Shaianna breathed in deep. The torches flickered. And the mages all stirred in their cages. The sense of wrongness amplified, pushing down on my shoulders. I shoved my hostage forward, and he immediately fell to his knees and bowed low, hands splayed on the floor, the chant spilling from his lips.
“Curtis.” Shaianna flicked her hand toward the opposite passage.
That was my cue to leave. I had turned toward it—thoughts reeling from the loss of the Eye—when Anuska sprang from her kneeling position and lunged for Shaianna.
“Don’t!” I shouted at Shaianna, already knowing how this would end.
Whatever the captain had intended, she didn’t get far. Shaianna plucked her out of the air as though she was nothing more than a leaf on the wind and pinned the guard against the cell bars. The dagger flashed, and another shout leaped to my lips, but it was already too late. Shaianna plunged the dagger home, deep into Anuska’s chest. The captain’s cry rattled the mages, stirring them into a frenzy.
“You and your kind believe you have the right to freedom, and I do not?” Shaianna yelled over the howling mages. “This is my land! My power. Who are you to judge me? You are nothing but the dust I crush in my hands.”
“Shaianna, please…?”
Shaianna turned her head toward me. She didn’t see Anuska’s hidden blade until the last second.
“No!”
The dagger flashed and sank deep into Shaianna’s side. A splash of pain burst through me. I let out an involuntary cry and reached for my waist, knowing there wouldn’t be a wound. Shaianna tugged her dagger free from the captain’s chest and drew it back to slash open Anuska’s throat.
I gripped Shaianna’s shoulder and yanked her back, skipping out of reach as the dagger flashed for me. “Leave her! She’s dead anyway. We need to go …”
Shaianna blinked, clearing the murderous rage from her eyes. Her fingers came away from her side wet.
“Now, Shaianna.” I shoved her ahead of me, toward the dark mouth of a passageway. “Move!”
We fled through the passage as it twisted and turned beneath the Inner Circle streets. It had to breach the street surface somewhere, anywhere. The mages would soon be on us. I could feel them coming.
The passage abruptly rose, ending in closed storm-cellar doors. I slammed a shoulder into the panels and burst out onto a street ripe with the smells of wood smoke and damp stone. Outer Brea. Shaianna stumbled out after me, clutching her side. I slammed the cellar doors closed and maneuvered nearby barrels against it, blocking it shut. Hopefully that would hold the mages back long enough for us to escape.
“I know where we can go.” I staggered to the edge of the street corner and peered around to get a feel for which part of the Outer Circle we were in. Nothing looked familiar. “Shaianna?”
“I will be well.” She fell against the wall. “I just need some time.”
Her eyes rolled back and her legs gave out. I caught her, almost falling with her from sudden dead weight.
“Shaianna?”
The cellar doors rattled, but the barrels held. I scooped Shaianna into my arms and walked away from the tunnel, away from the howls, away from the Inner Circle.
Chapter Nineteen
The speed at which Agatha took Shaianna from my arms and disappeared into the left wing of the coach house left me reeling. Shaianna was alive. I knew that as surely as I knew my heart beat in my chest, but the captain’s dagger had done more damage beyond the obvious. I could feel the ache and burn as though I were wounded. If I’d needed more evidence that we were still bonded, I had it. But until she came around from the attack, there was nothing I could do.
I peeled off my wet coat and drifted into the kitchens. A wood-burning stove radiated warmth, drawing me to it. I pulled out a chair from under the table and slumped in front of the stove. I hadn’t known the cold could sink its teeth so deep into bone. Numb fingers burned along with the ghostly wound in my side. I wasn’t sure how long I had wandered the city with Shaianna in my arms. Once the cold had set in, I’d had no choice but to cut through some of the worst parts of town. We were lucky the cold had driven everyone but the drunk and equally desperate inside.
Agatha would keep us safe for a day or two. After that … I wasn’t sure. I didn’t have any money, just the dagger and some makeshift lock picks. I owed Lyn, Agatha’s brother, gems I couldn’t pay. I had nowhere to go and nothing to my name, just the crazy sorceress and a whole lot of responsibility for magic and mages I didn’t want.
