by Sara Holland
For the longest moment, I can’t move, can’t think, can’t breathe. Caro couldn’t know. She couldn’t possibly know that Amma was my friend. Could she?
Then a fresh surge of adrenaline floods my limbs, and I’m moving forward—through the heat and the thick smoke that permeates everything, billowing up in gusts of wind, searing my throat and skin, stinging my nose and eyes. I crash my way through the rubble of the butcher’s shop, the snapped wooden beams and splintered workbenches, the charred remains of the room where I loitered for hours upon hours, exchanging gossip and stories with Amma. A curtain eaten away by flame, half of a broken teapot with its ceramic surface singed. No sign of people. Maybe Amma was able to escape.
Then a ceiling beam falls from its place with a heart-twisting crash. In the hole in the wall it leaves, I see something that makes my heart stop.
Amma sits slumped against a fallen beam, her eyes wide and unseeing.
“Amma,” I breathe.
I rush to her and drop to my knees, taking her gently by the shoulders. Her chest is still. There are no burn marks on her skin—but her side is smeared with blood. My eyes fly to a streak of deep purple hardly visible on her filthy red-and-black-smeared dress. The unmistakable color of mava dye, left behind by a royal soldier’s weapon, and—
The handle of a dagger jutting out of her back. Though the polished silver is smeared with blood, I recognize it immediately: it belongs to Ivan Tenburn, commander of the guards at Everless.
Caro has already started to make good on her promise.
Rage at Caro rushes up in me, and with it, power. I fling out my hands, grasping at the threads of time, asking it not just to stop but to unwind, turn back, just like I did to save Roan Gerling when we were children at Everless. Save Amma, beats a rhythm in my head.
Slowly, the smoke around me billows inward and shrinks toward the ground. The gray churns, swirling in ways unconnected to the breeze. In the distance, I think I see some of the flames flicker and die. The pool of blood seems to shrink, flow back into Amma.
But then a deep, sick sense of wrongness fills me, a soul-deep nausea that makes my knees go weak. My body shudders as the strength drains rapidly out of me, and before I even realize I’m sinking, I’m on my hands and knees in the rubble, heaving with sobs, ash-black tears dripping down my face.
And now, I do scream: in grief, in frustration, in rage.
The ruined walls of the butcher’s shop crash down, burying half of Amma’s body in twisted wreckage. Behind them, in the now-exposed alley, a dozen soldiers in deep purple royal uniforms stand in formation. Their faces are covered in cloth masks.
“Seize her!” one shouts.
I drop my head as they close in, limp as a doll, the strength gone out of me. I barely notice something flash silver by my hand—a butcher knife glinting next to Amma’s loosened fist. I close my fingers around the handle and take it up my sleeve just before the masked soldiers descend.
They haul me from Crofton. The Alchemist of legend, bloody-handed and hollowed out with grief. My toes drag over the ground and leave trails in the dirty rubble. Everything swirls around me as if I’m in a dream, the soldiers’ words sounding like they’re coming from the other side of a pane of glass. The only thing I can glean for sure is that I am being taken to the palace, Shorehaven. To Caro.
A faint voice in my mind whispers, Fight them. If I tried to muster the magic in my veins, to summon the Alchemist, I might stop time long enough to slip their hold and run.
But I don’t. Because I know by the way they wrap chains around me—tight, tripled around my arms and waist as if I had the strength of ten people—that the soldiers are afraid of me. They don’t touch me, so they don’t find the knife. Their fear hushes my mind even as they toss me in a metal-walled carriage and close me in darkness. Amma’s death mask is seared onto the pitch-black canvas inside.
Caro took her from me, even if she didn’t wield the blade herself. She razed Crofton to the ground. She reduced my home to a pile of ash.
Now it is my turn to invade hers.
Seize the day, Amma whispers in my ear.
I will not fight. Not yet. Not until the soldiers take me to Shorehaven.
3
The carriage door has a small rectangular opening, subdivided by rusty iron bars. For the next three days, it becomes my window to the world. The soldiers cart me across Sempera—avoiding the towns, keeping to the woods or the plains. I imagine the mob that would descend on the prison carriage carrying the Queen’s murderer.
