The Cruelest Mercy

by Natalie Mae

  “I did not! I literally never said that. And trust me, Hen, this is one you’re really better off not knowing.”

  She gives me the kind of grin I imagine Apos, the god of deceit, gives his victims before he devours them.

  “Better. Off. Not. Knowing?” she says, her teaching quill bending perilously. “The last secret you thought I didn’t need to know, you became a crown princess. You are telling me this secret. You owe me this secret, or so help me, Zahru, I will quit.”

  I snicker nervously. “You won’t quit.”

  “Yes, I will, and you’ll be left with that crabby lump of a tutor they first assigned to you. And”—she braces herself on the desk, hovering over me like a pixie-sized demon—“I will tell everyone you hate chocolate.”

  I gasp. “You wouldn’t!”

  “I would. I’ll tell them you’ve developed a terrible allergy, and that no matter how hard you beg for it, they should never, under any circumstances, give it to you.” Her eyes glint, and I stare back at her, incredulous. “So. What’s it going to be?”

  I shake my head in disbelief. “You are a terrifying, diabolical person.”

  “Not a secret.”

  “But, Hen, this time . . . this could put you in danger.”

  “Now you are definitely telling me.”

  “I’m serious. It’s just better if you—”

  “—worry about you at all hours of the day, wondering what I could be doing to help, while you continue to lock me out for my protection?” Her shoulders drop, and the hurt on her face is far worse than her anger. “Is that what you would want from me? If I was in trouble, you wouldn’t want to know?”

  “What? No! Of course I would, but—”

  “You told Jet! I know you two haven’t been canoodling. You’re far too snappy for that to be going on. So why does he get to know? Because he can defend himself, and you don’t think I can?”

  I blanch. “Never!”

  “Then what is it? Have you . . .” She shrinks back, a hand over her heart. “Have you replaced me?”

  “I could never replace you! And I would have told you, except . . .” I hesitate. My Influence stirs against my ribs, nudging my hands like an eager dog. If I reach out, I know I’ll find Hen’s frustration, her hurt. The magic pulls at me, whispering that it can help, that it can make her decide she’s happy about this and doesn’t want to know more. I could go to Kasta’s room in peace. Hen would never bring this up again.

  I shudder and press back against it. I’m absolutely not changing anything in my friend’s head, never mind that I still don’t know how to do that without knocking someone out.

  Which leaves me only with the truth. And the panicky realization that if I’m going to keep this friendship from my old life, I can’t lock Hen out of my new one.

  “All right!” I say, dropping my quill. “All right. I’ll tell you, but you’re going to want to fix it, and I need you to swear to the gods you won’t do anything without talking to the team first.”

  Hen’s eye twitches. “A. Team. Knows about this?”

  “. . . which we’ll round back to another time! The point is—you have to swear you won’t wrangle in your contacts, or cash in favors, or even vaguely mention this to anyone in any context. Not even Mora can know about this.”

  Her eyes narrow to two oak-brown points as intense as Apos’s flaming spears. She doesn’t like having to make this promise, but she nods, and the pressure in my chest relaxes. For me, she’ll do it.

  “Good,” I say, drawing the rune necklaces from my pocket. “Because it would actually be amazing to have your help.”

  * * *

  As I knew she would, Hen takes in Kasta’s now being both a Shifter and an almost-god with an extreme amount of grace. Also as I knew she would, she takes being able to sneak into his room to look for evidence with an extreme amount of excitement.

  “I have a lot of experience with this” is the concerning statement she makes after I tell her our plans to gather evidence.

  “You absolutely do not.”

  “With sneaking into places and finding things, I do. These give us a quarter of an hour?” She taps the rune necklace at her throat, which she put on even before I started talking. I nod. “Plenty of time. You came to the right girl.”

  I would remind her I didn’t actually come to her, and that she threatened this out of me, but I’m finding I’m relieved she did. Now all my secrets are off my chest, and Hen and I can go back to what we were before, or at least as much as possible with me now in charge of an entire country.

