Red Tigress

by Amélie Wen Zhao

  Linn dreamt a familiar dream.

  At first, she was flying. Soaring, over an endless ocean of Kemeiran fir trees and mountaintops jagged against the horizon, the wind in her face and the wings of her chi buoyed like sails. The golden sun, threading through a fabric of mist over the shimmering sea, and the sky open and the earth endless, stretching all around her in infinite possibilities. Her brother, Enn, dipped ahead of her like a black-tailed sparrow, his laughter trailing in the breeze.

  The dream always ended the same way.

  She awoke with a gasp and sat up straight, her senses sharp as blades, her hands on the daggers at her hips. For a moment, there was only the darkness and the lingering taste of salt water and fear, fading fast as sleep gave way to wakefulness. And for a terrifying few seconds, she was once again sitting in the traffickers’ caravan, drugged with Deys’voshk.

  A soft wind stirred, bringing with it the sharp scent of snow and pines—and a presence that was at once familiar and not.

  Linn turned and met a pair of eyes silvered by the snow.

  “Bad dream?” From the shadows of a nearby pine, the yaeger—Kaïs—stepped forward with the grace and lethal poise of a Kemeiran snow leopard.

  Linn tensed. “Yes and no,” she murmured. What did you call a dream that was also your reality? She closed her eyes, trying to wash out the images of Enn’s body, folding and bending in all the wrong ways, falling toward that foreign ship with the flower-emblem sails and sailors whose hair looked to be spun of gold. Only later, once she’d boarded a similar one in search of Enn, had she understood what the ships were.

  She could sense his gaze, still on her. Those piercing eyes had a way of making her feel as though he saw everything in her head. Her soul. “What was it?”

  “My brother.” The words left her before she had a chance to stop them. Not that he could use that information to hurt her, anyway. That was one good thing about the dead. “He is the reason I came here.” She paused. “Was.”

  She had learned not long after her arrival in Cyrilia, from a broker’s log she had stolen that had earned her twenty vicious lashes, that her brother had died in an accident at a factory in a remote Cyrilian town.

  Kaïs lowered his eyes. “I am sorry.”

  Linn stood. The chi fell to her feet, exposing her to the cold of a predawn morning in the grand Northern Empire. Her head had cleared, her hunger and thirst were bearable, and whatever balms Kaïs had given her had reduced the pain of her wound to a dull ache.

  Kaïs watched her test her body and balance. “We should keep moving.”

  They were two days out from the Wailing Cliffs, but one could never be too cautious about whether guards were on their trail.

  Her wound still throbbed beneath the salves and bandages she had applied, but she was glad Kaïs insisted on moving. It was a soldier’s approach—and it assumed nothing less of her.

  “We go,” Linn said. She bound the chi and strapped it to her back, her fingers lingering on its shimmering, translucent fabric.

  Kaïs shouldered their pack and turned to her. “Where are we going?”

  Linn froze, small bells pealing in alarm in her head. Goldwater Port, she thought. She knew, only tangentially, that the Redcloaks’ base was there, and if there was anywhere she might get closer to Ana, it would be there.

  Besides, Linn had studied the map in Kaïs’s office last time she was there, and it was the only town large enough in their vicinity where she could lose this yaeger, if she needed to. Cloak or not, he was still an Imperial Patrol, and her distrust of them had started eight years ago on the moonlit shores of the Cyrilian Empire.

  “Perhaps it is better that I lead,” she said instead. “Do you have a compass?”

  Kaïs looked at her for a long moment. And then he held up his hand and tossed her something.

  Linn’s fingers closed around the cold glass surface of a compass. She didn’t look at him as she looked down and found southwest, to Goldwater Port, and began walking. She suspected he already knew she didn’t trust him.

  In which case, this was a gesture of faith. A step back, letting her lead.

  He followed her, his boots making almost no sound in the freshly fallen snow. He didn’t say another word, never pressed her. Perhaps that was why she started talking.

