Traitor Princess, Assassin Saint

by T. R. Sherwood

  The messenger just stared at him, open-mouthed. Heron barked out a short, sarcastic laugh.

  “Retirement is relative. I’ve stopped taking orders from the Crown and its nobles, but I still have plenty to do. The Wraith Initiative is far from over, and until it is…”

  Heron trailed off and slid a large panel away from the wall. Behind it, hundreds of small pieces of paper were pinned to the wall, covered in names and addresses and dates, all connected with black silk thread. The Wraith Initiative, one read. The messenger squinted at the names on the others. They were all metals, like Tin and Silver and Copper.

  “When did news of the memory ore deposit reach Seichre?”

  “Around six weeks ago, my lord.”

  Heron detached a piece of paper from the wall. It had the date of a day about six weeks ago scrawled across it, and a thin filament of black connected it to a name on the wall.

  “Tin disappeared about six weeks ago,” Heron said thoughtfully. “I think this might be his doing. Silver is dead, and Copper fled to Alrhen-Xiun. Yes, I think it must be Tin.”

  “My lord?”

  He turned to the messenger, and the fact that he wasn’t wearing a veil struck her with a jolt. Underneath it, he was handsome in a mild, average sort of way, but his black eyes were more alive than anything else around him. They sparkled and flashed like a volcanic eruption as he spoke, dynamic enough to be almost frightening.

  “You don’t need to know,” he decided. “In fact, you’d be better off not knowing. But what in the name of the Goddess does Tin want with that much volatile memory ore?” He froze. “Oh, no. Senne.”

  “Who?”

  Heron ignored her. “Is the horse you rode in on still here?”

  “Yes, my lord.”

  “Can I borrow it? You’ll get it back eventually, and in the meantime you can just stay here and make yourself at home. Or you can get ready to leave the country. Do whatever you feel is most appropriate.”

  The messenger felt anxiety twist in her stomach. “Sir, what’s going on?”

  “I don’t know,” Heron said, tossing his shawl across the back of a chair in favor of a much more businesslike black coat. “But I’m going to find out, and I know it can’t be anything good.”

  ✽✽✽

  The sun rose over the ocean and started to gild the whitecaps out in the harbor. Light soaked the streets of the Royal City of Seichre. Someone rapped sharply on the door to Wraith Manor.

  That’s strange, Senne thought, sitting up in bed. Normally everyone left Wraith Manor alone, frightened by its sharp peaked roofs, black walls, and monstrous resident. She got up, making the wooden frame of the bed creak, and Annara stirred.

  “What’s wrong?” she said sleepily.

  “It’s nothing. Go back to sleep.”

  Annara turned over peevishly and pulled the blanket over her head.

  Senne stretched and threw her coat on over her pajamas, then slipped her feet into her house slippers. The light had an early-autumn slant. Windows dripped little fragments of sun in unexpected corners. Someone banged on the door again, harder and more briskly.

  “I’m coming,” Senne called, and she opened the door.

  The man on the front steps was dressed all in gray, from his Crescentian-style cravat to his well-polished leather shoes. Everything he wore was a different shade of tombstone or gunmetal. The ring on his finger glittered, silver-gray and somehow industrial, as if it was meant to measure other rings instead of being worn.

  She looked up and met his eyes. They were tawny like the eyes of a lion and oddly intense. He looked very familiar, but she couldn’t quite remember his name.

  “Can I help you?” she said.

  “Yes.” His voice was strangely flat and strained, as if he was struggling to suppress a biting sense of irritation. “Did you know, Lord Wraith, that the organization that created you has grown weak?”

  “I haven’t heard anything from the Wraith Initiative in years,” Senne said warily. “I assumed it was disbanded. Either way, I don’t answer to them. I answer only to the Crown.”

  “You assumed incorrectly, Wraith. And that may change. It should change. It will change, under my leadership.”

  “Who are you?”

  “Do you not recognize me?” He removed his hat, revealing a head of smooth gray hair, combed back over his head. “I suppose that is only natural. I had little to do with the inconvenient work of raising you. I’ve always hated children, you see.”

