The Storyteller

by Traci Chee

  She shook her head, but when she looked up at him again, her eyes were still bright with tears. “I just . . . It’s so hard to believe. We’re almost free, aren’t we?”

  He nodded. Free of fate. Free of the future. Free to do whatever they wished.

  “Tell me about it,” she said in a soft voice. “Haven.”

  With a grin, he described leisurely days of eating what they caught from the sea and scavenged from the jungle, and nights spent in hammocks dangling from the trees, hundreds of thousands of hours talking and cooking and arguing and laughing and sitting, quietly, watching the lagoon with steaming cups clasped in their hands.

  “We can do anything,” he said, “as long as we do it toge—”

  But he couldn’t finish. She grabbed him by the back of the neck and pressed her mouth to his. Burrowing his fingers into her hair, he ran his tongue lightly along the edge of her teeth and was rewarded by a soft groan. Her hands found the hem of his shirt, pulling it over his head and tossing it into the sand beside the embers of their fire. He fumbled with her buttons, removing every layer until she was lying naked beside him.

  His gaze roved over her—every curve, this time, every exquisite shadow—as his hands explored her body: the hills, the dips, the smooth planes of her arms and back and thighs.

  She rose up to meet him, murmuring yes against his neck.

  He touched her in ways that left her gasping. Kissed her in places that made her murmur and moan and scream.

  It was a second. It was an hour. It was the whole night or the whole day or maybe it was forever, the two of them pressed chest to chest, sweating and breathing hard and whispering each other’s names in the dark.

  They were here. They were together. And they had their whole future ahead of them.

  * * *

  • • •

  They awoke at dawn, while the sun skimmed the horizon like a caress. They kissed and washed on the shore of the underground lake, where, for a moment, Archer marveled at her legs, her exposed hips, her hair trailing down her back in tangled waves, before she flung her shirt over the moonstone and doused them both in darkness.

  They still had three days to meet Reed at the Trove’s entrance, so they took their time on the return journey, stopping often to drink and talk and test new places on each other’s bodies with their tongues and teeth.

  Leaving the crystal gallery, they meandered through the halls, stopping to uncover trinkets and shiny things. Archer found Sefia an emerald pin, which he placed in her hair, and held up a tarnished silver mirror for her to study her reflection.

  She touched the vivid green gems. “I’m sorry, Archer.”

  “For burning the feather?”

  Her reflection seemed to waver, as if through water. “Yeah,” she said at last.

  “This is better.” He set the mirror aside. “This lasts.”

  They continued through the Trove all through the fourth day. With her magic back, Sefia could see the history of every piece of treasure, and as they walked, she told him stories about ancient jewelers and weaponsmiths, gem cutters and sculptors with a touch of magic themselves.

  They found chests of weapons—rifles and bayonets and beautiful revolvers—and sometime during the morning on the fifth day, Sefia presented Archer with a six-gun. The grip was inlaid with feathers of ivory and gold.

  “A real Behn revolver,” she said. “You know Isabella, the gunsmith who made the Lady of Mercy? This was made by one of her ancestors.”

  He ran his thumb over the cylinder. “I hope I won’t need it.”

  For the first time in months—in years, maybe—there was no taste of violence on his tongue, no craving for blood, no tingling in his fingers and knuckles. All he wanted now was to listen to the sound of Sefia’s voice—he could have made a whole occupation out of listening to her tell stories, of keeping her warm and safe and happy.

  As they neared the entrance, the caverns grew larger. They saw no sign of Dimarion’s treasure hunters, and Archer was glad. Desperate to use every last second of their time in the Trove, they found reasons to delay.

  “Look at this!”

  “Over here!”

  Once, Archer climbed onto the back of an obsidian winged horse and refused to come down until Sefia joined him, and for what seemed like hours, they lay in the curve between the horse’s black wings, dropping clothes onto the glinting coins below and giggling in the dark.

  Another time, they discovered a room packed with royal regalia from each of the Five Islands. Tiaras and orbs, rings, moldering gloves, bejeweled mantles, swords, mirrors, robes and sashes, long decayed, all arrayed around six oversize thrones.

  Sefia stared at them for a moment before she whispered, “These belonged to the six original divisions of the Guard.”

  “The Guard?” At the name, he waited for the rush of anger and hurt.

  It didn’t come. Was this what it was like not to be haunted all the time? Not to be looking for a fight?

  “Almost a thousand years before the Last Scribe eradicated writing from the world.”

  Archer took another look at the tarnished metals, the rotten fabrics, and reached for Sefia’s hand. “That was a long time ago.”

  But they couldn’t loiter in the Trove forever, and on the seventh day, they found their way, begrudgingly, back to the entrance halls. The floors were bare of treasure now, the stalagmite soldiers standing guard over nothing but rock.

  Archer’s pack was heavy with gifts for their friends, but his heart was light; his head filled with dreams of the future.

  They clasped hands as the doors began to swing inward. A vein of light touched their twined fingers and opened wide as fresh air swept into the cavern.

  “Ready?” he asked.

  She looked away. “Yeah.”

  The daylight soared over them, so bright it made Archer’s head ache.