The soldiers shove food and water through the slot, but I scarcely eat. There’s no room for anything else in my body but anger and a low, constant dread. And a growing sense, as we go farther east, toward the rising sun, that something is aligning within me, as if the Alchemist buried inside me knows the way to the palace on the shore—and longs to be taken there.
After two sunrises, in the foggy morning light, the sliver of the outside world that I can see changes: the woods and plains give way to low, rolling hills, scattered with scrubs and sand. The roads get wider and smoother. Where our path converges with another, there are suddenly more covered carts heading in the same direction as we are, each brimming with crates of apples or bleating livestock. Even the air is different—laced with the scent of brine, heavy and buzzing with something that feels like power.
We are close to Shorehaven. To the Sorceress.
It burns my blood to think of my things—the leather-bound journal especially—bouncing along in a soldier’s bag. Though they keep their voices down, I sometimes hear the guards speaking through the metal walls of the carriage.
“I don’t like this,” a female voice says at one point. “Bringing her to Shorehaven during the coronation. The palace will be crawling with silly nobles wanting to get a look at her—”
“We’re almost there,” a male voice cuts in. “One more day and she’s the Queen’s problem, out of our hands.” He chuckles darkly. “I need the blood-iron. My wife is expecting a little one any day now.”
Their voices wash over me until they stop making sense, the words carrying no more meaning than the rhythmic stamp of their footsteps. The hours stretch on. Whenever the company stops to let me out to relieve myself, a full half-dozen women soldiers trail my footsteps, their daggers and rifles out. Their wide eyes and trembling hands give me a faint, perverse satisfaction. They’re right to be afraid of me—they all are—even if it’s not for the reasons they think.
Unease blooms in me at the thought. Since when have I delighted in others’ fear?
On the third night after the fire in Crofton—after the death of my oldest friend—when the moonless dark is bleeding into dawn and I think I’m going to explode from the anger roiling under my skin, I hear it: the sound of waves breaking against cliffs. I pull myself up to the window, ignoring the pins and needles racing up my legs, and look out just as the carriage rolls over a narrow wooden bridge crossing two huddling cliffs.
The sea is at the bottom of a hundred-foot drop. Glorious and unending, the ocean stretches, black and calm in the distance, white and frothy near the shores. It makes my breath catch—I’d always felt that there was a cage around Sempera, walling us off from other lands that I’ve only read about in the pages of books. Here it is: all that water, trapping us here to eat one another alive.
From Liam’s map and the cliffs flanking the water in the distance, I know that this is a cove and not even the ocean proper. But it’s as close as I’ve ever come to the sea, at least in this life. I can’t help but stare—first at the water, and then, at the shape that looms at the end of the road. From a crown of rocks, Shorehaven, Sempera’s palace, rises up from the cliffs, outshining the moon.
The castle of pale stone is dripping with light. It looks strangely natural, beautiful in its asymmetry, as if it’s been pulled from the cliffs that surround it. The sight of it sends a fierce pain through my chest. I’ve never seen the palace before. Of course I haven’t. But when my eyes travel
across its hundreds of windows lit up like a chandelier against the night sea, I realize that’s not quite right. I know the castle, know that if I draw nearer it will reveal itself to have strands of ore veining its marbled sides, along with coal and gold and rubies and sapphires so subtly woven into the stone that you scarcely notice until the sun sets or rises. Then, the castle appears to be afire.
The memory rises to the surface suddenly, like when a sudden familiar scent plunges me back into the memories of childhood. I have been here, to Shorehaven. Suffered here. Not as Jules—as the Alchemist.
The images, sounds, feelings barrel through me: Caro had captured me. Was keeping me prisoner in the castle dungeons. Then, as now, she tried to break me. I remember blades, fire, pain. I pull the collar of my shirt up over my face so the soldiers don’t hear the half gasp, half sob that I can’t hold in.
The smell of smoke from Crofton still clings to my clothes, even after days of travel. It anchors me to the moment, reminds me what I have left to do. Amma is dead; Roan is dead; Papa is dead; but there are still people living, people who Caro might cut down to get to me.
