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It was not a ghost, but a girl. A girl and one uniquely talented accomplice.
We stare at each other, she and I. Laia of Serra is all passion. Feeling. Everything she thinks is written on her face. I wonder if she understands what duty even is.
“If I’m a gnat,” she says, “then why—” Understanding flashes across her face. “You’re not here for me. But if you’re using me as bait—”
“Then it will work effectively. I know my quarry well, Laia of Serra. He’ll be here in less than a quarter hour. If I’m wrong …” I twirl my dirk on my fingertip. Laia pales.
“He died.” She seems to believe her own lie. “In Kauf Prison. He’s not coming.”
“Oh, he’ll come.” Skies, I hate her as I say it. He will come for her. He always will. As he never will for me.
I banish the thought—weakness, Shrike—and kneel in front of her, knife in hand, running it along the K the Commandant carved into her. The scar is old now. She might see it as a flaw against that glowing skin. But it makes her look stronger. Resilient. And I hate her for that too.
But not for much longer. For I cannot let Laia of Serra walk free. Not when bringing Marcus her head could buy his favor—and thus more life for my little sister.
I think briefly of the Cook and her interest in Laia. The Commandant’s former slave will be angry when she learns the girl is dead. But the old woman disappeared months ago. She might be dead herself.
Laia must see murder in my eyes, because her face goes ashen and she shies back. Nausea lashes through me again. My vision flashes white, and I lean into the wooden armrest of her chair, the knife tipping forward, into the skin over her heart—
“Enough, Helene.”
His voice is as harsh as one of the Commandant’s lashes. He’s come in through the back door, as I suspected he would. Helene. Of course he’d use my name.
I think of my father. You are all that holds back the darkness. I think of Livia, covering up the bruises on her throat with layer upon layer of powder so the court does not think her weak. I turn.
“Elias Veturius.” My blood goes cold when I see that, despite the fact that I set the ambush, he has managed to surprise me. For instead of coming alone, Elias has taken Dex prisoner, binding his arms and holding a knife to his throat. Dex’s masked face is frozen in a grimace of rage. Dex, you idiot. I glare at him in silent rebuke. I wonder if he even tried to fight back.
“Kill Dex if you wish,” I say. “If he was fool enough to get caught, I won’t miss him.”
The torchlight reflects briefly in Elias’s face. He looks at Mamie—at her broken body and sagging form—and his eyes sharpen in rage. My throat goes dry at the depth of his emotion as he shifts his attention back to me. I see a hundred thoughts written in the set of his jaw, in his shoulders, in the way he holds his weapon. I know his language—I’ve spoken it since the age of six. Stand firm, Shrike.
“Dex is your ally,” he says. “You’re short on those these days, I hear. I think you’ll miss him very much. Release Laia.”
I am reminded of the Third Trial. Of Demetrius’s death by his hand. Leander’s. Elias has changed. There’s a darkness to him, one that wasn’t there before.
You and me both, old friend.
I haul Laia up from the chair and slam her against the wall, putting my knife to her throat. This time, I am prepared for the wave of sick, and I grit my teeth as it washes over me.
“The difference between us, Veturius,” I say, “is that I don’t care if my ally dies. Drop your weapons. You’ll see manacles in the corner. Put them on. Sit down. Shut up. If you do, Mamie lives and I agree not to pursue your band of caravan-raiding criminals or the prisoners they freed. Refuse, and I will hunt them down and kill them myself.”
“I—I thought you were decent,” Laia whispers. “Not good but …” She glances down at my blade and then at Mamie. “But not this.”
That’s because you’re a fool. Elias wavers, and I dig the knife in deeper.
The door opens behind me. Harper, daggers drawn, brings a wave of cold with him. Elias ignores him, his attention fixed on me.
“Let Laia go too,” he says. “And you have a deal.”
“Elias,” Laia gasps. “No—the Waiting—” I hiss at her, and she falls silent. I don’t have time for this. The longer I waver, the more likely Elias is to think of a way to escape. I made sure he’d know Laia entered the village; I should have expected him to catch Dex. You idiot, Shrike. You underestimated him.
Laia tries to speak, but I dig my blade into her throat, purposefully drawing blood. She trembles, her breaths shallow. My head pounds. The pain stokes my rage, and the part of me born from the blood of my dead parents roars, claws unsheathed.
“I know her song, Veturius,” I say. Dex and Avitas won’t understand my meaning. But Elias will. “I can stay here all night. All day. As long as it takes. I can make her hurt.”
And heal her. I do not say it, but he sees my vicious intent. And hurt her again, and heal her. Until you are driven mad by it.
“Helene.” Elias’s rage fades, replaced by surprise. Disappointment. But he has no right to be disappointed in me. “You won’t kill us.”
He doesn’t sound quite sure. You used to know me, I think. But you don’t know me anymore. I don’t know me anymore.
