Red Tigress

by Amélie Wen Zhao

  And Kerlan had just tried to drown him.

  The thought of the bottomless waters closing over him made him weak all over again, and he was glad he hadn’t tried to stand up yet. “I thought you left,” he croaked.

  Daya batted a hand. “I told you, Pretty Boy, my loyalties are where my goldleaves lie,” she quipped.

  Ramson felt giddy as the realization hit him. He was alive. He was, somehow, miraculously, alive. “Daya,” he croaked. “Thank you.”

  She snorted. “I didn’t do this for free. It’ll cost you double your fare.” When he didn’t respond, she grinned and elbowed him. “Sorry, sorry, I’m kidding. Too soon?”

  Ramson summoned a weak smile. “A bit.”

  “Who were those bastards?”

  Strength was slowly returning to his body. Sitting upright was getting easier by the second. Soon, he’d be able to stand. “That,” Ramson said, “was Alaric Kerlan. I caught him in the middle of…a much larger scheme than we’d anticipated.” His head hurt; the facts he’d learned sloshed around his head like water. “Which, I think, if he succeeds, will destroy the world as it is.”

  He was still working to process what he had seen earlier in the night—the makeshift lab in the hull of the ship, the Bregonian scholar. Bogdan’s look, the way he’d pleaded to get it out of him, get it out of him even as he’d performed his Affinity to gold.

  Kerlan had been the one to inform Morganya of this weapon he’d called a siphon. It made so much sense—that he would cut off the parts of his Order that posed a threat to him under Morganya’s new regime and find a way to gain her favor while plotting his vengeance.

  And the things Kerlan had said about Roran Farrald…no, Ramson couldn’t wrap his head around them just yet, no matter how much he thought they sounded exactly like something his father would do.

  He needed to get going. What was it that Kerlan had said? That the biggest party of all awaited him in the Blue Fort.

  “Goddess Amara. I’m extra glad I saved your life, then.” Daya tapped the knives looped through the metal hoops of her belt. “Good thing I have a way with locks.”

  Ramson pushed himself to his feet. The world swayed unsteadily for several moments before settling down. Blood rushed to his legs. He couldn’t have been out for long.

  Which meant Kerlan couldn’t be too far ahead. My forces have already infiltrated the Blue Fort. Within hours, my army arrives, and we strike.

  The impossibility of the task almost crushed the air from his lungs. Kerlan was going to invade the Blue Fort, tonight. He was going to crown himself king and trade Ana back to Morganya.

  He’d left for the Blue Fort already with two wagons full of his most loyal ex-Order members. Just how many were left, roaming about Bregon? Were some of them already hiding in the Blue Fort?

  Ramson shook the dizziness from his head. He needed to warn someone. He needed to—he needed to get to his father.

  A gust of wind slammed into him, cold and sharp and biting. Beyond the quays, the waves grew violent, rearing and smashing against the wooden jetties. The moon slid behind storm clouds.

  Ramson tilted his face to the air. It smelled of rain.

  A storm was coming.

  “Daya,” he said. “Where are the nearest stables?”

  Daya put her hands on her hips. “You owe me a lot of goldleaves.” She winked. “It’s right over there, next to the first pub.”

  Ramson looked to where the cliffs met the sea and the Blue Fort loomed. “Something very bad is about to happen. If I don’t come back, will you promise me to find the princess and get away from here?”

  The playful expression on Daya’s face slipped at the urgency in his tone. “Fine,” she groused. “I’ll have you know that I’ve never done anything for anyone as a favor. Don’t disappoint me, Pretty Boy.”

  The previous version of him would have cringed at a promise to pay back a debt. Now, Ramson couldn’t think of anything he wanted more, after it was all over.

  If there was an after.

  Ramson tapped two fingers to his forehead in mock salute before he turned away. “I hope to the gods I won’t,” he replied as he set off at a sprint.

  Linn splayed her feet and stood on her toes. There were some who preferred to fight like earth or like fire. Linn fought like her element, the wind. She had never been the strongest or the biggest in her classes with the Wind Masters, but she learned the flow of her opponents’ energy and then used it against them.

