Greer was watching the path with a rigid, soldierly posture. Darrow sighed and joined him, chucking him on the shoulder—a friendly gesture Greer ignored. Warily, Tanya joined them, standing on Greer’s other side. The mare trotted up to stand next to her and the four stood in a straight line, waiting for the Queen.
The Queen didn’t have to be there, of course. Tanya could have conjured the wind alone.
But the Queen wanted to watch.
The four of them peered into darkness until suddenly there she was, a witch-light held aloft by Sir Lurch, illuminating her standing in the field, dressed all in black.
She looked at them from a distance and then approached.
Her eyes slid over Greer and Darrow, who bowed in turn. “You have your orders, corpsmen?” she asked.
“Yes, Your Majesty,” said Greer, still in a bow.
The Queen nodded absently, not really interested. She stood directly in front of Tanya.
“I want to know where that magic is coming from,” she said evenly. “I want to know who is using it and then I want you to stop them. Don’t kill them, though—I’ll want them back at the Glacier. I have questions.”
Tanya tightened her grip on the quill.
“I wasn’t planning on killing anyone,” she told her Queen. “I don’t like the idea of kidnapping anyone much better.”
The Queen shrugged. “Your magic is stronger or theirs is,” she said. “They’ll take you or you’ll take them.” Tanya heard herself inhale sharply. “But my gamble is quite literally on you, Tanya. I truly hope not to be disappointed.”
“I truly hope not to be taken, so yeah, me too.”
The Queen smiled. “I’ll miss you, Tanya,” she said. “We understand each other.”
Tanya felt a sensation she couldn’t quite recall building behind her eyes. “Your Majesty . . .,” she began.
“Let me put something together to keep you upright.” The Queen stepped back. She lifted her arms and shot streaks of cold white light out of her fingertips.
The beams weaved in and out and around each other, forming a large, circular filigree cage. Tanya, the mare, and the corpsmen, Darrow dragging a wagon with their trunks behind them, stepped in.
Tanya stuck the quill in her arm, calling wind, swirling it faster and faster within the cage until it lifted into the air.
Then they flew.
It wasn’t as much fun this time—it was freezing that high up in the air, and Tanya couldn’t see anything at all except for the mare’s rump directly in front of her face, and exposed by a twitching tail—Tanya suspected by her design. But it was much faster this time, and Tanya was glad for the Queen’s magic cage. Tanya was nowhere near as disoriented upon landing as she had been last time.
That came in handy when, a moment after Tanya took her first few steps on solid ground, she was impeded by a wiry arm around her neck and knife’s point against her ear.
“I don’t particularly like it when people fly,” came the buoyant rasp in Tanya’s ear. “And I really don’t like it when people steal into my camp in the middle of the night. That’s bad luck for you, sister.”
Tanya gasped. “Jana?” The arm tightened and the knife pressed harder. “Jana, stop! It’s me, it’s Tanya!”
“Tanya?” Jana let go long enough for Tanya to whirl around and hold the quill aloft, illuminating her face. Jana stepped back, but she was still in a fighting stance, one knee bent behind the other, her knife arm outstretched. “You look different.”
“I do?” Tanya looked down at herself. “I . . . well, I did get some new clothes. And I’m clean. You’re not used to seeing me clean.”
Greer looked up from where he was puking in the bushes. “Who are you talking to?” he asked, struggling upright. “Tanya, we’re not supposed to talk to anyone until Bloodstone.”
“Oh, it’s ‘Tanya’ again, is it, corpsman Greer?” she asked witheringly.
“Corpsmen!” Jana did a mind-bendingly quick triple aerial cartwheel, maneuvering around Tanya and landing with a neat roundoff behind Greer, who quickly spun around, fumbling for his own sword. “Oh! It’s you,” exclaimed Jana, smiling as if seeing an old friend. “Hi, again!” She flipped her dagger around and raised the hilt. “Bye, again!”
“You don’t need to do that,” Tanya said, stepping in front of Greer.
“She does, actually,” said Greer hotly. “Now move out of the way, Mistress Tanya, and let me do my job. Darrow!”
