by Traci Chee
“And we’re one step closer to the Cage,” their leader added.
“You think we’ll meet Serakeen, Hatchet?” Redbeard asked. “I hear Garula met him, when his boy won in the Cage.”
The hair rose on Sefia’s forearms. The Scourge of the East. Was he responsible for the kidnappings, the brandings, the killings? It fit with his brutality. But why here? Why pay impressors to turn boys into murderers when he had enough murderers in his fleet already?
Hatchet flicked the last of his scab into the dirt and squinted at the raw skin beneath. “I couldn’t care less about Serakeen. It’s been too long since we’ve even gotten that far, and I’m dying to find out just how much the Arbitrator pays.” He stood abruptly and motioned to one of his other men.
Sefia watched one of the tallest men in the crew disengage from the rest of the group and trot over to where Hatchet and Redbeard sat.
“Yeah, boss?” he asked. When he spoke, the scar across his lower lip stretched and pulled, making his face seem crooked, like that of a clown.
“Get that mess cleaned up, Pal.” Hatchet gestured to the spit and carcass. “Bury it. Far away. I don’t want scavengers to come nosing around here tonight.”
Up in the tree, Sefia set her jaw. So the impressors were Serakeen’s lackeys. How many boys did he have now? How many boys had died for this?
These men didn’t have Nin. She doubted they knew anything about the book either. But they were connected, the book and Serakeen’s impressors, by the symbol. And she had to find out how. She checked for Nin’s old lock picks in the inner pocket of her vest and settled down to wait.
You’ll get more than scavengers tonight, she thought.
• • •
One by one the fires became red pulsing embers, and the men settled under their blankets. Some of them snored, but most fell into the deep soundless sleep of the exhausted.
Sefia shouldered her pack and climbed down from her tree, alighting at the base of the trunk like a shadow. Unhooking the safety catch on her knife, she crept forward. The lone sentry, a young impressor with red hair, sat on one of the carts at the edge of the clearing, leaning against the sideboard for support.
She paused beside the cart wheel, watching the back of the sentry’s head. The handle of her knife grew hot in her palm. She couldn’t risk him alerting the others. She had the advantage. Easy. It would be quick.
Still she didn’t move. The side of his face was silhouetted in the dying firelight, which passed through the fine fuzz on his jaw, illuminating each thin strand. He was barely more than a boy himself.
The sentry’s head tipped forward. He began snoring softly.
Swallowing, Sefia released her knife. She slipped the lock picks into her hand and crept to the crate, looking forlorn at the edge of the clearing.
Running her fingertips along the splintery edges, Sefia searched for the heavy iron padlock and grinned. It was a simple lock, the sort you could commission from any common blacksmith. She’d been picking locks like this since she was nine. She took a deep breath and scanned the rest of the clearing, but no one stirred.
She traced the symbol on the corner of the crate. Two lines for her parents, one for Nin. One for her, and what she had to do next. Inserting her picks into the lock, she set to work.
After a few seconds of tinkering, she released the padlock and eased the door open with one hand. With the other, she grasped her knife. Deep inside, she was still hoping to see Nin, or at least books and stacks of paper, but she wasn’t surprised when a battered-looking boy emerged from the shadows. He was laced with fresh wounds—cuts and bruises on his legs and arms, across his bare back. He peered out from under the crook of his arm, but she couldn’t tell if he was afraid or ready to attack.
“Shh,” she murmured, stealing a glance at the sleeping sentry. “I’m here to help you.”
The stench was awful: a mix of blood and sweat and urine. But she gritted her teeth and whispered in the kindest voice she could muster, “Come with me.” The boy cringed, but she said it again, though her hand didn’t stray from her knife. “Please, come with me.”
He began to crawl. As he crept into the light, she saw more wounds, scars. The skin around his neck was puckered and white—a scar that encircled his throat like a collar.
At the sight of it, her sense of the other world washed over her and Sefia staggered back, blinking.
In an instant she had one of those dizzying visions, like the one she’d had the moment she learned to read. The boy was flesh and blood and bone, yes, but also pulsing with light. Little streams of light circling and expanding around him like a river. For a second, Sefia swore she saw storms, great roiling clouds rolling with thunder, and lightning cracking overhead. There was smoke. Hot wet blood. Teeth. Fists and feet.
Then, just as quickly, it was replaced by a sense of smallness and quiet. Night. Kerosene lamps, reflected a hundred times. Walking alone on a rocky coast with white-capped waves thrumming against stone. In the dark, two pairs of hands gently exploring each other, roving quietly over knuckles, cuticles, fingertips, the delicate details. Smiles like patches of sun.
Then it was gone.
Blinking, Sefia leaned on the side of the crate for support, digging the heel of her hand into the splintered edge, as if the pain would distract her from the upheaval inside her.
Nausea. That was familiar, at least. But the rest?
She’d done nothing different. But when she saw that scar, it was like her sense of the lighted world had boiled over all at once, rushing over her, revealing images, stories . . . or were they memories? History?
Was this magic something her parents had wanted to keep from their enemies?
Whatever it was, she was getting better at it.
