by Traci Chee
“But I’m not doing anything!” Lon was about to continue when he saw the girl at the threshold of the Library. He didn’t know when it had happened, but as if out of thin air she had appeared in the doorway, clutching two blue-bound volumes in her arms.
His face reddened.
She was small and thin, with big dark eyes and black hair knotted in a bun near the top of her head, exposing her neck. Lon’s heart pattered around in his chest. She was arrestingly beautiful. Sometimes when he saw her he forgot to breathe.
She was the Apprentice Assassin, but she didn’t have a name. Assassins didn’t have names. Assassins knew the hunt and the kill, and nothing else. Instead, she was known as the Second; her Master, the First. Like the other divisions, there were only ever two.
The Second was a few years older than him and had been there longer, so she had more privileges, like being able to check out Fragments from the Library and return them at her leisure. In the year since his induction, she’d never said more than a handful of words to him. Not that she was always around. Like Rajar and the Apprentice Administrator, she and her Master frequently left the Main Branch on errands for Director Edmon. It was only Lon who was stuck here.
But he knew she was talented. Without meaning to, he kept turning toward her, to see her better, to see what she would do.
She moved with quick, delicate motions like a bird or a dancer, shifting from foot to foot in a silent, complicated shuffle, as if she were practicing choreography. A kick, a slide, a tap of her toe on the tile. Then she looked up, saw Lon staring at her, and stopped. Her eyes bored into his, daring him to keep looking.
He blushed and turned away.
Finally Erastis noticed her by the door. “Come, come in, my dear!” he said, motioning her over to the table. His gloved hands fluttered like large white moths. “You’ve completed your reading of the Ostis Guide to Talismanic Blade Weapons, have you? What did you think?”
She crossed the tiled floor soundlessly and set the volumes on the table beside the Librarian. “Thank you. I have what I need.”
“Excellent!”
Lon approached the table too, his frustration with the Master Librarian momentarily forgotten. He tried not to look directly at her. “For what?” he asked.
He felt the Second staring at him silently, but Erastis beamed. “The Second will be forging her own bloodsword soon.”
“What’s a bloodsword?”
The Second glanced at the Master Librarian, who gestured for her to explain. Frowning, she pressed her fingertips to the edge of the table. “A bloodsword is a weapon that’s undergone Transformation. You’ve heard of those?” When Lon shook his head, she tried again, “A magic weapon? Like the Executioner?”
A black gun cursed to kill every time it was removed from its holster, and if you didn’t pick your target, it would pick one for you.
“Oh. Yeah.”
“According to Ostis, you can use Transformation to imbue a sword with ‘a thirst for blood,’ so when it comes time to kill, the blade itself seeks out its targets.”
“You mean the sword kills on its own?”
“No. It becomes a more accurate and deadly tool for a skilled swordsman. In the wrong hands, it would likely injure or kill the bearer.”
“Oh.”
“It will also soak up the blood of its targets, giving bloodswords their distinctive ferrous odor,” Erastis added helpfully, “and making for easy cleanup.”
“Wow . . .” Lon paused. For a moment he was more impressed than ever with the Second, with the things she could do, the things she was learning, but then his jealousy and frustration returned. He whirled on Erastis. “She gets a bloodsword? Why don’t I get a bloodsword? Or whatever! A . . . a bloodpen!”
Suddenly the Second was in motion, all curves and violent grace, striking him in the chest so hard he stumbled back into the chair she’d somehow slid out from under the table. He plopped down, dazed.
She was so fast.
She had touched him.
He could feel her handprint like a burn throbbing against his collarbone.
“This is your Master,” the Second snapped. “You don’t speak to him that way.”
Erastis chuckled. “Oh, he does this all the time. I don’t let it get to me. I went without an Apprentice for decades. I wouldn’t have chosen him if he wasn’t worth it.”
She made a disgusted sound in the back of her throat.
“Hey!” Lon glared at her and rubbed his chest where she’d hit him.
The Second met his gaze. It was strange: When he was a kid, he’d made a living off his ability to read people. But he couldn’t tell what she was feeling now. Annoyed? Scornful? Likely. That’s how she always looked at him. But as she closed her fingers, he couldn’t help but wonder if she felt the same warm pulsing in her palm as he did in his chest.
Lon glanced away. “I am worth it,” he declared, standing. “I’ll show you.”
Without waiting for her to respond, he looked over at the skull and blinked. The Illuminated world burst to life before him, an interconnected web of brilliance.
There was a hairline fracture in the jawbone. He followed it back through the glinting threads of the old Librarian’s life. “When Morgun was an Apprentice, he was walking down the stairs when the Apprentice Soldier shoved him.”
Beside him, the Second added, “Morgun fell forward, cracking his jaw on the banister. Stupid. Soldiers have no restraint.”
She must have been reading the skull too, as quick to rise to a challenge as he was. Lon glanced at her, and his heart dropped.
In the Illuminated world, she was radiant. Like a comet. Like devastation and loneliness. All fire and white heat, blazing defiantly across the black.
