There’s another way.
“And what of you?” I called, eyes ahead. So close. Just a few more jumps.
My boot slipped on a loose tile, and my ankle twisted. I sprawled sideways, hit the roof, and slipped down-down-down. My fingers slid over tiles. I skidded, scrambling to catch a hold of something—anything. The gutter rushed to meet me, and in the next weightless breath, I went over the edge.
Falling.
In a blink, a second, a moment, I would hit the ground. The fall might kill me; it would certainly break me. And the city and its people would burn.
There is another way. This is how it ends.
The ground rushed up to meet me. I hit hard, but the ground flexed, capturing me in an embrace instead of shattering the life from my flesh and bones.
“Mmm …” she purred. Her snout snuffled close to my boots and her eyes blazed as she admired me—ragged and winded—cradled in her claws. “Careless thief.”
The watcher in my dreams. The presence who could stop everything, but would not. “Shaianna.”
“Shaianna is gone.” The thunderous voice boomed inside my skull. “Soon to be forgotten.”
I still had the dagger and turned it slowly in my hand, ensuring each finger had a firm grip on the handle. “She wanted to live. She was afraid of you, of what she knew was coming. She’s part of you, somewhere. The part that feels.”
The dragon’s lips pulled back in what I could only interpret as a smirk. It turned its head side-on and eyed me close with one luminous green eye. Those eyes truly glittered like gems with so many facets—so deep and containing hundreds of years’ worth of knowledge and anger. So much potential. She had said it herself. If only her true self could see its own potential. But it couldn’t. She could not be stopped, not by magic, not by flame, not by cannons.
I thrust the dagger forward and punched the blade hilt-deep into her eye. She exploded with rage and tossed me away. I had a few seconds of weightlessness before pain slammed through me as I hit something hard and unforgiving: a wall, a street—I wasn’t sure and didn’t care. Numbness and nothingness almost stole my consciousness. I could sleep a while, right here in the street.
“Get up, you wretched man. Get up and live.” The roaring rolled on and on, a terrible thunder shaking Brea to her foundation.
Just a moment’s rest. It didn’t seem like a lot to ask. I was so very tired. The fight was lost. It was never going to be won. In the fog of my detached thoughts, and through the drifting smoke, Brea’s spire stood proud. Firelight cast one side in a surreal orange glow, while the other was clad in shadow. The spire. The mages …
Embers and ashes dallied in the air. I should have been in pain, but I felt nothing besides a satisfied peace. I saw her, then, my savior, my fate. She strode toward me through the smoke and ash, just like she had in the alley that fateful night.
This might even be the same stinking alley, I mused.
She held her head high, her eyes bright and her dagger gleaming in her hand. The assassin, the sorceress. The woman with many names, though she didn’t seem to know who she really was. I still had hold of her dagger’s twin. It seemed important that I not let it go. I’d always had it close, needed it close.
“You do not die here today, thief.” Shaianna smiled a soft, sympathetic smile and laid her cool hand on my face.
“You need to stop this.” The words came out fractured and broken. Her cool touch flowed farther than my cheek, deeper, reaching into the numbness and plucking away the apathy and pain.
“I cannot,” she replied.
Fire blazed close behind her, filtering through her loose dark hair and casting her in a shifting reddish glow. But the screams had ceased. Too many were dead. The city was lost.
“Why?” I lifted my bloodied hand and brushed my thumb across her cheek, smearing dirt, grit, and blood across the gem that glowed there.
“I cannot,” she repeated. Her lashes fluttered. A tear broke free. “I do not have a choice. But you do, thief. You do.”
Her touch fizzed against my skin and the numbness cleared, bringing clarity to my thoughts.
“You are free to choose.” Knowledge still sparkled in her eyes. Here, now, she could feel, and dream, and regret. Regret filled those tears shining in her eyes.
I shifted upright, feeling something in my chest push inside, where it shouldn’t, and leaned back against a wall. “Did you use me?”
She nodded. “Yes, and I continue to do so.”