  I adjust my own rune necklace as we move out of the study. “Remember, we need something indisputable. Animal pelts, preferably. But also anything out of the ordinary. Cryptic letters to people, bloodstains—”

  “Bodies?” Hen pipes, too brightly.

  I grimace. “Yes. Ew, but yes. But if we don’t find anything, we’ll have to go in again, so we can’t mess anything up that he’d notice . . . Why am I telling you any of this?”

  Hen turns in front of the glass balcony doors, smiling like a patient mother. “Go on. These are all good tips. It’s encouraging to know you have all this on your mind already.”

  I sigh. “The only thing I haven’t figured out is how to get in. He has guards outside his door around the clock, and Jet already made sure there’s no way to get between the rooms.”

  Hen’s still giving me that look. There’s an amused edge to it now, like if I think a little harder about what I just said, I’ll come to the answer.

  “You’ve already figured out how to get in there, haven’t you?” I ask.

  Hen beams. “Yes.”

  “How? And why does this not make me feel better about keeping Kasta on his side of the wall?”

  “Because he doesn’t have me, or these runes. Which makes our job very simple.” She throws open the balcony door and steps into the sun, and I’m readying myself for any number of questionable solutions, which I can only imagine involve drugging guards or sawing through Kasta’s roof, when she points next door.

  “You’re right next to him,” she says. “We’ll jump over to his balcony.”

  “Oh,” I say, entirely disappointed. “That’s it? I thought you’d drill out a passage in the ceiling or something.”

  “Also a good idea,” she says, looking impressed. “But too time-consuming. And it would require an Earthmover, whom you’ve forbidden me to speak to.”

  At least the don’t tell anyone part of my instructions got through to her. I glance at the water clock on the dresser: three and a half marks. Only half a mark until Kasta returns. It’s now or never.

  “All right,” I say. “Let’s do this.”

  I follow her outside, the dry afternoon heat skimming my arms like teeth. Jade bounds out after us, swatting at dragonflies, and we pause at the marble rail, Kasta’s windows waiting dark and quiet on the other side.

  “Stay,” I tell Jade, who responds by sitting grumpily on one of the glass party tables.

  Anticipation shivers through me, and I pull myself onto the stone railing.

  The top is wide enough to set a plate on, which makes it alarmingly easy to jump the distance. But a comforting pulse of heat on my neck reminds me that the rune necklace is working, and that Kasta has no way to get his own. Hen peers into the first window, then the second, and curses.

  “Rie,” she says. “What is it with you royals having the curtains closed all the time?”

  This gives me a jolt, not only for being referred to as “you royals,” but also for the realization that my paranoia is starting to look a lot like Kasta’s. I glance back at my own drapes and shove the thought away. This isn’t the same. This is temporary.

  “He should be at training,” I say, sidling over to the balcony door. A small slit remains between its curtains, and I peer inside, ready to jump away at
the smallest motion. But only darkness waits within.

  Nerves flash through me, and I grip the serpent-shaped handle. This is where it began.

  It could also be where it ends.

  I slide the door open just wide enough to squeeze through.

  The damp blue light of the torches spills over me. Memories unspool in the shadows as I take in the room, from the surgical cleanliness to the thick blue curtains. There’s the couch where Kasta cut the sacrifice’s symbol into my wrist; there’s the table he overturned after I struck him and got away. There’s the window Jet broke through, before my mother’s protection rune knocked Kasta cold.

  I force myself to move. Hen slinks ahead of me, lifting a stack of papers from an ebony desk. One of many desks, I realize, as my eyes adjust to the light. In the same corner where my room has bookshelves and a reading chair, Kasta has four curved, polished tables arranged like a horseshoe. Glass instruments line the tops in neat displays, some connected by delicate tubing. A metal cylinder sits over a circle of burned wood. I don’t remember any of this being here before.