  “I do not want to fight you.” Kaïs’s voice was steady yet low with regret as he reached for his double swords. The sound of metal sliced through the air. “Do not make this hard, Linn.”

  “I did not,” she replied. “You did.”

  Something in her heart had broken when she’d seen him in the dungeons, shattered by the depth of his betrayal. After so many years of being alone, seeing the silver armor and white cloaks as signs of a ubiquitous enemy, she’d thought him different. She’d begun to trust him.

  It had been a mistake.

  She felt his Affinity in her mind, yawning over her winds like an unrelenting hand. Her Affinity snuffed out.

  Linn stood her ground. She had trained to fight without sight and without sound. In Cyrilia, she had been forced to endure without her winds under the traffickers’ blackstone or Deys’voshk too many times.

  She wouldn’t need them to win, now.

  Kaïs watched her with those inscrutable eyes, and she held his gaze. A current of energy seemed to crackle in the air between them, as though they were two moving parts of a whole. A yin and a yang.

  He sprang first, and Linn tucked herself into a roll beneath him. The clash of their blades rang out under the paintings of the Bregonian gods, reverberating in the silence.

  Linn sprang back to her feet. Out of the corner of her eyes, she saw Ana rush over to the Bregonian scholar. He was leaning against the bookshelves, his mouth opening and closing like a fish as he gripped his chest, trying impossibly to stem the flow of blood down his front.

  Linn pivoted, putting them behind her as she faced Kaïs.

  She attacked first this time, taking off at a sprint and lashing out. He dodged, but she had feinted; she whipped out her other arm and aimed at his chest. He leapt back just in time; the tip of her dagger grazed the collar of his shirt. A thin gash exposed his skin.

  Kaïs looked up. “I’m sorry, Linn. I never meant to hurt you.”

  Linn raised her hands. “Tell it to my blades.”

  She charged again, but he moved, surprisingly fast, and then his sword was arcing down at her. Linn sprang out of the way, but his other blade came swinging low, aiming at her feet. She caught herself just in time, twisting and delaying her fall for a moment longer. Her foot hit the flat part of his sword and she launched herself into the air, landing several feet away.

  He turned to face her again.

  “Do not hold back,” Linn said, pointing her dagger at him. “I can always tell when one’s heart is not in the fight.”

  He raised his weapon. “I wish you didn’t have to be involved in this.”

  “This is my fight, as much as it is Ana’s.” Her tone softened. “And, until now, I thought it was yours.”

  Torchlight and shadows flickered on his face. “I do it to survive.”

  Linn allowed herself to taste a small sliver of frustration at last. “Survive?” she repeated. “That is all I have been trying to do these past years, Kaïs. Yet I would never hesitate to give my life to do the right thing.”

  His expression turned stony. Linn was running out of time. There was something in him worth saving, something worth redeeming. She could almost see it, reach it.

  “You are a good person, Linn,” he said quietly. “I am a selfish one.”

  “Then choose to be a good person!” The words exploded from her in
a shout. Linn charged. In her moment of fury, she forgot her winds; she became fire, surging forward in a storm of blades.

  He countered; their weapons clashed. Linn twisted, slashed.

  Blood sprayed the air.

  Kaïs stumbled back. A line of red trailed across his chest, glistening bright as rubies. He looked up and wiped sweat from his brow. “I would gladly give my life for yours,” he said, “but it is not mine I am trying to save.”

  Linn blinked away the hot tears in her eyes. “Then whose?” she demanded. “Whose life is so important that you would choose the side of a murderer, that you would watch her burn down the world?”

  There it was, a glimpse of sadness so profound, it was like trying to look into the depths of the Silent Sea. “My mother’s.”

  Everything seemed to stop then. Linn drew a sharp breath. They’d spoken of his mother, back in the cold, ice-tipped forests of the Syvern Taiga. He’d mentioned it to her, and she’d felt the emotion in his words, a gripping ache that mirrored her own feelings toward Kemeira, toward her family.

