by Natalie Mae
Then jog, Maia thinks, her grip tightening. I have no choice.
“Is something wrong?”
In response, Maia’s gait quickens, and now I do have to jog to keep up.
“Maia, what is it?”
The mention of her name must stun her, for she looks down at me before pressing on.
He’s in danger.
I’m ashamed to say part of me feels hopeful at this, because if someone else takes Kasta down then I won’t have to do anything at all. Or he might be injured enough that I can break the necklace while he’s being healed. They’re terrible thoughts. I’m a terrible person, and I’ll never be able to look Fara in the face again. Fara prides himself, and me, on the good we do in the world, the healing we bring. If I’ve become just as heartless as the person I’m trying to get through to, I may as well not go home.
But I can’t help it. I want us to be too late.
I make a deal with myself that I won’t hinder our progress on purpose, but neither am I going to rush to his aid. Maia drags me past the last of the huts, over a crowded bridge, and into market streets, where the buildings are taller and gleaming and filled with smiling people who’ve turned their backs on the Forsaken. A baker tosses a loaf of bread he dropped to a pair of fat hounds. I think of what the girl said to us, and my stomach twists.
Left, right, the Shifter thinks. The Stone Chalice. Second floor . . .
We weave deeper into the city, dodging hagglers and merchants, musicians and drunks. In moments I’ve gathered enough snippets of conversation to guess why Kasta chose now to make his move: Sakira is throwing a party on a Dreamwalker’s yacht, and everyone who goes drinks for free. The same information, no doubt, that Maia conveyed to Kasta in the cave. People are busy either making their way there or talking about when they’ll go, and even with Maia’s height and unusual armor, no one pays us much heed. One man even compliments her “costume” as we pass, then drunkenly explains to his friend he wants to go looking just like that.
We’re in the heart of the city when Maia yanks me through a darkened doorway. A gleaming juniper counter marks a bar, and tenants squint at us from mudbrick benches built directly into the tavern’s walls. Maia only has to look at the bartender for him to point frantically upstairs.
“I told no one he was here,” he says, backing against the washbasins. “They must have followed him. I thought they were guards . . .”
Something solid hits the floor above. We cross the room and stride up tiled stairs to a large sitting area where tables cluster to one side and a rolled piece of parchment marks the area as closed. At the far wall, three masked men have Kasta cornered, two blades raised against his one. The third holds a ball of light that crackles and sparks like a twisting piece of lightning.
Kasta’s gaze shifts over their shoulders, and one of the swords-men turns. And freezes.
“Ivan,” he mutters, nudging his companion.
“What?” Ivan snaps, his focus on the prince.
“We have a problem.”
“The leopard,” Kasta says, returning his gaze to his assailants.
“Foolish prince,” muses the man with the lightning. “We were just going to hold you quietly awhile; give your sister a few days’ head start. Now it’s looking much easier to just kill you.”
“Is that the sacrifice?” says Ivan, with a grin that makes my stomach churn. “What do you think Sakira’s reward would be for her?”
Sakira’s fanatics. Exactly as Kasta feared.
Maia reaches around her belt and unlatches a shimmering, spotted pelt.
“I don’t know,” chokes the first man who turned. “I’m too worried about the Shifter.”
“Then kill the prince quickly, and we can handle her together.” Ivan turns back to Kasta, leering. “Should have cooperated, aera.”
He strikes. Kasta blocks and slices wide toward the other swordsman, who jumps back with a curse. The man with the lightning slings it at Kasta’s chest, and the prince jerks his wrist to block it, the protective bracelet glowing white-hot as the bolt slams into the wall instead. Beside me, Maia is changing. The ears of the pelt meld into her crown, spots stretching down her back, fur soon covering every place that once was armor. Her tail twitches around her haunches and she snarls, fangs dripping with saliva.
