Born Assassin Saga Box Set

by Jacqueline Pawl

  Mercy and Nynev make quick work of the deer, slicing through the thin skin and muscle over its stomach and ribs. Mercy had tried to hide her grin of satisfaction when Nynev had pointed to the rack of knives and told her to choose one for butchering the deer; she’d been eyeing the sharp, shining blades since they’d first entered the tent, and it feels good to have a weapon in her hands again. As they work on skinning the deer, Mercy glances at Tamriel, impressed to find him working quietly and efficiently, his face expressionless except for a frown of concentration. Even Nynev notices his work.

  “It appears I underestimated your friend,” she whispers. “Perhaps he isn’t as weak as his father. The other one, though . . .” She grins as Calum pauses in the middle of plucking one of the birds to spit a small feather from his mouth, scowling, and Tamriel laughs. The sound rushes over Mercy in a wave, warming her as she fights to keep her expression neutral.

  “You really have no idea what Cassius meant when he had a vision of your sister with the cure?” Mercy asks.

  She shakes her head. “Not a clue. I’m sorry. But . . . you could ask some of the other clan leaders at Ialathan. Since the Cedikra grows better on the eastern islands, their healers might have more experience with it than ours.”

  She spreads the deer’s hide onto a table to dry, gesturing for the two elves who had been working nearby to take over the butchering of the meat. They wordlessly begin butchering the deer while Nynev leads Mercy to a bucket of water to wash her hands. “Leave the knife there—they’ll clean everything later,” she says as Mercy dries her hands. She says something in Cirisian and the elves affirm her order. Without another word, she washes and dries her hands and strides out of the tent.

  “Um, are we finished?” Calum asks, glancing between Mercy and the door.

  She ignores him as she crosses the room, plucks a feather from Tamriel’s hair, and blows it into his face. “You’re a mess.”

  Tamriel catches her hand and grins. Calum groans. “You guys are terrible. If you need me, I’ll be outside, trying to convince the elves to give me my crossbow back. Wish me luck.” He brushes past them and slips out of the tent, pausing just outside to wipe the half-dried blood from his boots.

  “You found Cedikra?” Mercy asks.

  He nods. “Not much, but more than we had before, as Calum was eager to point out. In three days, we’ll have more Cedikra than we can carry, according to Firesse. We don’t have Niamh, but hopefully one of the healers here or in the city will be able to find a use for it.”

  “We’ll figure it out. Cassius Bacha has been right about everything so far. He must be right about this.”

  “That’s what I’m worried about. You said he’d painted the entirety of Beggars’ End red, right?” When Mercy nods, he lets out a long breath. “There are thousands of helpless people locked inside. That red paint marked them as the first to be infected; they’ll be the first to die, as well. We must save them.”

  “Three days until we can leave these cursed islands behind us,” Mercy says softly.

  “It can’t come soon enough.”

  “Firesse told me something last night,” Mercy begins. She hesitates, the butchers’ knives scoring the meat the only sound in the room. The news about her parents—they’re alive—sits like a lump in her throat, unwilling to move any farther. She has spent so long hating them, then missing them, then actively avoiding thinking about them that she doesn’t know how to react to the news.

  “Mercy?” Tamriel asks after a moment. “What is it?”

  “My—"

  “Your Highness?”

  Mercy steps back instinctively as Maceo pops his head into the tent. His eyes wander from the plucked birds on the table to Mercy’s face before finally landing on the prince and the stray feathers stuck to his shirt.

  “Your Highness?” he repeats, as if he doesn’t believe Tamriel is actually standing in the middle of the butchers’ tent.

  “Yes? What is it?” Irritation flickers across the prince’s face.

  Maceo straightens, holding one of the tent flaps open for Tamriel to step through. “The foragers have come back with more of the fruit. And Kaius is asking for you.”

  “He hardly needs me there to supervise. Have them place the Cedikra in the crate where we put the rest.”

  “I believe he wished to speak with you about Ialathan, Your Highness. It seemed important.”

  “Kaius can wait,” Tamriel says, turning back to Mercy. “What did Firesse tell you?”

  She shakes her head, the words sitting heavily on her tongue. “It’s fine. Go. I’ll speak to you later.”

