Shimmer and Burn Read online

  She’ll kill Cadence.

  Lowering my head, I close my eyes. “So then what did you want from me?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I don’t have any money,” I say, looking at him. “I don’t have any gold rings, but you came looking for me, not Bryn, back there in the woods.”

  His expression goes blank. “Happenstance,” he says, hands dangling between his knees. “Tobek was just as likely to find you.”

  “You just said this spell has nothing to do with me. If that’s all you really wanted from us, you would’ve gone after the source.”

  North ducks his head with a tight, humorless smile as he examines his hands and avoids my accusation. He must know I’m hiding more than just a spell beneath my skin, that there’s magic enough for him to steal if he wanted it. He’s as mercenary as all the rest of them.

  “I just wanted to help,” he says.

  “I know that trick,” I say. “A handsome man offers to help me and the next thing I know, I’m standing in a foreign country chained to a princess.”

  The edge of his mouth twitches. “A handsome man?”

  “You’re not a stupid man, either,” I mutter with an unwanted rise of heat.

  His eyes meet mine. “Would you believe me if I said—”

  “No,” I interrupt. “I wouldn’t.”

  He tilts his head, eyebrows raised. “You’re not even going to give me a chance to lie to you?”

  I stare at him.

  “Or maybe I might have told you the truth,” he says wryly. Brandishing Thaelan’s ring, he asks, “Is this yours?”

  I look away. Blood echoes in my ears. “No.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “It never belonged to me,” I say, teeth clenched. And now it never will. It’s like losing Thaelan all over again, and I hate Bryn and Alistair for doing that—for tainting his memory with their own greed.

  Standing, I waver on my feet and North rises, offering me a hand. “Don’t touch me,” I say, stepping out of reach.

  “You too, huh?” His lips flatten as he slides his hands in his pockets, rocking back onto his heels. “What’s your name?”

  “What difference does it make?”

  “You asked me what I wanted.”

  “Don’t mock me.”

  “Names are power,” he says. “You underestimate the value of yours.”

  “I’m a servant,” I say. “My only value is in my skin.”

  North doesn’t argue. He doesn’t speak at all, he simply watches. Waiting.

  I hold back a sigh. I haven’t given my name to anyone in months and it feels rusty on my tongue. “Faris Locke.”

  “Faris Locke,” he repeats softly, like it’s something special, worth remembering. He offers me his hand for an introduction before remembering himself. No touching. The hand slides through his hair instead, spiking it in dark, unruly peaks that slowly settle back into place on either side of his forehead. “There was an old pistol on the ground back there in the woods,” he says.

  I flinch, feeling its weight, its power, its finality all over again. Shame warms my skin and yet I hug myself, suddenly cold.

  “Where did that come from?”

  “It was a gift from the king,” I say, staring at the ground.

  “Miss Dossel’s father the king?”

  I nod, and he lifts his chin in acknowledgment, eyebrows drawn in consideration.

  “It’s probably still out there if you want it,” I say, turning for camp.

  “It wouldn’t do me much good,” he says. “Avinea hasn’t produced ammunition for almost fifteen years, and our trade routes to the Northern Continents have been closed for more than twenty. Is that where it came from? The Northern Continents?”

  I shrug, frustrated: What difference does it make where the gun came from? I used it to kill a man. Why isn’t he asking me about that? “I don’t know. Yes? Ask Bryn.”

  “I suspect I’ll have to pay for any answers from her in silver and blood,” he says, glancing toward the wagon.

  “Then maybe I’m offering my answers too freely.”

  His eyebrows shoot up. Interested. “Name your price.”

  My price is fifty gold kronets and signed papers releasing my sister from the nightmare of the workhouse. But North can’t give me that.

  “Just get us to New Prevast,” I say, hugging myself even tighter. “As fast as you can.” Because if Perrote’s councilman was able to find us after only one day, who—what—might find us next?

  “Seven days,” North says, resting his weight on the outsides of his boots. “We’ll leave in the morning.”

  I nod tightly, turning away. “Thank you.”

  “Miss Locke?”

  I pause.