  “I boarded a trader’s ship to Cyrilia,” she said quietly, her voice barely carrying, “when I was ten years old. When I arrived, the first thing I saw were Imperial Patrols, standing guard at the harbor checkpoint. I remember their silver armor and the crest of the Cyrilian tiger on their chests. I saw their white cloaks.

  “I cried out to them. I pleaded that I was here against my will. I begged them to take me back home.” Her voice was steady, but she felt less steady than she’d been in years. Her knees threatened to buckle beneath her with each agonizing breath she took. “They laughed at me.”

  It was all she could do to keep plowing forward, the snow at her ankles, her breath hitching as she fought against the pain of those memories she’d kept locked away.

  “I’m sorry.”

  She reminded herself that his words meant nothing.

  “I know you don’t trust me,” he continued. “But trust me when I say that I will change all of this. That I will help you get back home.”

  Home.

  What would be left of her home? The thought inevitably drew the last memory she had of Kemeira, watching the misty coastlines and jagged mountains grow farther and farther away from the trader’s ship. The image of Enn’s body plummeting toward the ship, seared indelibly into her mind. The thought of Ama-ka, sitting by their wooden hut stirring rice and salting fish, gazing out at the setting sun from between the fir trees for a glimpse of her two children who had vanished into the fog.

  She’d long ago stopped believing in anything. Promises were made to be broken and lies were easier than the hard truth. But something in this soldier’s voice gave her pause.

  “I know it’s hard to believe,” Kaïs continued in that steady bass of his, “but I was like you, once. I was born in Nandji and taken to this empire at a young age by a trader’s caravan.” His voice was calm, as though he were reciting facts instead of his life story. “When they discovered my ability as what they call a ‘yaeger,’ they took me away from my mother to train as an Imperial Patrol.”

  Linn clutched the compass to her chest. It had been years, almost a decade, since she’d opened herself up to someone like this. Since someone had confided in her in turn. “You told me you were searching for her still.”

  A pause. “Yes,” Kaïs said, softly and heavily at once. “I want to find her. And when this all ends, I want to take her back home. Across the Dzhyvekha Mountains and the Aramabi Desert.”

  His tone stirred something in her. Linn looked at him, his face clear in the light of day that had broken across sleepy blue skies. “Do you still remember her?” she asked. She did not mention that the memory of her own mother faded a little every day, and that there was so little to cling to that Linn didn’t know if she still had enough of Ama-ka and Enn to love.

  “I do,” Kaïs said at last, and this time Linn let herself look back at him, allowing herself to drink in the quiet loveliness of it all. It was one of the few moments of truth between them that she would remember. Perhaps, in another life, they might have been friends. “I remember the scent of her. The feel of her. She always told me I had her eyes.”

  Her gaze lingered on his eyes for a moment longer than she had intended. They were striking: the pale blue of clear springs that first broke through winter’s ice. “What is her name?” she asked.

  Nearby, a hawk cried out, sending showers of snow tumbling from a nearby conifer as it took off into the misty gray skies.

  Kaïs’s reply was a long time coming. “Shamaïra,” he said softly. “Her name is Shamaïra.”

 
The name meant nothing to Linn, but she understood, all too well, the way he spoke it, with a gentle tenderness that belied an ocean of longing and love. Perhaps, she thought as she picked up her stride again, there was something she shared with this yaeger after all.

  They continued onward, the sky giving way to violets and then corals and then the gray-blue of a Cyrilian winter morning. The sun hid behind clouds that promised snow. At some point, Linn sensed it: a thrumming in the air around them, an urgency to the breezes that whispered to her.

  By her side, Kaïs tensed. “Patrols,” he said, his eyes narrowed as he scanned the area around them. He nodded at a large cluster of pines. “They’re on horseback. We’ll hide there and let them pass. Can you sweep our tracks?”

  Linn drew a deep breath and summoned her winds. She held out a hand and guided them over the footprints they had left in the snow until there was nothing left but a smooth, glittering surface.

  Together, they crouched behind a thicket and waited.