“Did you feel anything?”
“No.” That single word belied the raw sadness in her eyes. “I felt nothing when you made me laugh and made me see—when you brought me to life.” She ran her fine fingers through my hair, brushing it back from my eyes, and then tilted her head.
With her face inches from mine, I saw how the fine lines crowded around her eyes and how her lips pressed into a tight line. So sad, but not yet lost. Her eyes and expression pleaded with me. She couldn’t stop this, but I could.
I closed my fingers around the dagger’s hilt. It had to be my choice. A choice I never would have made if not for meeting her, if not for my sister’s last words. “Don’t make the wrong choices, brother.”
I didn’t want it to end like this, but there was another way, and this was it.
Shaianna leaned in close and brushed her soft lips against mine. She smelled of the meadow outside Arach, of summer sun and rich grasses and a time forgotten. I only wished that it could have been different, but I understood why it wasn’t. Some things are meant to be destroyed.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“I know.” She sighed. Her breath fluttered warm against my cheek.
I lifted the dagger, swallowed, wondered if I would see my sister again, and punched the blade home, sinking it deep into my chest. It slipped in fast and true. A relentless heated throbbing followed—the sound of my heart. Beating waves rolled over me, blood pumping, sharp and tight, then dull and heavy. I clung on to the dagger, let my head fall back against the wall, and watched as Shaianna staggered out of my reach. Her chest heaved as she tried to breath around the pain—my pain, her pain.
Kill me, thief, and you kill yourself. She had always known it would come to this. The bond. The curse. From the moment I sipped from her cup, this fate had been waiting, watching, ready to catch me when I fell.
She blinked her tears free. “This is the right choice.”
I smiled. “I know.”
She dropped to one knee, then fell forward, bracing herself against the road. “I will be ashes and dust and dreams and nothing more.” She lifted her tear-streaked face. “I am the last, and I do not want to die.”
“But you lived, and you laughed, and you loved.” I swallowed hard. My focus blurred and the throbbing in my chest migrated throughout my body, filling my hearing with the deceleration of my heart. “Rest now. I will never forget.”
In the haze of looming unconsciousness, a swirl of fire and light twisted over her, lifting her up inside a sudden wind around her. I shielded my eyes from the grit and opened them again to find the dragon pushing off and taking flight. But its gait was crooked and its flight hindered. She sent a forlorn roar out into the city, and I knew it would be her last.
I pushed off the wall, crying out as the pain in my chest hardened. But I had to see, to know … One foot in front of the other. Just a few steps. I staggered into the street and turned.
And there, clutching the spire, she had settled. She curled her tail around its base, clamped on with her claws, and lifted her head toward the spire’s tip. Stone crawled up her scales, climbed and skittered and danced up her back, and spread across her relaxed wings. When it reached her head, it captured the dragon as truly and uncompromisingly as only earth could. Her green eyes still glinted high up among the smoke and darkness atop the spire. But she was gone, and so was her legacy.
I fell to my knees and pulled the dagger free. Blood. So much blood. It cooled on my chest and soon crept around the cobbles, findi
ng its way through the crevices into the earth. It would be over soon, and I was glad. I hoped not all was lost. That Brea would live. But I would not see it.
I slumped forward and pressed my cheek against the stone cobbles. One last sacrifice for peace. The life of a thief. A poor price, it seemed. I smiled. The life of the best thief in Brea, the thief who’d stolen a heart of stone.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
The ship had creaked and groaned all night like a wretched old woman, and would for the next ten days at sea, Tassen had gleefully told me. At least, on the deck of the square-rigger, the salty air gave me the illusion of freedom and cured some of my rolling nausea, and I wasn’t throwing my guts up anymore.
The Lady Jane merchant vessel was currently powered by steam engines puffing and wheezing below deck. The rigging was stowed away and the crew was busy elsewhere among the ship’s cabins and engine rooms. Tassen had told the crew I was just like any other landlubber paying for passage across the sea to Lanskewly, which meant, as I stood on the deck, dagger tucked inside my long coat, that few paid me attention, even though they should. I had questions. Lots of questions. The most pressing being, how was I alive?
