Wesley would leave her behind to rot.
9
TAVIA
The moon was high and there were monsters lurking beyond the forest.
Tavia had seen her fair share of evil and heard her fair share of whispers, but there was something different in the wind tonight, and as it swayed through the tree branches it almost sounded like a croon. It sounded like death.
She patrolled a lot, mostly out of habit from nights spent wandering the streets as a busker in search of people to sell the Kingpin’s darkest magic to. Tavia was restless and she wasn’t used to sitting still, or standing around doing nothing.
Especially at night.
Nobody else was interested in the patrols the way she was. The Crafters in the Rishiyat camp were either too confident in their power, or too complacent in their hidden sanctuary, but either way none of them thought to search the trees for intruders. Even Karam seemed to be spending most nights focused on pillow talk with Saxony, instead of hunting for enemies.
Maybe Tavia was just the mad one who needed to stop looking for danger where there was none and enjoy the small solace they had found while it lasted. She’d thought about that a lot over the past few days as she searched the woods alone and found nothing but crisp leaves and, once, a small snake that didn’t even take the time to hiss at her before slithering away. She thought about it tonight as the moon stared down at her in judgment and begged her to just go to sleep already.
And then she heard the crack of those crisp leaves—a sound that could only be footprints on the dirt—and she felt the whispering trees gasp, and suddenly Tavia didn’t feel like she was mad anymore.
She hid behind a mossy trunk, her hand on her knife hilt as Nolan Kane, the cocky little bastard she had bested back in the city center, sighed, unzipped his pants, and started to piss on a nearby tree root.
Tavia resisted the urge to look away, just in case he spotted her and tried to pull something, but the wincing couldn’t be helped.
How in the fire-gates did he find this place? And what in the name of the Many Gods is he doing here alone?
Alone.
Tavia focused on that, just as she focused on the backpack by his feet. More magic, ready for the taking.
Nolan didn’t look like he had company. In fact, as he swayed and pressed a hand to a tree trunk for balance while he carried on with his business, he looked a little drunk, his eyes bloodshot under the light of the stars.
Drunk and alone, with a heap of magic at his side.
Now that was interesting.
Tavia stepped from the shadows and the trees rustled in warning. Perhaps for her to run and turn back, or perhaps to alert the others that someone was so close to their camp.
Tavia ignored the trees and focused on the magic by Nolan’s feet. She could take on one drunk busker, and his backpack looked too good to resist.
How funny it would be to rob the same guy twice in just a matter of weeks.
How hilarious it would be when she told Karam about it later.
“Fancy meeting you here,” Tavia said.
Nolan looked up at her in a squint.
Slowly, he zipped his pants back up.
“Are you following me?” he asked in a slur.
“No,” Tavia said. “Are you alone?”
“No,” he said, but it was clearly a lie.
“Did you just … wander into the Uncharted Forest?”
Tavia was beginning to doubt the intelligence of Rishiya’s supposed best busker.
Nolan swallowed and it seemed to make him stagger a little. “I was in the Flower Hamlets having a drink and got tailed by some amityguards,” he said. “I needed somewhere I could lie low and they weren’t gonna check this place. It’s uncharted for a reason. It’s haunted.”
Tavia laughed, unable to help it. Getting chased by amityguards seemed like a lifetime ago and it was reassuring to know that Doyen Fenna Schulze still had control of the other cities in Uskhanya, even if Creije was falling.
“I hate to break it to you,” Tavia said, “but you haven’t exactly found safe haven. Now, how about you hand over that backpack without a fuss, for old times’ sake?”
Nolan grabbed the backpack from the ground and hugged it protectively to his chest.
“No way,” he said, blinking as though to sharpen his vision. “You get away.”
Tavia laughed and reached into her pocket, pulling out the small marble that she had stolen from this very bastard back in the city. It was a deep, unyielding blue, and when she tossed it up and down in her hand, she thought it looked a little like holding the ocean.
