Red Tigress

by Amélie Wen Zhao

  “Enough,” Ana snarled, stepping in front of Ramson. His vision blurred in and out of focus, but he thought that he’d never seen Ana that furious before. Her lips were curled in disgust, her gloved hands clenched into fists. In the gray light, her eyes were red.

  On the opposite wall, Sorsha struggled, splayed like a butterfly.

  A flash of movement over their heads. On the rooftop of a building, a marksman appeared. Metal sliced gray in his hands.

  Ramson lunged forward, a cry of warning at his throat—but someone leapt over them, light as a shadow, flitting through the air. There were several plinks, and then blades clattered to the ground as Linn landed like a slip of wind. Kaïs stepped to Ana’s side, his double swords in a defensive position.

  Ana’s gaze flicked to the roofs, then cut back to Sorsha. “Call off your soldiers.”

  Sorsha thrashed, and when it was of no use, she let out a screaming cackle. “Or what, you red-eyed bitch?”

  Ana’s smile was wicked as she tilted her head, her irises swirling a familiar shade of crimson as they caught the light. For a few moments, nothing happened. The wind threaded through their alleyway, rattling empty bottles on the cobblestones.

  And then Sorsha gave a shout. She staggered, clutching her chest. For the first time since Ramson had seen her, that smirk slid from her face, and she looked…angry. “What are you doing?” she hissed, her eyes narrowed at Ana.

  “Teaching you some manners,” Ana replied, and stepped closer. “That was just a taste. Call off your soldiers, or I won’t hold back next time.”

  Sorsha spat blood. Slowly, her lips curled, and her eyes brightened like a child looking at a delectable tart. Bloodied spittle dribbled down her chin. “Magen,” she gasped. “Blot magen!” Blood Affinite.

  Ana pulled off her gloves and lifted her hands. Dark veins twisted over her flesh, rising from each of her fingers and stretching to the skin of her arms. Ramson had seen her do this on occasion—had seen a shadow cross her face, morphing her features into something cruel.

  “Fascinating,” whispered Sorsha, and then her voice rose into a shriek. “This is fascinating! I want to see—I want to see you bleed my soldiers dry! Can you do it? Will you do it for me?”

  A flicker of uncertainty crossed Ana’s face. “I came to negotiate with the Bregonian government, not with you,” Ana snapped, and for a moment, her eyes flicked to Ramson. “I demand an audience with King Darias Rennaron and the Three Courts of Bregon.”

  Sorsha blinked. “And who the hells are you?” she snapped.

  Ana lifted her chin. “My name is Anastacya Kateryanna Mikhailov,” she said, “and I am the rightful Empress of Cyrilia.”

  Silence fell across the streets. The shadows lurking over rooftops and hidden in alleyways seemed to still. But Ramson kept his gaze pinned on the only important player in this scene.

  Sorsha’s face was frozen, caught between a snarl and surprise. She stared at Ana, her thin lips slightly parted. And then she collapsed in a peal of laughter. “The Empress,” she shrieked, her voice rising to a hysterical scream, “of Cyrilia!”

  Ana looked unsettled; she took a slight step back.

  For once, Ramson was at a loss for what to do.

  “Gods!” Sorsha screamed, tilting her head to the skies, clutching her stomach. “The Empress of Cyrilia is here, dressed in tattered rags like a common whore—”

  Ramson’s mind blanked to a searing white heat. A common whore. He’d heard those words his entire life, whispered in the stone hallways of the Naval Academy or in the dank dormitories at the Blue Fort, seen it in the smiles of his peers and in the shadow of his father’s turned back. The son of a whore.

  Something in him snapped then, and before he knew it, he’d sprung forward, his hands closing around Sorsha’s throat.

  He slammed her against the brick wall of the alleyway, hard enough to rattle the breath from her and shake the laughter from her face.

  “Have some respect,” Ramson hissed, his face inches from hers, “for the common whores.”

  Sorsha’s lips curled into a cruel sneer. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you, my filthy half brother?”