The Stormshrike gathers another electric ball from the air. Maia races toward him and he heaves it at her, but it’s a careless throw and she dodges, and in an instant she’s on top of him. His scream cuts short as she rips into his throat. I gag and turn back to Kasta, who manages to evade a blow from one man only to be cut across the arm by Ivan. Kasta growls and swings wildly; the second man raises his sword for a killing blow, and Maia leaps on him from behind.
One on one, Ivan and Kasta are well matched. But the cut is to Kasta’s dominant arm. He blocks blow after blow but isn’t quick enough to attack; he nearly loses his head when Ivan comes at him two-handed, metal singing as a thin line slices from the top of Kasta’s throat to his chest. The rune necklace falls with a clack. Kasta casts a panicked look at it and has to spin away to avoid another slice, but no matter how he tries to force his way back to it, Ivan blocks him at every turn.
Maia raises her head, jaw dripping with the second man’s blood.
“Maia,” Kasta says.
Ivan lunges. His attacks are frenzied now, wanting to finish Kasta before the leopard can finish him. Kasta is tiring beneath them. He blocks too late and Ivan smashes an elbow across his jaw, knocking his head into the wall. Before he can recover Ivan yanks his sword from his hand and positions both blades around his neck.
“Maia!” Kasta yells.
She casts a tormented look at me, and back at Kasta. Her muscles strain with indecision. She takes a hesitant step forward—
And sits.
XXII
I’VE dropped into a nightmare. I must have, for I can’t be here, watching this happen, with two men dead and another—a boy who wants to kill me, a boy whose greatest fear is that he has no one left to trust—about to die. About to die because a girl who used to believe in him, who he clearly desperately believes still holds a thread of that loyalty, has given up. And is hoping, as I was not too long ago, that fate will take its course.
I thought that’s what I wanted, too.
And gods, it would make things simpler. With Kasta gone, this could all be over—not likely over, as I’ve been hoping all along, but truly, definitively over. I could see Fara again. I could jump into Hen’s arms. I would never, ever travel again in my life—
And I would always think back to this moment, when I stood here, unmoving, as a prince I lectured about mercy is cut down with his own sword.
“Oh, Apos,” I swear, glancing around for a weapon. Ivan has noticed the Shifter’s hesitation. He’s jeering now, the blades grinding as he gloats.
“And when it comes down to it, not even a monster will defend you.” Ivan chuckles. “What a favor I’m doing the world.”
I sprint forward. Maia snarls when she realizes what I’m doing, but she’s too far to stop me, and just as Ivan tenses to pull the blades, I grab a broken stool and smash it across his head.
Ivan stumbles sideways, dazed. Kasta grabs hold of the man’s face and I gasp when the screaming starts, the sound like its own knife in my head, as Kasta pulls every remaining year of Ivan’s life away and adds them to his own. I force myself to keep moving as the shrieks crescendo. The broken necklace is only a few paces away and I lunge for it, but Ivan’s screams die as his body thunks to the floor, and just as my fingers snag the first stone of the necklace, Kasta wrenches my arm up and jerks it away.
He holds the necklace in a trembling fist, his glare shifting to Maia.
The leopard snarls and darts for the stairs.
Kasta doesn’t stop her. He only looks at me with those same burning, bottomless eyes, like I was t
he one who betrayed him.
* * *
Now there is most certainly no talking.
Kasta grips my wrist as we walk the streets, low enough on my arm that the casual passerby would think we were holding hands. His white cooling cloak hoods his head and billows against his arm. Its steam makes the city look like a mirage. I have my hood raised as well, but I’m sure I’ll still die of heat. Or maybe I’m just hoping I’ll die of heat before something else happens to me. The fear burning my veins makes the day cold in comparison.
His grip on me tightens and relaxes, as if he can’t decide what I deserve.
I can only think of his hands on Ivan’s face.
“A necklace for you, lady?” calls a merchant. “The garnet holds a message from your loved one! Sir, you need only to whisper to it, and the stone will remember. Sir? Sir!”