“So instead of coming with me willingly, you fancy putting up a fight?” she asked. “I could do with a little exercise tonight, I suppose.”
“No need to get violent,” Nolan said. “I’m unarmed. Lost my knife back in the Hamlets.”
He raised his hands high in the air in surrender, backpack included, and gave Tavia what she thought was supposed to be a charming smile. Nolan stepped forward, stumbling a little on the uneven ground, and then his hand shot to his pocket and he threw a trick bag at her before Tavia could even think to dive out of the way.
The pouch landed at her feet.
And blew her straight back onto her ass.
A jolt of what felt like lightning zapped through Tavia’s toes and propelled her to the forest floor. Nolan ran, sprinting through the forest without looking back.
Tavia groaned.
“Curse your mother and the train she rode in on!” she yelled.
She pulled herself to her feet and chased after him, winding through the trees she had spent the last few weeks hiding among.
“May the Many Gods spit in your father’s beard,” Tavia yelled as Nolan jumped over a small creak. “And chop his balls right—”
Nolan tripped.
His foot caught in a large tree root and he fell with a loud thud straight onto the forest floor, the wet dirt splashing up like water around him. He tried to get back up, but his drunken arms collapsed underneath him and so eventually he just lay there, rolled onto his back, and murmured a curse that made Tavia raise her eyebrows.
“If this is the best that Rishiya has to offer,” she said, “then I don’t know why I was so worried.”
“Get back!” Nolan said.
He kept the backpack clutched to him and reached inside to pull something out. Tavia’s hand lingered by Wesley’s gun, just in case, only when Nolan pulled the first piece of magic he seemed to find, it was a far greater weapon than the one she had.
The purple liquid swam inside the vial, lighting the ground and banishing the moon’s glow from that patch of the forest.
The Loj elixir.
“Where did you get that?” Tavia asked.
“Get back,” Nolan said again, still flat on the ground. “I’ll use it, I swear. It’ll knock you into a haze!”
“It would do more than that,” she said.
Tavia stepped toward him and drew Wesley’s gun.
“Drop it,” she told him.
And, as if there was something in her eyes he had never expected to see—something she had never expected to feel—Nolan did as he was told.
The Loj elixir was outside of Creije, in the very city Tavia and her friends had hidden themselves. She didn’t know how it had gotten here, but if it wasn’t contained anymore, then that meant that it could be anywhere.
It meant that they had been wrong, thinking Dante Ashwood wanted Creije first.
He wasn’t taking on Uskhanya a city at a time, starting with their home before making his way across the realm.
He was doing it all, everywhere, right now.
* * *
LESS THAN ten minutes later, Tavia pushed Nolan onto the ground.
Around her, the two dozen buskers she had woken from their night’s sleep for backup smiled in that same slow and deadly way that Wesley had taught them.
The way only a Creijen could.
She didn’t wake Saxon
y or Karam. She didn’t want them to be here to see the side of her that she needed to show.
“Shall we kill him?” one busker asked.
“Nah,” said another. “Let’s just cut out his tongue so he can’t talk.”
Nolan tried to sit up a little more, but it looked like the dizziness from all the alcohol was getting to him. So instead he slumped back onto his elbows and glared like he didn’t fear death half as much as he feared losing.
“You,” he said to Tavia, still a little drunk. “This is your holier-than-thou alternative to the Kingpin?” He spat on the ground by her feet. “You dirty traitor.”
Tavia picked the dirt from her nails with her knife, unfazed. “This is a trial by your peers,” she said. “You might want to stop being so volatile. I could lose my temper.”
Nolan’s laugh was like a gunshot. “Like you scare me.”
Except, she needed to do just that if she was going to lead these buskers. Wesley had taught her well what it meant to be feared, and right now the buskers were looking to Tavia to stand in his shoes as a worthy replacement. She couldn’t risk not being feared by someone like Nolan, even if it meant she had to become someone worse.
Tavia took a step toward him. “Tell us what you know about Ashwood’s plans and maybe you’ll get out of this alive.”
