by Anna Holmes
It’s a particularly bad plan. That’s how I know they’re not Legion.
I’d suspected brigandry from the moment I caught sight of them. Too much facial hair, too many missing teeth, too many tattoos. Some bulge out of their borrowed jackets, possibly taken off the bodies of dead soldiers. They’re much too rounded out to be Elyssian survivors of the war. I turn to her. “So it’s thievery now in Rosalia’s name? They won’t take kindly to that.”
“And they love you whoring yourself out to Elyssia’s queen.”
I look between her and the men. If they get that sack to the airship and close the door, they could risk cracking the cryst and releasing the magic contained therein. If they get it in the air, it’s not a matter of risk anymore, but certainty.
I glance up and find a shelf. I summon it free from the wall and send it sailing toward the men’s heads. One ducks, the other does not. It catches him in the face and drops him to the ground. I turn back to Jori, but too late. She reaches out a hand and wrenches my bad leg.
Pain splits my vision and bows my whole body. I nearly retch, and the air rushes past as she jumps up and over me, the edge of her boot catching on my bad leg as I fall. I see the blue velvet of Caelin’s cloak unfurling in the spaces between guards and pirates. She’s too close.
Caelin is the best fighter I’ve ever encountered. But Jori almost killed her once, and Jori never leaves anything incomplete.
Except, oddly enough, me. I’m still alive when I’m prostrate on the ground, unable to even curl up to protect the most vulnerable parts of me. I’m still alive when I’m the one who filled her with enough rage to fill this hangar, when I’m the one who the Legion, the one thing that Jori has served above all else, wants dead. Even more than Caelin.
She’s not here for Caelin. She’s here for me, and alive, mostly unharmed, and if Caelin dies along the way, all the better. That sounds familiar.
The pirates are a decoy, I tell Caelin. Keep her busy for a moment.
I see Caelin’s head whip up just as Jori arrives, and Caelin brings down the sword in a neat arc. It’s a showy move—not her usual. I want to tell her to make with the stabbing already and save the swordplay for someone who doesn’t mind her dead, but I shut my eyes. She knows what she’s doing. I know she does. This won’t be like the last time.
I scrape myself together enough to stand. The leg barely holds my weight for more than a second a step, so I end up lurching forward a bit at a time. The push-pull trick won’t work anymore, and she’s likely suspicious of the sorts of things I specialized in.
So I won't attack her. I attack me.
I look around to assess the state of the fight. The brigands have left off the crossbows for the most part as they’re overwhelmed by the guards, possibly afraid of setting themselves on fire. I get myself as near to the scuffle as I can, focus on the pirate furthest from me, and start convincing him that he really, really wants to take the shot.
It’s hard to do—not only because convincing someone to do something that they don’t want to do is difficult, but because I don’t particularly want to get shot. It’s harder than anything I’ve done this fight, anything I’ve done in a year. I have to stare straight at the fellow, who slowly lowers his corner of the crest sack and turns to face me. Come on, then, I coax him. I’m just standing here. I shouldn’t be just standing here, right?
He shakes himself as though trying to ascertain if he’s awake and I curse at myself under my breath. I’ve called attention to the illusion I’m building just for him. I’m stupid for standing here, I correct quickly. And I’ll probably magic you to death with my freak magic powers. You’ve heard of those, haven’t you?
He starts to level his crossbow even as his cohort rushes around to pull at his arm. Apparently killing the prince consort of the country isn’t on the pirates’ schedule. It’ll be quick, I promise my scapegoat, shoving back the dread brewing in my gut. Just do it.
The crossbow snaps, and the bolt flies. The blue flash cuts through the air, and I get ready to stop it.
As planned, Jori catches sight of the arrow and shouts, “No, you idiot!”
Caelin also notices and shrieks my name. No, it’s all right—I try to tell her.
But it’s too late. She slashes Jori across the leg and dashes for me. At the same time, I go to hold out a hand in front of me. It pulses blue, shakes, and I start to sag at the very instant Caelin dashes in front of me and throws her arm up in front of the bolt. It embeds itself in her bracer with a horrible thuk.