  Kaïs was panting, his double swords lowered. “Morganya and Kerlan have my mother. If I do not do as they say…if I do not succeed in this mission…they will kill her.”

  She wanted to drop her weapons right there, for in that moment she saw that they were reflections of each other. There was nothing she wouldn’t do to save her family. She’d boarded a strange ship, journeyed to a foreign empire, and spent years of her life in search of her brother.

  I cannot do this, Linn thought. I have lost.

  Beneath an alcove a little way from where they fought, the scholar lay very still on the searock floor of the Livren Skolaren, his blood pooled around him. Ana had straightened and was gazing directly at them.

  “Shamaïra,” she said quietly.

  Kaïs froze. Linn could see the tension in his broad shoulders.

  Slowly, he turned to Ana. “What did you just say?”

  “Your mother.” Ana spoke as though she were gazing at a ghost. “Your mother is Shamaïra of Nandji, is she not?”

  Kaïs stared at her. Emotions shifted in his eyes, as though they bore a storm. He gave a single nod.

  “I know your mother,” Ana said. “She saved my life. She sent me, Kaïs. She sent me here. To save the world. To save you.”

  Linn had the sensation of fate rushing by her, of the meeting of two threads of life, piecing together jagged fragments of the same story. “You know Shamaïra,” Linn breathed, a part question, part statement in wonder.

  Ana’s gaze never left Kaïs’s. “She was an ally to me and to the Redcloaks, a figure of the rebellion. She told me she lost her son to the Affinite trade many years ago, and she’s been searching for him since.” Her voice cracked. “She crossed the Aramabi Desert for you. She survived for years in the Cyrilian Empire, because she has been looking for you, Kaïs.”

  Kaïs dropped to his knees, his swords clanging on the floor. He pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes, slowly shaking his head. “No,” he moaned. “I can’t. I don’t have a choice.”

  Linn lowered her daggers. “You do,” she said, taking a step toward him. “I know how it feels, to be trapped. But if there is anything I have learned, it is that you can always make a choice.”

  “I think,” Ana continued, “that if your mother were here, she would tell you that we will not find fairness in this world. But it is up to us to take what we are given and to fight like hell to make it better.”

  Kaïs buried his face in his hands. When he looked back up, a sheen of tears glistened in his eyes.

  Linn knelt. Gently, she placed her knives on the floor between them. Met his gaze. Slowly, she brought her hands together, cupping one over the other.

  Action, counteraction.

  “Please,” she whispered, and the word trembled in the silence between them. “The choice is yours.”

  The wind had whipped into a screaming gale by the time Ramson reached the top of the Crown’s Cut. He pounded at the heavy ironore gates, and every excruciating second it took for the guards to emerge from the keep felt like agony.

  “Ramson Farrald,” he panted. The Royal Guard held his torch to Ramson’s face. Satisfied, he waved it once, twice, three times—a signal to open the gates. “Tell me, have two wagons gone through this evening?”

  The guard gave him a disinterested look. “Yes, over a bell ago.”

  Shit. Shit.

  The first drops of rain hit his face as he sprinted through the courtyards. The buildings and trees of the Naval Academy flew by in blurred shadows, and at last, at last, the steps leading to the Naval Headquarters appeared.

  Ramson vaulted up the steps three at a time. The corridors were strangely empty—the absence of guards worrying him more. When he reached his father’s chambers, though, he was relieved to find a squad of Royal Guards standing sentry.

  “Announce me,” he gasped. “And do not let anyone else in.”

  One of the Royal Guards opened the door to step inside. With a violent step forward, Ramson shoved his way past the guard and burst into his father’s chambers.

  Admiral Farrald was sitting at his desk, penning something onto parchment. Relief flooded through Ramson. “Admiral—”

  “I hope you’ve persuaded your Blood Empress.” His father spoke without looking up from his writing. “It would be highly inconvenient for the deal to fall through tonight.”

