by Lisa Henry
“I knew Talys and your brat were planning something,” Robert said. “Clever.”
“Oh, the cleverness is all your daughter’s, sir,” Min said, his heart beating fast. “You should be very proud.”
Now that drew a thin, bitter smile from the man.
“She told you, then, about the plan.” Min tried not to feel the sting of betrayal. He’d been a fool to put his trust in Talys in the first place.
Robert’s jaw clenched. “I caught her trying to put hellebore root in the soldiers’ beer supply.”
Sons of Rus! The soldiers would have been vomiting for hours had she succeeded. She definitely was clever. Ruthless too.
Robert held Min’s gaze. “Your plan failed.”
“Poison was never part of my plan,” Min said. Only because he hadn’t thought of it, but why muddy those waters? “I prefer distraction.”
“I swore to Talys that I wouldn’t hurt you,” Robert said. “Or your nephew. But if you ever attempt to return here again, you won’t be leaving. Kazimir is beyond your grasp. You never would have reached him anyway.”
“Possibly,” Min said. “Have you never done a hopeless thing just because you knew that if you didn’t, it would eat at you for as long as you lived?”
Robert’s shoulders stiffened. “No.”
“Well, this was the first time for me as well, so it may happen for you yet.”
Robert glared at him. “You’re a fool.”
“No doubt.” Min inclined his head and swallowed around the ache in his throat. “I have no right to ask anything of you, sir, but, as you say, I am a fool, so I will proceed. Kazimir isn’t your enemy. He’s just a boy who has done nothing to earn your hatred except to be born, and that was no fault of his. His blood, his Gift, they are hateful things, but he did not ask for them, and he doesn’t deserve to be punished for them.”
Robert clenched his fingers into fists.
“I do not believe you are a cruel man,” Min said honestly. “Just… be kind to him, please. He has known very little kindness, I think.”
He could not read Robert’s silence.
“Please,” he said again softly, his chest aching.
“It is out of my control,” Robert said at last. His voice rasped a little as he spoke, as though the words were difficult to force out. “My father is sending him to the Iron Tower at dawn, where he will be placed into the custody of the king.”
Min’s stomach clenched. “And treated as a fae? The enemy? Just so your father can curry the favor of the king?”
“It is out of my control,” Robert repeated, a muscle in his cheek twitching.
“The king’s favor,” Min said, “and all for the cheap price of your own sister’s child. Or do you think of him as your husband now? How was the wedding, sir? Was there dancing? Cake?”
Robert stepped toward him, his face a mask of rage. “Get out. Get out of this house now, you insolent fucking dog!”
For a moment Min thought Robert would strike him, but suddenly, from the direction of the front of the house, there was a dull boom. And then another, and another, like the rapid barrage of thunder cracking overhead. Doors slammed throughout the house, boots tramped, and voices yelled back and forth. Min smelled smoke.
“What the fuck is that?” Robert exclaimed.
“That,” Min said, forcing a smile even as his throat ached, “is the distraction.”
The noise and smoke should have drawn the soldiers guarding Kaz’s door to the front of the house. It should have been the work of moments to break the lock and free Kaz while the soldiers and the servants ran about in panic as the pots of saltpeter, burning rags shoved in them, smashed against the portico and exploded into flames. It should have been the both of them climbing out the window and both of them slithering down the tree and into the garden while the focus was on the front of the house.
It should have been two of them fleeing into the night.
But Min was alone when he climbed back over the wall and dropped down into the street.
He was alone as he slunk off into the night.
And Kaz, wherever he remained, was alone too.
THE COLD night air stank of smoke. Trails of it floated through the air like wisps of cloud before dissipating into nothing. As Min slunk away from the Sabadines’ house, he could hear shouting in the street. The harsh voices carried farther than they would have during the day when the other noises from the city would have swallowed them up. At night, all noises seemed louder.