I sink to my knees, both with the same sort of inexorable exhaustion that dropped me in the ballroom and that terribly familiar flood of cold realization invading my every limb. In keeping her from being shot, I’ve gotten her shot. My breath shudders, and I bow forward. “Gods, Caelin, no,” I eke out.
She falls to her knees too, her sword clattering to the ground in front of me.
Her hands close firmly around my wrists, and I manage to lift my head, barely able to understand what my eyes are trying to tell the rest of me. She’s not dying.
Darkness pulls at the corners of my brain, starts to beckon me onward again just as it had in the ballroom, but I shove it back, force myself to check again. She hasn’t caught fire. The leather around the bolt smolders and her face is creased, but she lets go of me for a second to pluck the thing out like a particularly annoying splinter and toss it away. “Stay with me,” she tells me. To the guards, she shouts, “Finish this. There’s room enough in the dungeon.”
I stare, even as my vision flickers. “You’re—”
My voice is drowned out by the shrill of a horn, and behind us arrives the Prince of Folgia, flanked by his guards and a few of ours. Tressa and Bannon rush out from behind him as he stops to take in the scene of the fight. “Never you fear, my queen,” he rumbles. “This ends now.”
I lean over myself and try with every ounce of energy I have left to make sure that for me, at least, he’s not right.
Chapter Six
Caelin
Alain’s whole body shakes in my arms, the slits at his neck opening rapidly. He’s folded over, his head nearly touching his knees. “Come on,” I beg him. “Not today.”
“You’re all right,” he murmurs for what has to be the fourth time. I don’t even know if he remembers saying it the last three.
Daryon strides on ahead of us, and Riley grabs my shoulder. “Caelin—”
“She’s all right,” Alain says, lifting his head and laughing weakly.
“I don’t know if he is,” I tell Riley. “Please. Get him home.”
A pair of thuds interrupt us, and I snap my head up in time to see Jori throw back two of the guards. She shouts to her people, “Retreat! Leave the cryst and go!”
I hear Daryon let out a long string of curse words in Folgian, and he rushes after the brigands. “You wretches,” he shouts as they run. “This was not the agreement!”
I demand, “What?”
Before he can answer me, more shouting cuts across the bay. Tressa jostles for freedom as Jori dashes around the corner from the maintenance bay, moving away from the ship. She yells, “She’s getting away! Move!”
Alain must feel me tensing, because he grasps my wrist. “Let her,” he tells me, the sound barely escaping his lips.
“I’m sorry,” I tell him. “Not today.” I look up to Riley. “Please. Take him.”
The airship starts to churn upward, the pirates piling onto the platform. Those who remain hold out their arms, and long cables fly out from their black cuffs and clamp onto the airship as it rises. The guards manage to wrestle a few of them down, the cords coiling across the ground like angry snakes. I look up again. “Riley, please.”
He stares back at me, his face gray, even for him. “What are you—?” he starts, stricken.
“Don’t let her,” Alain slurs. “Don’t….”
I fix him with a look. “Riley. I need you right now.”
He shakes himself and moves to bend for Alain. �
�Yes. Yeah, I have him.”
Alain fights to hold onto me, but his grip is weak. I set a hand briefly to his face before swiping up the hilt of my sword from the ground and hauling myself to my feet again. I dart around to stare Daryon in his face, creased as it is with consternation as he watches the low-hanging clouds absorb the airship. “We will be discussing this,” I tell him tightly. “You can wait here.” I move to follow where Tressa finally broke through the confused snare of guards. To them, I mutter, “Get someone in here who can contain the cryst again.”
I’m a lot of things at the moment. Most of them involve some flavor of pissed off. In the background lurks terror, but I force it back with the ease one can only attain after years of running headlong into terrifying situations. And that's exactly how I leave the shelter of the maintenance bay and find myself in the beginnings of an early snow.
