Shimmer and Burn Read online

Page 3

“I love you,” I whisper, and it hurts. I tell myself that it’s better this way, that Cadence doesn’t remember me, or home, or what she used to be, but it’s a coward’s truth. It’s only better for me that her eyes are dull, devoid of recognition.

  Devoid of accusation.

  “Go back to work, number eight-six-three-nine-one,” I say, and she obeys without question, resuming her scrubbing.

  I linger longer than I should, unwilling to leave when I don’t know when I’ll be back. The last of the harvest means long days stripping the orchards of fruit, and a long queue of hungry people looking for work means short nights to ensure I’m at the head of the pack when the guards hand out positions at dawn.

  The back door opens and voices approach—Mistress Ebbidens and her paunchy visitor—and I quickly tuck myself out of sight behind a basket of damp linens. It’s not strictly wrong for me to be here—some women come to visit their children, for what good it does—but it is dangerous to risk anyone connecting me to the little girl caught trying to escape through the tunnels. It’s the same reason why I still work as a field hand, an anonymous face picked by a guard from the crowd, no interview required. There’s no money in the fields, but there are no names, either.

  “—choice of candidates,” Mistress Ebbidens says, full of phlegm and gravel.

  “Someone obedient,” the man says, with a watery laugh that turns into a soft cough. “A girl, of course.” The top of his head appears over the rise of the linens, thick dark hair slicked back, almost flat. By contrast, Mistress Ebbidens’s hair rises like a frothy column of whipped cream.

  They stroll the yard and the man simpers over the children, patting their heads or examining their faces by tucking his pudgy hand beneath their chins. They accept his attention like they accept their orders, wordlessly and without a spark of complaint.

  When they approach Cadence, the man’s eyes sharpen; his smile spreads like oil. “Well, hello,” he says, and I pull tighter into the corner, out of sight, fists pressed against my stomach. “What a pretty face.”

  “Orphaned,” Mistress Ebbidens says.

  “Excellent,” says the man. “Families cause unnecessary interference.”

  She’s not orphaned, I want to scream. She still has me and she has her father, for all he’s worth. He wouldn’t even come with me that day in the square. “There’s no point,” he had said, haunted eyes and trembling fingers reaching for his drink. “She’s already dead.”

  Just like him, I had thought as he signaled for another. “You could speak for her,” I had said, with a stupid hope that her life meant more than his. “You could save her.”

  My father had looked at me, gray as the stone walls behind him, a man who had never fought a day in his life. “When have I ever saved anyone?” he’d asked.

  “What’s this?”

  I risk a glance around the linens and see the man examining the pear from Cadence’s apron. He cradles it between his fingers and holds it to the light like an exquisite glass of wine. “I’m not her only admirer,” he says with a laugh that sends chills down my spine.

  Mistress Ebbidens doesn’t laugh with him. Her eyes narrow, lips pursed in a frown as she glances around the yard, suspicious: All visitors are supposed to sign in. “She turns twelve on the king’s birthday,” she says, turning back toward the house with an unspoken command.

  The man rolls the pear between his hands. “Worth the wait,” he says, before he takes a bite, juice dripping down his chin. “Fruit needs to be ripened.”

  Rage boils inside me and I dig my fists deeper into my stomach, pinning myself down before I can lunge out and rip his disgusting eyes out of his head to keep him from looking at my sister like she’s already his.

  Laughing, still eating the pear, the man follows Mistress Ebbidens back to the house. Bending over my knees, I hold my breath until I hear their footsteps recede and the door shuts again, returning the yard to its eerie quiet. Only then do I allow myself to breathe and move out of hiding, to confirm that Cadence is as oblivious to the man’s threat as she was to my promises.

  I could take Cadence right now and run. At my command, she would wrap her arms around my neck and I would carry her over the crumbling wall that edges the back of the property. We would disappear like shadows into the Brim and share an hour, maybe a night of stolen freedom. But the magic that hides her freckles ties back to the king, same as the loyalty spells on all his soldiers. If she goes missing, all he has to do is twitch a single thread of magic, like a spider sitting fat in his web, and his provost will follow the trail straight to her. To me. No mercy for her age this time; we’d both be carved up like Thaelan, our blood painting a warning to all those below.

  Nobody leaves Brindaigel.

  I kiss Cadence one last time, hugging a bag of bones that jars against my hip without any warmth, any feeling.

  “Avinea is still out there, Cade,” I whisper to her. “And I swear to you we’ll find it.”

  Three

  BLOOD IN MY MOUTH, SALT in my eyes, and the sound of encouragement shouted by a ring of featureless men clutching paper bets in their fists. I grin, savoring it all.

  My opponent throws a punch but it goes wild, above my shoulder. I duck out of the way and slam her hard in the ribs, knocking her back a step. Lunge, parry, block, and thrust echoes in my head, and while I have no sword, I have my hands, and they can be just as lethal.