  Ramson knew that about a dozen invisible arrows were pointed at him right now, but he didn’t care. His plan was shattered, the ugly truth torn out and strewn on the street like blood. There was no point in hiding it now; he needed to focus on turning the situation around.

  If he did, indeed, share a father with this girl, then that was something he could exploit. After all, Ramson knew the tactics of his father better than anybody in this world. “The Admiral,” he said, his tongue twisting around the word as it had for his entire life, “has an agreement to see her. And I don’t think he shared his plans with you. Not with a worthless daughter.”

  It had been a lie, a gamble, but he saw it in her eyes. The mad glint turning to sudden fear, and then cold anger.

  Ramson recognized it. The years and years of subtle, cutting remarks that slowly but surely burrowed into your heart like a thorn, and bled you little by little. A turned shoulder, a cool glance, the knowledge that you were never good enough.

  Perhaps Sorsha was more his sister than she realized.

  They were both, after all, their father’s children.

  One illegitimate son, barred from power for his birthright, and one angry daughter, barred from inheritance for her sex.

  There was only one way to save this situation: by convincing Sorsha that Ramson had planned this with their father, all along.

  So Ramson seized that thorn their father had buried in Sorsha’s heart throughout all these years, and he twisted it. “He has a grand plan, little sister, that doesn’t involve you,” Ramson whispered. “Do you really think it a coincidence that his long-lost son would show up on his doorstep with the rightful Empress of the largest empire in the world?”

  There it was again, that uncertainty that writhed like a shadow across her face.

  Ramson pushed deeper. “What do you think he would do to you if he found out you’d interfered in his great plans to gain a stronghold over the Cyrilian Empire?”

  “You’re lying,” said Sorsha, but her breathing came too quickly, and her eyes were too wide.

  You have much more to learn, little sister, Ramson thought. Out loud, he only said, “Do you really want to find out?”

  Their gazes clashed, hers the bitter black of their father’s, and Ramson’s the sharp hazel of his mother’s.

  Sorsha’s eyes narrowed in cunning, and Ramson found an exact mirror of himself reflected in his half sister’s face. “Guards!” she shouted. “Surround them! We’ll take them to the Blue Fort.” And then, in a lower voice so that only Ramson could hear, she hissed: “I found you. If I take you and your whore empress to Daddy Dearest, I get the credit.”

  The soldiers hidden on rooftops and behind houses and alleyways now came into view. They stepped out of the coiling mist, wrapped in leathers and decked in metals. Ramson caught the flashes of the Bregonian insignia—a roaring seadragon—on their chests.

  Sorsha whipped her cloak around her, metal boots and swords clinking as she stalked past them. “Follow me,” she said brusquely, and the Royal Guards turned on their heels and swept after her like a wave.

  In the silence, the reality of his situation sank in. He’d just bartered his way back to the place to which he’d sworn never to return. To see the man he’d left behind in another life.

  The sound of boots drew farther from him, and it occurred to Ramson that this was his last chance to run. He’d come to Bregon to see an end to Alaric Kerlan and to take Goldwater Port and the rest of what Ramson had built over the years.

  This wasn’t part of the deal.

  Ramson turned and met Ana’s gaze as she strode over and pressed a hand to his bleeding wound. Her touch both unmoored him and anchored him.

/>   “Farrald,” she said quietly, looking up at him. Her hands, still bare, became ribbed with black veins as she applied her Affinity to his wound. “Admiral Roran Farrald.” Her gaze snapped to his, crimson, a question burning in them.

  He looked away, his breathing going shallow with her so close, her fingers curling against his skin.

  He could tell she was gathering her thoughts, trying to parse her emotions into logic. “I read in the books the Bregonian Admiral had a daughter. I didn’t know…You didn’t tell me…” She trailed off, and he would have preferred her anger to the mixed sympathy on her face.

  “They wouldn’t have written me into history books,” Ramson said shortly. “I’m his bastard son.”

  She fell silent for several moments, her forehead creased. Her hand was still warm on his wound, his blood crusted all over her skin. The bleeding had stopped. “And you were going to keep this from me forever?” Her words were as sharp as blades.

