I dragged a hand down my chin and rolled onto my back. Finding another bed to keep warm in hadn’t been my finest decision of the night. Those few more beers hadn’t helped either.
A scream outside wrenched me from the bed. Tugging my clothes on, I staggered to the window and swore. Roaring firelight licked up the townhouses and over straw-covered roofs. The Half Crown Inn was back there. Shaianna.
I snatched my dagger from the dresser, woke my companion, and told her to clear everyone from the nearby buildings.
Out on the street, people fled the flames, while others rushed in, buckets sloshing. A few buckets wouldn’t get this blaze under control. Nothing short of a miracle could save the town now.
I rounded the street corner and found one side of the street awash with flame. The Half Crown Inn’s thatched roof steamed. It hadn’t yet caught, but it had minutes, if that. Heat pushed against my back as I fought through the stream of fleeing people.
“Have you seen the woman I came in with…?” I asked those rushing from inside. “The woman with black hair? Have you seen her?”
I pushed through the inn’s main door into the bar.
“You can’t go in there, sir,” a maid stammered as she shoved by.
Smoke rolled across the low ceiling. I buried my face in the crook of my arm, ducked low, and headed for the back stairs. Screams—I could hear them, but I didn’t know if they were real or in my head. I pushed on, stumbling up the stairs, eyes streaming and lungs burning. Shaianna could be sleeping. Drunk as she had been, she could be oblivious to the danger. I hit the landing and the oily smell of scorched meat hit me. Memories simmered to the surface, but they couldn’t have me, not now. I had to find Shaianna.
I veered left at the top of the stairs, and clutched the bannister in the thick smoke. A groan sounded through the building and rumbled through the floorboards. Somewhere behind me, the timber floor creaked. Hot air rushed over me. I ducked into my room just as half the ceiling collapsed in a roar behind me, spilling flames with it. I slammed the door closed, coughed into the crook of my arm, and blinked through streaming tears at Tassen.
“She’s not here,” he said as though more surprised by her absence than by the inn burning down around us.
“Why are you here?”
“Never mind that. We have to leave.”
The door at my back was hot to touch. Paint bubbled on the panels. “Can’t go back. The ceiling’s collapsed.”
He looked down at my boots, where smoke crawled through the gap beneath the door.
“What’s your interest in Shaianna?” I demanded, pushing forward.
“We have more pressing matters, don’t you think?”
“No.” My fingers curled into a fist. “Some folks won’t make it out of this fire.”
“Mayhap one of those folks could be you, thief.” He lifted his hands. “Save the pissing contest until we’re away from the flames.”
I swung at him. He dodged the right hook but not the left I buried in his gut. He doubled over and clutched my shoulder. I had him against the wall before he could retaliate and pressed the dagger to his throat.
“Tell me or die here,” I snarled.
Wide-eyed and his hat askew, he spluttered, “I was paid to track you both.”
“And?”
“And take her back.”
“To Brea?”
“Yes.”
“Inner Circle?”
“What? No. Just a man … a man with gems to spare.”
The same man who had hired me to steal the cup, or someone else, someone who knew more about the pieces of this puzzle?
The same curious urge to spill his blood came over me, same as it had in the highwaymen’s camp. “I should bury this blade in your heart and leave you for the fire.”
His smile twitched nervously. “Meanwhile, your lady friend could be anywhere—”
“I am no lady.” Shaianna perched inside the open window, one arm draped over her knee. Head cocked, she looked less than impressed with her uninvited guest. “My thief is correct,” she said. “You should die here. All men should die. You are treacherous beasts.”
I might have argued my case if smoke hadn’t been rolling around the room and drifting higher.
“Kill him, thief,” Shaianna ordered.
Tassen swallowed. The bulge in his throat bobbed against the edge of the blade.
“No..” I pulled him from the wall and shoved him toward Shaianna. “I want to know who hired him. He comes with us.” Tassen staggered, caught his hat, and aligned it back on his head. He looked between Shaianna and me, judging who was likelier to keep him alive.
