by Elly Blake
“You need it more than I do,” I said.
Her hand flashed out, and the purse disappeared quickly into some hidden pocket in her patched and baggy vest.
“This will keep us fed for weeks,” she said, eyes bright. “Months.”
“Listen, Kaitryn,” I said impulsively, “I’m about to go on a voyage and I’m thinking life aboard a ship would be better than life on the streets. Why don’t you come with me?”
She looked up at me, her eyes narrowed thoughtfully, but then a chorus of young voices came from the street and her eyes widened again. “One of the gangs. They don’t like me poaching here. Time to go.”
“Kaitryn, wait, I’d like to help you if—”
But she was as slippery as the nickname Kai had given her, a little fish that slid from his grasp and disappeared into the crowd. I rushed into the street, but she was gone.
“A friend of yours?” Kai asked as he followed me. I scanned the forest of heads, but Kaitryn was nowhere to be seen.
As we walked toward the wharf, I told him the barest details of my first meeting with Kaitryn, lengthening my strides to keep up with his.
“Ah, the little fish has had a hard time of it.” I was surprised at his regretful tone, which made me like this arrogant stranger just a little bit more. “I would have offered her a place on the ship if she’d stayed.”
“Really?”
He shrugged. “Why not? Either way, she’s gone. Along with your purse.” He looked at me askance. “Did no one teach you to guard your gold?”
“I’m not used to having anything to steal. Speaking of, I believe this is yours.” I slid the ring off my finger and he took it, our fingers brushing briefly. Though his skin was hot, I shivered slightly. It was still so strange to feel skin the same temperature as mine.
We turned a corner and suddenly we were on the timber-floored wharf set against a sparkling blue-green harbor.
I followed Kai through a moving maze of seafaring folk. They marched past carrying barrels or crates, sold fresh fish from rickety stalls, and played noisy games of dice. Here and there, families and sweethearts said good-bye before boarding ships. A young couple embraced, looking as if they never wanted to let each other go. I swallowed and turned away. I didn’t need to witness anyone else’s good-byes. I’d just endured one of my own.
We stopped at a scarred wooden door with a faded sign bearing what appeared to be a rotund weasel smoking a pipe.
“The Fat Badger,” Kai said with a flourish. “Where no one asks questions as long as your pockets are deep. Lucky for you, I didn’t give my money away.”
“And how did you get your hands on Tempesian money?”
His brow twitched up. “Does it really matter?”
It didn’t. He could be a thief or a charlatan, but he was still my ticket to Sudesia.
There were only a few quiet patrons in the tavern—a man and woman talking over a meal at a small round table, a few people at a long wooden bar. A pulse of cold air signaled that at least one of the patrons might be a Frostblood.
A strange feeling came over me—dizziness and a prickling on the back of my neck. “Not now,” I muttered. This was no time to be thrust into a vision. But none came. Only an unsettled feeling, as if unseen bees hummed their way around the room, waiting for a chance to sting.
A stocky barmaid wearing a dirty smock over a heavily patched dress brought two bowls of stew to our table.
“Extra pepper, just how you like it,” she said to Kai. “Do you need anything else, love? Anything at all?”
Kai grinned. “Not now, thanks, Inge.” He gave her a wink, making her cheeks redden. I wondered if she knew he was a Fireblood. And whether it would matter to her either way, considering the strength of that blush.
“Tempesian food is so bland,” Kai muttered as she left, poking at his stew with his spoon.
My mouth was too full to reply. A hot meal was welcome after the hard cheese, dried meat, and stale bread I’d eaten for the past three days.
Out of the corner of my eye, I caught the man at the small table staring at me. But when I lifted my head to meet his gaze, he wasn’t looking at me at all. Then from my left, I saw heads from the bar angle toward me. But when I turned toward them, they were hunched over their tankards or chatting with the barmaid.
As I looked back at Kai, I saw that he held a knife, the serrated blade pointing toward me. I reared back.
But then I blinked, and it wasn’t a knife. It was a spoon, frozen halfway to his lips. One of his brows lifted in inquiry. “Something wrong?”