  A name resurfaced in Senne’s memory. Tin. Every Wraith Initiative member was codenamed after a type of metal.

  “What do you want, Tin?”

  “Nothing,” he said, “but for you to do your duty.” He fiddled with a buckle on a leather case next to him. The leather was stippled and pocked, as if it had goosebumps. “Although you can’t exactly do that in your current form, can you?”

  “What do you mean?” she said cautiously.

  “Your monstrous form is more powerful, and therefore more useful.” He opened the case.

  The first thing Senne saw was the case’s black silk lining, lit from below with the shifting hues of memory ore. Then the effects of the ore hit her. Her vision flickered at the edges, tinting sepia, then green, as if a scene from a memory was trying to force its way into reality. She saw dim shapes shift and flicker behind Tin, and the air distorted into the shapes of faces of people she had once known. The air tasted like iron. Her skin felt bruised, and then it started to change.

  Senne screamed. What else could she do?

  ✽✽✽

  Annara woke with a start to the sound of a piercing, metallic keen. She ran to the entrance of the house, not bothering with shoes or slippers. The door swung on its hinges.

  Framed by the door, glistening and iridescent in the strong morning light, there was a massive, dragon-like creature. Its mouth was easily the size of Annara’s arm, with a long snout that bristled with black, crystalline teeth. Its claws were like dark quartz, slightly transparent and sharp enough to gouge scratches in the stone beneath them.

  This time, the creature was free. Annara froze in the doorway. Some atavistic instinct locked her limbs in place, like a rabbit under the fierce gaze of a fox. The creature’s eyes widened, blank and black. There was no trace of Senne in its animalistic gaze.

  It lunged in slow motion, scales rippling in the light. Motionless, Annara watched its jaws open sideways, ready to close around her throat and snap her spine. This was it, then. She was going to die by Senne’s hand, just like the fortune-teller said. Her destiny was here early.

  A gloved hand landed hard on her shoulder and pushed her away.

  Annara stumbled and snapped out of it enough to scramble away. Once she was out of range of the creature’s claws, she looked back. Heron, bare-faced and dressed in his usual black, had shoved her away at the last second and caught the creature’s massive face. A knife was buried up to its hilt in the creature’s neck, but the creature was so big that it hardly seemed to have made a difference.

  Heron caught her looking. “What are you waiting for?” he shouted. “Run!”

  Annara turned and ran without hesitation. Behind her, she heard the sounds of a fight: flesh hitting stone, metal against metal, a crash.

  She kept running until she reached the summit of a nearby hill, where she would have a good view. She sat down in the grass and started patting her pockets.

  Below, the creature that used to be Senne reached out one of its massive paws and backhanded Heron. He flipped midair and landed on his feet, although he wobbled slightly on the uneven cobblestones. Annara watched him regain his balance. A pair of curved daggers flashed into his hands. The wind started to pick up, making his coat flare out behind him.

  It was a good effort. He’s still going to lose, Annara realized. Heron was tiny next to the creature, and although he might have been faster, the creature was much, much stronger. He didn’t even have a sword or a pistol. He only had his two daggers, and against
something that big, he needed something with range.

  Annara took out a notebook and a charcoal pencil and started to take notes on the fight. How fast the creature was. The materials that its claws could cut.

  What are you doing? part of her brain shrieked at her as she did it. That’s someone who was kind to you. That’s someone you care about. Both of them were kind, actually. Both these people saved your life, and you’re going to let them destroy each other.

  “Of course,” Annara said out loud. “I am not about to ruin eight years of planning because of six months of comfort. I have no...”

  One of Senne’s claws caught Heron’s shoulder, ripping a shred of fabric and a splatter of blood free. The page of Annara’s notebook crumpled under her fingers.

  “No need for sentiment,” Annara finished shakily.

  “Annara?”

  She turned. Haol stood behind her, looking travel-worn in a dusty red cape and his usual black uniform.

  “Haol,” she said.