  Gradually, they heard the rhythmic squeak of wagon wheels and nicker of horses. A procession of Imperial Patrols emerged into view, sitting tall on their valkryfs. The first, presumably the kapitan, bore an unfamiliar emblem on his breastplate.

  “That’s an Inquisitor,” Kaïs said, his voice low. “Affinites handpicked by Morganya to run the Imperial Inquisition.”

  Several Whitecloaks rode behind the Inquisitor, followed by a tall black wagon that emanated cold and made Linn think of her prison back at the Wailing Cliffs. “Blackstone,” she whispered.

  Kaïs shifted his head in an almost imperceptible nod. He then paused, and pointed, his eyebrows creasing.

  The wagon was followed by another lineup of Imperial Patrols. Linn had never seen so many accompanying a single blackstone wagon. She remembered, so vividly, the feeling of coldness and emptiness seeping into her very veins, robbing her of her power and her breath. The view, through the bars, of a shifting landscape of ice and snow, crystalline trees and gray skies, and the ever-present flash of a white cloak, a pale-eyed valkryf.

  By instinct, she shrank back, her pulse quickening, her palms sweating.

  A firm hand on her shoulder. “It’s all right,” Kaïs whispered. “They won’t find us.”

  She swallowed, counting. Twenty Whitecloaks, accompanying a single wagon. “I have never seen so many.”

  “Me neither.”

  A scream cut through the silence, an animal sound so raw that Linn felt it scrape against her insides. It tapered into a moaning sound, eerie as the whistling of the wind between empty peaks, and Linn found herself digging her nails into her skin, the hairs on her arms standing.

  The Inquisitor signaled, and the entire procession drew to a grinding halt. Linn watched as the man disembarked, along with several of his patrols. They drew their swords as they rounded to the back of the wagon. One Whitecloak stepped forward and slammed a fist against the door, shouting something at the prisoner inside.

  For a moment, the keening stopped. And then another fit of strangled yells exploded, the wagon visibly rocking on its wheels as whatever was inside pounded against the walls.

  The Inquisitor made a motion, and a patrol stepped forward with the keys. As soon as the doors were unlocked, flames exploded from within. The shouts from the men nearest were cut off as they were engulfed in the searing fire.

  There were cries of alarm, and the Inquisitor moved to dash forward—but stopped. Snow and ice had wrapped around his feet to his thighs, freezing him in place. Linn watched in half fascination, half horror, as snow rose from the ground, condensing into ice as it snaked up patrols’ boots, freezing them in place.

  “Affinites?” she said sharply.

  Kaïs hesitated. Slowly, he shook his head. “Affinite,” he corrected. “There is only one inside the wagon.”

  Before Linn could ask him what he meant, a man stumbled out from the wagon doors. His eyes were aglow in light blue, as though covered by a sheen of ice. Yet his arms and hands were charred black. One of his handcuffs was a peculiar green color, so tight that it seemed to have melded with his skin. With every staggering step he took, ice trailed behind him as flames crackled from his fingers.

  “It’s not possible.” Kaïs’s voice was hollow. “He has two Affinities.”

  Linn’s mouth went dry. The man had fallen to the ground, twitching. Flurries of snow began to swirl around him, intermingling with bright flares of fire. “Get it out of me,” he screamed. Blue light had bled out from his eyes and was slowly spreading down his cheeks and his neck. The flames swirled up his arms, turning them red, and then black.

  Wrong, something screamed inside Linn. Wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong—

  Behind the Affinite, the Inquisitor had managed to break out of the ice. Unsheathing his sword, he turned to the fallen prisoner.

  “Kaïs.” Linn’s teeth chattered. “We need to help him.”

  By her side, Kaïs held absolutely still. His gaze locked on the scene before them. The Inquisitor, approaching the Affinite. The man, spasming on the ground, a whirlwind of ice and fire growing fiercer and larger around him.

  Linn’s hands found her daggers. She crouched.

  Without warning, Kaïs pounced—not toward the Affinite, but toward her. His hands locked around her wrists as he pushed her back behind the trees that hid them from view. She sensed the iron grip of his Affinity clamping down on hers, and the world grew still as her connection to the winds broke.