  “Sef!”

  “Cap?” she called, shielding her eyes. “What’s the matter? What’s going on?”

  Reed dashed through the opening doors, his coat flying out behind him. “There’s been news,” he said. “The Alliance has taken Epigloss.”

  All the warmth left Archer’s body. The bloodletters were in Epigloss. His bloodletters.

  “Probably Epidram too,” the captain continued.

  Sefia’s grip tightened on Archer’s hand. “How do you know?”

  “The chief mate heard through the wand. Your lieutenant, Scarza, said the bloodletters escaped with six other ships—a mix of outlaws and merchants—but they’re on the run from the Alliance and can’t find their bearings to get to Haven. The crew’s already decided to help them.” Captain Reed looked from Archer to Sefia and back again. “But they’re asking for you.”

  Sefia’s dark eyes were glazed with fear. She was squeezing Archer’s hand so hard the tips of his fingers were starting to tingle.

  Or maybe he just wanted to fight.

  * * *

  • • •

  You were going to strand me here with you?” Archer demanded. “Without giving me a say in it?”

  “I thought it was the only way to keep you safe!” Sefia cried. She wished Captain Reed hadn’t told them any of this. She wished he’d just gone along with the plan. But he hadn’t, and she’d been trapped by fate again. Seven days—the exact amount of time they’d needed to find the Amulet, the exact amount of time the Alliance had needed to attack Epigloss and send the bloodletters on the run, asking for help.

  Archer whirled on Reed. “And you agreed to this?”

  The captain shrugged. “It was my idea. I ain’t proud of it, kid, but if it kept you alive . . .”

  Archer’s eyes narrowed. “You mean, if it got you the Amulet.”

  Reed said nothing.

  “Why’d you change your mind now?” Archer asked.

  “It’s yo
ur crew out there. I’d wanna know, if it was mine.”

  “Don’t you get it?” Sefia snapped. “This is exactly what I was afraid of. This is how we fail. This is how you die.”

  “We have to help them.” Archer glared at her. “This is the bloodletters we’re talking about.”

  “Wasn’t that what I told you in the Trove? We try to leave. We try to escape. We get drawn back in again and again and again until we’re in too deep to save ourselves. Unless we leave. Together. Right now.”

  “We’re gonna fetch ’em anyway,” Captain Reed added. “We don’t need you for that.”

  “But I need to go.” Archer looked to Sefia. “They’re my bloodletters. My responsibility.”

  She stared at him for a moment, searching his face for signs of relenting, but his jaw was set, his gold eyes resolute.

  He was going to get himself killed, and he didn’t care.

  Shaking her head, she turned away, placing the Amulet in Reed’s hands. “Here. I’m holding up my end of the deal.”

  There was a pause as she stalked to the edge of the stone dock, where the tide thrashed against the stalagmites, spraying her shins with water.

  “What do these marks mean?”

  “We don’t know,” Archer answered.

  From behind her, she heard the captain murmur, “Thank you.”

  She twisted her pack straps. She’d tried to leave, and destiny had beaten her again. Archer was right. Now that she knew the bloodletters were out there, that her friends were out there, asking for her help, she couldn’t abandon them.

  “Don’t worry,” Archer said, coming up behind her. “We’ll go get them and we’ll take them to Haven. That was the plan all along, anyway. We’ll all be safe at Haven.”

  That was the plan all along.

  Sefia straightened. She spun around, feeling the weight of the Book heavy in her pack. “You’re right. It was always supposed to be Haven. Get to Haven. Let the war pass us by at Haven.”

  “See? It’s per—”

  “What if we were wrong, though? What if Haven wasn’t where we were supposed to go to escape destiny, but where we were supposed to go to fulfill it?”

  Archer frowned. “Then why wouldn’t fate have let us go after you saved Frey and Aljan?”

  Reed ran his thumb along the edge of the Amulet. “Maybe you had to get this first . . .”

  Sefia shut her eyes, grasping for the rest of her idea, her new plan, trying to make it come together. “What if, all this time, we thought we were running from our future, when really we’ve been running toward it?”

  Archer shook his head. “I get what you’re saying, Sefia, but how do we beat fate if everything we do, everything we try to avoid it, has already been written?”

  That was why they hadn’t been able to escape.

  Everything they did had already been written. And what was written always came to pass.

  To beat the Book, they had to change what was written. But how?

  As she opened her eyes, the Illuminated world flooded her vision. A million drops of light rained down on the cave, cascading over the walls, the boat, the water, until she, Archer, and Reed were soaked in gold.

  They were so bright, the threads that connected them, twisting and joining—her parents giving Reed his first tattoo, the Book, the , the day Lon decided to form the impressors, the invisible crate, the Second Assassin—the innumerable ways their lives were linked.

  And she was reminded of the first time she’d seen this magnificent tapestry of fate, in all its interwoven glory—the first time she’d killed a man, in the Oxscinian jungle.

  Palo Kanta. That had been his name. She remembered the scar on his lower lip, the bullet she’d turned back on him. He wasn’t supposed to have died in the forest with her. She’d seen his future—he was supposed to have made it to Jahara with the other impressors; he was supposed to have died of a knife wound, stabbed outside of a bar in Epidram.