  “You’re safe now,” he says. “I promise.”

  I glance toward the stars, so many I could drown in them. “I’m sorry,” I say. “I still don’t believe you.”

  Twelve

  I RETURN TO THE FIRE, to a plate of food thrust in my hands and a seat beside Bryn on a rock. The pheasant Tobek roasted sits in a pool of buttery oil dotted green with herbs I don’t recognize. It reminds me of the blisters lanced across the hellborne as they ravaged Loomis’s corpse.

  I can’t eat.

  “You and Miss Locke can share the bottom bunk,” says North, his own dinner neatly dissected on his plate, fork and knife crossed at the center. “Tobek will sleep on the floor.”

  The formality in addressing us by titled name seems ridiculous: He’s barely older than us and in desperate need of a shave and yet he treats us like we’re generations separated.

  “Absolutely not,” says Bryn. “Faris can sleep on the floor, you and Tobek may share the bottom bunk, and I’ll take the top.” Arching an eyebrow, she cuts her meat into tidy portions. “I sleep beneath no man.”

  Tobek snorts into his cup, sobering as both Bryn and North give him withering looks. “Sorry,” he mumbles, shoulders hunched over his own plate. Bones litter the side, picked clean of meat.

  Bryn shifts with a rustle of skirts. She sits straight where I slouch, prim where I cower. Every time her fork scrapes across the plate, I flinch at the noise.

  “I will not allow a woman to sleep on the floor,” says North, reaching for a cup cradled at his feet.

  “And I do not share a bed with servants.”

  “Aren’t you hungry?” Tobek asks me.

  “Are you a transferent too?” I ask to distract him, setting the plate aside.

  Tobek looks pleased. “No, only an intuit. Transferents have to touch things before they know whether there’s any magic inside, but I can smell it without being anywhere near it. North taught me how to tell clean from dead.”

  Bryn snorts. “So that’s your talent? Smelling magic?”

  “Well, I smelled it on you back in Cortheana.”

  “You and every hellborne addict out there,” says Bryn, rolling her eyes.

  “I’m not an addict,” he says hotly. “And anyway, the hellborne can’t read the course your blood will run. Not like me.”

  “You can tell the future?” She quirks an eyebrow, amused.

  He stiffens, turns cagey. “For the right price.”

  “Of course. You saved my life so you could charge me pennies for my dreams. I suppose you do card tricks as well.”

  His hand flies to the front of his vest, to a deck of cards that hangs in the pocket.

  “I don’t mind sleeping on the floor,” I say.

  “No,” says North.

  “I don’t cheat,” Tobek says. “Not anymore.”

  “I really don’t mind,” I say.

  Bryn’s fork scrapes across her plate. “She’s fine on the floor.”

  “I will not argue—”

  “My servant,” says Bryn, “my magic, my rules. If we are not absolutely clear on the parameters of our agreement, you are more than welcome to leave us here.”

  “Bryn,” I start, embarrassed.

  With a slash of silv
er, her dinner knife cuts across her palm. Crying out, I bend over my knees, biting back tears as I cradle my stinging hand to my chest. North stands, spilling the cup at his feet. His eyes flash with warning, but Bryn clutches her knife, undeterred.

  “My servant, my magic, my rules,” she repeats. Then, to me, “And you were told how to address me.”

  Humiliated, I scowl at the fire, cradling my hand. “Yes, your majesty.”

  “You came looking for us,” Bryn says, standing. “Greed costs, gentlemen. Do I make myself clear?”

  Nobody speaks.

  Straightening, Bryn throws her chin up. “But a good queen knows when to compromise. Faris can have the bottom bunk.”

  “A good queen doesn’t crown herself while her father still breathes,” says North.

  “A smart man keeps his mouth shut when his opinion is not requested,” says Bryn.

  North inhales deeply, shoulders rolling back. His hands curl into loose fists at his side, the knuckles whitening. “Tobek,” he says, his eyes locked on Bryn; “we’ll sleep outside tonight.”

  “The tent has a hole in it,” Tobek protests.

  North’s expression doesn’t flicker. “It’s not raining,” he says.