The boy was fully out of the crate now. He was taller than her, maybe a year or two older. Looking wide-eyed at the shadows, he hugged his arms awkwardly, like he didn’t know what to do with them. All he wore was a pair of ripped trousers, and his bare feet gripped tentatively at the ground. He was underfed, so skinny his bones protruded under his skin, and he looked so lost, standing there, clutching his own elbows. The scars at his neck glowed almost white in the moonlight.
Whatever it was she had seen in the flash of light, it had been real, she was sure of that. Somehow, she’d peered into him, like watching a frothing sea through the eye of a needle, all those images and thoughts and feelings at once, all part of him. She knew what he had done—what he had been made to do—but she couldn’t forget how tenderly he had touched those other hands. She didn’t know whose hands, and that didn’t matter. It was that sense of calm and warmth. Blinking back a headache that had begun knotting behind her eyes, she fastened the safety on her knife.
But she couldn’t leave yet. She crawled inside the crate, gagging as she riffled through the bits of straw on the floor and felt the walls for signs of safes or hidden compartments. There was nothing.
She could have sunk into the ground.
There was nothing.
The boy shifted hesitantly beside her, still looking around like a lost child. Gritting her teeth, Sefia got to her feet, clipped the padlock back in place, and tapped him on the shoulder to let him know they had to go.
Instantly, his hand snapped over her wrist. Sefia went for her knife. But he looked surprised when he saw what he had done, and quickly released her. There was a horrified expression in his eyes, like he couldn’t believe that was his hand. He hung his head. She let the blade slip back into its sheath.
With one last longing glance at the crate and the symbol on it, Sefia headed off into the jungle. The boy fell into step beside her, strangely silent, and together they stole away into the woods.
They walked for hours without saying anything, picking their way over logs and under low-hanging tree branches. Their pace was glacial, slow enough to set Sefia’s teeth on edge, to ma
ke her jump at every branch snapping, every rustle of movement. But she couldn’t leave him.
The boy soon began shivering in the moist night air. He didn’t complain. His teeth didn’t even chatter. But he hunched his shoulders and rubbed his arms and Sefia knew he was cold. Pausing a moment to pry the blanket from her pack, she offered it without touching him. He looked at her warily, but she forced a smile, and he took it and wrapped it around his shoulders.
They continued walking. She stopped once or twice more to give him meat to chew and a few sips from her canteen, but otherwise, they walked without speaking, and almost without sound. Sefia was glad he didn’t try to make conversation. She didn’t want to get close to him. Those who were close to her always got hurt.
It was near dawn when they finally halted. They had crossed streams and doubled back on their own tracks more than once, just in case the men had a tracker among them, and Sefia was exhausted. She clambered wearily up a nearby tree and began slinging her hammock.
The boy followed, wincing, but he made it. Sefia gestured him into the hammock, where he fell asleep immediately. Settling herself on a wide limb, she leaned back against the trunk, knotting a rope around her so she wouldn’t fall. For a while she tried to keep watch, scanning the ground for signs of movement, but soon she drifted off, frowning and fists clenched, as the night melted into gray predawn.
• • •
Once the door began to open, letting in a crack of moonlight so bright it was painful, the boy scuttled to the corner of the crate and huddled there, shielding himself from the light. He had been locked up for days, had been jostled, bumped, dropped. If he saw sky at all, it was only through the holes in the sides of the crate; everything else was dark and close, smelling of blood and waste.
He winced. Every extra breath of light and air meant fear and pain were coming. Fear and pain were coming soon, and it would hurt and someone would die. The sight of the trees and the forest floor made him cower and cringe. The moonlight was drifting through the door. Fear and pain were coming.
Instead, it was a voice that came to him—Shh. I’m here to help you.—like a soft dark tendril in the devastating light, stringing one word after another so, so gently, stirring inside him memories so deep that they had become like dreams: Come with me. A dark shape reached for him and he cringed, but the words were still there: Please, come with me.
He began to crawl, like an animal, out of the crate and toward the words, which fluttered before him like delicate shadows. He stood and blinked and looked around. Fear and pain were not here. They were not here. Only this cold, and this voice. But he remained alert. Because they were coming. They always came. And it would hurt, and someone would die.
• • •
Knife cuts in a tree trunk, high above the forest floor: This is a book.
Chapter 7
Born Killer
Over the spreading canopy of the Oxscinian forest, the clouds rolled through the sky, growing darker and darker with each wave. The night creatures returned to their hollows and grottoes, and the birds flitted nervously between the branches, twittering. Rain was coming.
It wasn’t until well after noon that Sefia woke. The rope tying her to the tree dug into her waist, and she spent a few moments unknotting it while she studied the boy, asleep in the same position he’d been in the night before. His nose was crooked—it must have been broken in the past—and there was a slight powdering of nearly invisible freckles on his tawny cheeks. He looked more human now, less like a caged animal.
She wondered what her vision had shown her the night before. Moments from an ordinary life. His life? Did this magic allow her to see the past? Had her parents been seers too? Was that why the woman in black wanted them?
No, Sefia corrected herself. The woman in black had said it. She’d wanted the book.