“There are worse things than death,” I say. “Shall we learn about them together?”
His temper rises. Tread carefully, Blood Shrike. The Mask still lives within Elias Veturius, beneath whatever else he’s become. I can push him. But I can only push him so far.
“I’ll release Mamie.” I offer the carrot before I brandish the stick. “A gesture of good faith. Avitas will leave her someplace your Tribal friends will find her.”
It is only when Elias looks at Harper that I remember he does not know Avitas is his half brother. I consider whether the knowledge can be used against Elias but decide to hold my tongue. The secret is Harper’s, not mine. I nod to him, and my second carries Mamie from the cabin.
“Let Laia go too,” Elias says. “And I’ll do as you ask.”
“She comes with us,” I say. “I know your tricks, Veturius. They won’t work. You can’t win this if you want her to live. Drop your weapons. Get those manacles on. I won’t ask again.”
Elias shoves Dex away, cutting his bonds as he does so, and then levels a punch that drops him to his knees. Dex doesn’t hit back. Fool!
“That’s for interrogating my family,” Elias says. “Don’t think I didn’t know about it.”
“Bring the horses round,” I bark at Dex. He rises, dignified and straight-backed, as if there isn’t blood drenching his armor. After he leaves the cottage, Elias drops his scims.
“You will let Laia down,” he says. “You will not gag me. And you’ll keep your bleeding distance, Blood Shrike.”
It shouldn’t hurt, him calling me by my title. After all, I am not Helene Aquilla anymore.
But when I saw him last, I was still Helene. Minutes ago, when he first saw me, he said my name.
I drop Laia, and she takes great gulps of air, color returning to her face. My hand is wet—a trickle of blood from her neck. A droplet, really. Nothing compared to the torrents that poured out of my mother, my sister, my father, as they died.
You are all that holds back the darkness.
I say the words in my mind. I remind myself why I am here. And whatever little feeling was left in me, I set to flame.
CHAPTER FIVE (#ulink_423a594a-2644-5b69-88e6-fa1a06e18208)
Laia (#ulink_423a594a-2644-5b69-88e6-fa1a06e18208)
“Check Veturius,” the Blood Shrike says to Avitas Harper when he returns without Mamie. “Make sure those manacles are secure.”
The Shrike drags me to the door of the cabin, as far from Elias as she can get. The three of us in this room together feels strange and full of portent. But that feeling fades when the Shrike pushes her blade deeper into my skin.
We need to get the hells out of here. I would rather not wait around to see if the Shrike will make good on her threat to torture me. By now, Afya and Darin must be out of their minds with worry.
Dex appears at the back door. “The horses are gone, Shrike.”
Enraged, the Blood Shrike looks at Elias, who shrugs. “You didn’t think I’d just leave them be, did you?”
“Go find more,” the Shrike says to Dex. “And bring a ghost wagon round. Harper, how long could it possibly take to make sure those bleeding chains are intact?”
Experimentally, I test my bonds, but the Shrike feels it and twists my arms savagely.
Elias sits sprawled in his chair with practiced ease, observing his former best friend. I’m not fooled by the boredom on his face. His gold-brown skin grows paler with every moment that passes, until he looks ill. The Waiting Place pulls at him—and its pull grows more insistent. I’ve seen it before. If he stays away too long, he will suffer.
“You’re using me to get to my mother,” Elias says. “She’ll see it coming a mile away.”
“Don’t make me rethink that gag.” The Shrike flushes beneath her mask. “Harper, go with Dex. I want that wagon now.”
“What do you think Keris Veturia is doing right now?” Elias says as Harper disappears.
“You don’t even live in the bleeding Empire anymore.” The Blood Shrike tightens her hold on me. “So shut it.”
“I don’t have to live in the Empire to know how the Commandant thinks. You want her dead, right? She must know it. Which means she also knows that if you kill her, you risk civil war with her allies. So while you’re out here wasting your time with me, she’s back in the capital, plotting skies know what.”
The Shrike frowns. She has listened to Elias’s advice—and offered her own to him—her whole life. What if he’s right? I can practically hear her thinking it. Elias catches my eye—he’s looking for an opening just like I am.
“Find my grandfather,” Elias says. “If you want to take her down, you need to understand how she thinks. Quin knows Keris better than anyone else alive.”
“Quin’s left the Empire,” the Shrike says.
“If my grandfather has left the Empire,” Elias says, “then cats can fly. Wherever Keris is, he’ll be close by, waiting for her to make a mistake. He’s not stupid enough to use one of his own estates. And he won’t be alone. He has many men still loyal—”
“It doesn’t matter.” The Blood Shrike waves away Elias’s advice. “Keris and that creature she keeps around—”
My stomach plunges. The Nightbringer. She means the Nightbringer.