She’s the Queen’s problem, the soldier said. Ina’s face takes form in my mind as she was the last time I saw her, smiling and happy, before I found out the truth about Caro and the Queen. And about Ina—that we were born together to a woman named Naomi in a town called Briarsmoor, in the midst of fire and screaming. I learned she was my twin, just as everything fell to pieces. Ina must think— My sister must think me a murderer now.
Unless—would she believe me, as Amma did?
Together, could we destroy Caro, dismantle her invisible reign?
I take a deep breath, trying to stay clearheaded, to temper the rush of hope that cuts through my grief and anger.
As we get closer, a larger, main road comes into view, packed with carriages that crawl along like shiny black beetles. The procession is illuminated by oil lamps hanging on the end of the tall iron poles that line the road. These must be the nobles of Sempera, arriving for Ina’s coronation. Is Liam somewhere within those walls?
For a second, I see his face—his midnight-dark eyes, his lips parted as he breathes a word. Alchemist.
The name jolts me. Because even in my daydreams, that’s what he says. Not Jules. If neither of us had ever learned the truth, if I was just another farmer’s daughter from Crofton, would he have even learned my name?
I shove the thought away. It doesn’t matter. It can’t matter—not with Caro hunting everyone I care about. I conjure Ina’s face instead, intelligent eyes in a pale freckled face, framed by cropped dark hair, familiar to me before I knew why. She’s the one I need to find. Assuming I can escape the guards.
Rather than joining the glowing parade of carriages streaming in through the front gate, ours turns sharply along one of the narrower roads that spread from the main path like spokes on a wheel. I stand by the gated window, my fingers wrapped around the cool bars.
The palace is ringed on its land-facing side by a seamless, pearl-colored wall—deceptively low, but smooth and uniform as metal. Above, I can see golden light through glass, flowered balconies lit up with strings of lanterns. Below, enormous waves batter at the base of the cliffs, their spray almost reaching to the lowest of the windows that dot the palace sides. The ocean water leaves the stone wet and shining.
I repeat what I need to do to keep myself calm as the palace grows outside. One way or another, prisoner or free, I need to find Ina. Stop Caro.
I touch the butcher knife still tucked into my sleeve, as if I could draw strength from it.
The small, dark shapes of guards pace along the top of the wall, most watching the main gates. Even above the sound of the waves, I can hear the laughter and joyous chorus of rich, fluted voices. To the left, the smooth palace wall slopes off with the ground, so that there’s nothing between the palace and the ocean but a sheer drop—a height of at least thirty or forty paces. Below, huge, sharp boulders poke treacherously up through the waves like the metal-gray teeth of a sea monster, jaw gaping open to swallow the palace whole.
Fear crashes over me as we pass through a narrow gate set into the northern wall. The gate shuts behind us with a groan, shutting out the sound of the waves. Quiet falls, broken only by swells of distant music and wind swishing through trees.
I think of Amma’s burned butcher’s shop, the forlorn shape of her body. Anger and grief surge through me, pushing down the fear as we roll into a moonlit garden.
The doors open, spilling moonlight over me as thick as blood. Leather-gloved hands reach in. I scramble out before the soldiers can take hold, swallowing a whimper when my legs cramp and tremble. I collapse into a heap on the cool grass. Beyond the wary soldiers surrounding me, the garden blooms with thickets of flowers and slender trees. I peer up, surveying the glittering spread of windows, hoping to find some clue of where Ina might be.
And then— “Hello, Jules,” someone says.
My scream freezes in my throat.
Caro stands deeper in the garden, still as a statue. Her face is in shadow, but I would know her anywhere. How she stands, the way her dark hair whips in the breeze. I want to back away, but it’s like my body has frozen, the air turned to ice in my lungs.
She makes a gesture, and the soldiers file away out the gate we came in, as quick and silent as mice trying to avoid capture. One hands her my bag before departing. She opens it and withdraws the journal, which she pinches between her fingers before flinging it to the grass. Anger blooms in me, but I remain still. Papa died for that journal.
