by Traci Chee
She dashed out from behind the sofa, but a whoosh of air stopped her in her tracks—she smelled gun smoke—and Tanin appeared between her and Archer.
Sefia’s mind churned. Tanin, here? Why? With one hand still holding the barricade over the door, she watched the woman warily.
Tanin grimaced, touching her ribs. Blood stained her palm, her silk shirt. She was injured.
A disadvantage.
But was it enough of a disadvantage for Sefia to get to Archer and teleport him away without losing her hold on the door? The candidates were banging on the barricade—she could feel them pounding against her magic.
Tanin’s gaze darted across the floor. “You don’t have the Book to hide behind this time,” she whispered.
“I’m done with hiding.” Sefia glanced at Archer. She was only seven steps away. Could she make it past Tanin without letting the candidates in?
“Your whole life, all you’ve done is hide.” Tanin smiled. “From us. From me. What did you think you were doing, running to your precious Hav—”
Sefia attacked, palming the air with her free hand. Tanin tried to deflect, but her injury must have made her slow, because Sefia’s magic caught her in the shoulder. She stumbled.
Sefia was already drawing a knife from its sheath at her waist. It was already singing through the air.
Regaining her balance, Tanin narrowed her eyes. She flicked her wrist, sending the blade point-first into the floorboards at her feet, and put her hands together, summoning a wave of force.
Wide-eyed, Sefia saw the sofa come rushing at her, huge and heavy. She leapt aside, rolling, as Tanin hurled a broken lantern at her. She felt her ribs bruise.
She hit the floor, winded, as Tanin’s magic caught her again, flinging her back.
Her grip on the barricade loosened. The wardrobe splintered.
Wrenching a leg from the table, Sefia sent it flying at Tanin.
The woman brushed it aside easily, but the momentary distraction gave Sefia enough time to stand, firming up her hold on the door.
Grimly, Tanin grabbed Sefia’s knife from the floor and reached for the windows at the rear of the cabin. She flung the blade. She flexed her fingers. The glass shattered, shards soaring toward Archer, where he lay curled on the floor.
Sefia didn’t have enough hands. The knife, the glass, the candidates. Which would she stop?
She chose the glass. She chose to save Archer.
Whipping her free hand through the air, she sent the points of glass quivering into the wall.
The knife sank into the arm holding the door. Crying out, she dropped her hand. In the barricade, the table split. The wardrobe cracked. Bullets whizzed into the room, sending both her and Tanin under cover.
With the blade still in her arm, Sefia shoved the sofa at the door, plugging the holes in the barricade, and ripped the glass shards from the wall.
Tanin was getting up.
But Tanin was too slow. The glass struck her in the back. She let out a cry.
Pulling the knife from her arm, Sefia leapt across the room and knocked Tanin to the floor.
Her foot was on Tanin’s neck.
Her blade was in her hand.
This close, she could not miss.
And Kelanna would be rid of another Guardian.
That’s it. In a flash, Sefia understood what she had to do, how to use the power of the Scribes to beat every enemy she had—the war, the Alliance, the Guard, fate, the future, the Book.
But while she hesitated, Tanin thrust upward with the heel of her hand. Magic like a battering ram slammed into Sefia’s chin. Her head went back. For a second, her vision went dark.
That second was enough for her power to falter. The barricade shattered. More liquor bottles came crashing to the floor as gunshots burst into the cabin.
Staggering to her feet, Sefia shook her head and summoned her magic. She ran to Archer’s side. He was hot. His breath was coming too fast. It was like he couldn’t get enough air.
“I’ve got you,” she whispered, putting his arms around her neck. He buried his head against her, hands holding her tight. “You’re safe.”
Tanin groaned, trying to get up, with spikes of glass sticking out of her back as the candidates rushed into the cabin. Sefia and Archer teleported to the Current of Faith, where the battle for Haven was roaring around them. There was the smell of smoke and gunpowder, salty air and blood.