“You think I know anything about the Kingpin?” Nolan asked. “That’s above my pay.”
Tavia knelt down and pressed her knife to his neck. She felt the buskers around her smile, heard one lick his lips in the anticipation of a kill. They all wanted revenge for their lives being uprooted and an enemy busker was the perfect avenue for their anger.
“Tell me what you know about the Loj elixir,” Tavia said. “How did it find its way onto the streets of Rishiya? Is it anywhere else beyond here and Creije?”
Nolan laughed out a shaking breath. “What’s wrong?” he asked. “Creije’s best busker afraid of a little magic? From what I’ve heard, that elixir is a one-way ticket to being on the right side of this war. It’s happiness. Ljoisi uf hemga, right? It’s a bloody suit of armor.”
Tavia’s heart screamed against her chest as her mother’s voice echoed in her ears.
Please, ciolo. You have to be strong.
The thought of the same elixir that had poisoned her muma’s mind and stolen her from the world being touted as happiness made her blood boil.
The elixir destroyed lives, long before it took minds.
Tavia pressed the tip of the knife harder against Nolan’s throat. “It strips you of your free will,” she said. “And it’s a one-way ticket to losing your sanity.”
Can’t you see them, ciolo? her mother’s memory begged. My ghosts, Tavia. Can’t you hear them screaming?
“I made a deal with your underboss,” Tavia said. “Casim promised to align with us. He told me that your comrades would be here in a few days. Was he lying? Has he been working with Ashwood this whole time?”
Nolan laughed again, and Tavia was beginning to think that it was the worst sound in the realms.
“Casim is a traitor,” Nolan said. “And he doesn’t see what’s going on right under his nose.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning that I’m not aligning myself with the losing team,” Nolan said. “You lot are going to burn. If not by the Kingpin’s hand, then you’ll get yours in the fire-gates.”
Tavia tried to hold her anger in, but it was rising to the surface quicker than she’d thought possible. “How many people in Rishiya have you sold the elixir to? Who gave it to you? Who else has it?”
She wasn’t about to let anyone else be driven to madness by mind magic, and if the Loj had gotten ahold of Rishiya, too, then they didn’t have time to spare. Tavia had seen what this sort of thing did to people. She had seen the first iterations of the Loj—the experiments, Ashwood had called them—disguised as a magic sickness, infecting countless people in the slums of Creije.
She had started this battle because she couldn’t bear to see that happen to another family like it had to hers.
“You want me to draw you a map of the supply chain?” Nolan asked. “Why don’t you just ask your underboss about it?”
Tavia paled. “What do you know about Wesley?”
“From what I hear, Wesley Thornton Walcott is standing by the Kingpin’s side, as loyal as always.”
Tavia snarled at him and the knife felt suddenly so light in her hands. “Wesley wouldn’t betray us,” she said.
He wouldn’t betray me, she thought.
Nolan’s sneer was unbearably arrogant. “When the time comes, Dante Ashwood and your precious underboss are going to take this realm and kill anyone who gets in their way.”
Tavia punched him.
She hadn’t even wanted to, but the action was instinctive and before she knew what she was doing she’d raised her fist high in the air and brought it down straight onto Nolan’s nose.
His head ricocheted back and hit the forest floor, blood spurting from his hateful face. Tavia’s hands shook and she felt the anger lessen inside her, just a little, but not nearly enough.
The buskers laughed and one of them stepped forward and kicked Nolan in the ribs. Then another. One of them bent down to punch him. A fourth stomped on his knee and it was only when Nolan screamed out that Tavia held up her hand.
“Stop,” she said.
Though she wasn’t sure she wanted them to.
The buskers stepped back.
“You have one chance to save your life,” she told Nolan. “And you’re really starting to push it.”
Nolan shoved himself up from the dirt and clutched at his ribs. He looked newly sobered. “Just kill me and be done with it,” he said. “That’s what you lot are planning on, no matter what I do.”
