by Leigh Kelsey
“I know,” he agreed.
“She’s not a bad kid,” Ev huffed, looking at the curtain-shrouded window, away from him. “She doesn’t deserve to be executed for a power she can’t control having. She can stay.”
“Oh, she can?” he asked, mouth curving as he leant back into the sofa cushions. “I wasn’t aware I needed your permission.”
She kicked his calf without even looking. “She’s upstairs, and worked up. I couldn’t get her to calm down, only to reel her power back in. You’re always … good at that. Calming people, making them feel safe again.”
Az didn’t give a shit that Evrille was a grown woman and eighteen years old; he leant across the gap between their seats and pressed a kiss to her hair. “It’s my job.”
She waved him off. “Go mother someone else.”
Azrail laughed softly, already heading for the stairs. By the sounds of Zamanya and Jaro snickering in the kitchen, they’d gotten into his bottles of potato vodka. He left them to it, and hoped they didn’t drain the entire store as he pushed off his exhaustion and climbed the stairs.
Siofra was on the bed in Jaro’s old bedroom, pressed into the corner beneath a shelf covered in assorted clutter, with her knees to her chest and her body jerking with sobs. It was the only sound in the otherwise silent room. The bite of her tears mixed with Jaro’s scent of vanilla and licorice as he took a rough breath.
His heart crashed, and memories of Ev crying blended over the vision of Siofra.
“Sio?” he murmured, bed springs creaking as he tentatively sat on the edge of the mattress. He reached for her, but thought better of it, letting his hand fall back to the bed, tracing its rough weave. Like most things in the house it was budget and cheap, their few fineries coming as favours and thank yous.
At his careful voice, Sio lifted her pale head off her crossed arms and sniffled. She was wearing a pair of Ev’s old pyjamas, but the sleeves were too short, thin ivory wrists poking free, too knobbly for his liking. They needed to fatten her up, but that wasn’t an easy task on a shoestring budget.
Az sighed, meeting her watery gaze. He dropped every guard and wall, letting her see his honesty, his worry. “I know you don’t know me well enough to trust me yet,” he said. “But I hate to see you cry, love, so I’m offering a hug. If you want it.” He opened his arms—and blinked in surprise as Sio threw herself at him with no hesitation, her small body hitting his hard enough that the air punched out of his stomach, a bruise surely forming. “It’s alright,” he murmured, closing his arms around her shaking form. “Evrille’s fine, she’s not even mad. She was actually less grumpy than normal when I spoke to her.”
Siofra let out a sniffling laugh, gripping the front of Az’s shirt so hard the fabric wrinkled. “I hurt her.”
“You didn’t mean to,” he replied gently. “She knows that. So do you, love. It was an accident; we all have them.”
“Even you?” she asked, peering up at him, both canny intelligence and naivety in her violet eyes. She’d been forced to grow up too soon, he knew, but was still too young to be secure in herself, to have any sort of confidence.
“Even me,” he promised, and tried to forget every accident he’d ever made. Something about having Siofra with them reminded him of Evrille being young and all the fuck-ups he’d made raising her: food too hot that it burned her, baths too cold that she caught a chill, forgetting to teach her letters until she was six, and a million other things he still blamed himself for. He’d been trying to raise a child and work full time back then, plus keeping his identity hidden and staying off the Foxes radar.
Luckily, everyone believed he’d fled the city after his parents’ executions, and after searching for him for a year, they’d given up the hunt for the traitor’s son.
Now he was someone else, hiding in plain sight.
“Evrille won’t hold it against you, and neither will I.” Azrail squeezed Siofra’s shoulders and gave her a smile, the cry of the wind the only sound for a moment. “What you did when you healed her was a very kind thing.”
“I don’t know how I did it,” she admitted quietly, intensely. She stared up at him, gauging his reaction. “I just wanted to fix it, and … the magic did the rest.”
“Magic’s clever like that,” he agreed, about to let go until she clung on tighter. “Is this the first time you’ve healed someone?”