  I manage a sharp strike to her temple before I dart back to catch my breath. The girl lurches forward, teeth bared and eyes wild: All rules forgotten as she attacks for the win.

  I welcome the battle.

  We’re nothing but shoulders and knees and strangled curses as we roll across the floor, scratching, grabbing, hurting. The girl disappears and it’s the oil-slick smile of the man who wants to buy Cadence; it’s Alistair Pembrough, King Perrote, the walls around Brindaigel that fall beneath my blows. Hate feeds my adrenaline. Hate and self-loathing and a need for blood, for punishment.

  Panting, I pin the girl with a knee to her hip. Blood smears her features and the eyes that stare up at me are swollen, bright with pain and a needling look of fury. She grabs my hair—kept loose, the way the men like it—and I raise my fist for one last strike, inwardly apologizing to her pretty face and her desperate hunger, as familiar as my own. But only one of us can win, and I want it more than she does.

  The girl releases my hair and shakes her head, palms flashed toward me. Claiming defeat.

  “You’re done,” a voice barks. Palif, a bartender, hauls me back as another man shoulders the girl to her feet. Men jeer at her loss, throwing wadded up betting slips in disgust. Palif presses coins into the girl’s hands—a meager fifth of what I’ll earn as the winner, barely worth the bruises in the morning—before she’s spun into the waiting arms of a frowning young man who hurries her outside.

  Someone offers me an arm up and I accept, touching my nose to find it dripping blood. A handkerchief is shoved in my direction and I rock my head back, staggering toward a table.

  Men rattle their own tables with satisfaction as Reed, the organizer, pays out their wins. Pinching my nose, I slump in my seat, heart aching with adrenaline, with fear, with the feeling of absolute power.

  And lurking underneath, the feeling of absolute helplessness. With every high comes the inevitable, unavoidable low. Pain layered upon pain; there’s no escaping the broken heart inside me.

  Someone buys me a beer that I accept with a grunt of acknowledgment, lowering my head just long enough to take a drink. By the time Reed approaches me with my bag and my percentage, a headache’s arrived, thick and blistering.

  “Am I good?” I ask.

  Reed clicks coins together in his palm, expression grim. Wordlessly, he drops the money on the table and I pocket it without looking, as if ashamed. Maybe I am, profiting from my anger, legitimizing my hate.

  But not enough to stop.

  Leaning my elbows into the table, I curl bloody fingers around the beer glass and roll i
t along its bottom rim, watching leftover suds slink down the sides. “How is he?” I ask, and despite myself, my eyes scan the crowded bar, searching for my father’s back among those that fill the shadows.

  “Alive,” says Reed.

  “And he’s good?” I already know the answer: My father’s tab comes straight out of my winnings before they ever reach me, and I had coins to spare tonight.

  “He’s good,” Reed says anyway.

  I nod, sniffing back a runner of snot and blood. “So is she,” I say, standing, dragging the strap of my bag over my shoulder. “In case he asks.” My eyes briefly meet Reed’s before they dart away. I can’t bear the looks he gives me, the pity.

  “He never asks,” says Reed.

  “Tell him anyway.”

  “Tell him yourself.”

  I scowl in reply, pulling my hair over my shoulder. He knows my father hasn’t spoken to me since I told him that it was my fault Cadence was caught in the tunnels, that it’s my fault she’s locked away with bleeding fingers and empty eyes and no memory of her own name. I pay his tab to keep him here, drunk, so he doesn’t feel the need to ever come home to me, angry.

  Wadding up the bloody handkerchief, I shove it in the pocket of my skirt. “What do you have open tomorrow night?”

  “Nothing,” he says.

  I look at him, pressing my bleeding knuckles to my mouth, calmed by the metallic taste. “I saw your lists when I came in. What do you have?”

  “Nothing for you,” says Reed. “That”—he tips his chin toward the fighting ring—“is not what I pay for.”

  “That’s what your patrons pay for,” I say hotly. “Nobody wants a clean fight.”

  “But they expect a fair one.” He shifts his weight, arms folding over his chest. “You’re going to kill somebody one of these days. Or you’re going to get yourself killed. And it’s not going to happen here.”

  My teeth clench, biting back my rising anger. “I had it under control—”

  “Find somewhere else to fight.”

  “Everywhere else wants sixty percent.”

  “Nobody else knows why you’re doing this,” he returns. “Nobody else knows your father.”

  “You can’t stop me,” I say. “I barely make a tretka working the fields. I need this money!” I need this power, this feeling of being in control of something, even if it’s only how much pain I can withstand.

  “He’s already lost one of his daughters—”

  “She’s not dead!”

  Heads turn toward us and I scowl away the curious stares and whispers. Reed sighs, rocking his head back. He was a fighter too, once, and his body still bears the memory of that strength. The inner anger. “You can’t save anyone making ten tretkas a night,” he says at last.