  From the back of the room, one of the elves snaps something in Cirisian and gestures at Maceo to close the tent. “Your Highness?” he asks again, lowering the weathered canvas an inch.

  Tamriel glances at Mercy. When she makes no move to stop him, he nods. “All right, I’m coming.” He brushes the stray feathers from his shirt, then walks out of the tent, Maceo following closely at his heels.

  When the tent flap falls shut, Mercy sighs and crosses the room to the rack of knives. She glances over her shoulder and, after making sure the two Cirisians are occupied with the deer, slips a knife into her sleeve. It’s a far cry from the beautiful daggers Calum had crafted for her in the Guild, but it’ll work, and it’s much less conspicuous than her sword. Then, simply out of a need to do something useful, she picks up a butchering knife and returns to the table where Tamriel and Calum had been working, quickly cutting and gutting a fat pheasant for the night’s dinner. In the silence, she falls into a rhythm, the same two words echoing through her mind while she works:

  Three days. Three days. Three days.

  21

  Calum

  As night falls, the elves light several campfires throughout the camp. The elders emerge from their tents with pots of stew and spits skewering the various kills Kaius and his hunters had made during the morning’s hunt. Calum lingers beside his tent, frowning as he watches Akiva and Clyde talk just out of earshot. Niamh is dead—their best hope for figuring out the cure, gone—but he hasn’t had the heart to tell his men. Their families are in Sandori. Their sick families are in Sandori.

  He’ll tell them tomorrow.

  Probably.

  As he scans the camp, Calum deliberately avoids looking at the roasting pheasants he and Tamriel had plucked, recalling with vivid clarity the clamminess of the birds’ skin and the way their dead eyes had stared up at him. He imagines his father sneering at him from the Beyond.

  Can’t stand the sight of a dead animal? How will you avenge me if you can’t stomach a little blood? Do you think Ghyslain felt sympathy when he had me killed?

  Pathetic.

  Calum pushes the mocking voice away. It’s not that he’s afraid—not exactly. It’s the way his stomach had turned when the huntress had tossed the carcasses onto the table, the way the limp bodies had thumped onto the stained and scarred wood. It had reminded him of the night he’d betrayed Tamriel—when the pommel of Calum’s dagger had connected with his skull, the way he had crumpled to the ground at Calum’s feet, the feeling of carving that damned gash into his cousin’s back. Tamriel will wear the scar for the rest of his life. He must never learn who had given it to him.

  As the scent of smoke and roasting meat fills the air, elves begin to emerge from their tents and the forest, speaking to one another in lightning-fast Cirisian. The sound grates on Calum’s nerves. Since Firesse’s clan is the closest to Beltharos, most of the elves speak the common tongue—they simply refuse to speak it to him. They find some perverse entertainment in his and his men’s lack of understanding.

  An elf walks past him carrying a crossbow—Calum’s crossbow—and Calum has to fight back the sudden urge to growl. Semris had brought back a wild boar earlier, had hunted it down with the crossbow he had stolen when Kaius and his men ambushed them by the stream. It boils Calum’s blood to see it being tossed around like any common weapon. Doesn’t Semris know how special that
crossbow is? No, of course not. He doesn’t care that it had taken Calum a month to craft it in the blacksmith’s workshop in Myrellis Plaza. He hadn’t spent days sanding and staining the wood, forging and hammering the metalwork, carving and balancing each bolt for perfect accuracy.

  To him, it’s just another trinket he had stolen from an undeserving human.

  Across the camp, Tamriel speaks to Kaius and the leader of the tribe’s fighters, a middle-aged woman with a thick, ropy scar across her scalp. Silas and Maceo stand at attention just behind them, watching warily. Out of habit, their hands hover over where their swords would be hanging if the First hadn’t confiscated them.

  “You shouldn’t scowl all the time,” Firesse says, startling him. “You’ll give yourself gray hair, and you’re much too young for that.”

  Calum instinctively jerks back. How had she managed to sneak up on him? He hadn’t even heard her approach.

  “Sit down and eat,” she continues, waving a hand toward the nearest fire. Semris’s boar roasts over the flames, its fat sizzling. “You’re our guest, after all.”