Sio nodded. “But I … I can turn people to nothing, and one time I … I jumped over the river.”
Azrail’s eyebrows shot up, a bright spark of shock cutting through his bleak mood. “You jumped over the Luvasa?”
“No.” She smiled, the tiniest thing, but it was there and full of sass and personality. “The Curve.”
“Ah.” The smaller, offshoot. Still, it was the distance of two houses back to back. “That’s a long way to jump, Sio.”
She ducked her head, her smile growing as she finally let go of him, curling up back against the headboard. “I know. They still caught me, though.”
Very carefully, measuring each word, Azrail asked, “Before you were caught, where did you live?”
Sio frowned, a deep V between her eyes. “With my mama. But they … they stopped her.”
“Stopped her doing what, love?”
Sio shook her head, pale hair flying around her face. She dropped her hands into her lap, twisting them in her pyjama top. “No, they stopped her. She tried to keep them there, in the house, so I could run away. I was supposed to run to the Brewery if they ever found us,” she said, sounding the big words carefully. “My mama was beastkind.”
Az’s stomach shot to his feet, and he reeled. “Are you, too?”
Sio shrugged. “Not yet. I don’t have an animal, and I think my dad was fae like you. But mama thought I might get an animal when I got older, and she said if they ever found us, I had to run or they’d lock me up.”
Or worse, Az didn’t say. The thought of Sio working dawn to dusk as a maid or cleaner, her hands cracked and bleeding, her pale hair dirty with sweat, and her eyes empty and dull … he had to exhale slowly to calm himself. He knew there were beastkind children put to work in this city, but had never seen any with his own eyes. If he knew exactly where to find them, he and his family would have broken them free, but they were kept secret.
The pillow rooms … another story entirely. They’d tried to raid them over and over and over, but the complex magic protecting those hateful buildings repelled them every single time. Even Zamanya’s gold power and Az’s earth magic hadn’t been able to get through. But Sio’s saintslight…
No. He shut that thought down, refused to use her that way.
“I’m sorry about your mama,” he said softly, tracing another whirl in the bed sheets as his throat tightened. “I lost mine, too, when I was young, too. I know how scary it is to be alone.”
Sio looked at him, one of those all-seeing stares that made her seem much older than she was. “You’re not alone,” she said with a smile. “You have Ev, and Jaro, and Zammya.”
His mouth quirked at her pronunciation, but he nodded. “You’re right. And now you have us, too.” He squeezed her shoulder and stood, trying not to think about why Sio was free to sleep here, in Jaro’s bed: because his friend never used it during the night, too busy at work.
Even now, Az knew Jaro was getting ready to go to work, his shift starting at two a.m. He honestly didn’t know when he slept.
Siofra thought about what he’d said for a second, and nodded. “Now I have you. And her; she’s coming too,” she added with something like relief.
Az froze, a step away from the bed, and a pang of alarm and unease went through him, both his earth power and that dark beast in his gut stirring. “Who?” he asked, every worst-case scenario racing through his mind. A Fox? The queen? Someone worse he hadn’t yet had the displeasure of meeting?
“Your soulmate,” Sio said, as if it should have been obvious. She gave him a funny look. “Didn’t you know that?”
Azrail shook
his head, dismissive until he remembered she had saintslight—and the power of the saints ran in her veins. “When?”
She shrugged, sitting cross-legged on the old mattress and peering up at him, her moon-white hair pooled around her. “I’m not sure. Soon, I think. She’s in danger.”
“Sio,” he asked, keeping his voice perfectly calm even as he freaked out internally. He didn’t believe in soulmates, but if Sio had been given clairvoyance from the saints, and she’d seen someone coming to them… “How do you know these things?”
She gave him another strange look, as if it was perfectly normal to know what was to come. “I just do.” Her face slipped, doubt and fear rupturing her calm. “Did I do something wrong again?”
“No,” Az said quickly, smiling reassuringly. The mask came easy, even years after Ev had grown and he’d taken it off. Or had he ever? “No, of course not,” he assured Siofra. “Just tell me if you know someone’s coming, okay?”