“Let me give you some advice, Tassen. My lady friend doesn’t much like you, and I’ve seen what she does to people she doesn’t much like. Were I in your shoes, I would keep my mouth shut and do as she says, else she will kill you, and she won’t make it quick.”
Shaianna pinned her killer’s glare on Tassen, her joyous smiles and easy manner long gone. Once more, she was made of stone. “Perhaps the fall will kill you?” She smiled a hungry, wolfish smile.
Tassen blustered, but his grin didn’t last as he realized she meant every word and could easily make it happen.
With the walls and floor groaning around us, we each climbed from the window and inched along the sills, stepping over gaps. Shaianna made scaling the building’s facade look as effortless as her dancing, while Tassen struggled to cling to the stones as he followed behind her.
His boots slipped. I snatched his sleeve and yanked the man up, allowing him to clutch the sill protruding above us. Gratitude shone in his eyes once he had regained enough strength to open them. I nodded him on.
I was sick of mysteries and unanswered questions. Once we were free of the fire, Tassen would talk, or he would find himself alone with the real Shaianna.
We had reached street level when Shaianna whirled and pinned her gaze on something behind me.
She plucked her dragger free. “Look out, Curtis!”
I ducked aside, twisted—dagger out—and struck at the blur coming at me hard and fast. The thing slammed into me. We hit the ground hard, tumbling together. Claws caught my left side, pain burned, teeth snapped at my face, and red eyes burned into my soul. I slashed wildly with the dagger and only knew I had stabbed the mage in the gut when hot, syrupy blood spilled over my hand and down my arm. It opened its maw and howled a blood-curdling scream. I cracked my fist across its face and kicked its limp body off. But my relief was short-lived. I climbed to my feet and saw them, all of them …
The houses crawled with mages. They scurried down the walls into the street, pouring through the gaps in the flames.
May the fire cleanse your soul …
I turned around on the spot, looking for a gap in the onslaught. Tassen was gone. I was alone, but the screams were real, weren’t they? No, my parents hadn’t screamed. Those screams had belonged to my sister.
Fire boomed from my left, spewing from windows and doors. I shied away from the heat, spotted Shaianna beckoning me forward, and broke into a run. Fire licked through the buildings as fast as we sprinted down the debris-strewn street, the flames framing us as we fled.
We veered around a corner and slowed as a wall of rippling flames surged across the plaza, devouring the festival’s strange straw mannequins. All the houses huddled around the town square were ablaze. I shielded my face against the heat beating at me. Hot air cracked my lips and burned my lungs. And behind us, the mages came.
“Give me your dagger.” Shaianna held out her hand. She stared back the way we had come, at the wave of mages rippling closer.
Those things—they had to be a hundred strong, and still more appeared, spilling in from side streets, out of broken windows, down walls. How were there so many?
“Give me your dagger, thief, and when you see an opportunity, run. Run and don’t look back.” Shaianna looked me in the eye. “Do as I command and live.”
I handed her the dagger. Her finger
s brushed mine, and a chill trickled up my arm. Daggers at her sides, she walked toward the oncoming storm.
The mages didn’t pause. They surged as one, pooling into a stream of rippling black bodies.. Shaianna opened her arms as though inviting them closer. I had prayed only once before in my life, when my sister had lain dying in my arms. The restless gods hadn’t answered my prayers then, and I doubted they’d answer them now, but unarmed, with the fire at my back, I had nothing left to fight with.
“By the restless gods, keep her safe.”
When the first few mages hit Shaianna, I was sure they would bury her. The battle would be over before it began. But Shaianna slashed both daggers in a wide arc around her, throwing the mages back. She didn’t stop. She moved in—cutting, slicing, dancing. Every step was deadly, and every strike accurate. Within a few strides, the gems scattered about her body glowed brightly through her leathers, lighting her up from the inside until the same ribbon of emerald light spiraled around her the way it had atop the moors. The mages kept coming, like oil trying to smother water. But the more mages came, the brighter she glowed. A shining star inside an ocean of darkness.