If he chases us, I will start crying. I’ve seen enough violence in the past few days to last my lifetime. But Kasta pulls me into an alley, and the merchant finds another couple to prey on.
The storage huts slide back into sight. We follow a group of nobles across the bridge, close enough that we look like part of their group, then break off between buildings on the other side. Instead of weaving through the center as I did with Maia, Kasta keeps to the edge, looking over his shoulder every few steps.
We round a small group of huts—
And stop.
“No,” Kasta growls. His grip tightens as he searches the perimeter, eyes locking on clusters of palm trees. Then he whirls, pulling me along, and storms back toward the city.
“Can’t you just call Maia back?” I say, so quietly I’m certain he won’t hear me. I’m not actually sure I want him to hear me.
“It’s the horses,” he says, anger curling his words. “He took them.”
“‘He’?”
“Christos.” He spits the name like a curse. We’re back on the bridge again, exposed this time, but Kasta no longer seems to care about being discreet. “We passed those men on our way to the tavern. They were speaking of their preference for my sister . . . of how they’d kill for her.” His jaw clenches. “I was distracted trying to find the scroll we mark to check in. By the time I found it, Christos had slipped away. I thought he’d only deserted me.” He pulls left to avoid a wagon clinking with potions. “Then those men came up the stairs.”
We slip back into the streets. I want to say this seems dangerous when the Healer could still be here recruiting the aid of more such men, but I suppose the absence of the horses means he’s long gone.
“You warned me,” Kasta says, a bitter smile pulling his lip. “I didn’t listen.”
I swallow. I fear I already know the answer to this question since I’m still at his side, but I ask it anyway. “But it hasn’t changed your plans?”
He doesn’t answer. A single stone of the rune necklace sways from a pouch near his hip, and I contemplate the chances of being able to summon Maia before he could get it back when he yanks me into an alley and behind an abandoned cart. He turns and grabs both my wrists, his gaze burning with my reflection.
“Why did you save me?” he asks.
He’s cutting off the blood flow to my hands. I grit my teeth, and I don’t know if it’s my frustration or the sudden conviction that nothing I do will make a difference, but I meet the fire of his gaze with ice of my own. He’s no longer as perfect as he looked this morning. Dirt streaks his face on one side, his jaw purpling where Ivan hit him.
“Let me go and I’ll tell you,” I say.
A grunt. “Of course.” A sneer snakes onto his mouth, but his shoulders fall. “You thought if you saved me, I’d help you escape.”
“I’m talking about my hands,” I snap.
A skeptical line appears between Kasta’s brows, and he looks down, at the place he grips my wrists.
“You’ll run,” he says.
“You’d catch me.”
“You’ll call for help.”
I falter, not because that had been on my mind, but because it hadn’t even occurred to me that was something I could do. He’s right, though. I’d be bound to attract the aid of at least one of Sakira’s supporters . . . but I think of the bounty hunters, and the men willing to kill for Sakira, and shake my head.
“They’d save me only to deliver me to your sister,” I say. “I’d be no better off.”
A frustrated growl. “Then it truly is that you saved me to save yourself.”
“Oh, no,” I say, my laugh bitter. “If that’s what I wanted, I’d have let you die. Maia would have gotten me out of here before anyone else knew what happened, and this would be over. I’d be on my way home, back to people I dearly miss, instead of standing here trying to convince the world’s most paranoid prince that maybe one person in his life is simply trying to do the right thing! Gods, why did I save you?”
I pull back, prepared for him to wrench me around for speaking in such a way, but he lets go so easily I have to use the cart to keep my balance. Run! screams every muscle in my body. But I’ve been good at ignoring my survival instincts thus far, so there’s really no reason to give in now. In any case, I don’t want to risk being back in Sakira’s hands. At least Kasta will be slowed now without a Healer or horses, and that means much better odds of reconnecting with Jet.