Tassen had taken me aboard his vessel with little more than a raised eyebrow. But he would ask—and soon. Molly too was here. With no heirs, the city had claimed Fallford’s wealth and possessions. Tassen had stepped in and hired Molly as his ship’s cook, and when she saw me, she’d had all manner of questions burning in her shrewd eyes. I had hidden her cleaver as a precaution.
I plunged my hand into my coat pocket and turned over the small ruby between my fingers and thumb. A shiver rippled up my fingers and tingled across the back of my hand. Magic. No whispers though. Not yet. I still sported the knot—Shaianna’s mark—low on my back. I’d borrowed Molly’s hand mirror to get a good look at it. So perhaps the knot would be enough to curb any mage-like urges, or perhaps now that Shaianna was gone, the knot was nothing more than a tattoo.
I should have died on that street.
I had been dying. Death had crept closer with every breath, and then the oddest thing had happened. The dagger and the ruby together had hummed—I couldn’t think of a better way to describe it. They’d resonated in unison, and I had lain there, my breathing strengthening and my heartbeat quickening. My body had become my own again. The ruby and the dagger, perhaps both, had been my saviors on that street that day, and both had woken something inside—the something I had denied all my life. Magic.
So many had died that day. I should have died. Would that have been justice after I had let Shaianna kill without mercy for so long?
It would seem, the restless gods weren’t yet done with me.
“Lookin’ pensive there, Master Vance. Might you do your broodin’ in the kitchen and help me whilst you’re there?” Molly leaned against the rail beside me, furiously wiping her hands on her apron. The salty air whipped her red locks about her face. She shoved them back with her fingers.
A smile lightened my lips. “I might.”
“Reckon we’s got ourselves a thief aboard. Made some fine spirits and brought them with me, I did. And yet they’ve a gone. Whisked away in the night, along with my hand mirror. You wouldn’t know nothin’ ’bout that?”
“Spirits?” I shrugged. “Had I the inclination to steal from you, Molly, I would be more interested in the silverware you stole from Fallford’s possessions.”
“T’was right.” She huffed and flicked her moppy curls of hair from her forehead. “He’d ’ave wanted me to ’ave it.” She saw my grin and scowled at me, as though by looks alone she could scold the grin off my face. “Cap’n Tassen says nobody really knows what befell the dragon. How it came to turn to stone. Is that what you think? Nobody knows?”
“Dearmad.”
“Was a dragon, no matter what’s you call it.”
I let my gaze wander back out over the endless sea. The morning light seemed softer here, but farther out, in the direction we sailed, the skies were laden with gray clouds.
“What is this world we’re in, where dragons and beasts can drive a people from their homes? It comes, with no reason, no warning, and turned to stone. Like them’s monsters in the spire.” She eyed me side-on, knowing I had secrets. Molly didn’t seem the sort to let secrets die.
“Monsters?” I asked, not quite succeeding in sounding suitably surprised.
“Hundreds of little disfigured creatures. Did yah not hear? They found them down there, ready to be sprung.”
“No, I stayed away—stayed at the harbor.”
Brea’s spire had become a monument to the thousands of lives lost—a reminder so we may never forget the past. But I couldn’t stand to look at it. Wherever I went in Brea, she had watched. It had taken a weak to clear the debris from the harbor. I’d focused on the repairs and then hopped aboard Tassen’s ship with just the dagger and a single gem in my pocket. Neither of which I would ever part with. I will remember.
Tassen hadn’t yet asked for payment, but he would. I’d find a way to pay him for passage, but first we had to land in Lanskewly. A new continent, new people, a new life.
“Well, I’m sure glad to be leaving.” Molly sniffed and nodded at her own conviction. “Too many ghosts in Brea.”
“I hear that.” I leaned on the rail, gave her a few moments to ask whatever was really on her mind, and then prompted, “Go on, say it. Whatever it is you want, ask it.”