I lift the hood of my cloak and squint against the gauzy curtain of white rippling through the air. I can make out the dark outline of Tressa near the gate headed back into the city. She stops when she sees me. “Anything?” I ask her.
“She’s been erasing her footprints,” she says through a clenched jaw. “But hastily. What I can see of them indicates dragging, so I don’t think she’s gone far. She’s also bleeding, so nice work there.”
I let out a short laugh. “I wasn’t entirely sure she would.”
“What do you know?” she says, gesturing for me to climb on her back. “She’s a person after all.”
I have my doubts about that.
Jori keeps to the back alleys of the upper town—a labyrinthine mess of rubbish depositories, dilapidated fences, and overgrown shrubs that grab at Tressa and me both with extreme prejudice. She brushes a trailing vine away angrily. The blood spatters are growing less frequent. “She either heals fast or she’s caught on,” Tressa tells me, voice tight.
I readjust my grip on her belt and try to push my currently overactive heart back down where it belongs. Tressa’s been trying to find Jori Crow for months, rushing out at every possible sighting, no matter the likelihood. Did either of us really think about what to do once we found her?
It’s taken everything I have to make this country into a place that doesn’t mete out death like Rosalia does, even for its criminals. I won’t kill Jori unless I have to, because I don’t want a hypocrite made of me.
But gods, she may be the one person I can’t stay in the same room with without trying.
Tressa leans forward as we come to a crossroads. “She’s close,” she says.
I slip from her back and pull my sword again. “How do you know?”
“Blood on the walls and scuffs in the snow. She’s struggling.”
“Well, that’s just rude,” a voice calls from the path to the right.
Tressa hoists her bow and starts to move into the alley, which winds into town. I lean my head over and check the path to the left, which ends in a dead end. No one is visible in either place. I gesture for her to take to the right, and I start to edge down to the left. “What, no taunts left?” I ask when our approach fails to net any more sound.
The wind answers with a hollow whine through the canvas awning above. As I go, I shuffle my feet, kicking up snow on the unprotected half of the alley and checking to see if it lands anywhere other than the ground. Unless she’s managed to become intangible as well as invisible, I’m starting to think that she’s fooled us again.
Out of the corner of my eye, I see it. Mixed in with the white flakes is a droplet of red, which lands in the dirty slush and runs toward the wall at the end of the passageway. I glance up. There’s a distinct bulge in the faded red fabric above. I pace back closer to the opening of the alley, lift my sword, and slash through the awning.
Something heavy tears through the remaining canvas with a loud rip and a muffled groan. Snow explodes outward as she flickers back into view on the ground, in the process of trying to pull herself back up. Her sides heave as she straggles up, her pretty face twisted in pain and fury. “Not easy, is it?” I say as I watch her, my voice low. “Trying to get around with a busted leg.”
“Somehow, you manage, hauling around that huge head,” she huffs out.
I start to call for Tressa. Jori chooses that instant to try to make a run for it. I drop my sword and grasp her by the arms, forcing her back. She falters on the leg I’ve sliced and sinks to the ground. “All out of tricks?” I get out as Tressa rounds the corner and gallops to a halt just behind me.
“Oh, I have one left,” Jori spits, a burst of magical blue fire appearing in her palm. Her eyelids sink and her shoulders shudder. “Just enough. No further.”
“If you let that go, you pass out,” I remind her.
“But you’ll be dead,” she tells me with a pleasant smile, as though we’re just talking about the weather. Awful cold snap, don’t you think?
Tressa keeps her arrow trained on Jori’s throat. “So will you.”
“Then there’ll be no one left to discuss what’s happening to our dear prince as we speak,” she replies, tilting her head to the side and gathering her lips into a little pucker toward the side. I touch Tressa’s arm and shake my head slightly. She doesn’t lower the bow, but Jori smirks anyway. “There, now. That’s a good little figurehead. Isn’t that how it works with you royal sorts? I’ve got something you want, so you let me live long enough for you to take it from me.” She jerks her head toward the city. “There’s no one here to listen to this speech, is there. No one has to know. You’ll leave my body back here, and even if somebody somehow traced it to you, that’d be your right, wouldn’t it?”