“That’s two out of three,” Erastis said, sounding amused. “You have one more.”
Lon searched the skull for another mark, another referent, but found nothing. He walked over to it and picked it up, turning it in his hands, peering into its darkened crevices.
That was when he saw it: protrusions deep within the temporal bone, where the ear canal would have been. He would never have seen it with his eyes alone, but in the web of light he could peer past the bone into the hollows of the skull. He laughed.
“You’ve seen it,” Erastis said.
“He was deaf!” Lon crowed. “Morgun was deaf. These bony growths closed his ear canals when he was an infant.”
He blinked, and the light faded from the world. “See?” He turned to the Second, grinning, chin thrust out.
But the Second frowned and shook her head. Her pupils were pinpricks, barely visible in her dark brown eyes. She must have still been using the Sight. “Where?” she asked, all her annoyance with him gone.
Another time, he would have wanted to gloat, but not now. Not to her.
Lon gave her the skull, feeling her open palms slide over the backs of his hands, and pointed to the cavity in the temporal bone. “Here.”
Her eyes widened, and he knew she was seeing Morgun as a child, holding his ears and crying with pain. She was seeing a doctor strike a tuning fork and hold it up to the sides of his head. She was seeing Morgun rubbing his fingers by his ears, listening for a whisper of sound, and slowly growing accustomed to a life lived in silence.
The Second blinked again, and her pupils returned to normal. “How’d you even know it was there?” she asked.
“He has a good teacher,” Erastis said, returning his spectacles to his face.
Lon laughed. The Second was watching him, her mouth pulling slightly upward at the corners. A smile. In the whole year he’d known her, he’d never seen her smile. It was a magical thing. When she caught him looking at her, her smile widened. And this time he didn’t look away.
Chapter 11
The Folded Page
Tanin fed leaf after leaf into the campfire,
where they curled inward like blazing tongues before they shriveled and turned to ash. Around her in the smoke, the trackers laughed and told ribald stories that would have made a lesser woman flush with embarrassment. Tanin, however, smiled tolerantly at their jokes—she liked to consider herself above such petty emotions. On another night, she might even have joined them; after all, she could tell a dirty story as well as the rest of them.
But she was in no mood for it tonight.
Tanin trailed her finger through the leaves at the edge of the campfire, tracing the letters arranged there:
S A BOOK
She frowned. It had taken them three months to learn the girl even existed, and another two to figure out she was still in Oxscini, but they were close now. Close enough for Tanin to abandon what she was doing and join the Assassin in the humid jungles of the Forest Kingdom. Close enough that she could almost feel the draw of the Book like the draw of a magnet on iron dust.
They would catch up to the girl in three days.
She plucked up a leaf with deep purple veins and spun it between her fingers. The girl must have written this sentence hundreds of times by now. As Tanin and the trackers closed the distance between them, the words became more and more obvious—carved into logs, scrawled onto stones with charcoal—as if the girl were deliberately leaving a trail for them to follow.
To the trackers, the words were as meaningful as scat or broken twigs, signs of the girl’s passage but nothing more, and Tanin kept it that way, eliminating every letter they found.
And if a tracker’s curiosity overcame his discretion, she eliminated him too.
More than anything else, the girl’s recklessness bothered her. If the girl’s parents had taught her to write, they should have taught her to be more careful. They should have taught her that words were dangerous. That if they fell into the wrong hands, it could be the undoing of a plan that had taken generations to put in place.
She gathered the remaining leaves and flung them into the fire, where they caught, flaming, and drifted upward like burning black pages. Sitting back, she watched the leaves flicker out in the understory.
Beside her, the Assassin glowered at the trackers, the darkness of the jungle rising behind her like two black wings. Like her master, who had been called away on a mission in the Oxscinian capital, she wore all black, and from beneath her hood, her eyes darted from one man to the next as their jokes grew more and more vulgar.
Nudging her with his elbow, a stout man named Erryl winked sloppily at her and extended a flask. “Hey, you’re awfully quiet. Why don’t you loosen up?”
The Assassin’s pale blue gaze roved once over his hands and face before flicking away again.
Erryl laughed. His oily cheeks gleamed in the firelight. “Come on, you’re making the rest of us look bad.”
Hesitantly, the Assassin took the flask and lifted it to her lips. A second later, she thrust it away from her again, coughing. When the trackers laughed, her porridge-like skin flushed with shame. She seemed to wilt into the shadows.
Erryl snatched the flask out of her hands, guffawing.
Tanin narrowed her silvery eyes at him in warning, but he was too drunk to notice.
“You can always judge a woman by how she takes her moonshine.” He chortled. “Does she swallow or—”
“You can always judge a man by his talk.” Tanin’s words were as precise as a blade parting skin. “The more he has to say, the less he knows.”
The others laughed as Erryl sputtered.
“In fact, judging by how very much you talk, I’d say you know very little about anything.” Her voice dug into him again. “Better you keep your mouth closed for the duration of your time with us, I think. Maybe you’ll learn something.”