“Sefia?” In her arms, Archer was clutching the worry stone, rubbing his thumb across its smooth facets over and over, his face streaked with tears.
Ignoring her bruised ribs and wounded arm, Sefia clutched him tightly. “Don’t worry,” she whispered. “I know what to do. I know how we can save you.”
Even with the power of the Scribes, they couldn’t fight the Red War as it raged across the Central Sea on Oxscinian shores.
Nor could they fight the combined strength of the Alliance, with its three kingdoms’ worth of ships and soldiers.
But the Guard that controlled the Alliance was only ten people—Librarians, Politicians, Administrators, Soldiers, Assassins. If they stopped those ten people, the Guard would be finished. The Alliance would dissolve. The Red War would end.
And without a war to win, Archer would not fulfill his destiny.
Archer would live.
He’d said it two and a half months ago, to that cotton-headed ninny Haldon Lac.
The Guardians were the real villains. The Guard was the real target. Not fate, not the future, not the war. The Guard.
A Threat to Roku
Facedown on the bed, Tanin could see little beyond the crisp white pillow and the carved headboard, but she could hear the snip, snip of the scissors under the distant rumble of cannon fire, and she could feel every lance of pain as her clothes were cut from the glass shards embedded in her back.
“My Apprentice’s daughter did this to you?” The First’s voice was faint and dry as smoke. Snip.
Tanin couldn’t see him, but she could smell the scent of his bloodsword filling the cabin with its distinctive metallic odor. The smell still reminded her of Mareah, who’d earned her bloodsword after using it to murder her own parents.
To fulfill their grisly duties, Assassins could have no compassion, no mercy, no ties to anyone other than the Guard. They couldn’t even have names. Which was why they were only referred to as the First and the Second.
Snip. “How I would have liked to train her.” The First began peeling Tanin’s clothing from her skin. The Master Assassin had taken on another Apprentice after Mareah betrayed him—the Second, with pockmarked skin and muddy gray eyes, who’d been killed on the Current of Faith. And he had another Apprentice now—Tanin. But after all these years, he still spoke of Mareah as if she were the only one who mattered.
Isn’t she, though? Tanin thought before she could stop herself. She’d loved Mareah and Lon like they were her siblings. She’d almost let herself love their daughter.
But because of her love, she’d lost the Book. She’d lost her position. She’d been stripped of her name. She would never let love do that to her again. Sentiment was for the weak. That was the one thing Stonegold had taught her.
“Unfortunate that you didn’t kill her,” someone said in an indolent voice, “but you did well at Haven, my little dog.” A heavy hand patted the back of Tanin’s head, jarring her whole body. She could feel every fragment of glass in her skin.
Biting her lip, Tanin closed her eyes to hide her revulsion. Stonegold. The King of Everica was the Guard’s Master Politician—and now their Director. He’d forced her out. He’d made her beg. It was all Tanin could do to keep from leaping up and slicing each of his jowls from his face.
Forbearance, she reminded herself. If she murdered him in front of all these witnesses, the other Guardians would turn on her immediately. And that would
n’t do.
“Really, Director,” she whispered, “it’s my pleasure to serve.”
In the dead of night, she and the candidates had slipped from the Black Beauty to sink every ship in Haven’s protected lagoon and slit the throat of every person they came across. They’d detonated bombs in Adeline and Isabella’s compound and torched the jungle. By the time the outlaws knew what was happening, the Alliance had opened fire on the ships patrolling the currents beyond the islet.
She’d counted thirteen of the original outlaw vessels, plus a stray from Oxscini, the Crux, and the Current.
Only, the outlaws could not make a difference now, not when the Alliance had hundreds of ships ready to go.
Like a wisp of fog, the First’s raspy voice reached her again: “The pain may cause some nausea.”
Tanin set her jaw and said nothing as he began removing bits of glass from her flesh. She’d done this dozens of times for Mareah, plucking shrapnel from her arms and legs, sewing up gashes, smoothing salve on welts the First had inflicted on her. Assassins had to be trained to take wounds as well as inflict them, or they’d be of little use.