  She twisted, preparing for a move to throw him off, but he’d anticipated it; with a grunt, he pushed her into the snow. “We cannot help him.” His voice was a low growl. “We cannot sacrifice our mission for one person.”

  Linn turned back to the scene before them. Through the low-hanging branches partially obscuring her view, she saw the glint of the Inquisitor’s sword. Heard the neat slice of metal through flesh, a sound like cutting fruit. And then felt the heavy silence.

  Low murmurs of discussion, the sound of a body being dragged through snow, the clang of wagon doors shutting, and, eventually, the squeak of wheels as it continued its journey.

  Kaïs released her and drew back, breathing hard. “I apologize.”

  Her breaths were shallow; her head felt light. “Do not touch me again. Ever.” Her voice was barely a croak.

  He looked away, his outline silvered by the dust of a distant sun. When he turned back to her, his eyes were flat, cold. “You were about to give away our position and jeopardize our journey. There would have been no use in trying to save him. That man’s Affinities were consuming him.”

  Linn closed her eyes briefly, steadying her breath. “What was wrong with him?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Sparks of anger ignited in her from a wrath old and bitter. “I do not believe you. Those were Imperial Patrols. You were one of them.”

  “I did what I had to do to survive.” His gaze seared like fire. “You want to find out what that was? You want to bring down this regime? We find Anastacya, and we do it together.”

  He was right, Linn thought, tension unfurling from her in a sigh. She’d started off wanting to find her way back to Ana because that was the only thing she still knew. Now, the mission took on new urgency.

  The image of the Affinite haunted her, the way the blue veins of the ice and the black of the fire—tells from both his Affinities, she assumed—had swirled on his skin. Get it out of me.

  Why had a squad of Imperial Patrols been transporting an Affinite in a blackstone wagon, if Morganya’s prerogative was to protect them? And not just any Affinite—one with two types of Affinities.

  It was unheard of. Unnatural. Back in Kemeira, they’d had wielders and givers—people with connections to the world around them, and people without. They had existed in harmony, each doing their own part to contribute to a greater whole.

  In all her
trainings with her Wind Masters, in studying the principles of alchemy that built the foundation of their world, she had never heard of a wielder with two connections. What were the chances that Morganya’s Imperial Patrols had found such a person?

  There was something bigger going on here, and she needed to find Ana to deliver this information. We find Anastacya, and we do it together.

  Linn looked at Kaïs. He sat in his disheveled uniform, hair loose and slick as black ink, looking further and further from the image of the terrifying Whitecloak she’d conjured in her mind for so long. His expression was troubled, his gaze dark, and for several moments he resembled a boy who was just as lost as she was.

  They should have been enemies—and they once were—but he’d helped her. He’d broken her out of that prison and saved her life. He’d used strategy and militaristic logic to steer her in the right direction just now.

  Linn found that her head was telling her one thing and her heart another. Perhaps…perhaps there was something redeemable within him, after all.

  Linn pushed herself to her feet. The compass he’d given her spun in her palms as she turned. “We go.”

  Ramson was on a boat sipping wine, and all seemed right with life again.

  He leaned back, watching the last dredges of night fade into the dirty, washed-out color of dawn. The infamous Black Barge, a ship converted into a floating pub at the unsavory end of Goldwater Port, had cleared of customers from earlier in the night. Ramson had sat watching as transactions took place beneath the tables of rotting wood. The excited babble and roar of drunkards had subdued into a handful of murmured conversations, and now the Barge was almost empty.

  He’d arrived two nights ago, and immediately started checking in on his old haunts, careful to keep his face hidden. He’d been to the underground markets, the shadiest of inns, eavesdropping and striking up conversations with strangers. There were no bounds to a man’s tongue once you offered him a goblet of whiskey or five.

  The most reputable crooks, it seemed, had caught wind of a trade ongoing between Cyrilia and Bregon. None could name what, exactly, was being traded but claimed to have seen midnight ships leaving docks on silent waters. And word was, they sailed for Bregon.