I buried my face in my trembling hands. There was too much to think about, too many unknowns. I couldn’t think on them. Not yet. All I needed was warmth and peace. My responsibilities would eventually catch up with me, but until then, I wasn’t moving from the stove.
A blanket settled around my shoulders.
Catherine held out a mug of steaming broth. “You need it.”
Her hair was pinned in a messy bundle, and her robes were plain and fraying at the edges. Catherine was rarely seen without her finery.
“Thank you.” I bracketed my hands around the mug and let the heat soak into my palms. “How is she?”
“Penny’s with her. She’ll be fine.”
Penny was a young maid and general nurse. She had patched me up once or twice after I’d fallen from a few roofs. Shaianna was safe with her.
“We thought you died. Someone talked about the mark on your back. Word got out—one of the clients, maybe—and then guards took you away. You were as gray as a corpse.” Catherine picked up a coal bucket, opened the fire hatch, and shook coal inside. “I er …” Her cheeks flushed. She wiped a hand across her face, smudging coal dust below her eye. “I admit I was relieved to see you.”
“Thank you for taking us in.”
“Thank Agatha. What was that creature?”
“I’m not sure I know. They were men and women, once.”
“They? The guards have mentioned similar attacks across the city for months now. They’re blaming it on vagrants, but what I saw—the creature you killed—that was no man, Vance.”
“No.” By the look on her face, she wanted me to say more, but what could I say? That the people of the Inner Circle each had the potential to turn into those things, me included? It sounded mad.
Catherine let it go with a sympathetic smile. “Agatha was most distressed that she wouldn’t be getting her percentage of your latest venture.” She straightened and wiped her hands down on her apron. “She tried to hide her relief when Jake told her you were at the door. She doesn’t like us thinking she feels much of anything. I’m sure she’ll be down to see you soon.”
Hunched inside a blanket, broth in my hands, and the fire thawing the frost from my limbs, I couldn’t remember the last time I had felt this safe. Probably beneath the same roof with much the same people. “We won’t be here long.”
“Quite all right by me, but it is not me you have to impress.” Catherine set about clearing and stacking plates. “Who is your companion?”
Anyone who’d seen Shaianna couldn’t have missed her exotic appearance. I could imagine the gossip spreading through the house and smiled at the thought. “She’s complicated.”
“A friend?”
“Yes, but she’ll also kill you without blinking if she thinks you’re a threat to her. She is … sensitive.”
“I’m sure we can manage her.”
I smiled into my broth and took a drink. I wasn’t sure if anything short of a natural disaster could manage Shaianna.
“Once you’re warm and fed, there’s a room and some fresh clothes waiting. Get some rest. When you’re ready, join us in the sitting room?”
I nodded and thanked her again as she left the kitchens to continue her chores. As warm and safe as I felt, I knew it was temporary. I had stirred up a nest inside the Inner Circle, and they would come. Maybe in an hour, maybe in a day, but soon. I was ready. The boy who had been blinded by lies was gone. I saw all the ugliness now and knew it had to end. It looked as though, of
all people, a gemless thief would be the one to end it.
Sleep claimed me for much of the following day.
I woke to the sound of the early afternoon bells, thinking Agatha would likely charge me a handsome sum for the room. I washed, shaved, and dressed in the simple shirt and trousers left out.
Refreshed, I avoided the entertaining areas and searched for Agatha, discovering her seated with a young well-to-doer woman in the sitting room, the both of them enjoying tea from porcelain cups. A boy, no older than Daryn, strummed a tune on the guitar, occasionally missing a note. A fireplace roared, and others, not yet entertaining, lounged about the room like cats sprawled in sunlight.
“Ah, Vance, my dearest.” Agatha beamed and set her cup down in its saucer. I opened my mouth to ask after Shaianna, when Agatha introduced her companion with a flourish of her hand. “Your friend here was telling me how you escaped some unsavory types on the streets last night.”
