by Anna Holmes
“Has clasht grascha,” she spits.
Well, she means that. I lift an eyebrow. “Have I struck a nerve?” She says nothing, her mouth pulling down. “Oh—you’re telling me you weren’t pretending? That leg of his seems to suggest otherwise.”
“I didn’t ask him to do that,” she hisses.
“And what did you think he’d do?” I’m almost shouting now. I have a lot of words for her—journal pages full of them, words I’d never think of using in any other circumstance. Jori’s eyes lift to me, her lip curling. “Did you ever think for a minute he’d just let you go?”
“No, I didn’t,” she spits. “And yet here you are.”
My lips purse, and I keep my words crisp. “Did you try to find out?”
“Of course I did, valsht. He told me he had no idea what was in that file. I didn’t have a pretty earring like yours, but I bet you anything if I had….” She glances up. “Oh, look at that. I’ve decided our standoff is over.”
A crunch sounds in the fresh snow behind us. I whirl and try to find the source. A black clad figure slides down the wall, the cords coiling back into his cuffs. I ease my sword from its sheath again. “Stay on her,” I tell Tressa.
The man barely even slows at the sight of the sword, though I don’t see a weapon on him. Another magician? He wears a thick leather strap across his chest with many compartments. No, an alchemist. He looses one of the compartment flaps and smashes a jar at my feet.
Something acrid seeps into my nostrils. I try to hold my breath, but the vapor in the air doesn’t need my permission to go to work, apparently. I grow terribly lightheaded, my limbs flailing out uselessly. I manage to keep my feet through an ungainly wobbling waddle. The man clutches a scarf over his face, barely suppressing the bronze waves of his hair. Tressa turns, and even past the odd bubbling effect on my vision of whatever strong-smelling thing is leaking from the remains of the vial, I can see Jori fling the fire.
The alchemist’s eyes widen. He kicks the vial away, drops his scarf, and shoves Tressa aside with a well-placed push against one of her forelegs. The arrow we’d promised Jori flies out wide and lodges in a barrel. I drop in time to avoid the flame and pull my sluggish self toward Jori. She’s limp, exhausted. If she’s unconscious…there’s something else I need to be doing. What is it? The wheels in my head grind against one another. What am I forgetting?
Tressa. I look over my shoulder and watch her struggle with the man, trying to wrest his arms away from his belts. “Tressie, stop,” he shouts. “It’s me.”
Tressa starts. I can’t get a good look at her face, but her voice is choked. “You—”
“I’m sorry,” the man tells her, grasping her forearms. “I have to take her.”
“And I have to stop you.”
“I know.” He laughs miserably, his head bowing.
Venomously, she spits, “Let me go, Kai.”
My drugged, sluggish brain finally catches up. Kai. Her brother.
“I can’t,” he tells her, pressing his fingers firmer into her arms.
She glances down for a moment, then looks back at him. “Don’t you bloody dare,” she tells him thickly. Her head sags forward.
“I’m so sorry,” he whispers as her legs buckle two by two.
I try to drag myself toward him, try to stop him. Whatever he’s doing has taken the strength out of Tressa, and she drops now. I’m not much better. I manage to scrabble slightly closer, but he lets Tressa’s arms lay limply at her side as her head bobs up and down. He squeezes her shoulder once, then stoops for Jori. He scoops her into his arms as though she weighs nothing more than a child, presses a metal piece on his belt, and waits for the wires that uncoil from it and wind back up to hoist them over the wall.
I see all of this, but I can do nothing about it. The vial, still radiating something sickly sweet smelling, is too close to my head. I gag, wishing to the gods I could borrow Alain’s gills for a moment. At long last, I manage to throw a hand over my head and knock the jar a little ways away. He hadn’t seem affected by it when it was a short distance from him, so I wait, trying not to panic as I choke for clean air.
It filters in eventually. Once I’ve got my wind back, I stumble up again and make my way over to Tressa. Her head nods ineffectually. “Tressa,” I mumble, my tongue still thick with the drugging. “What did he do to you?”