  “‘Guest’ is a fancy way of saying ‘prisoner.’”

  “And ‘explorer’ is a kind way to say ‘intruder.’” Anger flashes in and out of her eyes, and it’s obviously not a request when she says, “Sit.”

  He does, settling onto an empty log. The elves around the fire shoot him dark looks, but do not otherwise acknowledge him. Every pair of eyes follows Firesse as she sits beside him, all grace and poise. Her red hair glows in the firelight. “Your friend seems quite comfortable here,” she says lightly, nodding at the neighboring fire.

  Mercy lounges on a log beside her new huntress friend, talking while the deer they had hunted earlier roasts. As Calum watches, the cook slices off the first thick piece of meat, slathers it with a creamy sauce, then almost reverently hands the chipped bowl to Nynev. The huntress shakes her head and passes the bowl to Mercy, who picks up the venison with her fingers and takes a big bite. She grins at the mess the sauce makes of her face and licks her fingers. The rest of the elves whoop and cheer before passing around bowls of their own. It’s some sort of celebration of the hunter. They’re celebrating Mercy.

  Watching them grin and laugh and clap Mercy on the back sends Calum’s mood plummeting. Of course they love her—she’s one of them. Seeing them treat her so kindly is a shock to Calum; it’s so different from the glares he and his men receive. He shudders to imagine what cruelty these elves must’ve endured to make them so hostile toward humans, but it’s obvious they’re not going to change their minds anytime soon.

  And the worst part? Although he cannot make out the words the elves in Mercy’s circle say, he can tell by the way her eyes flick from one speaker to the next and her answering nods that the elves are speaking the common tongue to her.

  “You look like you could use a drink,” Firesse suggests. He turns to find her offering a beaded leather flask. He stares at it warily until she raises a brow and shakes it a little, sending the liquid inside sloshing. When she pushes it into his hands, he brings the mouth of the flask to his nose and sniffs. Wine. He nods his gratitude, then lifts the flask, takes a big gulp and—

  Dear Creator—

  It burns his throat as he swallows and coughs, stinging his nose and bringing tears to his eyes. It’s some kind of wine, but it’s not good. It’s hardly tolerable. Firesse and the other elves watch with amusement as Calum shakes his head sharply.

  “What the hell is that?” He ignores the laughter of the elves around him and the smirks on his guards’ faces—of course they had glanced over just in time to see the entire thing unfold. Once they return to Sandori, he’ll never live down the story that he can’t handle a single sip of wine.

  “It’s wine. Or . . . it was supposed to be,” Firesse says with a wicked grin.

  “Did you even use grapes?”

  “Does this look like some fine Feyndaran vineyard?” She gestures to the land around them, then—to make him feel more like a fool—takes a long drink from the flask, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. She doesn’t seem to notice the alcohol’s bite. “We use what we can.”

  “I don’t think they drink it for the taste,” Tamriel calls from across the camp. He smirks when Kaius and several other elves nod.

  “Try it again. It’ll grow on you, I promise.” Firesse reaches over and opens his fist, placing the flask gently in his hand. Around them, the guards and Cirisians pause in their eating, watching expectantly. Even Mercy and some of the elves around her peer over from their fire. Tamriel catches Calum’s eye and grins.

  Calum takes a deep breath, preparing himself for the burn of the so-called wine. Then he lifts the flask for all to see. “To our gracious hosts,” he calls, ignoring Kaius’s half-annoyed, half-impressed expression. He tilts his head back and takes a swig. Again, it burns immediately, but not as badly as before. Although the quality is far from the fine wines and ales he’d drunk in the castle, there’s something wild about it . . . something fiercely Cirisian.

  He swallows and grins, passing the flask to his left for the next elf to share. Most of the elves return their attention to their meals, Mercy and her new friends once again steadfastly ignoring him, but he feels the weight of one man’s gaze on him more acutely than the rest:

  Kaius’s stare holds steady on Calum, his green eyes glowing gold in the light of the campfire. Calum can feel the archer examining him, dissecting him, sizing up the threat he might pose on the elves. When the archer’s lips quirk into a smirk and he looks away, Calum isn’t sure whether he should feel honored or insulted by the dismissal.

  Focus on the victories. They haven’t killed you yet.