  “He rebuilt his laboratory,” I say, that same strange feeling coming over me as when Jet joked about me burning this room. Kasta destroyed his first lab when he was a child, after he realized he’d never possess the magic he was so fascinated by. A palm-sized square of forsvine sits on a wooden stand, pieces of it cut off and missing. Another forms some kind of bracelet, the edges so soft that fingerprints mar its sides. In a nearby tube, more of the metal bubbles in liquid form over a low green flame.

  He wasn’t lying about studying it.

  “Yes,” Hen grumbles. “And he’s one of those irritating people who puts everything away. Which means we need to be careful how we put things back. Start on those scrolls, and pay attention to how you get them out.”

  I slide a letter from the next desk, but my shoulders fall when I unroll it.

  “I can’t help with these,” I say, despairing at Kasta’s tight scrawl. “I don’t even recognize a the in these first sentences.”

  Hen squints at it. “I’ll go through them. You look for bodies.”

  How she delivers that line without cracking a smile or grimace, I don’t know. The girl is savage.

  “Thanks,” I say. “That’s exactly what I was hoping you’d say.”

  She’s too busy with the letters to grace me with a response. I consider the rest of Kasta’s room—the open doorway to his private pool, and doors to other rooms besides. But I’m not thinking of bodies. Kasta wouldn’t be that careless. I’m thinking of pelts, and how they’d need to be someplace accessible, and also someplace no one could come across by accident.

  The white curtain over the closet flutters, and I wonder.

  I creep past the main doors, holding my breath as I picture the guards standing alert on the other side, but soon I’m through the curtain and staring at the shelves. Orange torchlight dances across a monotony of white. White tunics, white tergus kilts and capes and robes; the color favored by Mestrahs, as it’s the hardest to keep clean. A crown of twisting rattlesnakes, Kasta’s favorite, shines atop the head of a featureless stone bust on a pedestal. Strange that the model isn’t in the likeness of one of our gods. As if Kasta is only wearing Valen’s symbols to mock the god of fate, which makes an awful kind of sense when I consider how Kasta broke free of what Valen intended for him as Forsaken. Or maybe Kasta simply believes himself above the gods now altogether.

  Focus. I gingerly lift stacks of soft linens and silks, grateful that at least among all this white there can’t be cactus spire—except I realize halfway through that if I were Kasta, the last place I’d hide a pelt would be in a closet. That’s expected. Predictable. Two things Kasta has never been. But just as I’m shoving back one of the piles in defeat—I hear it.

  A soft crunch, like parchment.

  I ease the stack free and set it aside. A scroll rolls on its edge at the back, and carefully I lift it, noting it was on the left side of the shelf.

  “Hen,” I whisper as loud as I dare. I poke my head around the curtain, and Hen replaces a book she was looking through and jogs over.

  “You’re surprisingly good at this,” she says, closing the curtain. “I know who I’m calling on the next time I need something found.”

  “Absolutely not. I’m already halfway to a heart attack right now.” I hand her the scroll. “What is this?”

  “Hmm.” She unfurls it, and my skin prickles, electric. This is it. We’ve done it. It will be an order for bodies, or pelts, or maybe a list of people who won’t be missed by their families—people Kasta could make disappear without anyone noticing.

  But Hen sighs and hands it back.

  “It’s nothing,” she says. “It’s an order to locate the Forsaken. The only weird thing is that he’s dated it for the future.”

  “What?” I say, looking down. “No, it has to be something. He hid it. What does it say?”

  Hen follows the words with her fingers. “‘General Nadia, you will gather all the Forsaken who were sent out of the orphanages and build them lodging in Luksus. I want every living person found and treated as is fitting of a noble. You will provide them with new clothing, food, and belongings. If any should harm them or speak against you, lash and imprison them. I will deal with any unrest.’” She lowers her finger to a jagged signature. “‘Mestrah Kasta.’”

  I stare at the words in disbelief. Hen has no reason to make any of this up, but what she’s saying doesn’t make sense. Even if this isn’t a copy of the law allowing Mestrahs to be Shifters, it should be something similarly terrible: a demand for prisoners’ bodies, a declaration of war. Not an order to gather the people Orkena has cast aside and provide for them.