It was something else. She hadn't even been fazed when the jar made its initial appearance. I grasp at her arm and find four tiny red, raised pinholes there. “Shit,” I blurt, tilting her head up to look at me. Her eyes are cloudy. I try desperately to think back, remember the introductions to alchemy people kept trying to give me, from my very first tutor to Alain just last week.
I need to run into the town, get someone out here to help her.
I think of the guards today, hesitant to get out of her way, and last night, when they refused even to salute her. Would anyone help?
Her head snaps up, and she snarls, “Godsdamn him!”
“You’re okay,” I breathe out.
“Yeah, the bastard just stunned me,” she returns. Her eyes are sharp again, and so’s the rest of her face. “Gods, he is so lucky that Mum isn’t around to hear about this.” I breathe out, hard, and she glances around. “You have to get out of here.”
“Probably a good idea,” I gasp, holding the edge of my cloak to my face. It helps a little.
She unfolds much more gracefully than I managed to, and I have to marvel. Either what he used on her was much kinder, or she’s incredibly fast at recovering. She takes up my arm and leads me from the area, letting me stumble about like a drunk. By the time we reach town, my head clears properly, and I’m able to separate from her without wobbling like a toddler. She stops just shy of the first row of shuttered shops and glowers at the ground. “The only two people I’ve never managed to find, and they’re….”
I clasp her arm. “They’d better hope they run fast now.”
She glances to the thick trees that surround the berm of the city, calculating. “Tell Riley I’m sorry for deserting my post as bodyguard.”
“It’s not deserting if I order you to go.”
“Thank you,” she tells me. She backs away, tries to give me a smile, and hurries toward the airship port.
Chapter Seven
Alain
Bannon lets me fall into bed with an unceremonious thump. About what I’d expected from the fellow who spent the entire walk back threatening me indirectly. With the clock outside my window ringing out ten now and still without a sign of Caelin, he pulls up a chair and moves straight into direct. “What did you know of this, Northshore?”
“What?” I wheeze. I knew it was coming, but still, this reminds me far too much of the early days of my incarceration. Me, stuck in bed, pain threatening to rend my leg in two while a humorless man in a guard’s uniform asks questions in the tone I imagine punches to the face might use if they could speak.
“You heard me,” he says flatly.
I can do nothing but stare back at him for a moment, possibly because what was left of my energy got used trying to ensure he didn't have to drag all of my weight along. Now I wish I’d fainted out of spite. Bannon’s face, ordinarily mottled variants of the color gray, starts to go purple, like his hair. His leg bounces up and down rigidly, the chair creaking with each impatient bump.
I say, “Why don't we save ourselves a lot of talking and just have you go ahead and tell me what it is I've supposedly done this time?”
Bannon frowns, his shoulders hunching, hands clasped between his bobbling knees. “You mean to tell me that it's a coincidence that your lover happens to show up here, tonight?”
I cover my face with my hands and groan forcefully into them. “It assuredly is not. What my knowledge has to do with it, I have no idea. And she's no longer my lover.”
“Please. You were so broken up over her you thought to kidnap Caelin, and you expect me to believe that you've left her behind just like that?”
>
I lift a hand now and look at him shrewdly. “And you and your false Caelin with her multitudes of false lives? Have you clung to her, too?”
His face tangles into a partial snarl. Bannon only ever seems to show emotion with half his face, like he can’t get it to spread to both sides. “False,” he barks. “That’s the important word in there.”
“As it is with Jori,” I mutter. “You and I aren’t so different there, it seems.” I allow a long, ragged breath to circle my chest and exit my gills. For gods’ sake, the man has something lodged so firmly up his backside I think I can see it when he opens his mouth. My vision still does its best impression of a hurricane and every time I close my eyes to blink it feels like prying boulders in half to open them again, but if I wished to leave consciousness to spite him before, I want to hang onto it now to deprive him of the satisfaction. “It must be exhausting to be you,” I tell him.
“What?”
“The endless suspicion, the conspiracies dancing in your head so convoluted I couldn't follow them if I had written instructions. Doesn't it get boring after a while?”
