not unnecessary danger. If you’re caught, it’s over. For you and for me. For many witches.”
“We can’t bank all our hopes on the Hunt,” I snap. “If an opportunity presents itself, I want to be there—”
“As do I,” she interrupts, voice inching louder. “To make sure I can get you back to the manor without being seen. To ensure you aren’t wounded by the prince’s bodyguard, or worse.”
I start to laugh, the sound despairing. “None of those are the fiercely logical Y’shennria reasons I’ve grown to know and love. It sounds almost like you…” My throat swells up, unable to form the next few sounds. Y’shennria takes her hand from mine, staring at her palms with a pained gaze.
“I don’t want another painting in my hall, Zera.”
A painting. She means like Lord Y’shennria’s—a portrait of the dead. She clears her throat and turns her head to me, fluffy hair catching the red moonlight.
“It began as make believe,” she says. “As pretend. Playing house, with a new niece. Buying her things, teaching her things, watching her improve as a lady before my very eyes. I had hoped, a long time ago, to do such things with my own daughters. When they were taken from me, I—” Her scarred throat bobs. “I made myself give it all up. Locked the very thought of it away behind steel and glass.”
Her eyes catch mine, and she smiles twistedly.
“But the Old God loves to test us,” she presses on. “He loves to send us people who change our lives in great and terrible ways.”
“When I become human again,” I start, “then you can care about me. Not now. Not when I’m like this.”
Y’shennria laughs. “You don’t get to tel
l me when to care about you, Zera. That’s not how being an auntie works.”
My unheart clenches in my locket, so hard and sudden I skip a breath. Y’shennria recovers quicker than I do, always—she stands and makes her way to the door.
“You will not go tonight,” she says, clipped. “I’ll be ordering Reginall to lock all your windows from the outside, and he will be guarding your door for the rest of the night. If you leave, I will know.”
“You can’t stop me,” I snarl.
“No. But this can.” She holds up a dagger, a strange groove in the blade and a little latch at the base of the handle. A white mercury dagger.
“You—how’d you get one of those?”
“I may have asked the witches to give me one before you came to Vetris—a contingency required for me to agree to their proposition. I was quite worried about having a Heartless sleeping next to me. The difference now is I’ll use it not out of fear, but for your own good.”
“I warn you—I’m very good with a sword,” I press.
Y’shennria’s brows arch delicately. “And I’ve been wielding a dagger since long before you were born. You will not leave this room. You will not act on your own. You will attend the Hunt as we planned.”
She closes the door behind me with a soft thunk, the volume of it somehow more enraging than if she’d slammed it violently. I pace on the rug, my fists clenched. I should’ve known better—Y’shennria is just as stubborn as I am. She can understand my pain but not my hunger. I can feel it worming its dark fingers deeper into my veins with every second. I ate livers earlier, but the relief lasted a bare few minutes. If I don’t leave now, I’ll be late to the meeting place, and too hungry to even talk to anyone without my teeth showing.
A glassy clink draws my attention—an iron rod clipping my window locks closed from the outside. Reginall. He does each one, daring an apologetic smile up at me when I glare down at him from the window. I can’t break the glass, or Y’shennria would hear it. Besides, even if I jumped, I’d break my legs, and with my forearm still unhealed I seriously doubt my legs would heal either.
I bend three iron hairpins trying to pick open my door lock with no success. I shout to Reginall to let me out, pleading, but he doesn’t answer back. The hunger dares me to break things, break them (brEaK tHe foolS hOldiNg uS aGainsT oUr wiLL), but I rein in my jagged-growing teeth. Finally, I collapse on the bed, anger and effort exhausting me equally, my eyes skimming the black diamond pattern in the ceiling I’ve grown so used to.
Y’shennria is by no means an idiot. If anything, I’m one for daring to flaunt my intentions right in front of her. Then again, I couldn’t have seen this little lockup coming, considering I didn’t know at the time that she…cares for me. It’s with a begrudging sort of gratitude that I realize this must be how all humans with parents and guardians feel: angry and yet finding it impossible to be truly angry with them. My memories of how it was with my parents are long gone, but this feels somehow familiar. Somehow…right.
“I’ll care about her, too,” I grumble. “Just as soon as I’m done being furious with her.”
My eyes catch on the far left corner of the ceiling. There, the dark diamond tile is off—just a little more pronounced. I didn’t notice it the first few days, but after a straight week of staring at a ceiling, one tends to spot differences. I don’t make a habit of retaining every piece of useless noble gossip I hear, but my mind wanders to one:
It was a dinner party, one Y’shennria threw for me before I went to court. Baroness d’Goliev smiled at me with all her aging yellowed teeth over her cold fig custard.
“You should’ve met Lord Y’shennria, Lady Zera. A more brilliant man at court there’ll never be again.” She’d sighed.
“Oh?” I was genuinely curious. “Was he a polymath?”
“In his younger days, he aspired to be one. But his family was quite insistent he marry a Firstblood and bring honor to their name. And he always had a weak spot for family.” The Baroness wipes a fleck of custard off her silk bosom. “But he never lost his spark. Why, as a young boy he’d bring all sorts of little contraptions to court—things that moved, things with secret doors, little boxes you couldn’t open without puzzle solutions. He later refined the puzzle-locks, and sold the patent to Archduke Gavik, if you can believe it! That was the only invention of his that he pursued. Oh, and this manor, of course.”