Was she in league with Serakeen?
Sefia unhooked her pack as quietly as she could, but at the slight noise the boy opened his eyes. They trained on her, golden, or amber, with flecks of copper and mahogany in them. He seemed unafraid.
She’d never been this close to a boy her own age before. She hadn’t been this close to anyone since Nin was taken. Coiling the rope into her pack, she averted her eyes from his bare skin. “You can go home today.”
The boy didn’t speak, but he crawled slowly out of the hammock, barely rocking it. He looked around him like a baby animal seeing the world for the first time. Even the leaves and the grayed-out light filtering through the branches seemed new to him. He rubbed his eyes.
As Sefia soon learned, the boy didn’t speak at all. She didn’t know if he could speak. He only watched her, mild and curious, as she stowed the hammock in her pack, and followed her down from the tree without a word.
She quickly grew irritated with his helplessness. He just stood there, waiting for her to do something. She had to press a tin cup into his hands just to get him to drink.
As he slowly chewed his breakfast, she sat opposite from him with her arms crossed over her chest, watching. The skin around his throat was pinkish white where the burns had healed unevenly.
His right arm had been burned too, with fifteen parallel marks the length of her palm and the thickness of a finger, from the oldest scars on his shoulder to the newest past his elbow, like the rungs on a ladder.
She didn’t question him about them, but she did ask about the symbol, tracing it in the dirt for him: the circle, four lines.
He shook his head.
“Didn’t think so.” She dusted off her hands and pointed west. “There’s a town a day’s walk that way. Just keep going and you’ll make it. Someone’ll get you home.”
Dutifully, the boy turned in the direction she was pointing, then turned around. His eyes were questions.
“I’m going to follow them.” She pointed to the on the ground. “Maybe I’ll get some answers out of this yet.”
The boy nodded as if he understood, so she put half her provisions into his hands—more than he would need for just one day. Then she shouldered her pack and began walking back the way they’d come. She hadn’t gone ten paces before she heard his faint footsteps behind her. She turned, and the boy walked up to her.
“What?”
He cocked his head and blinked.
She scowled at him. “You’re free now. Go home.”
The corners of his mouth twitched. Maybe he almost smiled.
“Get moving.” Sefia paused. “Before the rain comes.”
When he didn’t respond, she muttered a curse under her breath and began walking again. But the boy continued to shadow her, clutching a few strips of jerky and saying nothing.
Every so often, Sefia turned to see if he was still there. He always was.
“Go away,” she ordered once. “What are you doing?”
The boy merely looked at her and put a narrow piece of meat in his mouth. He gnawed and stared. When she started off again, he followed, chewing slowly.
After an hour, Sefia took the meat out of his hands and stuffed it back into her pack. She gave him a drink of water and waited as he sipped. They had stopped beside a massive log, overgrown with moss and ferns. It had ripped a huge hole in the canopy when it fell, creating a clearing that let in the light. The sky was darker now, completely clouded over. The storm would break soon. Sefia sat down on the log and put her chin in her hands. They were losing time. It was already midafternoon. The boy stood awkwardly clutching the canteen.
“They’re probably looking for you,” she said, plucking it out of his hands. “You should get as far away from them as you can.” She waved him away, trying to ignore the pained expression in his eyes. “Now.”
The boy looked down at his bare feet.
“You don’t understand.” Her voice rose. She fluttered her hands uselessly at him. “I can’t take care of you!” She was speaking too loudly. She wasn’t listeni
ng hard enough. Behind her, footsteps crunched in the mulch. “It’s too dangerous.” She didn’t hear the creaking of leather or the men’s voices either. A last desperate hiss: “Just go!”
Two men stumbled into the clearing. Hatchet’s men. Sefia recognized the young sentry, though now his hair had been roughed up on one side and there was a bruise soaking his cheek. The other man was already pulling out his sword.
Sefia jumped to her feet, swinging her bow from her back and nocking an arrow in one smooth motion. The sentry cried out. Their swords flashed.
She let the arrow fly.
But the boy was faster than all of them. He was a golden blur leaping past Sefia, landing on the second man’s chest, knocking him aside so the arrow struck his shoulder instead of his heart. The man let out a grunt as the air left his lungs, the boy on top of him like a jaguar on its prey. There was a brief struggle, fists and fingers. Then the boy grabbed the man’s head and twisted. Sefia heard the crack and felt its tremors go up her spine.
The sentry backed away, turning to run, but the boy grabbed the man’s sword. He was standing. The blade was leaving his hands.
Everything slowed.
The boy’s arm extended, fingers empty.
The sentry’s back exposed.
Sefia blinked.
Between them, the trajectory of the sword was outlined in rippling eddies of light. She could see them more clearly this time: each current was made up of thousands of tiny specks, all drifting and swirling.
The boy’s hand—the sword—the sentry’s back.
She blinked again, and the currents of light disappeared. Time snapped into motion again.
The blade went straight through the sentry’s spine. Her bow clattered as it fell from her hands. She looked for the boy. He was just standing there, staring at the bodies.
The men were dead. The boy had killed them. They’d died so fast. She hadn’t known it would be so fast.