“I can do that,” she agreed, nodding and so relieved that an arrow lanced into Az’s heart.
“There’s a place here for you, with us, no matter what,” he told her, so glad that he’d decided to bring her here with his family instead of finding somewhere for her to stay with one of the people who visited the Brewery, like he’d done with the other two children he’d saved from the chopping block. The saints clearly had greater plans for him, for Sio, and wanted them together.
He’d think about her soulmate comment later, when he wasn’t scared of Foxes showing up at the door to drag him to the noose.
Chapter Thirteen
Maia was … tired. So tired that a night of drinking and dancing wouldn’t soothe her soul, and her attic room at the Library of Vennh was no longer a comfort or a distracting mystery. She supposed she’d have to find a new curiosity to study, to help her forget what her aunt made her do during the day.
In several sessions over the next day, Ismene had her snare a lot of people—four times the usual number. Maia knew it was punishment for failing to kill Prince Kheir, but she could do nothing but hum until her throat was hoarse, twist threads of her power around envoys’ minds until her magic was weak and empty, and obey without complaint.
She wanted to sleep for a week. Or a year.
The idea that the rest of her life would be like this, full of addling people’s minds, killing them with her power unless they fought back … it was a hideous future. And one she’d been entirely resigned to until her aunt had ordered her to crush Kheir’s mind. Something had shifted that day, and Maia didn’t know how to shift it back, didn’t know if she wanted to shift it back.
Her self-preservation instincts, honed by years in the palace, had begun to fray, leaving too many complaints and refusals on the tip of her tongue, threatening to break free at any moment—at every moment. Maia was lucky to have gotten through a whole day without those refusals escaping their cage.
As for Azrail, the Sapphire Knight, she’d resolved not to think about him—so of course every waking moment her mind clamoured with his face, his words, and every bit of information she’d collected about him over her years of obsession. Resolving the two people—hot Azrail from the library, and the dangerous Sapphire Knight who had blood on his hands—into one person gave her a headache.
Or maybe that was just a headache from overexerting her magic. Ismene had given up on convincing Prince Kheir to join her campaign for expanding the trade caravans, but she’d doubled down on the rest of the envoys, overworking Maia to the point of pain.
But when the queen dismissed her, smiling as the fifth emissary caved and nodded, agreeing to donate a couple thousand coins to her cause, Maia didn’t go up to her room and collapse on her bed. She wound her way through the quiet stone halls in the central wing of the palace. A hush hung over these rooms, and the engraved marble arches and scrolling pillars were lit a deep pink by the setting sun, giving the palace a dreamy feel. It hid the poison and evil of the queen well; from the outside Maia would never think something so heinous could happen in these beautiful golden halls. It even smelled of sweetness and innocence; honeysuckle and marshmallow. It twisted her stomach.
Maia kept her chin high, her gait unhurried, and prayed she didn’t look out of place. She kept her head high, acting like she had permission to access the vault at the very heart of the palace as she walked past the palace guard there and let herself in.
Maia’s shoulders drew up by her ears as she waited for rough hands to grab her and drag her out. But the woman didn’t bat an eyelid, and Maia closed the door behind herself with a sigh of relief. She let the gentle, calming touch of the room she’d entered ease her nerves, drawing a deep breath of fresh air. It tasted of oaks and moss and rainwater—of life. Maia even swore she tasted sunshine.
This space was both holy and functional, all six floors of balconies above her head ornate and gilded, and the perfectly square room was open to the sky above, so the enormous tree of power in the centre of the room could breathe. Its dark branches reached high above Maia’s head, gnarled with age and lined with verdant green leaves and delicate pink flowers, stretching even beyond the tallest palace tower and spearing the clouds like one of the Eversky’s bolts.
It was good luck if a petal from one of those flowers fell upon you, and even better luck if you managed to catch it in your hand. Maia held out her palm and prayed to no saint in particular, but no petal fell, and the branches didn’t even shudder in the faint wind coming from the square of cloud-filled blue sky above.