“I’d prefer there be no killing at all,” I tell her. “Don’t give me reason to change my mind.”
“I change a lot of minds,” she says, a nasty edge behind her voice even as she smiles. “It’s easy. Ask Alain.”
I retrieve my sword from a snowbank and put it away, folding my arms. As I do, my thumb brushes the bump under the front of my dress, and the ring rattles around the pendant, reminding me of its presence. I draw it out and release the hinge, affixing the earring to my ear. “I will have to when I get back this evening.”
“If you get the chance,” she says, lifting her light eyebrows.
“You don’t seem to understand how this works,” I tell her, gesturing to Tressa. “If you move to let that fire go, this arrow will find you faster than you can cast. Alain’s fastest cast—very fast, I’m told—is a few seconds long. My sergeant’s all ready to fire, and you are awfully close by.”
“Who do you think taught him to do that?” She laughs. “Maybe he’s been freakishly enhanced, but that doesn’t mean that he’s the very best at every spell. Do you really want to find out who’s faster?”
“Enhanced?”
“Oh, come on,” she says, leaning her head back. “You honestly think anyone is that good? That he’s naturally talented?”
Tressa tenses at my side, and my throat clenches. He wouldn’t—he couldn’t have lied to me. Was I wearing the earring? I try to think back and find that I can’t remember. No, I’d put it away. She’s lying—she has to be.
Except the earring hasn’t made a peep. Maybe it’s not working. “Yes, I do,” I tell her. The earring makes a faint scraping noise in my ear, like someone dragging glass over stone. It’s much quieter than when Alain out and out lied on my birthday, but it’s there. I guess this is what doubt sounds like.
“He really doesn’t know,” she chuckles. “Oh, dear.”
Her laugh comes like a dagger to my stomach. The bitterness swilling in it stings like poison. I should know. “What’s happening to him?” I demand. My voice carries the edge of a snarl.
“Why should I tell you?”
“This standoff has to end sometime.”
“It will,” she assures me. She reaches out with her other hand to stroke the edges of the fire, watching it lick over her fingers. “When I feel like it.”
I think she’s more likely to bleed out before then, but I
say nothing. Her casual ability to laugh at Alain, to mock him when he’d grieved her so sorely—seems to lock my jaw. Tressa glances sideways at me as though waiting for permission. I clear my throat. “Well, since you’re not going to tell me anyway, you win. You’ve changed my mind. I may as well have done with you.” I turn my back, folding my hands. “Sergeant, if you don’t hear anything that sounds like an explanation in the next few moments, you can fire at your leisure.”
The earring shrieks, and I do my level best not to wince, to stare back at her over my shoulder as if I’m actually as cold as the snow she’s stuck in. Jori’s eyes flick to Tressa’s fingers where they adjust themselves on the string, moving the arrow to keep her hands limber, but not enough that she’d miss if she fired. I watch Jori calculate her options with her eyes turned up to the awning and sigh. “‘Supplement required’,” she says grudgingly.
I turn back to face her. “What?”
“That’s what his file said.”
“What does that mean?”
“What does it sound like? Did your monarchist pig upbringing come with no tutors, valsht?”
“Last I checked, the only one of us who sold herself for money was you,” I tell her sharply. “Now. I’ll ask again, or the Sergeant here can ply her trade. What does that mean?”
“It’s a note in his health chronicle. He was assigned to my training group. I assess for weaknesses in all of the recruits, so I read it.” She shrugs. “It said “supplement required’, followed by a large hole in the page. If you really need me to spell out what that means for you, it’s no wonder Kelvin kept you back.”
My shoulders go taut, but I keep my face neutral. So it was redacted, whatever it was. “And you didn’t bother to find out what was in that space? In all that time when you pretended to love him, it didn’t cross your mind to find out?”