He grips the edge of the chair. “No. And the instant it does is the instant I resign, because I can't afford to get complacent. Caelin can't afford that. And if you are honest about your estimation of her, neither can you.”
I let my hands drop to my sides, trying not to look too hard at them. It is sickeningly familiar, that shade. “Fair enough,” I concede. “What do you think I know of this?”
“The reason they’re stealing cryst. What she’s doing with a bunch of scrubs in pilfered Legion uniforms.”
“So you noticed that, too,” I say, somewhat pleased. “To both, I haven’t the faintest. But I’d be prepared for backlash if I were you.”
His eyes narrow. “What are you getting at, Northshore?”
I adjust my head on the pillow, lifting my chin to try to pull a little harder for the scarce air. “I mean,” I groan, “the Legion does not take kindly to anything that tarnishes their illusion of perfection. Why do you think they want me dead?”
“To provide you plausible deniability as you worm your way into Caelin’s confidence.”
“Have you thought of writing novels, Bannon? That's an engaging fiction.” My shoulders seize for a moment, then fall back to the bed. I struggle for air again, then tell him, “They’ll want your prisoners and use me as leverage. Perhaps you and the rest of those so-called advisors wouldn’t mind giving me up, but she won’t, and so they’ll demand the pirates, and soon enough so that you won’t have gotten any proper information out of them.”
He’s quiet for a moment. I force an eye open. His legs have stopped bouncing, his chin tilted up, his eyes not really looking at anything but moving all the same. “What?” I ask.
Bannon's head turns and he frowns, but before words get properly started, there come staggering footsteps from the hallway. Caelin appears in the doorway. She’s bedraggled, soggy, a bit dirty, and most worryingly, when she steps into the room, she slumps against the doorframe. I immediately attempt to sit up and Bannon immediately shoves me back down on his way to her. She gives him a halfhearted whack to the shoulder, but doesn’t protest as he plops her down into the chair he vacated. “What happened?” he demands.
“It would be slightly easier,” she says, rubbing at her face, “to tell you what didn't happen.”
There's something about the mottled pink splotches on her normally golden skin that stirs something in the back of my head—something seen but not truly remembered. It’s unwise, but I push what little energy is still kicking around my core to the periphery of my ears and have a listen to the magic in the room. I push the usual enchantments aside impetuously, brushing off the gentle hum of the alchemist’s fire on my desk, the strident still new shrill of the earring, until I hear it—faint, but still there, the whispers of an alchemical binding with the guttural drone of the practice of medicine turned to dark purpose. “You were poisoned,” I blurt.
Bannon's head snaps up. “You what?”
Caelin sighs. “Drugged, more like.”
“Which is an abbreviated way to say poisoned but slightly more civil,” I point out.
She gives me a look—odd and sharp, like the ones we exchanged once when traipsing across the island trying not to kill each other. It’s not something I’m nostalgic for. I start to frown, but her head bobs slightly and the look is gone. “We chased Jori into an alley. Had a bit of a standoff, before Tressa’s brother showed up and started throwing bottles.”
Bannon starts. “Kai?” Caelin nods, her mouth a befuddled line as she starts to form words. Before they actualize, he abruptly performs an impeccable about-face and marches straight for the door. “I—need to check on something.”
Caelin closes her mouth in time with the door, still looking over her shoulder at where he was. “What the devils was that?”
He may not want me to, but this I recognize all too well. He’s worried—about Tressa—and in a way that most don’t understand, the sort of worry that grips and doesn’t let go. I reach out for her, and she relocates from her chair to the hollow between my hip and my arm. My daft clumsy fingers struggle with the buckle of her bracer, but in the end I ease it off and set it aside.
I don’t know what I expect to see—the remnants of a bolt and a huge burn? There’s only the smallest hint of blood, a small crater of a wound in the center of the ember, slightly bluer than usual. I laugh a little around the relief once I understand. She used the alchemist fire already in her to swallow the alchemist’s fire flying at her.
I lift her forearm and place a kiss to the inside of her wrist. “Thank you,” I tell her.