Darrow looked up from where he was sitting on the ground, shaking his head back and forth. He sprang up. “Sorry!” he yelled, sticking his finger in his ear. “My ear is clogged! I can barely hear you.”
“OK, but you can see, can’t you? Move!”
Jana cocked her head to the side, looking at Tanya. “These guys are with you?” she asked skeptically, before stiffening and adjusting her posture. “Or are you with them?”
“No, no, they’re with me,” said Tanya, taking a few steps closer to Jana, who instinctively backed up. “They’re with me. No one’s going to arrest you, or lay a hand on you, I promise.”
“The hell I’m not!”
“Greer, no.” Tanya spun to look at him. “Jana is—”
“I don’t care who she is to you,” cried Greer, going red in the face. “She knocked me unconscious.”
“Look, she does that to everybody.”
“I really do,” offered Jana, sheathing her dagger. “I wouldn’t take it personally.”
“See?” said Tanya. “She’s putting away her knife. And besides, what I was going to say is that Jana is from Bloodstone.”
Greer frowned. “No one’s from Bloodstone,” he said.
“Jana is. She grew up there. Right?”
“Well . . .” Jana hesitated, giving Darrow time to finally amble up and offer her a confused bow. “Oh, hey there, cutie. Riley will be sorry to have missed you.”
“Where is Riley?” asked Tanya, looking around the empty camp. “I thought the Tomcat had deserted this camp, but, well, you’re here. Where’s everyone else?”
Jana shrugged. “Bloodstone, I imagine. If they’d left, the Tomcat would have already sent scouts after me. Not that they would have found me. But I would have found them.”
“You ran away from your contract with the Tomcat? Jana! He’s going to kill you!”
“You think?” Jana backed up, raised her arms, and went into a handstand. She backflipped onto a boulder, then vaulted high in the air, swinging herself around a tree branch. Her legs wrapped securely around it, she swung upside down, nocked an arrow into her bow, and let it fly—it came so close to Tanya she felt her hair raise with displaced air.
Still swinging upside down, Jana smiled. “He can try,” she said. “But I don’t think he’ll bother. He was planning on setting up shop in Bloodstone permanently; he doesn’t need a tracker in there—there are enough scryers to drown one each day and never run out. And from where I’m standing”—at this Jana somersaulted neatly off the tree—“that leaves a job opening out here.”
Tanya raised her eyebrows. “You’re starting a gang? How’s it going?”
“Slowly,” she moaned. “I think my standards are too high. I wish I could have convinced Riley to run away with me, but he was scared of getting killed. He’s not as good at violence as I am. But then again, I’m a crap burglar.” She eyed Tanya and the quill. “What are you doing? Are you free?”
Tanya felt her mouth twist in a smile. She was as free as one could get in Lode: emotionally unencumbered and mostly in charge.
Darrow answered instead, “We’re on a mission, miss. To Bloodstone.”
There was a moment of silence and then Jana dissolved into laughter, collapsing onto the ground.
“I’m not sure I understand what’s funny,” said Darrow, gently puzzled.
“Nothing,” answered Greer caustically. “She’s a lunatic.”
Jana’s laughter got louder, until she eventually got herself together, and speaking through hiccups, ans
wered, “First of all, look at you calling me ‘miss.’ You are very cute. Second of all, you’re telling me that Tanya, after escaping in as spectacular a fashion as I’ve ever seen just to avoid going to Bloodstone, stealing Riley’s horse in the process—he is truly pissed about that, by the way, and he’s going to steal her back the second he sees her, so watch it—less than half a year later, she comes back here on her way to Bloodstone? Why did you bother running away at all?”
It was an excellent question and it made Tanya incredibly angry. She rolled up her sleeves and felt a warm bite of satisfaction when Jana, Greer, and Darrow all recoiled at the sight of her tattoos, writhing and terrible.
She held out the quill. “Here’s what’s going to happen,” she said, her voice light and cold, a perfect echo of the Queen. “You, Jana, are going to lead us to Bloodstone. Along a path that has not been overtaken by that black stuff, please. When we get there, you are going to be our guide. You are going to listen to what I say and follow my orders. I have the quill. Rank is irrelevant. Are we clear?”
“Yeah, OK,” said Jana, with her hands up. “But I’m not gonna let myself get murdered, quill or no quill.”