  Bryn smiles, dropping into an abbreviated curtsy of acknowledgment before she slips her arm through mine and pulls me to my feet. She keeps her knife, and I wish I had thought to do the same, because she’s terrifying. Head high, she ascends the stairs into the wagon as though it’s already been conquered in the name of Brindaigel.

  Once inside, I slide my arm out from hers and put distance between us, balling my sticky hand into the fabric of my skirt.

  “There,” she says, unclasping her traveling cloak and letting it drape over a chair. “And now we have privacy and a bed apiece.”

  “You could have just asked.”

  “That implies equal footing.”

  “Your majesty, I strongly suggest you don’t make an enemy of the transferent. He can pull the spells out of your skin and he can thread poison through you just as easily. I saw what he can do—”

  “He won’t touch me.” She trails a hand over the apothecary’s chest, opening drawers at random, sifting through the contents. “I’m too valuable to poison and now he understands that.” Finding a roll of bandages, she sets them and her knife on the table. “I’m sorry,” she says. “It may seem cruel to you, what I did, but I’m a woman, Faris, and that often requires more sacrifice than a man. I was born as a redundancy but I intend to be a queen. Not a princess or a consort or an ornament. A queen. Anything less is a waste of my time.”

  Bryn surveys the plants above our heads before dragging a chair beneath them, cutting several stalks of comfrey loose.

  “What are you doing?” I ask when she jumps down again.

  “A little trick Pem taught me,” she says. “It’s called compassion. Take off your coat.”

  I hesitate. I’ve grown accustomed to its weight, the extra layer of protection.

  Bryn clucks her tongue and begins tugging on the coat until I shrug it off. She throws it over her own cloak and surveys the bloodied mess I’ve become. “Pity about your hair,” she says, sweeping the blond tangles away from my face.

  The door swings open and North staggers inside, a bucket of water sloshing in his hands. With a grimace, he lifts it up, out of the stairwell, splashing a wave of water across the floor.

  “I thought you might want to wash the smell of piss off of your skin,” he says, his tone acid, eyes on Bryn. “And maybe the blood from under your fingernails.”

  Bryn turns and brandishes her hands for demonstration. “It’s my favorite color,” she says.

  Nostrils flaring, North slams back outside and Bryn snorts, approaching the bucket. “Come here,” she says, beckoning me toward the water. “You need this more than I do.”

  I wet my lips, eyes on the knife. Would she miss it?

  Of course she would.

  Protocol dictates that she wash first and I take the dirty water left behind, but Bryn is insistent in this new game of sympathy. Dipping a wad of cloth into the water, she straightens and begins to dab at my scraped wrists and cut palm with a light, shivery touch, eyebrows pulled in concentration.

  “I can do it myself,” I say, embarrassed. Uneasy. I reach up to take the cloth from her but she pulls back before I can.

  “I don’t want your loyalty because a spell demands it, Faris,” says Bryn, rinsing the cloth before she swipes it across my cheeks. Pink- and gray-colored water drips down her arms, darkening the sleeves of her dress. “I need to earn it. A good queen honors the people who fight for her. Who kill for her.” Rocking her weight back, her expression turns hazy, unfocused. “I know this is hard. But nobody conquered anything without losing something along the way.”

  What has she lost that she wasn’t already willing to leave behind?

  Bryn unrolls a clean length of bandage and starts wrapping my hand. “Pem again,” she says with an absent smile. The magic beneath my skin skitters away from her touch, dropping out of sight only to resurface again, the braided threads more knotted than before, as if strengthened by her proximity. “I used to watch him conducting his experiments before my father found out.” Snorting, she tucks the end of the bandage into place. “I can marry an executioner, but I can’t show an interest in his work. Especially the work he’s not being paid for.”

  “Your father thinks I kidnapped you,” I say.

  Her smile widens, showing her teeth. “Which is good,” she says. “I worried he would assume I ran away on my own.”