She rolled her eyes at herself. Even the saints wouldn’t be able to help her with all the problems stacking up. She needed back the ruthless obedience she’d had just last week, needed to follow her aunt’s commands no matter what they were or how disgusting she found them. She’d caught Ismene’s attention now, instead of flying under the radar, and she didn’t like the itchy, frightening feeling of someone so powerful being displeased with her. If she kept her head down now and used her snaresong without question, she knew she’d be fine, and Ismene would probably forget all about the issue with Prince Kheir, and yet … and yet it had changed something in Maia. And she didn’t think she could blindly obey anymore, even to keep herself safe.
She growled, a rush of power tingling up her throat, and threads of magic stretched across the room like inquisitive ribbons with no true purpose. The forest in the center of her soul was still withered and wintry, its branches bare and dry, nothing at all like the tree at the heart of this room.
She’d come to access the vault, but now that she was here, her thoughts racing a mile a minute, Maia trudged across the lapis mosaic floor to the benches arranged below the tree. She sank onto one with a hard sigh, the hard, icy steel digging into her back. Not iron—never iron, in this hallowed space where fae had been coming to speak to the saints for so many ages that Maia had lost count. If it had been made of iron, Maia’s legs would have burned at the first contact, the red leather of her dress intact but her flesh beneath … nothing but blood and welts. Like all fae, she was allergic to iron, the metal deadly to her kind.
She’d contemplated finding a shard of iron and using it against her aunt, just after she’d told Ismene no for the first and only time. After the queen had Maia punished so badly that she hadn’t been able to get out of bed for weeks, her still-growing body broken in so many places that the bones still weren’t set right in her left arm.
She’d hunted down an iron poker in a disused room, but the burn when she’d reached for it, even through seven layers of fabric … it had been enough to dissuade her from the idea. And no matter how angry or scared and rebellious she was feeling, she’d never acted on those thoughts, those meticulous plans she’d spent hours making—her first form of distraction, before she’d become obsessed with the saints and then the Sapphire Knight. Not just because of the burns she’d suffer—which she would gladly endure—but because of the consequences.
Queenkiller—that’s what she’d be. Kinslayer.
She knew she
wouldn’t even try to put herself on the throne after the deed was done, not that anyone would support her claim to it anyway, but … it left her a life of secrecy and hiding and running. A life full of terror and panic, ceaseless and unending. It was no life, she’d decided, and banished thoughts of murder. But now, after the week Maia had had, those thoughts were creeping back. Not to act on, never to act on, but … to take the edge off her rage, to whet the blade of her need for vengeance.
So Maia sat in that holy space, the branches of the tree bowed around her, and pictured how she’d do it. It would be easy enough; Maia had never shown any signs of being violent despite being trained to wield a sword, staff, and spear, to throw daggers into targets many feet away, to block a punch as well as throw her own. If she moved close to her aunt, no one would ever suspect it was to kill her until it was too late.
She cut off her fantasy before it could go any further than Ismene’s shocked face, her understanding of why as Maia let all the hatred she’d kept carefully hidden finally bare on her face. She didn’t let it play out any further than that initial satisfying blow, didn’t want to see the guards rushing for her, throwing her to rot in the dungeons, and then hauling her out to the executioner’s block in the Salt King’s Square. No, she just kept picturing her aunt’s shock and understanding, and told herself she could use her snaresong to turn the guards away, to get free in those initial chaotic minutes.
There was a chance it could work. Not that it mattered how possible it was; the fantasy itself was the important thing, and the longer she closed her eyes and pictured her aunt bleeding out of her gaping throat, the calmer she became.
A soft brush on her knuckles had her jolting, her eyes flying open, but it was only a velvety leaf, the purest, darkest green, and resting just on top of it: a tiny, delicate petal in palest pink.
Maia tipped her head back and grinned at the tree, at whatever bloodthirsty saint had agreed that Ismene deserved to die, even if no one would ever be brave enough to kill her.