  I made you a promise.

  And this is another.

  “But . . . that can’t be all of it,” I say, feeling numb. “He’s signing it as Mestrah. Why? Why hide it and not send it now?”

  Hen rolls the parchment. “Look, I don’t want to defend the stabby prince any more than you do. But you realize how controversial an order this is? This wouldn’t get past his father.”

  “No.” I search the shelf for another scroll; I take out the stack of clothes next to it. “There’s more to it. He’s using this to distract from something. Or . . . or he wants to eat them!”

  “By first treating them like nobles and building them homes?” Hen hands the scroll back to me. “I know you want to find something, Z. But this isn’t it.”

  A door clicks. Hen and I freeze, dread lancing down my spine, and slowly, so slowly, I dare to look through the slit between the curtain and the wall. Kasta. His head is down, his hair stuck up with sweat. He studies a curling slip of parchment in his hand. I jerk out of view and grip Hen’s sleeve. He’s back early.

  Follow, Hen mouths, tugging my elbow. With the deft silence born of panic, I slide the scroll and the folded garments back in place with little more than a whisper. Kasta’s footsteps sound in the room, moving away. Hen pulls me to the rear of the closet, where the finest of Kasta’s tunics hang. We cram into a corner behind a swath of floor-length capes—where I slice my heel against something sharp.

  “Tyda,” I breathe. Hen elbows me, and I bite the inside of my cheek. Hot blood trickles down my heel.

  Kasta’s room falls silent.

  My heartbeat thuds in my ears as his footsteps resume, this time drawing closer. Hen grips my hand. Folds of white and red satin are all that separate us from view, and I close my eyes against the screech of the curtain jerking aside, the sudden shadow that darkens the room.

  I would rather be found by the Wraithguard than him.

  As if the gods accept this challenge, the runes on my necklace flash cold—a warning that their magic is nearly depleted—and I almost laugh.

  More silence. I open my eyes, expecting the tunics to be flung aside, a hand to grab my throat. Nothi
ng happens. It’s quiet for so long that I’m wondering if he left, when grit crunches under a sandal. Clothes slide from a shelf. Footsteps move away, and the curtain jerks closed.

  Hen taps her necklace, eyes wide, and counts down from ten on her fingers before gesturing for me to move. We slip from our hiding place. Kasta’s steps fade, and I peek through the curtain in time to see him disappear into the pool room.

  My heel aches. Hen slips forward, but I grab her arm and point to my foot. Blood streaks the tile. She grabs a folded tergus, rips a piece free with her Materialist’s magic like it’s clay, and I wrap the strip tight around the wound. We use the rest of the garment to wipe the floor, but just as I start for our hiding place, Hen grabs my hand—no. The runes pulse cold on our necks. We’re out of time.

  We pause at the curtain long enough to hear the splash of water, then sprint for the balcony doors, my blood rushing so hard I’m sure it’ll soak through the bandage. We slip outside, close the latch without a sound, and leap to my railing, and it’s not until we’ve slammed the door and shrieked our victory in the safety of my room that I realize we didn’t actually achieve anything.

  No pelts, no bodies.

  Only more proof that Kasta is not the monster I want him to be.

  XIX

  HEN says she’ll handle the bloodstained tunic, which I accept with an expert amount of nonchalance, and we call in Melia for my heel. I should be grateful the small cut is the worst that happened. But while Hen writes to Jet to tell him what we found—and to inform him she’s now in charge of our coup—impatience stirs in my chest. This new version of Kasta can’t be real. It has to be a game, a false light, as Maia put it, and I can’t fall for it again. Even if he showed Odelig mercy. Even if he’s already planning to help the Forsaken, without any prompting or pressure from me.

  But despite what I know must have happened for him to survive, a splinter of doubt pushes into my mind.

  Maybe he didn’t.

  Maybe Maia is still alive, and he’s trying to make up for everything by doing good.