A gap opened between the mages and a half-collapsed building where the flames had burned out. I dashed for it and didn’t look back, didn’t hesitate. Head down, I ran until the heat faded and the light dulled. I continued across the bridge marking the outskirts of town, where the Calwyton people stood watching their homes burn.
I stood beside weeping, broken families who had been laughing and dancing only hours before. Embers sailed high into the sky, and the sounds of Calwyton’s death throes carried deep into the valley and across the moors.
I was the last to cross the bridge.
I caught two tame horses in the fields outside Calwyton during the early morning hours and walked them to where a stream burbled and the air smelled of damp bark instead of burning tar. Mist drifted across an empty dew-drenched field and rolled up against the stream, but it stopped short of seeping into the forest behind me.
I sat on a moss-covered rock and pulled my coat around me. Shaianna would be well. Had she died, I would have felt her passing through the bond, wouldn’t I?
The horses pawed at the earth and snickered, but the quiet was thick, as though the restless gods had granted the people of Calwyton a moment of peace.
After escaping the workhouse, I had wandered Brean’s streets for months, stealing scraps and avoiding the worst parts of the city by chance more than skill. The streets weren’t kind to anyone, and to someone like me, raised inside the Inner Circle wall, I might as well have been a lamb in a warg’s den. A delirious sickness almost claimed me once, after I’d eaten something offered to me by a well-to-do woman with cruel eyes. Another time, I narrowly missed the affections of a gang after they had lured me in with promises of food and warmth, but the worst of it came when I was attacked and beaten, left for dead in a gutter. I would have died had it not been for a kindhearted whore who had mistaken me for a pile of rags. After cleaning me up, she too had recognized a way to use a young, naive boy. But my penchant for thievery—a skill I’d acquired on the street and perfected in her company—proved far more useful than my body.
I was the sum of my mistakes. Fifteen years as an Inner Circle brat, so convinced of my own self-worth until my dreams of being a city guard had burned along with my parents. I’d escaped the Inner Circle only to be press-ganged into the workhouse. Five years of torture had followed. A world as different from the Inner Circle as night was from day, a world so horrific my sister had taken a kitchen knife to her heart to escape it—and me. The streets had been kinder; six months on my own, then maybe three years as a thief, and sometimes as an escort when the mood struck, until Shaianna demanded I drink from her cup.
I didn’t deserve Shaianna. She was either the best or the worst thing to happen to me. I’d yet to decide which.
She was truly a puzzle. A frustrating riddle. In one glance, she could be beautiful, joyful, and hopeful, and in the next she’d be cold, guarded, and detached. She reminded me a little of the girls in the coach house, who wore their personalities like masks. The reality of them was far different from the ones they presented to their clients by the hour. But who was Shaianna’s act for? Certainly not me. I doubted I featured much in her thoughts at all. She cared for her cup, and the Dragon’s Eye, and freeing herself from the wretched thief she had mistakenly bound herself to.
I dipped my hands into the bitterly-cold stream, cupped some water, and splashed my face, shocking the fatigue from my system..
If half of Shaianna was an act, which half was true? The laughing woman or the sorceress assassin?
I wanted to see the laughing woman again. The woman who’d lifted her hands to the waterfall, the woman whose smile had warmed my withered heart, the woman who had danced with the Calwyton townsfolk as though she didn’t have a care. Perhaps I was a fool to think such things. She would certainly think me so if I asked her to smile for me.
Movement in the mist drew my eye. She approached through the field with purpose, running her hands over the waist-high grass while her sights remained locked on her target—me. I wondered if she had lingered to kill Tassen and if the same fate awaited me.
She stopped on the opposite side of the stream and regarded the horses. “Stolen, thief?”
I straightened and scratched at my chin. “Borrowed. It’s about time you turned up. Some of us have fabled gems to find.”