I blinked at the woman seated opposite Agatha. The girls had pinned some of her dark hair back in elaborate swirls—I couldn’t imagine her doing it herself. Her dress—a subdued combination of gray silk and lace filigree—sloped from her shoulders and flowed over a figure I struggled to tear my gaze from. She looked like the type of woman I’d steal from, but only if I’d missed her smile, for it was a bright and honest curl of her ruby-tinted lips. Gone was her snarl and the sharp set of her glare.
“Vance?” Agatha inquired. She might have asked something, but I hadn’t heard a word.
“Agatha, can I speak with you? Privately.” I smiled tightly at Agatha and turned away from Shaianna’s coy expression.
Agatha gave Shaianna the polite Please excuse my friend look and excused herself. The only private area was by the window, opposite where the boy played guitar. I waited until Agatha had shuffled her many layers of skirts over and then asked, “What are you doing?” The strain was back in my voice, and I didn’t care that she had heard it.
“Vance, don’t get ideas above your stature. You’re in my house,” she hissed.
“Shaianna isn’t one of your whores to dress up and loan out by the hour.”
She straightened, affronted. “You misunderstand me.”
I laughed dryly. “No, I understand you all too well. She’s different, and you think your punters will pay a high price to have her all to themselves.”
“You are wrong, Vance. Although it did cross my mind. She has the most astonishing designs painted on her body. And her bone structure—” Agatha cut off at my scowl. “She asked to borrow one of the girl’s attire. Did you know she’s never worn a gown? I don’t know where you found her or why she’s with you, but I see loneliness and I understand it. You should not be so quick to judge. She wanted to dress like my girls, and I’d say she wanted to dress like my girls for you.”
My gaze flicked to Shaianna. She was watching the room, her smile still playing on her lips. She sat too still to be real, and even dressed like a lady, there was an edge to her that no one else in the room possessed.
She caught me looking and sadness softened her smile.
I gritted my teeth and forced my glare back on Agatha. “She’s not for the likes of you.”
Agatha reached for her necklace and teased the fake gem between her fingers. “My house was good enough for you.”
“And what am I? A thief among whores. I am nothing.”
Agatha bristled at my words. “She doesn’t think so.”
Because she is well stuck with me. “We can’t stay, and I can’t pay you for that dress—or my clothes. I appreciate your hospitality, but the longer we stay, the likelier it is that trouble will find us. And you do not want the kind of trouble that is chasing us.”
I expected her to frown and demand I find a way to pay her what I owed, but she sighed. “Then go, but before you do, have you considered what she wants?”
“All the time.”
“Well, you’re clearly missing the obvious. I once saved a boy, took him off the street, clothed him, put a roof over his head, and gave him somewhere safe to call home. It may not have been perfect, but it changed the boy and put life back into him. Perhaps your friend just wants some company and to live a little, Vance. Have you considered she doesn’t know how?”
“And you’re going to teach her?”
“Me? No.” She laughed. “You. Oh Vance, sometimes you look so hard for things to steal that you miss those things that are freely given.”
Agatha turned to leave, but I caught her arm and whispered, “Listen. Brea isn’t safe. Before you ask, I cannot tell you why. Make sure your women are armed. And be ready. A storm is coming.”
I didn’t want to tell her it might already be here, dressed like a lady and drinking tea from a china cup.
Her smile faltered. “Before your storm strikes, sit with her awhile, Vance.”
Agatha tugged her arm free and joined some of her women across the room.
Sit with her? We should be fleeing the city. I returned to Shaianna and sat in Agatha’s chair. “You’ve healed remarkably well.”
“As I said.” She inclined her head. “Time was all I required. I am much restored.”
Restored … I replayed the image of her crushing the Dragon’s Eye in her hand. The very jewel she’d said she needed to help restore her. Now it was gone. I wasn’t sure what to make of that and set the thought aside for another time, perhaps later when she tired of the dress and returned to her assassin garb.