“Jules,” she says again, her soft words carrying across the space between us, wrapping around me like she’s whispering in my ear. “It’s good to see you.” She steps forward, stopping just feet from me, and withdraws a long dagger from her belt. A shiver runs over my skin, which tightens, expecting a blow.
But Caro doesn’t strike. Worse—she smiles with a languid, luxurious movement that seems to stretch seconds into minutes, like a noble sipping blood-iron from a steaming teacup.
She offers me the knife, handle first, her fingers delicate on the blade.
Moonlight catches her face, so familiar from my brief days at Everless—and, somewhere deep in my mind, from centuries of engraved memories. She’s smiling as if we are schoolgirl friends reunited after a few days apart. Her teeth shine in the dark.
I rise to my feet as steadily as I can and pull Amma’s knife from my sleeve instead of taking the one she offers me. She shrugs and turns it around in her hands, her fingers closing lightly around the handle.
She’s not afraid of me.
Still, I brandish the blade between us, hoping Caro can’t see how my knife hand trembles. The knife isn’t what Caro should fear. I call out to the time in my blood, will it to respond, and then gasp in almost pain as it tears out of me—more time magic than I’ve ever wielded before, making the earth beneath my feet tremble.
And yet—nothing freezes. The air in the garden seems to shudder, but time doesn’t stop, doesn’t freeze. My blood shivers in my veins. Something is holding me back, preventing me from stopping or even slowing time.
Caro doesn’t react except to sigh, “Oh, Jules.”
“How are you doing that?” I grit out, furious.
Her laughter rises like bells in the night, mixing in with the faint melody from inside the palace that falls around us, steady as rain. Caro takes another step toward me, close enough that I can reach out and touch her. “You left a few year-coins behind at Everless. You shouldn’t be so careless with your blood.”
An involuntary shudder passes through me. I’d completely forgotten leaving the coins behind on that awful night she engineered an accusation of theft from the Gerling vault, and manipulated me into selling time for her. When I had tried to feed her my blood-iron, she couldn’t consume it; it re-formed and stuck in her throat. That was how she knew, finally, that I was the Alchemist, and not Ina.
Caro seems to read the memory on my face. “I
found a way to consume it, which has had interesting effects to say the least,” she says, a smile crawling across her face. “You consumed my whole heart, Jules. Surely you wouldn’t begrudge me a little of your—”
“Enough,” I growl. The knife handle is hard and cold and rough beneath my white-knuckled fingers, a reminder of what I’ve lost, why I’m here. In one heartbeat, I drop the attempt at time-bending and lash out at Caro with the knife, a wide swing.
Immediately I regret it and back away as Caro ducks, her own knife sweeping through the air. Not rough and scorched like Amma’s knife, but jeweled and gleaming and sickeningly sharp. “I thought you were above trying to fight me, Jules. You’ve failed in every life. What makes you think you can succeed now?”
Because Amma told me I was strong, I think wildly—but the truth of Caro’s words cut me, making me feel impossibly small next to the vaulting towers of Shorehaven. In front of me, Caro’s power radiates in waves. I try not to show my fear. “I stole your heart, didn’t I?”
I’m pleased to see her jaw clench in anger.
“And even diminished, I beat you easily,” she growls. “And when I break you, I will take what’s left of it back, even though you’ve wasted it on”—she pauses, eyes raised to the blue-dark sky as if she’s remembering—“eleven pathetic lives. I won’t kill you now, Jules. And you shouldn’t be so bold with me, considering you’ve only one life left.” She sneers. “Instead, I’ll hollow you out and make you my puppet, just like I did the poor late Queen. All of Sempera will see what I can do with time until I can break your heart for good. Then I’ll dispose of Ina, and Sempera will see what a queen worthy of her throne can do. What else could I bind to their blood, Alchemist?”
The words drop ice down my spine. Bind something else to blood? What could she mean—what else could be taken from us, from our veins? Fear makes me slow. When Caro lunges fiercely at me, I only barely dodge her blade.
“But I was hoping we could talk for a bit first,” she says conversationally. “I’ve missed you. And we oughtn’t disturb the coronation guests.”