  His laugh was bitter. Ramson flung her hand from him and turned to follow the Royal Guard. “Ana, you’re the heiress to the world’s most powerful empire,” he said. “There was never going to be a forever.”

  Ramson followed close on Sorsha’s heels. Even when she walked, his half sister had an erratic sort of stagger that made her appear almost drunk. She wove in front of him like a phantom, mist clinging to her.

  Behind, Ana, Linn, and Kais followed quietly.

  As they passed through the narrow alleyways and curving streets, the city came alive in the shadows of Ramson’s memories, and it was as though he had been plunged back in time. The rough-hewn stone gilded with touches of brass and bronze, the multistoried buildings stacked high, the smell of ale and steel in humid air.

  Another thought came to him then, one that sharpened his gaze and honed his senses.

  Kerlan was somewhere in this kingdom.

  He had never planned, so long as he lived, to ever return to the Blue Fort, or to see the monster that was his father again. But it seemed the gods had thrown them on a collision course. There was no escaping the reckoning that had been due seven years ago.

  The thought—the inevitability of it all—steadied him like steel. He would play along for now, return to the Blue Fort and help Ana with her plan. As soon as he had a chance, he would leave to do what he’d come here for in the first place.

  They turned, and the alleyway ended sharply, cobblestones giving way to the lap of waves from another branch of the canal.

  Sorsha stopped, and her procession of guards halted behind her. Ramson watched them carefully. This wasn’t the way to the Blue Fort as he knew it.

  A foghorn sounded, and a boat cut through the veiled gray mist. Not a gondola, but a steel-plated barge, masts reaching to the sky like daggers. The sails billowed midnight blue, a gold Bregonian seadragon roaring proudly like a phantom from the mists.

  Sorsha barked rapid-fire orders and a small gangplank was lowered. She threw them a glance. “You stay in the back with that beggar empress of yours,” she sneered, and boarded with her escorts.

  The barge was small enough to navigate the winding canals of Sapphire Port, yet large enough to fit over two dozen people. Ramson swept his gaze over the Royal Guards as he boarded, noting the dark blue uniforms and the bronze seadragon badges glinting on their chests, indicating their affiliation to the Navy. There were three, however, dressed in livery of a blue so pale that it appeared white. Their pins bore a seadragon, a stallion, and an eagle, all enclosed in a circle.

  That was new, and Ramson had no indication of their meaning other than rankings to the Navy that had been added after his departure. He kept his eye on them as he settled in the back, leaning against one of the masts. Linn perched against the edge of the ship and gazed out, seemingly oblivious to Kaïs as he stopped by her side. Ana stood rod-straight, her knuckles white as she gripped the railing of the ship.

  With a slow-grinding creak, they began to move. The barge glided forward in silence but for the lap of waves against its sides. The alleyways faded into tall stone walls that loomed into the sky on either side. The waters undulated black beneath them, and when Ramson looked hard enough, he could make out shapes skimming through the darkness of the depths.

  Linn leaned over the railing, watching them with quiet interest.

  “Wassengost,” Ramson offered. When both she and Ana looked at him, he jerked his chin to the shapes in the water. “Water spirits.”

  Linn’s mouth formed a soft O. “Like ice spirits?”

  “I suppose. Ours are quite harmless.” He pitched his tone toward skepticism. “Legends say they’re the last remnants of magic that the gods left in this world.”

  As Linn turned back to play with the wassengost, sending small gusts of wind toward the surface of the water, Ana turned to Ramson. Her gaze was hard and piercing. “Can you tell me more about your father?”

  He could see other questions in her eyes, words unspoken lingering in the air between them; this question was clinical, cold, and carefully chosen. Not for the first time, he wondered what it would take for the trust between them to be broken beyond repair.

  “My father?” he repeated, turning to look at the water. Cold glances and cruel smiles. Smashed mugs, red blood, the shadow of someone whom he’d spent his lifetime chasing. “He’s an asshole.”

  She focused a glare on him.