“—are up to something,” the Shrike says. “I need to destroy her before she destroys the Empire. I spent weeks hunting Quin Veturius. I don’t have the time to do it again.”
Elias shifts in his seat—he is preparing to make his move. The Shrike’s loosened her grip on me, and I squeeze my hands together, bending, pulling, doing anything I can to wriggle out of the binding without giving it away. My slick palms grease the rope. It is not enough.
“You want to destroy her.” Elias’s manacles clink. Something flashes near his hands. Lock picks? How the hells did he sneak them past Avitas? “Just remember that she’ll do things you’re not willing to. She will find your weakness and exploit it. It’s what she does best.”
When Elias shifts his arm, the Shrike whips her head toward him, eyes narrowing. At that moment, Harper enters.
“Wagon’s ready, Shrike,” he says.
“Take her.” She shoves me at Avitas. “Keep a knife at her throat.” Harper pulls me close, and I ease back from his blade. If I could just distract the Shrike and Avitas for a moment, enough for Elias to attack …
I use a trick Elias taught me when we traveled together. I kick Avitas in the soft place between his foot and leg and then drop like a hammer from a roof.
Avitas curses, the Shrike turns, and Elias shoots from his seat, free of his manacles. He dives for his blades in less time than it takes to blink. A knife whooshes through the air above my head, and Harper ducks, dragging me with him. The Blood Shrike roars, but Elias is on her, using his bulk to bowl her over. He’s got her pinned, a knife at her throat, but something glimmers at her wrist. She has a blade. Skies, she’s going to stab him.
“Elias!” I shout a warning when suddenly, his body goes rigid.
A gasp bursts from his throat. The knife falls from his hand, and in a second, the Shrike has wriggled out from beneath him, lips curled in a sneer.
“Laia.” Elias’s eyes communicate his rage. His helplessness. And then darkness fills the room. I see the swing of long dark hair, a flash of brown skin. Depthless black eyes bore into me. Shaeva.
Then she—and Elias—disappear. The earth rumbles beneath us and the wind outside rises, sounding, for a second, like the wailing of ghosts.
The Blood Shrike leaps toward where Elias stood. She finds nothing, and a moment later, her hand is around my throat, her knifepoint at my heart. She shoves me back into a seat.
“Who the hells,” she whispers, “was that woman?”
The door bursts open and Dex enters, scim drawn. Before he can speak, the Shrike is bellowing at him.
“Scour the village! Veturius disappeared like a bleeding wraith!”
“He’s not in the village,” I say. “She took him.”
“Who took him?” I cannot speak—the knife is too close—but she doesn’t let me move a muscle. “Tell me!”
“Ease up on the knife, Shrike,” Avitas says. The dark-haired Mask scans the room carefully, as if Elias might reappear at any moment. “And perhaps she will.”
The Blood Shrike pulls the knife back by no more than a hair. Her hand is steady, but her face beneath her mask is flushed. “Talk or die.”
My words stumble over each other as I try to explain—as vaguely as I can—who Shaeva is and what Elias has become. Even as I speak the words, I realize how far-fetched they sound. The Blood Shrike says nothing, but incredulity is written in every line of her body.
When I finish, she stands, her knife loose in her hand, looking out into the night. Only a few hours until dawn. “Can you get Elias back here?” she asks quietly.
I shake my head, and she kneels before me. Her face is suddenly serene, her body relaxed. When I meet her eyes, they are distant, as if her thoughts have moved on from me.
“If the Emperor knew you lived, he’d want to interrogate you himself,” she says. “Unless you’re a fool, you’ll agree that death would be preferable. I will make it swift.”
Oh skies. My feet are free, but my hands are bound. I could wriggle my right hand free if I pulled hard enough …
Avitas sheathes his scim and bends behind me. I feel the brush of warm skin against my wrists and wait for them to tighten as he rebinds me.
But they do not.
Instead, the rope binding my wrists falls away. Harper breathes one word, so softly that I question whether I truly heard it.
“Go.”
I cannot move. I meet the Blood Shrike’s stare head on. I will look death in the eyes. Grief ripples across her silver features. She seems older, suddenly, than her twenty years, with the implacability of a five-body blade. All the weakness has been hammered out of her. She has seen too much blood. Too much death.
I remember when Elias told me what Marcus did to the Shrike’s family. He learned it from the ghost of Hannah Aquilla, who plagued him for months before finally moving on.
As I’d listened to what happened, I’d felt sicker and sicker. I remembered another dark morning years ago. I woke up with a start that day, scared by the low, choking cries echoing through the house. I thought Pop must have brought home an animal. Some wounded creature, dying slowly and in agony.
But when I entered the main room of the house, there was Nan, rocking back and forth, Pop frantically shushing her wails, for no one could hear her mourn her daughter—my mother. No one could know. The Empire wished to crush all that the Lioness was, all that she stood for. That meant any and all connected to her.