“This manor? Did he have a hand in building it?” I asked.
“Indeed! He invited me over during its construction, in fact. Showed me a wonderful little catwalk of his, in the upper levels. You had to get to it by this athletic hole in the ceiling—but it was so well hidden I never spotted it at all!”
The Baroness laughed, and I laughed with her.
But now, I’m not laughing. I stand beneath the strange tile. It’s high up, but if I move furniture to reach it too loudly Y’shennria will definitely hear. Surely she’d know if my room had a secret catwalk made by her husband. Still, I carefully pile my trunks on top of one another—as wobbly as it is, it gets me high enough to touch the tile. I press on it, and like a tightly wound spring it gives, the tile opening on a hinge and revealing a dark hole just barely big enough for someone my size to fit through.
“Gods bless you, you clearly very skinny genius,” I grunt, reaching for the hole. I pull myself up with difficulty, a dim corridor stretching ahead of me. I stay on my hands and knees, making my impacts with the wooden catwalk as gentle as possible. I must be passing over Y’shennria’s room right now.
The corridor ends just above what I think is the bathroom. The spring-loaded tile gives way under my hands, and I lower myself off the edge carefully, my boots still making a resounding thud. I freeze, waiting for the inevitable uproar, but nothing happens. My hand reaches for the doorknob, only to find it locked. It’s never locked! Count on Y’shennria to cover all her bases.
I wander to the windows; at least they’re unlocked. And then I see it—a cherry tree, tall and proud and twisted just so. I could do it. I could also miss and shatter my entire spine, and it wouldn’t heal this time.
“In the words of the very intelligent witch philosopher Erildan,” I grunt as I open the window and perch myself on it, the night wind blowing my hair every which way. “What is safe can never be satisfying.”
I throw myself as far as I can, and for a split second, I feel like I’m flying. Then painful reality slams into me, my torso wrapping around a branch and knocking the wind from me. I scrabble to hold on, easing myself down to the ground and limping away into the night, far from the sight of the manor.
“In the deathbed words of the maybe not-so-intelligent witch philosopher Erildan,” I pant. “I shouldn’t have done that.”
I’m in so much pain from elsewhere on my body I don’t notice the cut on my cheek until I enter the Tiger’s Eye Pub, and Prince Lucien, sitting at a table in his dark leather cowl and armor, starts up from his chair. The windlutes playing in the corner go soft to my ears, the crowd drinking and singing all around us dulling as he approaches. His sharp, dark eyes over his cowl are the only things I can see of his expression.
“You’re hurt,” he murmurs, procuring a handkerchief from seemingly nowhere and pressing it to my face. He sighs. “I’m starting to hate this trend wherein you’re always somehow bleeding when I lay eyes on you.”
“I happen to be a girl of many talents, including expunging life force from all orifices,” I chirp, then wince. “Oh gods. I didn’t mean to make a monthly joke this early in our partnership.”
Lucien smirks. From behind his broad shoulders I hear a loud, half-swallowed laugh. Malachite sits at the table watching us, though when I look his way he avoids my gaze. Fione sits next to him, tapping her fingers impatiently on the wood. Lucien looks at them, then to me.
“Don’t egg Malachite on—he’s got the humor of a ten-year-old.”
“He heard that?” I marvel. Lucien leads me to the table.
“What? Did you think those
things on the side of his head were just for show?”
Malachite’s long ears bob in the lamplight as he nods to me.
Fione clears her throat. “Now that we’re all finally assembled—”
“My apologies,” I whisper frantically. “For having to escape total familial lockdown.”
“We can begin.” She ignores me. “Let’s go.”
She stands, Malachite following suit, but Lucien asks, “Where will we change?”
“Not here. The streets are safer,” Fione asserts.
“Where?” Lucien repeats. “What street?”
“I was thinking First and North.”
“Butcher’s Alley? That whole place is swarming with lawguards this time of night. Second and Fish is better.”
“I’m sorry, Your Highness.” Fione smiles sweetly at him. “But with all due respect, this is my operation.”
“With all due respect,” he retorts, stone and dark iron. “This is my city. I know it better than you. Of that, I’m certain.”
There’s a tense moment where they stare each other down, and Malachite rolls his eyes at me in a this is how they always are way.
“Not to be the bearer of bad news or anything.” I cough. “But there’s this pesky little thing called time, and it keeps moving forward whether or not we’re moving with it.”
The animosity between the nobles breaks, and Fione sniffs, standing with her cane. “Very well. Second and Fish. Quickly!”
The four of us depart the Tiger’s Eye Pub, Lucien leading the way. He takes us through a dizzying series of sharp turns until he stops us in a disused alley filled with fish guts. I gag, the scent nearly as bad as my worst memories of death.
“Ugh.” Fione winces. “This place reeks.”
“Why do you think the lawguards avoid it?” Lucien says coolly.
“Is this the part where we all start stripping wantonly?” Malachite asks, utterly unaffected by the smell. “Because that’s really the only reason I’m here.”