“You’ve proven your loyalty, but you failed to do what I asked.” Stonegold’s hot breath skimmed the bare skin of Tanin’s back. “You failed to kill the traitors’ daughter. That’s twice she’s escaped you since I allowed you to live. Once more, and I’m afraid you won’t be able to be our Second Assassin after all.”
“My apologies, Director, but she has an advantage. She has the—”
Stonegold interrupted her with a long, drawn-out sigh.
Tanin paused. “I have no excuse, Director.” The words made her mouth pucker with distaste. To quell her gag reflex, she imagined the look in his dying eyes when he realized she was the one who’d killed him.
Somewhere behind him, she could hear pen nibs racing across parchment. Tolem, the Apprentice Administrator, and June, the Apprentice Librarian who’d replaced Lon, had been summoned to take notes and report back to their Masters at the Main Branch.
Once, the two Apprentices had been frightened of her. Now they were witness to her humiliation.
Tanin turned her face away.
They were in the captain’s quarters of Braca’s prize flagship, the Barbaro. The cabin was roomier than most, with friezes of battles from the Everican Rock-and-River Wars carved into the doors of the built-in wardrobes and walls decorated with the military awards the Master Soldier had racked up during her lifetime—gold bars, multicolored ribbons, shields—under frames of glass. Among these simple, martial adornments, the only item that appeared out of place was a full-length mirror, its frame a lavish carving of the Library—a portal for Guardians like the Apprentices and Stonegold, who hadn’t mastered Teleportation and needed a way to access her ship.
By the cabin windows, the Master Soldier herself, Braca Terezina III, military leader of the Alliance, stood with her hands crossed behind her back, watching distant explosions light up the night sky.
After the attack on Broken Crown, she and her forces had pushed into the Bay of Batteram, the Oxscinians’ next line of defense. Now they were battling the Royal Navy and a complement of Black Navy ships Roku had sent to the Forest Kingdom’s aid.
Braca’s Apprentice, Serakeen—Rajar—was out there somewhere, in the darkness, leading the attack in his flagship, the Amalthea, a former pirate vessel with a winged horse flying at her bowsprit.
The lantern light touched Braca’s blue suede coat, her gold-tipped guns, the edge of her burned face. Her name wasn’t even Braca—at least, it hadn’t been to begin with. When she was an Apprentice, the Guard had required her to take on the identity of a soldier who’d died in a fire, to legitimize her place in Stonegold’s army, so she’d submitted to the facial disfigurement, later appearing out of the ashes as Braca Terezina III, soon to climb the ranks.
They all made sacrifices for the greater good.
“I’m reassigning you, my little dog,” Stonegold said, interrupting Tanin’s thoughts. “You won’t be returning to the Black Beauty and the candidates.”
Tanin gritted her teeth. The Beauty was her ship. The candidates were Lon’s brainchild. Both should be under her command. But her voice was level when she spoke. “What’s to happen to them?”
“They’ll sail south for the invasion of Roku.”
In Lon’s original plan for the Red War, the fifth and final kingdom had been an afterthought. A former territory of the Oxscinian empire, the littlest kingdom was a cluster of rugged volcanic islands near the Everlasting Ice, useful for mining the materials necessary for making weapons, but the high cold winds, the stench of the geysers, and the periodic eruptions of lava, ash, and mudflows made Roku so inhospitable that no one went there unless they were forced to.
Now, however, half of the Black Navy was here, in the Bay of Batteram, leaving Roku ripe for the taking.
An Alliance invasion fleet was already on its way. In three weeks, they would batter the Rokuine defenses; capture Braska, the capital; and compel Sovereign Ianai to bow to the Alliance or be executed.
The Alliance would be four kingdoms strong. And it would not be long after that Oxscini, the last holdout, would fall.
“What of me, Director?” Tanin asked.