The street dipped gently toward the valley, and Min followed it down. He walked for several blocks until the streets around him narrowed. There was a tavern nearby that marked the boundary between the quarters, and while it was certainly too close to the mansions of the nobility to be anywhere in Min’s budget, it wasn’t exclusive enough that he looked out of place lurking outside. Anyone passing would think he was a patron who had come outside to catch some fresh air or to piss in the street.
Min leaned up against a wall and waited for Harry and Aiode to catch him up.
His chest ached, and it had nothing to do with climbing into windows and jumping over walls. His eyes stung as well, and he knew better than to blame it on the cold or the smoke.
Min was not a man unaccustomed to failure, but the weight of this one wasn’t only his to bear, but Kaz’s as well. What was that old saying about a burden shared? No. No, because thinking of Kaz, who must have heard the explosions and wondered if they meant rescue, only made the weight of his failure press more heavily on Min’s shoulders. To have offered him that glimpse of hope, only to have it crushed slowly as nobody came….
Min curled his mouth into a bitter smile. Yes, because what this already miserable night needed was for him to imagine a thousand different scenarios of Kaz’s suffering, all of which were designed to cut more deeply than the last. What would his perverse self-hating brain conjure up to torture him with next?
And thinking brought it immediately into being: Kaz’s face, pale in the moonlight, his eyes shining. “I don’t want my uncle to be the first man who has me. I want you to be the one to do it, so that at least there will be once in my life that it’s not….”
So that it wasn’t what had already happened when he and his uncle had been married.
Be kind to him, please.
Min had petitioned gods in the past who were easier to move than Robert Sabadine, but he’d tried.
He closed his eyes and leaned against the rough wall.
It counted for nothing in the end, but he’d tried.
He opened his eyes as he heard footsteps—thin boot soles skidding over grit—and a moment later Harry rounded the corner with Aiode following.
“Min!” Harry exclaimed, his gaze going past him and then coming back again. He pulled up short, his brow creased in confusion. “Min, where’s Kaz?”
Min didn’t trust himself to speak. He shook his head in answer and then turned and headed for home.
Chapter 16
MIN SWALLOWED painfully as he followed Harry and Aiode up the steps to the garret room.
Harry pushed the door open. “We have wine somewhere. Want some?”
“I want the whole bottle, I think,” Aiode said mildly. There was none of her usual sharpness in her tone. She put a hand on Min’s shoulder as he moved past her, and squeezed lightly. “I’m so sorry, Aramin.”
There was nothing in her tone except sincerity, and Min figured he must have looked bereft indeed to have inspired a cessation of their barbed banter. Her pitying gaze told him that Aiode knew now this had never been about revenge against Edward Sabadine. She’d very probably known it from the start.
Min nodded and crossed the floor to the bed. He sat and stared at his boots for a moment, and at the bright moonlight spilling across the dusty floor, and then closed his stinging eyes. He was tired. He wanted to crawl under the blankets and never come out. Instead he listened as Harry and Aiode moved around the room, speaking briefly and in hushed tones as though Min was
some fragile thing and even a sound might shatter him.
The sagging mattress dipped further as weight settled on it beside Min.
He blinked his eyes open.
Aiode held a cup of wine out for him.
Min took it. “Cure for a heartache, hedgewitch?”
Aiode tipped her head back and drained her cup. “This is the only one I’ve ever found that works, to be honest.”
Min snorted and threw his wine back as well.
Harry refilled their cups and sat on Min’s other side.
“I’ve never met a void before,” Aiode said at last.
Min drank again. “How long have you known?”
“Well, a man would have to be courting death to attempt what you did tonight,” she said, “unless he was either at least a sorcerer equal to Sabadine’s or a void. And you are no sorcerer, Aramin.”
“And far too craven to be courting death,” he murmured.
“I’ll drink to that too.” Aiode knocked their cups together.
“Strange,” Min said. “The entire thing was doomed to failure, but I put no thought at all into how it would feel or what I would do when it did fail. And yet here I am.”
Harry scrubbed his hand over his eyes.