“What, no lecture?” She asks peevishly. She settles back against me, her warmth seeping into my clothes, then my skin. “Go on, everyone else has something to say.”
“Well, if you'd like, I can remind you that I'm only a teacher and you're the queen of the whole country—”
“That is rubbish,” she bursts out. “That is the exact rubbish you would never have accepted from an inherited monarchist. Why is my life weighed any more heavily than yours?”
I blink in surprise. It takes a little longer than usual, since my eyes practically beg to stay shut, but I will stay awake for this. “Caelin—”
“Well?” She tosses up a hand, her gaze searing straight through the beams in the ceiling. “What makes you any less than Daryon, or me any more important than Jori?”
Oh. There’s something else going on here. Gods, that I were in better command of my wits. “Caelin. You know the answer to that last one. You don’t use people. You don’t mangle their feelings to suit yours.”
“The devils I don’t,” she spits out. “It’s my job. I send people in to fight for me, and they get….”
Her eyes light on me, and I hold onto my tongue for a moment before I say something that’ll only birth a fight. “You didn’t send me to fight for you. I went.”
“I didn’t argue.”
“And for that, I love you.” I tilt my head to try to get a look at her. “I was just trying to get her attention, to get her to use up her magic.”
Her head snaps around to look at me. “You made him shoot at you?”
“Well…yes.” I shake my head. “I don’t know what it is. She came to try to get at me, and alive. So that's how I was going to get her to let you be. I hadn't counted on—”
“On me?”
“On failing so spectacularly,” I answer, looking down at my hand. It’s still shot through with blue.
“You—for gods’ sake, Alain, what were you thinking?”
“She was trying to murder you! Again!”
Caelin tenses, her chin dropping to her chest. “She didn’t come to murder me. She came to taunt me.” Her face is red, scrunched as it gets when she's tired or angry. Today, it's a healthy heaping of both. “What supplement did you take, Alain?”
“What?” I struggle to sit up a little. “What did she tell you?”<
br />
She shrugs my arm off and shoots up to her feet. “The professor asked, and I believed you.”
“Caelin,” I say, keeping my voice low. “I am just trying to understand. She tried to tell you I took something? And you believed it?” I lean forward, trying to find her eyes. She keeps her face turned from me, pretending to be watching the snow. “How’s your head? Is the drug still—?”
Caelin turns sharply on me, her skirts consuming the sword at her hip, the point of it clacking against the leg of the chair. Her finger is looped through the earring on the chain around her neck, her eyes blazing. “Don’t you dare try that. Unless that enchantment was a lie too?”
My stomach bottoms out. Could Jori have manipulated the earring? No—she might have been able to detect the enchantment, what it does, but any attempt she could make to trick it would have met with the same resistance that keeps Caelin’s mind from being tampered with. So two options remain. Jori thought she was telling the truth.
Or she was.
“Love,” I start, my voice faltering. “Put it on and I’ll tell you I have absolutely no idea what she’s talking about. Because I don’t. I…really wish I did.”
Caelin watches me for a moment longer, the flush fading from her cheeks as she drops the ring. “Shit. You didn’t know.”
“No,” I say numbly.
“Shit. I’m sorry.” She puts her hand to my forehead, a little of the warmth out of it now. “You didn’t know and I…”
The air around her seems to swim in the same way it did in the hangar. I close my eyes and fight against the darkness thicker than what my eyelids can provide. I need to stay conscious. “How did she?”
“She said something about a file—something she looked over when she trained you. Health…something.”
“Chronicle.” I force a few good breaths, try to contain the racing of my pulse and mind. “Did she say what it said?”
“Just…‘supplement required.’ And then a hole in the page.”
I try hard not to let it, but my mind wanders back to all those pages of classified documents. By the time I’d become a prince they stopped cutting holes in mine so very often, but I remember the neatly excised sections, wondering what they’d said, what had happened to the precise little rectangles of text I wasn’t yet important enough to read. “Listen,” I say weakly. “At dinner. When your…self-styled fiancé showed up.”