“Actually, it’s not,” Tavia said. “You were right before, back in the city, when you said I wouldn’t kill you.”
The buskers beside her shifted at this revelation.
“But there are things I can do to you that would be far worse than death,” she said.
The buskers’ smirks returned and Tavia flung her arms out to gesture to them.
“They’d watch and smile while I did it. They’d help and laugh to drown out your screams,” she said. “The buskers stand against Dante Ashwood and if you stand with him, then you’re not one of us anymore. And I don’t think you want to be an enemy of the streets.”
For the first time, she saw the defiance in Nolan’s eyes lift, and a flash of the fear she had so desperately wanted latched onto his face.
“Tell me about Wesley.”
“I don’t know much,” Nolan said. “There were some whisperings about him and the Kingpin wanting to amass more forces in Tisvgen. It could be bullshit, I don’t know.”
Tisvgen.
It didn’t make sense for Ashwood to take Wesley there, unless Creije was on the verge of destruction.
Unless it was too dangerous of a place to keep such precious cargo.
“And the Loj?” Tavia asked.
“There are groups of Crafters in every city we have,” Nolan told her. “They’re supplying the buskers across Uskhanya with the elixir. Direct from the Kingpin.”
“But Casim—”
“Dante Ashwood isn’t stupid,” Nolan said, interrupting her. “The only underboss he’s ever trusted was yours.”
Wesley. She knew it was true. They were only allowed to get so close to Ashwood before because Wesley had been with them. The old man had barely spoken of the others, and when Wesley joked about killing his peers, Ashwood only laughed like he might just approve.
“Ashwood isn’t giving the elixir to any of the underbosses,” Tavia said. “He’s going straight to the streets.”
“Rendering Casim and all the rest of them useless,” Nolan confirmed. “We don’t follow the underbosses like we used to. We get our orders directly from the top now.”
“Casim didn’t mention being usurped,” Tavia said.
“He doe
sn’t know,” Nolan told her. “None of them do. The Crafters that gave me the elixir said that if I sold it under Casim’s nose, then the Kingpin would reward me in the new world. All the coin, magic, and Cloverye I could want.”
It was a small dream to have in a big world, and so Tavia knew what Nolan really wanted—what he’d really betrayed his underboss for—and it wasn’t booze or the deception of power. It was what everyone in the realms wanted. Survival. Nolan didn’t think Tavia and her side stood a chance.
“How many have you sold?” she asked. “How many elixirs are on the streets of Rishiya?”
“I only sold a handful myself,” Nolan said. He wiped blood from his face and onto his arm. “They told me to distribute it out among the other buskers, but the amityguards have been right on my ass, so I haven’t had the chance.”
Tavia wanted to feel relief at that, but she knew she couldn’t. It didn’t matter if Nolan had sold only a few elixirs in Rishiya and if no other buskers in the city had their hands on it yet, because buskers across the whole of the realm, from Kythnu to the government city of Yejlath, had backpacks full of the stuff.
The elixir was spreading like an infection and they didn’t have a cure.
It wasn’t coming: It was here already.
“Whether you kill me or not, you’re still going to lose,” Nolan said.
Tavia stared down at the bleeding busker.
She put away her knife and got Wesley’s gun back out from her belt loop.
The buskers wanted her to kill Nolan; they expected her to. She’d gotten all she needed from him and he was nothing if not a liability. She couldn’t trust him to stay here and she couldn’t let him back out on the streets now that he knew where their rebellion was.
They have to fear me, she thought. That’s the only way they’ll follow me.
Tavia wasn’t good at inspirational speeches like Saxony and she didn’t have that air about her that made people flock to her side like Wesley did. All Tavia had was a prisoner and Wesley’s gun.
“I thought your side was all about peace,” Nolan said. “Are you really going to kill me here?”
The look in his eyes said that he truly didn’t know what Tavia was capable of. And of course he couldn’t, because she didn’t know either.
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