  “I have a message for you.”

  With difficulty, Annara shut her notebook and faced away from the fight below. “It’s time, then?”

  “Yes. The Xiunian says all your preparations are complete. She asked me to tell you to return to Archon.”

  “Already?”

  “Apparently. Annara, what is that thing?”

  Annara felt a slight pang in her chest as she saw Haol looking at Senne, his face twisted with horror. She covered it with a sneer.

  “A Seichrenese state secret,” she said.

  “What’s going on here? Should we help them?”

  “No,” Annara said. “Leave them be. It’s going to be over soon, anyway. We need to be back in Archon.”

  She tugged him away, down the other side of the hill and towards the harbor. He stumbled slightly, frowning as he tried to look over his shoulder.

  “What is this, Annara? What are you planning?”

  “You’ll see,” Annara said. “You’ll all see.”

  ✽✽✽

  Senne floated in a sea of gray. Slowly, it coalesced into a monochrome version of the world, bleached gray-white and blurry. Colors seeped into it slowly, intensifying until everything was oversaturated and nauseatingly bright.

  Her body was the wrong shape. Everything was too small and she was too big, too unwieldy, with angles in the wrong places. She felt her hind legs— no, her knees— bend backwards, and a wave of nausea rolled up her throat. Scales crusted her skin like a thick rash. She had never been conscious during her transformation before.

  Her hand reached out and ripped through the air in front of her. She saw Heron’s thin, lanky form dart out of the way like a minnow in water. None of this was under her control. She was a powerless observer, locked behind the eyes of something bent on destruction.

  “Senne,” Heron said unsteadily, from somewhere to her left. “Can you hear me?”

  She snapped at him, and he dodged to the side. A strange laugh bubbled up from deep in her chest.

  “Of course I can hear you, Heron,” she said, except it wasn’t her saying it. Whatever darkness piloted her body spoke through her mouth in her voice, with harsh metallic overtones.

  “I want to talk to Senne,” Heron said, very clearly.

  She let out a roar that turned into a laugh and jumped at him again. He ducked out of the way at the last minute, but her claws caught the edge of his coat where it flapped open and ripped three slits in the wool.

  “I don’t want to fight you,” he said, clutching his moon-shaped knives.

  “Oh, that’s rich,” the creature growled. “Why shouldn’t you fight me? Why shouldn’t you hurt me? Look at me. Look at what I am right now. Why shouldn’t you kill me and do everyone else a favor?”

  Heron parried her claws with the edges of his knives, his feet slipping on the stone. His face was pale but still as composed as he ever was, with those bright black eyes narrowed into determined slits.

  “It’s not like I don’t understand how you feel,” he said evenly, “but you have to—”

  “I don’t have to do anything!”

  Her claws started to stretch. Something boiled under her skin, and new spines erupted from her scales. She lashed out, and she finally felt something connect. Her claws ripped into Heron’s stomach, and she heard his slight, pained gasp.

  “You don’t get to tell me what to do,” she hissed.

  He staggered backwards, pressing one hand to his abdomen. His fingers came away slightly bloodied, but it wasn’t a fatal wound. He shifted his stance, gripping both daggers and staring up at her.

  Run, Senne thought desperately. Give up. Go away. Leave me here and run.

  He didn’t, and while he hesitated, the creature caught his left wrist in its jaws and bit his hand clean off. It flung the severed hand away, still clutching its dagger, and shoved its clawed digits straight through his rib cage and clean out the other side.

  Heron’s mouth opened, but no sound came out. She could see through the small dark hollow space between his teeth to the back of his mouth. His tongue was too red with blood. He choked, eyes wide. Blood sloughed in thick, heavy streams from his severed wrist.

  “You’re so perfect, Heron,” the creature said in Senne’s voice. “You’re everything I’m not. You can handle anything. Whenever something happens, you just shrug it off. You laugh. You never say what you really mean.”

  She twisted her claw deeper into his chest. A small, desperate whimper escaped from the back of his throat, and twin trickles of blood streaked down his chin.