  I stare at her, stomach sinking. Everything that’s happened, even her insistence that I kill Loomis, has been orchestrated down to the details. Blood on my hands ensures innocence on hers. If her father does find us, he’ll find a daughter eager to return home and a girl whose family he first unraveled ten years ago. It’s not that she needed a vessel, or even a bodyguard. She needed someone to blame. Just in case.

  “My father will send more men when Loomis doesn’t return,” she continues, “which is why you have to trust the decisions I make for us both. If we don’t reach New Prevast before his men reach us, then all that’s left is to pray that Pem kills you quickly.”

  I swallow hard, past the tightening ache in my chest. I doubt mercy will be granted the girl who kidnapped the princess and murdered a councilman. “Why would your father waste the effort to recover a redundancy?”

  Bryn eyes me shrewdly. “I’m not the one he’s worried about losing,” she says.

  Her words slide like ice down my back. Of course. Nobody leaves Brindaigel, but I did. And until Perrote knows I’m dead, I’m a liability to the safety of his kingdom.

  Bryn cocks her head and studies me, dark red hair curled across her shoulders. “You hesitated in the woods, after I gave you an order. Don’t do that again, Faris. An instant can change everything. Do you understand me?”

  I press against the table, bone melting into wood as I remember the weight of the pistol, the recoil of its shot, the sound of one last breath and then nothing left. Living with that murder is fear enough; it terrifies me to know that she may ask worse of me before this is done. Seven days to New Prevast, North had said.

  Seven days too many.

  Swallowing hard, I lower my eyes and take a deep breath to slow my racing heart. “Yes, your majesty.”

  “Faris.” She tips my chin higher and I force myself to hold her gaze even as my fingers clench my skirt against my thighs. If I were home, I could lay my fear on the fighting floor and find solace in the taste of blood down my throat.

  But I’m in Avinea now, and the rules are completely different.

  “Hate me if you’d like,” Bryn says. “Hate keeps people alive when they have nothing else to keep them warm. And I need you still breathing.”

  Remember this, I tell myself: remember her. Pointed teeth and sharpened claws hidden behind soft curves and sweet smiles. I killed a man but she’s killed two already. “And how do you
stay warm without a heart?”

  Bryn smiles, almost sad, and traces the curve of my cheek before she slaps me.

  I refuse to touch my face, to give her the satisfaction of knowing that even her pathetic strength has power over me.

  “You will never understand what it takes to be queen,” says Bryn.

  But I do understand what it’ll take to get my sister back: the same thing it takes to be a slave.

  Complete and utter obedience.

  Thirteen

  I DREAM OF ASH AND burning things, broken cities and coward kings. Everything is iron turned to gold beneath my touch. Everything is dead. Maybe I am too.

  Rough hands shake me awake, pulling me out of my nightmare. “Faris,” Bryn hisses with a hint of fear. “We’ve stopped moving.”

  I open my eyes to sunset colors seeping across the floor from the window above the bunks. The edge of a dream lingers, gold threads unraveling around me with the feeling of looming inevitability. I frown at Bryn, struggling to place myself in context. Painted stars on the ceiling, a groaning stove beside me, and a striped cat asleep at my hip.

  Avinea.

  Propping myself up on my elbows, I stare across the empty wagon, confirming Bryn’s assessment. The rattling of the wagon, such a constant lullaby since we left at dawn like North had promised, has been replaced with something far less soothing. Voices, muted by distance and thick walls.

  My heart plummets. Perrote found us.

  I push out of bed, disrupting Darjin, who mewls in protest and jumps to the floor.

  Bryn clutches her dinner knife, following me to the door as I brace my weight, hands tightening at my hips, stretching open the scab on my palm. Last night, long after Bryn’s soft snores filled the silence, I crawled on my hands and knees across the wagon, searching for the dagger I had dropped, but never found it. Now I scan the room, looking for something to replace it.

  Before I do, the door rattles in its frame and swings open. I lunge down the stairwell, knocking into Tobek before he can react. We somersault off the running board and hit the ground hard. Grabbing him by the shoulders, I roll him flat on his back and prepare to strike.

  North watches from several yards away, on the other side of a campfire. Stones rattle in his hand. “You are determined to see him dead,” he says.