“You seem to have charmed your way into the old woman’s heart.”
“There is a strength in her. I admire that.”
I waited too long to reply and forgot what I’d been about to say, something about strength and hardship, but I lost my trail of thought in the mesmerizing contradiction of her. “You deny you’re a lady, yet you play one rather well.”
“A dress does not a lady make.” She smoothed her skirts with a faint smile. “I wanted to pretend, just for a while—before it’s gone.”
“Before what is gone, exactly?” I’d given up expecting a straight answer from her, but I hadn’t given up asking for one.
The guitar player picked up a merry tune, and Shaianna’s smile from back in Calwyton, when she had danced through the night, returned. “What it means to be here, with you and them.”
I settled back into the comfort of the chair and watched her as I had at the inn, not long after we met. The aloofness was all but gone, replaced by a rare warmth. This woman would be the death of me.
“What do you see?” I asked softly, inviting her to read the room.
“I see people. Some old, some young, some yet to decide. I see sadness, and hope, and sometimes fear. But mostly, I see faith.”
“Faith?” I looked at Agatha’s men and women and tried to picture how Shaianna saw them, but to me, they all looked like hardened survivors dealt a rough hand of cards. They’d battled with their fingernails to carve themselves a life out of something hardly worth carving.
“Faith in one another,” she added. “Faith in the other people they hold dear. They walk this world alone, but side by side.”
The guitar player picked up his beat, finding his rhythm.
She was right, I supposed. They were alone in their depravation, but they had each other. I’d left that behind when I struck out on my own. And I’d be lying if I said I didn’t miss the company.
“Your people,” I said, drawing her wandering attention back to me. “What were they like?”
“Beautiful. Deadly. Swift to strike … Feared.”
“Like your queen?”
“She was my queen, but I was not of her people. You assume I am something I am not.” Her smile sipped sideways as the touch of that sly knowledge she never went without narrowed her eyes.
“Then tell me.” I leaned forward. “Tell me who you are.” She opened her mouth to speak, but I cut her off. “Not shadow and dust. Something tangible. Something real.” I took her hand, placed it in mine palm up, and brushed my fingers across
her palm. So smooth. So perfect. Not even a sign of a scar like the one that marked my palm. “Tell me who Shaianna is today.”
She leaned forward too and looked down at our hands. “She is afraid, and alone, and lost in a world much changed from the one she remembers. Her life and her loves are gone. She remembers them as though they lived yesterday, but hundreds of years have passed. Nothing remains. And for that, she regrets. The people here know nothing of the gods before they were restless. They do not remember the ways of the past. They have forgotten her.”
Her head stayed bowed, her gaze fixed on my fingers as I trailed them around her palm. I watched her dark lashes flutter against her pale skin and how she measured each breath carefully behind her control. Even now, while she appeared so small, there was danger in her. In her stillness and in her glances. A sharp, deadly mind worked behind that beauty.
“She is anger.” She sighed. “It burns harder and brighter with every passing day. She knows what she must do, but doubt distracts her. It has been so long. She wonders whether some things are best left buried.”
“Not you,” I said and smiled when she lifted her head. “You are too bright a treasure to bury, Shaianna.” I closed my hand around hers. “Come with me …” I pulled her gently from her seat.
We wove through people, leaving the chatter of the sitting room behind, climbed the staircase, and veered down one of the hallways toward what had once been the servants’ wing. A few steps away from the end of the hall, I ran my fingers along the painted paneling. Shaianna watched curiously—her eyes full of questions. The panel beneath my hand clicked and popped inward. Shaianna’s smile came alive at the sight of the secret door. She followed me up the cramped, winding staircase.
The hidden staircase brought us out onto a narrow balcony. A bitter winter air embraced us, misting our breaths despite the winter sun hanging high in the sky. I followed the balcony to the back and onto a flat section used to access the roof for maintenance. Hardened snow provided sturdy footing. Shaianna battled with her skirt, but once she’d joined me, the view spreading out before her, she lost her scowl and her eyes widened with delight.
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