  The warmth budding in his chest builds as the elves pass the flask around the circle. The cook uses a soot-blackened stick to adjust the crackling logs and stoke the flames of the campfire, while the slippery sounds of Cirisian wrap around the camp. When Firesse finishes her second sip and passes the flask to Calum, he smiles and drinks again.

  “Well, if it isn’t Mr. Can’t-hold-my-liquor. How’re you feeling?”

  The deep chuckle jars Calum’s ears, the sunlight streaming through the open tent flap cleaving his head in two. He groans and turns over on his bedroll, throwing an arm over his eyes. Damn those Cirisians and their so-called wine, he thinks. They didn’t try to kill me with blades yesterday, but the wine nearly did it.

  “Close the tent and leave me be,” he mumbles to the intruder in the doorway, backlit by that wretched light. His brain pounds against his skull. He’s lying in last night’s rumpled clothes; he only partially remembers stumbling into the tent in the early hours of the morning, nearly breaking his neck when he had tripped over Akiva’s pack. Creator curse her, Firesse had been right: the wine had grown on him. “Will you please leave me alone?” he growls when the intruder offers no response.

  He sighs and drops the arm from his eyes. Tamriel stands in the doorway, shaking his head as he chuckles to himself. Calum knows how foolish he must appear, but he doesn’t care. After he sleeps a few more hours, drinks some water, and quite possibly vomits, he’ll reprimand Silas and Maceo for allowing him to drink so much. That is, if he can summon the courage to look them in the eye—he doesn’t remember much of what happened after his third drink, and it fills him with mortification.

  “You poor fool,” Tamriel finally says, grinning. “You stupid, stupid fool.” The flap falls shut as he crosses the tent and crouches beside Calum, smoothing the hair from his cousin’s brow. “Thought you could drink yourself away from here, huh? Unfortunately, I can’t let you go just yet. I won’t lose you and Master Oliver in the same trip.”

  “Selfish bastard,” Calum murmurs. He can’t help but grin when Tamriel laughs.

  “How bad is it?”

  “Remember when some of the guards took me down to the shipping district taverns for my nineteenth birthday?” When Tamriel nods, Calum says, “Double it. I don’t know what they put in that wine—and
I don’t want to—but promise me you won’t let me touch another drop of that stuff.”

  “You and I both know you’ll do as you please.”

  “Except next time it’ll kill me.”

  Tamriel snorts. “It’s a wonder you and Mercy aren’t better friends—you’re both ridiculously melodramatic. Doesn’t it ever become tiresome?”

  “Terribly. Now, will you please tell me why you are here so my melodramatic ass can go back to sleep?”

  “Firesse has offered to take us to one of the places most affected by the war. Myris and her fighters are going to escort us to an old battlefield on the southern side of the island. She seems to think it will convince me to keep my promise to her, as if I need another reason to end the constant bloodshed of our countrymen.”

  “Fantastic. I’ll see you in a few hours. Hopefully I won’t be choking on my own vomit.”

  “Firesse has asked for you to accompany us.”

  Calum groans. “She has resorted to torture.”

  Tamriel smiles. “Now get up—we’re leaving in thirty minutes.”

  “You’re not going to leave me alone until I agree, are you?”

  “I’m not likely to, no.”

  “Fine. Fine, I’ll go. Now leave me alone to change. Have Clyde bring me a bucket of water. I’ll see you as soon as the world stops spinning.” He closes his eyes and rubs his temples, not caring that it’s highly improper for a commoner to order the prince. Tamriel doesn’t seem to mind.

  “Glad to hear it. But I’ll have him bring two buckets—one to drink and one to wash. You reek.”

  Without looking, Calum lifts his hand and extends his middle finger. Tamriel’s laughter trails him out of the tent.

  The prince, the guards, and Myris—the leader of the fighters—are waiting outside Firesse’s tent when Calum finally emerges, shielding his eyes with one hand. His hair drips water over his shoulders and down the back of his neck; he hadn’t bothered to tie it back after washing and dressing, but—mercifully—none of the guards say a word about his disheveled appearance. Their silence is only temporary; he knows the minute they set foot on Beltharan soil he won’t hear the end of whatever he had done the night before.