“I was just trying to have a little fun—”
“At the expense of my lieutenant?” Tanin laughed coldly. “Let me make this profoundly clear: You are expendable. She is not. As such, you will treat her with respect and deference to the point of obsequiousness. If you do not, she has my full permission to dismember you as quickly or as slowly as she pleases.”
The man blanched; his bloodshot eyes darted to the Assassin’s sword. The black scabbard was embossed in intricate detail—mere designs to the uninitiated, but readers like Tanin and the Assassin could pick out hundreds of tiny words hand-tooled in the leather: spells of protection for the bearer, curses against her enemies. As if responding to his fear, a tangy copper smell snaked out of the sheath, pervading the air.
Dusting off her hands, Tanin stood. “With that, gentlemen, I bid you good night.” She twisted her graying black hair away from her face and left the ring of firelight. Behind her, the trackers began speaking again, their voices more subdued, and as she hiked into the shadows, she glanced once over her shoulder at the Assassin, who smiled back at her.
Darkness hung from the canopy like black curtains, and as Tanin’s eyes adjusted, she picked her way among sprawling roots and rotting logs until she reached a clearing.
Under the light of the stars, she drew a folded page from her vest. The paper was old and creased, no longer stiff to the touch but pliable as cloth. The writing was hurried and cramped, the margins overflowing with questions and hastily jotted notes, but she could have recited every phrase and placed every punctuation mark with her eyes closed.
A copy of a copy. Most of the original Fragment had been destroyed by the fire, the burning pages flapping and frittering away into ash, all their words turned to dust. She had ordered what was left to be locked safely in the vault, but not before she copied this one page.
It was maddeningly incomplete—paragraphs scorched at the edges, whole words blotted out by fire—and over the years her notes had overwhelmed the actual text with conjecture and half-completed sentences until it was unreadable to anyone but herself.
Suddenly, she looked up. The stars had changed positions in the sky. She must have been standing there, studying the page, for hours. “I don’t know why you let them get to you,” she said to the darkness.
The Assassin stepped forward, materializing from the tree line as if out of thin air. “Easy for you to say. They like you.”
Tanin smiled as the sweet coppery smell wafted around her. She had learned a trick or two from the Assassins over the years, but she’d never be able to disappear into the shadows the way they could.
Just as well. She had no interest in being invisible.
“They fear me,” she said, “as they should you.”
“They do fear me.” The Assassin picked at the frayed cuff of her blouse.
“If they feared you, they’d respect you.” Tanin sat down on an overgrown log, patting the damp wood beside her. “And I wouldn’t have to intervene on your behalf.”
“You didn’t have to,” the Assassin muttered, joining her.
“Of course I did.”
Although the vows of her order forbade her from having a family of her own, Tanin still remembered younger sisters from her life before her induction: awkward, unpopular, willful, like less-beautiful versions of their older sisters, who they followed around like puppies. But you loved them—didn’t you?—for their nerve, their loyalty, and because they were your family.
And though Tanin wasn’t related to her by blood, the Assassin was family.
Tanin glanced down at the paper, as if the words might have rearranged themselves when she wasn’t looking. But they hadn’t, and she tucked the folded page back into her vest. She could never figure out the specifics, but the one thing she had always known was that she would get the Book back.
And now she knew when.
Three days.
The Assassin laid her head on Tanin’s shoulder. “Anyway,” she said, “thank you.”
Tanin pressed her cheek to the top of the Assassin’s head, her senses filling with copper. She closed her eyes, sighing. “Anytim
e.”
Chapter 12
The Boy in the Cabin
Sefia and Archer had reached the cloud forests of the Kambali Mountains, the last range before the land sloped sharply toward the north coast of Oxscini. In the alpine jungles, lakes and little rivers drew herds of deer and the big cats that hunted them, making for plentiful game. Three summers ago, she had come here with Nin to trade with the hunter-trapper families who lived in the cabins peppered throughout the mountains. Having been a loner all her life, Sefia hadn’t known what to do with the other children, so while they were playing Ship of Fools and gambling for copper kispes, she stole their most valuable trinkets.
A branch snapped in the woods—something large, from the sound of it—and Sefia and Archer dashed off the path, hunkering down among the leaves.
From down the trail, voices drifted toward them.
“That’s the problem with the wasting disease. The whole forest was littered with carcasses that year, just rotting away. We couldn’t do anything with them. Their meat and hides were useless.”
“What did you do?”
Two people appeared around the bend. The boy was a teenager, a little younger than Archer but not by much, with roasted-chestnut eyes and small-boned hands. The man was tall and thin, with a round face and laugh lines at his eyes. He carried the carcass of a deer over his shoulders, its legs stretched awkwardly, head lolling, and under his arm was a hunting rifle. He and the boy wore matching short-billed caps. “Your granddad used to say, ‘We’ll do better tomorrow.’”
“And did you do better?”
The man chuckled. “Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Times were hard. Then he’d say the same thing. ‘We’ll do better tomorrow.’ For some reason, I always believed him.”
They passed Sefia and Archer, concealed in the undergrowth, and continued north along the trail, their voices growing fainter and fainter in the jungle.