It wasn’t Stonegold who answered but the First. “You’re to stay with me, in Kelebrandt,” he whispered. His low rasping voice sent a chill down her injured back. “It’s time to begin your training so when you face my Apprentice’s daughter again, you won’t lose.”
CHAPTER 18
Enough
Sefia closed the Book, wondering how fate wanted to trap her this time. Did it want her to teleport to the Barbaro? If only she were strong enough, she could take out half of the Guardians right now . . .
And what? Kill them? She’d taken a lot of lives in her sixteen years, but she’d never set out with murder in her heart. Besides, Tolem wasn’t much older than her and Archer. She hadn’t seen much of him during her time at the Main Branch, but she suspected he might have even been their friend, if circumstances had been different.
No, the Book must have been manipulating her another way, with the knowledge of the attack on Roku, maybe.
Sighing, she brushed a lock of hair from Archer’s face as he slept. After his fit of panic during the fight with the candidates, he’d fallen into a deep sleep while the remaining outlaw captains had convened in Haven’s compound with Scarza, representing the bloodletters, and Adeline and Isabella, who’d fled into the jungle during the attack, taking with them dozens of outlaws who never would have survived otherwise. Sefia had been invited to join them, but she wanted to be at Archer’s side when he awoke.
So while Haven’s leaders argued over their next course of action, she watched his sleeping form. And she planned.
She had to take out the Guard some other way, but she wasn’t skilled enough to erase the entire organization from history, and excising individual Guardians would be as good as killing them. There was, however, another option . . .
Her father’s plan for the Red War. She’d seen it in the Book—a scrap of paper scribbled over many times in different hands, describing the Guard’s plans for conquest. Tanin used to keep it in her room, under glass. If Sefia excised that plan from the world, if Lon never conceived of it, maybe she could create a series of reactions like the ones she’d made when she’d erased an entire plant instead of a single grain of rice: The Guard would never plan for the war. They’d never hire the impressors to kidnap and mutilate children. Archer would live.
She shook her head.
Excising a single plant had given someone a scar they’d carry the rest of their life. If she took something as important as Lon’s plan for the Red War and allowed that erasure to cascade? She could have been born into the Guard. She could have been shaped into a weapon. She couldn’t even guarantee that Archer would live, because even if he
was never captured by the impressors, that didn’t mean he wouldn’t die another way.
Whatever she did, she had to control her magic.
No, she thought suddenly, I have to control theirs. What made the Guardians so formidable now was Illumination. The most powerful Illuminators—Tanin, the First, the Soldiers, Erastis, maybe even his Apprentice, June, if she’d gotten that far in her studies—would be able to teleport from any prison Sefia put them in. But without their powers, they were just like anyone else—able to be contained by cell walls and locked doors.
If there’d been any nightmaker left in Dotan’s laboratories, she could have stripped them of their Illumination now, but the Master Administrator was still in the process of making his next batch.
She would have to use excision to take their powers. And with excision, she would be rewriting the future, doing something fate could not control.
Sefia stroked the Book’s cover thoughtfully. Had the Book given her this idea? Was her plan part of some elaborate trap meant to drive her and Archer toward their destinies?
No, she’d first thought of it while fighting Tanin. And what she’d read in the Book hadn’t influenced her thinking.
Except . . . the attack on Roku. The Black Beauty and the candidates were sailing south with an invasion fleet. It wasn’t a coincidence that the Book had revealed this information to her. It wanted her to go south.
The question was, would she? Would she refuse to play into the Book’s traps and let the attack happen? Would she sacrifice Roku to spare Archer and herself? Would she choose the many or the few?
* * *
• • •
Archer slept, and when he slept, he dreamed of killing boys. In the fighting rings. On the deck of an Alliance ship. In a flooded quarry, while the dead tried to drag him into the black waves. He dreamed of killing boys he knew and boys without names, and most of all, he dreamed of killing Kaito.
No matter how many times Archer put him down, the boy would not stop coming for him.