The buzz in the back of my mind rose to a roar. It was joined by dark, tinny laughter that I knew, I knew, I knew.
Nonononono.
“We have to get out of here,” I said. Or I tried to, but my tongue felt thick in my mouth, the muscles too tight.
“What?” Kai asked. “What did you say?”
“True vessel,” said the resonant, bell-like voice that had once echoed from the throne. It was bigger now, stronger. But smoother, too. More controlled. More convincing as it chimed with soft words I longed to hear.
“Ah, how you hurt inside,” it crooned. “Pain. Loneliness. Grief. Tearing you apart. So unnecessary. So wrong for you. For us.”
I shook my head, breathing shakily. The Minax’s mind touched mine, stirring up all my sadness and loss and siphoning it away. Replacing it with heady relief. When I glanced at the people at the bar again, they were all looking at me.
They all hated me. They wanted to kill me. They were rising from their seats, drawing knives from sleeves or pockets or boots. Moving closer.
“Ruby,” a voice said, the accent pronounced. “Ruby! What’s wrong?”
I turned to see Kai, and two images phased in and out, first a look of concern on his face, then a look of killing fury. His hand held a knife, then it didn’t. Knife, no knife. Concern, hatred. Danger, safety.
And it was the arena all over again, the sense of life or death, the longing to live, the relief that darkness was taking over. Feelings no longer mattered. All the pain I’d felt over leaving Arcus conveniently faded away.
“They will kill you,” said the voice in my head. “They are all against you. They will plunge their knives into your flesh and rejoice in your blood spilling on the floor.”
Joyous darkness pulsed. How breathtaking, how enticing, how irresistible. Lost in its caress, I let it flow over me and envelop me like a sweetly clinging fog.
“We will destroy them. Trust only me.”
The world lost color and I was filled with stark power. I could see my opponents’ beating hearts. I fought against the impulse to cease that beating, grasping at sanity as I might grasp at the edge of a cliff to avoid plummeting to my death. But my enemies were all rushing at me now and it was live or die. Them or me.
“Ruby!” Kai yelled. “What are you—”
My hand, which no longer belonged to me, threw out fire. A man convulsed as heat filled his chest, his eyes rolling to show the whites. He fell and landed on his back, his head hitting the floor. His fingers twitched, his head turned to the side, and he was still.
Screams and chaos. A strobe of sunlight as the door opened. People rushing out. Someone’s hands on my wrists, holding my arms to my sides. A voice shouting at me in another language. And all the while the whisper in my head told me I’d done well, filled me with light-headed glee. Softened the edges of everything. And laughed.
I laughed, too. I couldn’t stop.
Harsh swearing in my ear and hands on my upper arms, shoving me toward the door. I whipped around, gathered my heat, and focused on the beating heart of my captor. The Fireblood, his center pulsing white with heat.
He grabbed my wrists and squeezed. “So you’re going to try to kill me, too?” He searched my eyes. “What’s wrong with you? What happened in there? Ruby!”
His firm but gentle grasp, or perhaps the shock of his temperature being so similar to my own, somehow brought me back to awareness. Someth
ing frayed and snapped. The darkness faded, tendrils of shadow lifting into the air, leaving me bereft and grieving and alone. I sagged toward the floor.
Arms caught me in a tight hold, hauling me back up. I shook my head, trying to clear it.
Kai. That was his name. His face was flushed, his arms hot around me, his expression horrified.
“I—I didn’t mean to…” I turned to look behind me. The bar was empty except for the barmaid and a woman wailing over the still figure of the man.
The man I’d killed.
“Sud, no. No!” I invoked the goddess of the south wind to help me. This couldn’t be happening.
But then the man on the floor moaned and coughed. The woman bent over him sobbed in relief. “Thank Fors you’re alive,” she said brokenly.
Relief overwhelmed me. But, oh Sud, what had happened? Had the man tried to kill me? Or was that all in my head?
“Call the constable!” the woman screamed. “That filthy Fireblood tried to kill my husband!”