  But Sefia had changed his fate. She had rewritten his future.

  Because she possessed a power no one had used for thousands of years. The power of the Scribes. She’d used it once, without even knowing it. And she would use it again to rewrite what was written and save Archer from destiny, once and for all.

  Look Closer

  Books are curious objects. They have the power to trap, transport, and even transform you if you are lucky. But in the end, books—even magic ones—are only objects pieced together from paper and glue and thread. That was the fundamental truth the readers forgot. How vulnerable the book really was.

  But not only to fire, or the damp, or the passage of time.

  To misinterpretation.

  A woman with a burned page assumes that once she gets what she wants, she also gets to keep it.

  But she doesn’t understand the story goes on beyond the page, and she doesn’t see it coming when her throat is slit.

  A girl with a flicker of magic believes she sees a man’s death—knifed outside of a bar, past midnight with no witnesses—and has the audacity to believe she can change the future.

  But she doesn’t understand that a life is more than a few isolated scenes. He’s been a kidnapper, an abuser, and a murderer for much longer than she knows. He’s already been to that bar with the birdcage above its door. He’s already been stabbed between the ribs and left for dead.

  If you’re reading this, by now you know you ought to read everything.

  By now you know you ought to read deeply.

  Because there’s witchery in these words and spellwork in the spine.

  And nothing is what it seems.

  Which is why, for a long time, Lon and Mareah didn’t know how it would happen. They couldn’t get enough information from the Book or the Illuminated world to give them the answer. Would it be an accident? A fall? An aneurysm, sudden as a summer storm? Maybe the Guard would find them, and Mareah would fight them off, sacrificing herself so Lon and their little girl could escape.

  All they knew was that she had five years. Five years after their daughter was born.

  And then she would die.

  Every week, Lon would study her with the Sight, searching for anomalies, endings, signals in the smoke and secrets in the sea.

  Look closer, his Master had told him once.

  So he looked closer. He looked deeper. He saw more.

  The sickness was in her lungs.

  She’d contracted it years ago, on one of her missions, long before they’d even conceived of abandoning the Guard.

  She’d dug in the sword, gleaming copper as it entered her target’s chest. The blade had soaked up whatever blood it touched, but it didn’t touch all of it.

  She remembered the red liquid seeping through the gaps in his teeth. Then the cough. The spray, warm and wet, speckling her face.

  It had taken this long to manifest, but now that it had, she and Lon finally knew. This was how it ended.

  Unless Lon could prevent it.

  As Apprentice Librarian, he’d used Transformation, the third tier of Illumination, to extract strains of mold from ancient books. He’d made cracked leather covers new again. With Transformation, you could augment and change all sorts of physical objects, from pieces of parchment to weapons.

  But you couldn’t change the human body. Only one branch of the Guard had ever had power like that, had had the ability to rewrite the world however they wished.

  The Scribes.

  So with the Book, he studied them. He learned of all the failed experiments they’d tried at the nascence of their craft—cutting paragraphs from the Book with the point of a knife, burning pages, blacking out whole chapters with the broad strokes of a brush, removing ink from the parchment with solutions of acid and alcohol, leaving behind passages empty as deserts. But you could not change the future by changing the Book.
<
br />   No, you changed the future by changing the Illuminated world, with the power of the Scribes, a power that had once been called Alteration.

  Lon read and studied and realized, to his dismay, that for all the years he’d devoted to mastering Illumination, he was not skilled enough, not powerful enough, to be a Scribe.

  He was a mere Librarian, and he struggled to grasp the Scribes’ most basic theories. He had little hope of mastering the full force of their magic.

  But he’d always had a healthy dose of arrogance, and he did not give up.

  All he had to do was harness the first tier of Alteration, a skill the Scribes had called excision. They’d used it to remove parts of history like organs from a body—he could use it to remove Mareah’s illness, one diseased cell at a time.

  He’d eradicate every last trace of her sickness from her past, her present, her future. And it would be as if the disease had never existed in her body at all.

  CHAPTER 13

  Our Past Lives

  Audacity. That was what the Book called it. She had the audacity to believe she’d changed Palo Kanta’s future, even though she’d been wrong. She hadn’t tapped into the power of the Scribes; she’d just used Manipulation, like she’d done countless times now.

  But despite her failures, despite her misinterpretations, she still had the audacity to believe she could change Archer’s future. She was her father’s daughter, after all.

  Of course Lon had tried to master Alteration, the power of the Scribes. Of course the fact that they’d erased themselves and all their magic from history hadn’t deterred him.

  Of course he’d tried to save Mareah.

  Just like Sefia was trying to save Archer.

  Laden with treasure, the Current and the Crux sailed past Steeds and began the voyage back to the Central Sea to rendezvous with the bloodletters and the other refugees from the attack on Epigloss while Sefia began to study Lon’s efforts. With the Book open before her, she researched his breakthroughs, his techniques, following his progress up and down the pages of the Book as he pursued Alteration with a single-mindedness Sefia recognized in herself.