  “I’m sure you’ll have no trouble with him,” Ramson continued. Already, he could feel his voice tightening almost as a bodily reaction, coldness clamping on his chest, and his face shuttering by instinct. “You’ve spent several moons dealing with me, after all.”

  He could sense her anger rising like a tide, but to his surprise, she only folded her arms and reined in her expression. “Tell me something that will help me win him over.” Her tone was cool, controlled.

  He’d been baiting her, and a part of him even wished for her fury at this moment. He would rather have her anger than nothing at all.

  He turned away, mulling the question over. How would one negotiate with his father?

  The answer was right in front of him. He simply hadn’t wanted to see it.

  “He’s just like me,” Ramson said quietly. The words tasted like ash in his mouth. “He won’t give anything for nothing. Everything is a negotiation to him, a game of politics. And he doesn’t waste his time with people who he thinks have nothing to offer him.” Like my mother, he thought. “To win, you have to make him an offer he can’t resist. Something he wouldn’t find anywhere else.”

  Ana opened her mouth, but they were interrupted by a gasp from Linn. “Look!”

  The fog was beginning to clear, and Ramson saw what Linn was so excited about. The waterway had turned into a river, flowing between high cliffs that knifed to the sky on either side of them. Ahead, it pooled into a lagoon, extending in a wide circle as far as the eye could see. Estuaries and streams flowed into the main waterway from all directions before plunging into the sea from the cliffs at the end of the river. And in the center, the live, beating heart of it all, was the Blue Fort.

  Tucked into an outcrop of rock at the base of where the cliffs met the sea, its sharp towers rose almost as high as those of the Salskoff Palace, made of a glistening sea-blue material that wove and wended like waves, winking in the sudden sunlight.

  “It looks as if it is made of water,” Linn breathed.

  “That’s searock,” Ramson said. “Ranks among the strongest materials in the world. Our myths say it has magical properties.” It was also one of the few resources that Bregon refused to trade.

  His attention caught on something else. Beyond the searock structure of the fortress itself stood a new, second ring of crenellated walls. This set loomed tall enough that ships docked at the quays beyond it were cast in its shadow; it was made of a dark gray material that looked to be part stone, part metal.

  Ir
onore—the heaviest and most expensive alloy, supposedly created by magen for defensive weapons.

  Ramson could only imagine what an entire wall made of ironore would have cost.

  There was silence but for the sound of their ship sluicing through the water. As they sailed beneath the shadows of the walls, Ramson saw that they approached a massive set of gates, shimmering in the gray-metallic hue of ironore. In the center of each gate was a massive metal branding, almost as large as their entire barge. On the left gate, an eagle, its talons outstretched as it soared in the skies. On the right, a stallion, mane flowing as it reared on its hind legs.

  And, in the center, the head of a roaring seadragon, connected to the other two carvings through a triangular marking that adjoined all three.

  In his years spent in Bregon, he had never seen anything like this.

  On either side of the boat, the water seemed to rush by faster, swirls forming in their depths. A cry came from the head of the barge. “Helmesgatten!”

  The three light-cloaked guards took positions at the prow. In perfect synchrony, they swept their hands up, and as a strange, humming energy filled the air, Ramson realized what they were.

  Magen. Affinites.

  Wind roared. Fire exploded. And water rose in a massive wave.

  A gale howled through the statue of the eagle, blasting through its open beak in a shriek, tunneling through the triangular marking. Fire lit up the stallion’s stone figure, its eyes glowing as bright as suns, swirling up the second leg of the triangle.

  And, finally, water swept through the maw of the seadragon, its whiskers and gills rippling as though it were alive—

  And the three elements met in an inferno in the triangle.

  Ramson felt as though he were gazing upon magic, upon a foreign sorcery. When he’d left, there had been few, if any, magen serving in the Navy. Most had been regular civilians, perhaps with slight advantages to their everyday lives.

  This, though…was something utterly different. As the roar of the three elements sweeping into the gates compounded to a crescendo, Ramson felt his own emotions awaken, part awe, part fear. This gate was something three magen should not have had the power to move. It was something that had not existed in his time at Bregon.