Kai yanked me out the door into the confusion of the wharf. His hand was clamped on the back of my neck.
“Where are you taking me?” I asked, pulling against his hold.
He dragged me into an alley and pushed me up against the side of a building. “Why did you try to kill that man? Tell me!”
I shook my head violently. “He had a knife!”
“He was just sitting there! Did you recognize him? Did he hurt you before?”
“No.” I was trembling all over. So cold. “It must have followed me somehow. I don’t know.”
“What? What followed you?”
“The curse. Please, please, just take me away before it comes back.” And to my horror, I found I was sobbing.
There was a long silence. And then I was being pulled along the wharf to one of the creaking docks. A short, wide-shouldered man wearing a cap helped me into a rowboat and Kai climbed in after me. They spoke in lilting Sudesian, and the burly man began to row with steady strokes.
We moved into choppy water, around the headland, and into a cove. A ship nestled there, its front covered by the figurehead of a wide-eyed young woman with flowing carved hair that streamed onto the sides of the ship. She looked as startled and as lost as I felt.
A couple of sailors threw out lines and secured the rowboat, then tossed out a rope ladder. When I reached the top, I dropped to the floor—or rather, the deck. I’d read about ships enough to know that much. I listened to Kai shouting orders, then the creak of chain as they hauled up the anchor.
The wind caught the sails and spray arced over the ship’s side, shockingly cold on my fear-heated skin. I pushed to my feet and scrambled to the railing. As we curved around the jut of land that bordered the harbor, the docks and wharf grew smaller and smaller and slipped out of sight. Eventually even the land was nothing more than a series of inky smears on parchment left by the fingers of a child.
I stood there for a long time and watched Tempesia fade from a violet-gray blur into the flat, blue horizon—leaving everything I’d ever known behind.
SEVEN
WHEN I WAS DONE HEAVING OVER the railing and my legs felt like wet straw, Kai led me to a small cabin where I promptly crawled into bed and fell asleep.
Sometime later, he came back wearing fresh clothes: fawn breeches, black boots up to the knee, and a loose-fitting white shirt. The lamplight made highlights and shadows out of his angular features and tinted his hair a deeper orange. He held a metal tray with a cup and a wooden bowl that steamed.
“Eat,” he said, plunking the tray on a small table next to a chair, both of them bolted to the floor. “I think your sickness has passed.”
The cabin was so small I could make it from one end to the other in a single leap. Not that I felt like leaping. Or moving at all. I considered pulling the covers over my head and going back to sleep. Instead, I forced myself to sit up.
“Thank you,” I said quietly.
“It’s just pottage with turnips. You won’t thank me once you’ve tasted it.”
“No, I mean thank you for bringing me aboard after…”
He leaned against the wall and crossed his arms. “If that man had attacked you, I would have fought alongside you. But he did nothing. You didn’t answer me when I told you to stop. You were like a wild thing. An animal.”
I shuddered. “I know.”
His eyes were hooded. “You claim there is a curse.”
I’d forgotten I’d said that. I flapped a hand in the air to cover my anxiety. “It won’t make sense to you. You won’t believe me.”
He hesitated. “Your eyes are the color of honey in the sun, but when you looked at me in the tavern, the color was gone. Your terror was genuine. Tell me what scared you, and I will try to believe you.”
To buy some time while I considered what to say, I took a bite of pottage and grimaced. If Kai thought Tempesian food was bland, I didn’t know how he could stomach this. I put the bowl back on the tray. “It’s a long story.”
He folded himself into the chair next to the bed, crossing his outstretched legs at the ankle and folding his arms. “The journey is long. There is time.”
Brother Thistle had cautioned me not to tell the queen my reasons for coming to Sudesia. It stood to reason I shouldn’t go around blabbing my plans to anyone else. Kai might seem like an ally, but I barely knew him. So I gave him an altered version of events.
“I had to fight for my life in the arena,” I said, searching for partial truths that he would accept. “I had to kill people.”
“Yes, I know this.”