“Did you kill him?”
I looked her in the eye and saw honest rawness there. Had I killed Fallford? I had bought Shaianna to his door, the same as I had to Agatha’s, and Calwyton, and, in the end, Brea. But I’d been played. I may not have been a good man, but I wasn’t a bad one either. I’d made mistakes, but I’d tried to put them right. “No, I didn’t kill Fallford.”
She glared back, reading every fine line, scar, and scratch on my face. She didn’t trust me, and I couldn’t blame her for that. “But you were part of all this. A big part.”
I had wondered if I hadn’t obeyed the sorceress in that alley, if she may never have become real and solid. If she had never been brought to life, thousands would still be alive today. But the truth would still be out there, hidden, buried—waiting to be found. I’d wondered over and over whether I could have stopped her sooner, just turned the dagger on myself in the beginning. But I wouldn’t have. I hadn’t yet become the man who could do such a thing. She’d taught me what it was to live, even if her lesson had been fleeting. There cannot be life without death.
Sometimes I cursed my selfish idiocy and wished I’d realized what fate had been trying to tell me, and other times I yearned to have her back, just for a few moments. I missed her like I missed a piece of myself I hadn’t known existed. And I feared what she had left me with—the tingling in my hand, over the scar, and the mark on my back. I had seen Anuska turn mage and suspected that same fate lurked in my future.
“Vance? You were part of this madness? Tassen tells me it’s not proper to ask. Says to leave you be. You helped it end though, didn’t you?”
I leaned my arms on the rail and closed my eyes. Sea spray dampened my face, cooling the healing cuts and grazes. “She was the true hero, not I. She lived with the horror of the truth inside her. She discovered what it means to live—to be alive—and she gave it up.”
I could still hear her laughter if I listened hard enough. Opening my eyes, I watched sunlight sparkle on the rippling ocean waves.
“Where is she now?”
I couldn’t help the crooked smile that tugged on my lips. “Forever watching over Brea.” I pushed off the rail and swept my arm around Molly’s narrow shoulders. “Come, let us see if we might find the light-fingered thief you speak of.”
She shrugged off my teasing embrace. “I’ll have those light fingers of his and wear them as a necklace.”
I didn’t doubt it. “Tassen might have a few things to say about his cook wearing severed fingers.”
“That captain has a lot to say.�
�� She huffed, stomping across the deck. “Not much of it be useful.”
I laughed and cast one last glance out to sea. I heard the whisper in the wind, saw the rise of ocean waves, and wondered about the stirring below still waters. I would never forget the good in Shaianna. The laughing woman, the sorceress, the assassin, the woman with many names. So much more than shadow and dust, she would live on in my memories, and that would surely be enough.
For now.
The End
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Acknowledgments
No book is written alone. The act of writing might be a personal one between the author and her story, but producing a book takes a dedicated team of professionals. I’d like to thank my lovely editor, Elizabeth, from Arrowhead, for her astute and on point observations and hilarious comments. Also, the cover artist, James from Bookfly, who is always a pleasure to work with. I’d also like to thank my husband, for all the crazy he puts up with. And last, but most importantly, I want to thank you, dear readers. Without you, these worlds and their characters wouldn’t be possible. So thank you!
*Notes:
“Twenty Thousand Brean Men”
Adapted from the Cornish Folk song, “The Song of the Western Men,” written in 1825 by R.S. Hawker (1804-1875).
Also by Pippa DaCosta
The Veil Series
Wings of Hope ~ The Veil Series Prequel Novella
Beyond The Veil (#1)
Devil May Care (#2)
Darkest Before Dawn (#3)
Drowning In The Dark (#4)
Ties That Bind (#5)
Get your free e-copy of ‘Wings Of Hope’ by signing up to Pippa’s mailing list, at www.pippadacosta.com
Chaos Rises
Chaos Rises (#1)
Chaos Unleashed (#2)
The Heartstone Thief (Dragon Eye Chronicles Book 1) Page 25