  “Nothing ever really hurts you, does it, Heron?” she continued, bringing her misshapen head down to get a closer look at his face. “Tell me. Does this hurt? Does it hurt now?”

  He was dead by then, of course. His eyes had gone glassy and unfocused, and his remaining dagger clattered out of his hand.

  “Does it hurt?” the monster said, positioning her teeth next to his ear. “Does it? Does it hurt?”

  She felt the corpse twitch. Not quite dead after all, then. Heron lifted his head up, very slowly, and licked his lips, which had gone sticky with blood.

  “Yes,” he said. “It hurts. It always hurt.”

  The creature recoiled and withdrew her claws. Heron staggered, but remained standing, despite the massive crater where his heart should have been.

  “It always hurt,” he said again, a little louder. “Everything hurt, all the time, but I didn’t tell you because I wanted to think that you still had a future, Senne. A future that wasn’t quite as bleak as my present as Lord Wraith. Because you were a child.”

  He swallowed, apparently with some difficulty. From somewhere deep inside the creature, Senne realized that he was crying. Tears streaked glittering paths on the dust and blood on his cheeks. Even the creature seemed to recoil. Tears didn’t make sense on Heron. He never cried.

  “And yet it seems that all I succeeded in doing was making you feel like you were alone,” he said, choking back a sob. “I’m sorry, Senne. I should have done so much better for you.”

  “You— how are you still standing?” the creature said. “I killed you. You should be dead.”

  Heron raised his stump of a wrist, and the blood that lay in thick clotting pools on the cobblestones turned black like ink and started to tremble. It changed shape, elongating and lengthening into hundreds of little threads. The filaments connected to his severed wrist, and his missing hand rose up, tugged forward by the dark blood, and reattached itself to his body.

  There was a thin, ragged line marking the place where it had been severed, but soon even that fragmented and disappeared. The hole in his chest was healing too, with little dark threads of blood and bone weaving back together.

  “You have yet to refine your heart shard,” he said. “I refined mine a long time ago. I think— yes, that is probably the only way to end this.”

  He ripped his gloves off both hands. His fingernails turned the gray-black of tarnished metal and lengthened into claws t
o match her own. Small horns protruded from his disheveled hair. The back of his coat suddenly bulged, and for a split second, Senne thought he would transform to match, two mindless monsters ripping each other to pieces in the streets of the Royal City.

  Instead, wings emerged from the back of his coat, cutting slits in the fabric as they spread. Each feather was dark metal, delicate and formed with exquisite detail as if made from filigree or lace. They rasped against each other as he shook out the wings, carving two long scratches in the ground below him with his feathers.

  She let out a wordless howl and dove at him, but he was already in the air, weaving over and under her attacks. He wasn’t as graceful in the air as he was on land. She nicked his legs with the tip of her claws, twice, but none of his wounds ever bled for long.

  He waited for an opening. When one came, he fell to the ground and tucked into a roll. He came up, bracing himself against the stones, and plunged his hand into the creature’s chest. His fingernails cut like knives. Ribs cracked.

  A shiver passed over her scales. She suddenly shrunk into the form of a human woman, half-conscious, with her long black hair strewn over her face.

  Senne’s lips were dry. She licked them and said, “I’m… sorry. I’m sorry.”

  “Yes,” Heron said. He squeezed his eyes shut, and tears rolled down his cheeks and gathered on his chin, where they hung, trembling. “So am I.”

  And he wrenched her heart out of her chest.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The ship pushed away from the harbor. Annara watched the water swirl into foam by the hull, and then she turned and watched the peaked roofs of the Royal City fade into the haze. There were no signs of the conflict between Heron or Senne. There was no sign that anything at all had gone wrong.

  Haol joined her and rested his forearms on the side of the ship. His cloak flapped in the wind behind him. Its hem was stained with salt.

  “What was that all about back there?” he asked.

  Annara scrubbed a hand across her face, although there was no blood on it. Senne had cleaned it all off last night. “Seichrenese internal politics,” she said. “Nothing that affects us.”