“Even though it was necessary to my survival, I sometimes feel the burden of what I’ve done. Sometimes I even feel like a… a dark presence has taken hold of me.”
“What kind of presence?” he asked, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees.
“I have memories of those fights that are so real, it’s as if I’m reliving them. For a few moments… sometimes… I can’t tell what’s real.”
I watched his face, gauging his reaction. I had to be careful not to tell him things that would make him distrust me, but at the same time, a part of me wanted to unburden myself. Part of me still wanted absolution for what I’d done, even though I’d had no choice. The death of Clay—the boy from my village whose rebellion against King Rasmus had landed him in the arena—wasn’t my fault, but it still haunted me. And the eyes of Captain Drake’s wife and daughter as I stood over his bloodied corpse flashed into my mind at odd moments. I told Kai, and he listened quietly with a neutral expression.
“So you had a flashback in the tavern?” he asked.
“I… The man must have reminded me of someone I’d fought in the arena.”
It hadn’t been a flashback, though. The Minax had made me see things that weren’t there. No wonder there had been so many murders. It must trick people into thinking they are under attack, filling their minds with hallucinations.
“But you said something had come for you. A curse. You begged me to take you away before it came back.”
I grasped at the first explanation that came to mind. “There are times I believe I’ve been cursed for what I’ve done. And I want to escape that curse and start over.”
There was truth in that. I wanted to be free of the Minax. I wanted to discover what my life would be like without the creature’s consciousness affecting my thoughts and dreams, ruining my sleep and my peace of mind with guilt and disturbing memories.
His expression was serious, lips firm, eyes a little wary as he said, “And what happens if you encounter someone else who reminds you of an old opponent? Will you attack that person, too?”
I shook my head and spoke with conviction. “Those flashbacks are connected to Tempesia. When I’m in a new place, those memories will fade.”
I hoped that was true, that I was leaving my visions behind. I was on a ship sailing south on the Vast Sea. Surely I’d be safe from the Minax with that much distance between us. And when I returned to Tempesia
, I’d be armed with the knowledge, and hopefully the means, to destroy it.
Suddenly I felt lighter. Calmer.
“Are you sorry you brought me along?” I braced for him to tell me that I was too dangerous to be on his ship.
His eyes narrowed thoughtfully, but he didn’t answer right away. I burrowed into the covers and watched the lantern light flicker against the ceiling.
He made a sort of thoughtful humming noise and stood up, stretching his arms, pressing his long-fingered hands against the low ceiling, then smoothing his shirt back into place and tugging on his cuffs. His keen gaze came to rest on me. “I’m not sorry I brought you. I understand wanting to leave your past behind. And you have survived things even I cannot imagine.”
“Thank you,” I said again, nearly weak with relief. “I know you could have taken me to the constable.”
He leaned his leg against the bed and gave a wolfish half smile. “Do you really think I’d have taken my little bird to the constable?”
“I’m grateful to you, Kai. But I am neither yours nor a little bird.”
“But you look like one. Lost and alone in your nest.” He picked up a few strands of my hair and let them fall, laughing as I narrowed my eyes at him. “And it’s so easy to ruffle your feathers.”
“Don’t make it sound as if you brought me along out of pity. I haven’t forgotten that you told our attackers in the garden that I could help get something you need.”
“They want you in Sudesia, and I’m bringing you. Why shouldn’t I receive something in exchange for my trouble?”
“Who wants me?”
He hesitated. “Queen Nalani and her husband, Prince Eiko.”
The prospect of the queen’s attendance at the ball, though unlikely, had been monumental enough. The idea that she actually cared about my existence, had even sent someone to bring me to her kingdom, was too much to contemplate.
As a child, my grandmother had told me stories about the magnificent Queen Nalani, beloved by all Firebloods. In my daydreams, she was warm, unguarded, intimidating but fair. It was a fantasy, I knew, and yet a seed of that belief had remained. Whatever her failings, I was sure she wouldn’t be like King Rasmus—a twisted and power-hungry warmonger.