And Rie, there has to be a part of him that was affected by what I did. Fara says good deeds are like sparks; when one lands, it catches fire to everything around it. I refuse to believe Kasta is so far gone he can’t even feel its heat.
He looks at his empty hands and at me, as if someone else made him let go.
“I saved you,” I say, “because even after all you’ve done, you didn’t deserve to die like that.”
He closes his fingers. His voice is quiet when he says, “‘Like that’?”
“Outnumbered. Unarmed. Alone.” I press my thumb into my palms, rubbing feeling back into them. “Only tyrants deserve such a death.”
A weak smile. “You said I was a tyrant.”
“I said you’re fast becoming one.” I drop my hands and my gaze, turning to the bright street and its laughing people, at how impossibly unaffected they are by all of this. “But a person who mourns for children isn’t a tyrant. He’s incredibly frustrating, and it would be nice if he’d stop treating everyone like enemies, but he’s not completely gone.”
Kasta watches the distance between me and the street, and his hands lower, slowly. Merchants call to customers, and families laugh as they pass by. A pair of little girls races past us, nearly knocking into him, but his eyes stay on me.
Again he looks like he wants to say something but rethinks it at the last moment.
A shadow stretches behind me. Footsteps crunch the sand, and Maia steps into the alley, human again, her yellow eyes feral and searing. She clutches a large red pelt in one hand and a saddle in the other. The runes on her armor glow white-hot. She’s fighting Kasta’s summons with every grain of magic she has, but she cannot win.
Because of me.
The heat of the prince wafts against my shoulder, his voice gravel against my ear. “I’m not so sure.”
Maia raises the horse pelt she’s carrying and lifts its ears and nose to cover her own. Blood-red fur spills down her arms and legs, her teeth gritting as her bones break and thicken, until I have to close my eyes to block out the twisted sight of her. Kasta’s hand rests on my shoulder.
But this time, his grip doesn’t tighten.
XXIII
WE race from the city with eerie grace.
Maia’s gait is too fluid, as if she were part snake and not entirely horse. Her chestnut coat flashes like copper in the sun. Kasta bends around me like a thorn bush, his hood low, his muscles tense. Those unfortunate enough not to move from our path are forced out of it by powerful shoulders and snapping teeth.
Maia’s anger simmers be
neath us like a current.
As if the gods can feel it, a storm builds on the horizon. It’s far off now—little more than a smudge of darkness where the sand meets the sky—but they are the kind of clouds Fara would watch with nervous clucking, as if reasoning with them in another language. Sometimes the clouds would listen and stay north. Sometimes they grew, and before the wind started, Fara and I would rush to close the barn and cover it in protection spells, the ones that cost two months’ work to afford. It wasn’t rain we feared. The stable was built on a slope to withstand the storms that came each year, and they came with different clouds that Fara beckoned closer. These clouds didn’t bring water.
“Please tell me we have a tent now,” I say as Maia bolts past the last of the shops.
“We have one,” Kasta says.
Or Maia stole one, more likely. “And spells?”
“A few potions.”
I turn. “We’re going into the desert without spells?”
He ignores me, his gaze on the sand. “I was a little pressed for time. So no, we don’t have spells.”
“We have to stop.” I sit up, as if Maia could possibly listen to me over him. “We have to stay in the city tonight.”
“No.”
“Do you see those clouds? That’s not rain. That’s sand. If we stay out in it—”
“I know what a sandstorm is.”
“Do you, though? Because I’m thinking your father may have a point when he says you don’t take advisement.”
His jaw tightens. “If we stay in the city, I could be dead by morning. What would you have me do?”
I’m so caught off guard by the presence of a question, I don’t know how to answer. “I . . . well . . .”
“Our ancestors used tents before they had spells. Ours should be enough. The storms never last long.”
“And if it’s one Alette prayed for?”
A pause. “It would do Sakira no good to kill you. The gods would only give them a storm strong enough to slow us.”