“Ah, well.” Min set his cup down on the floor. “What happens in all those stories you read, Harry, when the heroes are defeated?”
Harry shook his head. His throat clicked when he swallowed. “They never are.”
“Must be nice.” Min rubbed a hand over his tight chest. Kaz was gone, but the ache remained. Min didn’t begrudge it. It was all he had left. He reached down for his cup again and raised it to his mouth. The wine was thin and bitter. He took a mouthful and then spat it out again as something wet and stringy snagged against his lips. He picked whatever it was from his lips and held it up toward the candlelight to inspect it.
A twig of some sort?
No.
A thin feather, the vane stuck to the shaft with wine.
Min’s heart skipped a beat as he looked toward the open window.
A raven perched there, huddled over as though enfolded in misery. Min blinked his vision in an attempt to clear it, but the raven remained.
Min set his cup down on the floor. He rose to his feet and walked slowly toward the window.
“Chirpy?” he asked in a voice hardly louder than a breath. If this was a spell—and how could it be anything else?—then Min wanted to sink into it, not to shatter it.
The raven let out a small, sad noise and tilted its head to look at Min.
Min held out his hand, and the bird fluttered and flapped toward him, ungainly and almost comical. He landed on Min’s wrist and tapped his beak against his thumb. The bird was a solid weight, claws digging into the skin of Min’s wrist. The last time Min had seen the bird, he had been traced in ink on Kaz’s pale skin. The tip of a feather, the curve of a claw, or the sharp end of a beak appearing out of Kaz’s dark curls, the literal bird’s nest of his unruly hair. But tonight the bird was real, a solid weight shifting on Min’s wrist.
Min’s chest tightened. “Chirpy, where’s Kaz?”
Chirpy made that same mournful sound, and Min watched, his heart clenching, as a glistening tear formed in the bird’s eye and slid down his glossy black feathers.
“Chirpy?” Min asked, and the raven tapped his thumb again, feathers fluttering. “Don’t cry, Kaz. Don’t cry.”
Because Min had no doubt in that moment the tear that dropped onto his wrist, that burned as hot as a coal, was Kaz’s. That the raven was some unknowable part of Kaz, some facet of him that was as impossible to grasp as his shadow or his spirit but just as fundamentally him.
Ravens couldn’t weep, but Kaz could.
“Kazimir,” Min whispered. He raised his free hand and stroked his fingers down Chirpy’s glossy feathers. He could feel the bird’s heart beating rapidly through the gentle touch. “Oh, my sweeting.”
Chirpy sidestepped up Min’s arm, shuffling onto his shoulder. He tapped his beak against Min’s cheek, scraping it over his stubble, and then tapped it against the shell of his ear. For a moment Min was lulled by the raven’s sorrow and the gentleness of the gesture. But only for a moment.
From outside in the moonlight, bells began to toll.
Min’s blood ran cold as he stepped toward the window.
The alley outside was still; unusually so, given it ran past the back door of the Footbridge Tavern. Min watched the shadows that the moonlight made and listened to the bells as the sound rolled over Amberwich like a wave, rippling out from the Iron Tower where they must have sounded first, and picked up by each shrine and temple throughout the city.
Min had heard the bells of the Iron Tower rung before in celebration of some event worth remembrance, and those that hung by the city walls tolled at night to signal the ending of the day and then, hours later, the dawn. He had heard bells before when fires broke out in parts of the city, but he had never heard them all ringing at once, each one a voice that became a chorus of alarm.
“Sweet Mother of the Sacred Spring,” Aiode whispered. “What can it be?”
Nothing good. It could be nothing good.
Chirpy squawked and dug his claws into Min’s shoulder.
“What are you—fuck!” Min reared back as Chirpy bit his earlobe. He slapped at the raven, but Chirpy dodged him and fluttered to his other shoulder. “Sons of Rus, Chirpy!”
Chirpy squawked and tugged at Min’s hair.
“Knifebeak! Stop!”