  Ramson paused, the torrent of thoughts in his mind coming to a standstill. “What?”

  “The Three Courts are gathering at Godhallem as we speak.” The Admiral’s gaze flicked up momentarily. “We meet with the Blood Empress at eight bells.”

  Cold slipped through his veins. The biggest party of all in the Blue Fort, Kerlan had said. “No,” Ramson said, stepping forward. “You need to call off the meeting—”

  “I thought this would happen,” the Admiral interrupted. He set down his pen and stood, the scrape of his chair rattling against Ramson’s skull. “So I’ve already sent Sorsha to escort her to Godhallem. They should be on their way. It is all simply a show, to convince the insipid little King and the Three Courts that I’m adhering to the proper procedures. I’ll have your little Blood Empress’s magek whether she agrees to it or not.”

  The nonchalance in his father’s voice unleashed something hot and wild within him. Suddenly, they were back on that night seven years ago, pieces of his shattered cup strewn across the floor, hot chocolate dripping down the walls like blood. Jonah’s body limp and helpless on the cold searock floor.

  For a moment, he considered letting the attack on Bregon happen. He owed nothing to his father, to this wretched kingdom run by a wretched government. Perhaps, then, his father would finally know how it tasted to have all that you had loved and cared for destroyed before your very eyes.

  But he thought of Jonah. Of his mother, standing in that cottage by the sea. They had believed in the good part of him. They had loved him and, in return, told him that he was capable of loving and being loved.

  And that was what made him different from Roran Farrald.

  So Ramson forged his fury into something cool, sharp, and harder than steel. He crossed the room to his father’s desk and spread his hands across it. “Tell you what,” he said. “Let’s make a Trade. You take me to where she is, and I tell you why I’m here. About information I learned of an imminent attack on Bregon.” He bared his teeth in a smile. “How does that sound, Father?”

  The Admiral’s eyes bore through him. Father and son gazed at each other in a deadlock, and in that moment, an entire lifetime might have passed.

  When Admiral Farrald finally drew back, it wasn’t anger or fury on his face.

  It was disappointment.

  “I loved your mother, too, you know.”

  Of all the things Ramson might have expected his father to
say, it wasn’t this. The words hung in the air. Froze him. Turned his plan around and threw it back in his face. “This has nothing to do with my mother.”

  “I had them bury her, right outside Elmford. On a hill of white heather, by the sea.”

  “You lie.”

  “It wasn’t fair of me to love something more than I loved my kingdom, you see. Love made me weak. Love made me a fool. Love destroys us.” The Admiral circled to the window and looked out. And there, on the windowsill, sat a small pot of white flowers, leaning against the glass.

  Ramson’s knees went weak. His mind fractured; his world shrank, until there was nothing left in it but his father and that pot of white heather.

  Roran Farrald reached out, absentmindedly stroking a petal. “So I made sure to destroy it first.” He turned around, circling the table to close the distance between them. “And now, I see that love has made claim on my own son. Would you trade our kingdom, Ramson, for the life of one girl?”

  No, he wanted to yell. Don’t you dare put this on me.

  Instead, Ramson lifted his shoulder in the most infuriatingly insouciant shrug he could muster. “It’s not my kingdom,” he said. “It’s yours. And it just so happens that I have information of an attack by Cyrilia.”

  Roran Farrald’s face was serene as he waved a hand. “It doesn’t interest me,” he replied, returning to peruse his papers. “You see, your beloved Blood Empress was one step behind in the game all along.” He lifted his gaze. “I already have an agreement in place with the Kolst Imperatorya Morganya.”

  The world shifted sharply off-balance.

  “Oh, yes,” the Admiral continued tonelessly, seeing Ramson’s expression. “I have been developing something that requires the help of magen to, ah, test. The new Empress agreed to sell Cyrilian Affinites to me, under the condition that I share our results with her. Much more convenient than having to kidnap our own magen, which ruffled a few feathers in our government when it came to light.”

  Ramson grasped wildly for words. “The siphons.”