Something—I hesitated to say a smile—crossed her lips before she could banish it. She retrieved a dagger from behind her and held it out handle first. “Keep it close, thief. You will need it where we are headed.”
I looked at the blade, clean and sharp. No sign of blood or anything to indicate she had used it to carve through a small army of mages. Her face showed no signs of it either. But in her eyes, a small sparkle of fresh sadness rested there like dew on grass. Or perhaps that was my imagination, for her eyes were as dark now as they had ever been.
I took the blade. “To Arach.”
She bowed her head. “To Arach. And may these so-called restless gods be with us.”
She turned away, leaving me to wonder whether she had heard my prayer or if she also prayed a little when faced with darkness.
Chapter Eleven
“What does it say, thief?”
“You can’t read?”
“Not your language, no.”
We pulled the horses to a stop where the woodland gave way to a patch of clear meadow and the rise of what looked like oddly angled trees. Upon closer inspection, they weren’t trees at all, but stone columns choked by undergrowth.
“It’s nonsense, really,” I said, referring to the scratches etched into a fallen stone. It looked like a gravestone, especially when considering the words, but I wasn’t about to tell Shaianna that. Since riding out of the woodland to where the ruins jutted from the undergrowth, she had stilled and gritted her teeth, causing a muscle to flutter in her cheek.
“We should move on,” I suggested.
She stared ahead at the ruins, signaling we weren’t moving anywhere until I had obediently read the carving.
With a sigh, I recited the words. “‘Where once there were dragons there remains the dance of starlight. Look to the …” I paused and shifted my horse side-on to get a better view of the weathered letters. “It’s difficult to make out. Look to the whisper in the wind, the stirring below still waters, and the rise of ocean waves. Only the realm of man remains, where once there were dragons. See, just some nonsense put here by the moorlanders.”
She gave no sign that she had heard me and kicked her horse forward. Her galloping mare disturbed the field of flowers and butterflies, scattering clouds of pollen and dandelion fuzz into the air.
I let her go until the bond tugged and then geed my horse on. Less wondering about the riddle of her and more treasure hunting.
I found her riderless horse wandering the ruins where the meadow had breached crumbled
walls and spilled between monolithic stones.
“Shaianna?” I called and dismounted. I tied my horse’s reins loosely around a tree branch and did the same for Shaianna’s horse.
“Shaianna?” My calls didn’t carry far into the slumbering ruins.
Grasshoppers chittered, and the rich earthy smell of ferns tickled my nose. I jogged over some fallen stones the size of my entire loft and pushed through the blanket of ferns, treading carefully.
“Shaianna?” A little voice of worry declared she had disappeared to retrieve the Eye without me. I probably wouldn’t see her again, and all of this had been for … nothing.
A gentle breeze touched my face, bringing with it the sweet scent of wild flowers and the sounds of sobbing. I jogged higher, over the fallen stone and deeper into the ruins, until the tangle of jungle and stone opened into what must have once been a great feasting hall. The roof had long collapsed, but a few stubborn walls lingered. Shaianna knelt, head bowed, in front of a vine-wrapped pillar. Her all-black attire contrasted starkly against the swathes of grass. It wasn’t until I had hopped down stones to level ground that I realized her shoulders shook and the sobs were hers.
Wading through the grass, I carefully approached. “Shaianna?”
She didn’t cry. She was too much a killer to cry. But when she lifted her face from her hands, real tears glistened on her cheeks.
“I don’t understand,” she whispered, and then, with a gasp, she screamed the next words. “How can this be?”
I wanted to go to her, to wrap my arms around her and pull her close, but the shock of seeing her openly sobbing rooted me. She would likely stab me if I tried to comfort her. I hadn’t come this far to mess up by overstepping some intangible boundary.
She braced a hand on the earth and fell forward, as though in pain. I had dropped to a knee beside her before I could consider it might be a mistake.
“There’s nothing here,” she whispered.
The Heartstone Thief (Dragon Eye Chronicles Book 1) Page 9