“That’s fine. I don’t want you to get murdered either. That would be distracting.” She turned to the corpsmen. “Any arguments from either of you?” They shook their heads, Greer looking sober and Darrow instinctively standing in front of both him and Jana, as if his sheer width could protect them from the quill.
It couldn’t. Tanya lifted her fingers from the quill and it snapped into place against her arm. “Then let’s get some sleep. Jana, you’re in charge until we get to Bloodstone.”
Tanya retreated to her tent as soon as it was erected. Though she had picked her companions herself, she felt a tightness in her chest whenever she had to talk to them.
Tanya didn’t know how to account for it. Why should she care that they weren’t offering her, what? Friendship? Kinship? She had never felt kinship—nontransactional kinship anyway—in Griffin’s Port, and she had thrived. And her relationship with the Queen—that was explicitly transactional and Tanya had never felt more fulfilled.
Outside, it quieted. Tanya pulled out her history of Lode and began reading, the words moving faster for her than they had a month ago, lulling her to sleep.
Something soft hit her in the face and fell in her lap. She looked up and saw Jana holding her tent open, smiling gently.
The other girl’s eyes were bright in the darkness. “I’m returning it,” she told Tanya. “I washed it and everything.”
Tanya picked up her nightdress, feeling the worn fabric, the frayed satin ribbon at the neck, the rip she had mended in the armpit. Jana coughed. “I guess you’ve got nicer ones now,” she said.
Tanya looked down at herself, at the brand-new slip of silver. “It feels nice to sleep in silk,” she admitted.
Jana bit her lip and stepped inside, lowering to her knees. She looked behind her, as if to confirm that the tent was closed.
It was.
She crawled toward Tanya until she couldn’t get closer and then sat back on her heels. Tanya could smell her, the moss she had been using for a pillow, the honeysuckle she was always chewing, and sensation flickered down her spine.
Tanya suddenly remembered she had felt kinship once—with Jana and Riley, in the Tomcat’s camp. They had been friends with her when it didn’t help them to be.
At least she thought what she had felt for Jana was kinship.
Jana reached out and put her hand on Tanya’s cheek; her hand was cool and scratchy with calluses.
“Thank you for returning my nightdress,” Tanya whispered, frozen.
Jana smiled and leaned forward—slowly, slowly, slowly—until Tanya felt her quick breath on her own, suddenly itchy lips, and the thief swerved, kissing her on the cheek.
It was a leisurely kiss, lingering and soft. Jana sat back, then kissed her again, hard and fast on the lips, and scampered out of the tent.
Tanya leaned back on her pillow, poisoned blood thrumming through her veins, her mind racing—reeling—and blank. She was sure she wouldn’t sleep at all.
Except she did. She slept like a baby, or a princess.
Jana rather uncharacteristically insisted they start immediately after dawn. But by the time the sun was high in the sky, Tanya saw that she had been right. Long before they stopped to water the horses, an unaccountable heat had swelled and the chill winter breeze was too gentle to pierce the thick, gummy air.
Tanya stayed on the mare’s back as the horse bent to drink out of the stream. She would have preferred to get down, stretch out the growing ache in her thighs, but the beast wouldn’t let her. Every time Tanya tried, she bucked or shuffled.
If the mare was going to be dragged to Bloodstone with a thief for a guide, the girl responsible for that indignity was going to be as uncomfortable as it was possible to make her.
The girl in question stretched her arms above her head anyway and rotated her hips in the saddle. She looked out at the flat, shining river and thought longingly of the fog of her home; the way the rolling of the ocean kept the air always in motion.
Jana came up next to her and handed her up a canteen. “Thirsty?”
Tanya grabbed at the canteen and drained it.
“This doesn’t make sense. It’s winter! Why is it so hot?” demanded Tanya. “I’ve had it with nature not making any sense. This is why the quill is so essential—there’s no other way to keep things controlled! The Queen is—” Tanya stopped abruptly, but her brain finished the sentence without her.
The Queen is right.
“The Queen?” asked Jana curiously. “You don’t mean you actually got an audience with the Queen and Council?”
“Of course not,” Tanya answered quickly. “Just . . . someone should do something about it. The Queen and Council should.”