But apparently it wasn’t Min’s choice of name that had the raven so worked up. He fluttered around Min’s head like an angry black storm cloud, feathers slicing through the air, darting in and out of Min’s flailing arms to peck at him.
“Min!” Harry shouted. “He wants you to go with him!”
“What?” Min dropped his arms and glared at the raven. The raven, taking a break and perching in the nest of Harry’s fluffy hair, glared back.
“He wants you to follow him,” Harry said. He stepped toward the door, and the raven let out an approving sound not unlike a pigeon’s low trill. “See?”
“Is that it?” Min asked. “You want me to go with you?”
Chirpy ruffled his feathers and squawked.
“To what end?” Min wondered aloud, and Harry and Aiode stared back at him helplessly.
To the bitter end, probably, but Min reached for his cloak anyway.
THE STREETS were no longer empty, and those people not clustering in them, Min guessed, were awake behind their doors and shutters, fearful to know what the tolling of the bells throughout Amberwich meant. The city felt like a living thing tonight, and not any majestic beast at all, but some sort of growling skittish stray. It was a fearful half-wild dog cornered with hackles up, as likely to lunge and draw blood as it was to turn tail and run. And Min, along with every other soul in the city, was nothing but a flea caught on its back, hoping to avoid its snapping jaws.
Min kept his wits around him and his knife close to hand as he hurried through the moonlit streets with Harry and Aiode. Chirpy flitted ahead and back, ahead and back, as though he was drawing Min along on a lure. There was an association there—strings and puppets and a dead hedgewitch’s hollow “Who are you?”—that Min didn’t want to dwell on. If he was in Kaz’s thrall, after all, it had nothing to do with his Gift.
The cool breeze tugged at the edges of Min’s cloak as he followed Chirpy. Fingers of colder air prickled his skin. He was half-surprised that Chirpy appeared to be leading them away from the center of the city and the Iron Tower, but it wasn’t until they were on Stanes Street that he realized Chirpy was leading them out of Amberwich altogether.
The torches burning on the portcullis over Stanes Street threw sharp dancing shadows over the worn-down cobblestones and the walls of the surrounding houses. A company of men, all wearing the livery of the King’s Guard, stood in serried lines in the massive shadow of the gate, weapons at hand, and it seemed suddenly absurd to Min.
Thirty men here, and probably the same amount at every other gate in the city, and Min could only think of one reason the city bells were tolling out their warning. What the hell could these thirty men do but cower and flee if the fae walked up to the city walls? It was the Iron Tower that protected Amberwich from the fae, not any gate or guard or weapon.
A gray-robed mage stood amongst the soldiers. He was thin and narrow, a praying mantis, and he had a pinched, anxious look to him that wouldn’t have been out of place on a nervous whippet. He clearly wasn’t confident his Gift could repel the fae if they approached Amberwich. Neither was Min.
He wondered how close the fae could come before their magic was weakened by the Iron Tower. Min and every occupant of Amberwich had been told their entire lives that the fae could not tolerate iron, but Min didn’t know if he could believe it. Kaz was part fae, and the iron collar had subdued his Gift of necromancy, but his fae magic? Taavi and Chirpy should have been frozen on his skin, shouldn’t they? And he’d still been able to follow the leylines in the woods.
The iron collar had burned when Min had put it on Kaz in Anhaga. Then, days later, Kaz had been closing his hand around the chains in the manor house in Pran, and he had told Min they felt like stinging nettles. If Kaz’s body had learned to tolerate the iron, was it possible it would one day stop working entirely? And if it was true for Kaz, then why not for the rest of the fae?
Would the Iron Tower protect Amberwich forever?
Did it even protect them now?
Min wasn’t prone to flights of fancy, and he wasn’t the sort of man who got drunk in cheap taverns and muttered about how the king and the Gifted were nothing but liars and tyrants building palaces on the broken backs of working men, but he couldn’t help but wonder if the gray-robed mage’s fear was that of a man who knew he was about to watch a house of cards come tumbling down.