Jana laughed. “I don’t think they could do anything about this heat,” she said, refilling her canteen. “It’s always hot on this road. It’s always been hot on this road and it will always be hot on this road.” She looked up at Tanya, sobering. “That quill is a good weapon, but it isn’t going to protect you from the fact that Bloodstone houses demons.”
Tanya shuddered, thrown back into the nightmare landscape that Bloodstone had echoed through her childhood.
Chapter
23
They followed the river for the rest of the afternoon. Eventually the pebbly strip of beach metamorphosed into crumbling caverns of rock and boulders that had been tumbled into stepped cliffs, steep enough that Tanya had to dismount and lead the mare with rope.
The rock changed color as well as formation. The brown, white, and black from the forest floor darkened to red and black, some studded with icy chunks of quartz. Everything green fell away as they picked their way down a nearly invisible path—no more trees, no more flowers, no more grass. No more squirrels either, although as the sun sank away Tanya thought she could see bright animal eyes peering out at her from the crevices.
As they descended—her ears popping as they rode—the temperature got more unpredictable, alternating between pockets of an oddly wet cold and breaths of fire. And the smell of brimstone and bad, old magic just kept growing.
The group tightened into a single-file column as what had previously passed for a path narrowed further and further until just before sunset, when Tanya found herself hovering at the edge of a cliff, staring down a stone bridge at least one hundred feet in the air over boiling rapids.
“Um.” Tanya looked quickly from side to side, searching desperately for any other route across the chasm. But all she saw were steaming waterfalls.
She heard Greer and Darrow behind her start to shuffle and shift. She didn’t blame them.
She shouldn’t have been scared. She knew that if worst came to worst, she could always fly. But, on the other hand, it wouldn’t be smart to advertise that—not so close to Bloodstone.
Tanya rode the mare step by painstaking s
tep across that bridge, no more than three feet wide, fear competing with almost tangible wet heat to suffocate her.
Eventually the mare deposited her back on solid ground, and Tanya found that they were at the mouth of a vast cavern. Two tall, wide slabs of granite stretched into the hazy yellow sky at opposing angles. They were joined in the middle by an iron gate, glowing red as iron pokers after being thrust in a fire. The bars of the gate were tall and sharp as spears.
They had reached the Gate of Bloodstone.
Jana approached the Gate, reaching out her hand to touch the iron. Tanya winced, expecting a shriek of pain and a scorched hand.
But that didn’t happen. Jana swallowed hard, spit in her hand, and pressed it against the gate.
She quickly let go but her spit stuck, smoking, sputtering, until it erupted in a wreath of flames. Just as quickly as they erupted, the flames went out and a rain of ash fell to the soot-stained rock below.
The gates to Bloodstone soundlessly slid to the side, dissolving into the granite walls, opening the city to them. Jana smiled. Not looking behind her, she strutted through, saying, apparently to the Gate, “They’re with me.”
Greer and Darrow looked at Tanya, eyes wide. Wordlessly, she gestured after Jana. They both hesitated, and for a moment she wasn’t sure they were going to obey. But they eventually exchanged a glance and followed Jana, hands on the knives hidden in their belts. Tanya was the last to go through, half expecting the Gate to slide shut on her, slicing her in half.
The first thing she saw was a canal of boiling, lava-laced . . . well, she supposed it was water, but it wasn’t like any water Tanya had ever seen. It was iridescent orange, red, and green, churning like a witch’s cauldron and bubbling swiftly down a winding canal.
She raised her eyes and viewed a network of canals crisscrossing the city as far as she could see—which wasn’t very far in the steam. All manner of boats went about their business on these waterways, piloted by every manner of human—young, old, huge, tiny, one-legged, male, female—all wearing thick gloves and suspicious expressions.
“Tanya!” She turned and Jana’s face appeared out of the steam. “Come on,” said the other girl, already having hopped off her horse and bopping around as if she were safe at her own dinner table—which, Tanya supposed, in a way, she was. “You don’t want to get lost this close to the Gate of all places. And once we get away from the Pitfire, it becomes a lot less steamy. Easier to see.” Jana disappeared into the fog again.
Wench Page 24