  The beer sizzles in my head, watery but strong, and I suddenly crave more of it, enough to float down the streets of the Brim and over the wall of the city, out into the gorge.

  But beer costs money.

  I stare at Reed’s chin, the thin lips half hidden beneath his mustache. “Maybe I could make money upstairs,” I say, and my stomach turns just considering it. “You only take fifty percent of that.”

  “Nobody wants a girl who’s going to bite.”

  “I wouldn’t—” I stop, cheeks turning hot. Defy expectation, I think. Thaelan would never forgive me if I chose that path. But he’s dead and Cadence isn’t. “I need this, Reed,” I say, an inch away from begging.

  “Go home.” Reed turns away, dismissing me.

  “Where is that?”

  Reed stares down at me, unrepentant. “Not here.”

  Not here, not there, not anywhere. Like Cadence, I’m an orphan with a family.

  I take the long way through the Brim, head bowed and arms clutching my bag to my chest, diffusing my anger in the cool autumn air.

  I need that money.

  Fifty silver kronets is the king’s going rate for an unclaimed orphan in the workhouse. A bargain, they tell me, for someone so young, with so many years of service left in her bones. Fifty silver kronets to repay her debt to the crown, and proof that she’s my family, that I have the right to buy her back before she turns twelve and is sold to whoever wants her—with or without the spell of obedience still darkening her eyes.

  That man today did not want a little girl to do his laundry.

  My throat burns, full of acid, and I hug my bag tighter, trying to press the ache out of my chest, but it only rises higher, lodging beneath my scar where it settles with a familiar itch.

  Mist from the gorge banks over the kingdom’s walls and worms through the streets, shrouding the rot of the Brim with stretching fingers of white. It mutes my footsteps and dims the sparse oil lamps that burn above my head as I press deeper through the darkened alleys, scaling crumbling walls and balconies, emerging onto the rooftops. It’s a whole second city up here, full of twists and alleys of its own—even the occasional black market where pawnbrokers buy and sell from blankets easy to roll up and hide if a shadow crow comes scrying, looking for the king’s percentage of the deal.

  Cadence used to play up here, while I washed our clothes in the water that filled the clogged gutters. She used to practice out here too, living vicariously through Thaelan as he trained for the Guard, filling her hopes with stories of swords and long-ago wars, when Brindaigel and Avinea stood as allies against the rest of the world.

  He and I used to meet up here after she’d gone to bed, only we’d climb even higher, to where the buildings spread apart and we could see the stars. There was never more than a sliver of sky we could blot out with our hands held side to side. Never enough to satisfy the hunger in our hearts.

  I don’t bother looking for stars tonight as I pick my way toward my current residence, a drafty attic abandoned by its former occupants after their young daughter was caught weaving spells with the magic that holds the mountains in around us.

  The king tells us that only he can summon magic from the earth, that it’s a divine gift from the gods inherited through blood and birthright. But he leaves out the part about the gods demanding balance in all things, especially power among men. While the king alone can summon magic, there are others—even filthy Brim rats—who can manipulate it once it’s loose.

  In Avinea, King Merlock embraced these magicians, appointing four apiece as provosts to the touchstones he scattered across his kingdom to adjudicate in his stead. A transferent to siphon magic and dispense it as needed, a spellcaster to weave magic into useful spells, an intuit to track the amount of magic remaining; and an amplifier who could thicken a single thread of magic into a rope. At the start of the war, every one of them turned mercenary, draining the touchstones and selling the magic to Prince Corthen to use against his brother. It was this betrayal by Merlock’s magicians that sparked his decision to poison his magic and destroy his kingdom before he abandoned both almost twenty years ago.

  Which is why in Brindaigel, King Perrote preemptively kills them all.

  Magic does not belong to the people, he reminds us every year, after confirming that our borders must remain closed. Look what happens when a king trusts men and treats them as equals. Only Perrote and one provost can be trusted with that power, and they exercise it absolutely against anyone who demonstrates an inkling of ability. Even little girls too innocent to mean harm.

  My blistering headache returns as I slide through the broken window of the attic, breathing in the familiar dusty-damp smell of the rotting wood and stale blankets. There’s a comfort to it and, exhausted, I clutch my bag to my chest and lean against the wall, wilting across the hardwood floor until my legs are stretched ahead of me. Head rocked back, I hold my breath and exhale slowly as I close my eyes.

  The man with the oil-slick smile grins back at me, flecks of pear dotting his chin.

  Jolting upright, I dig through my bag, pulling out my change purse and tipping coins across the floor, catching a kronet before it rolls away. Trembling, I add tonight’s copper tretkas to the pile and
count, recount, sift through them a final time, determined to make more of the little I have.

  Nineteen kronets and thirty tretkas and only two months more to double that if I want to save my sister. She turns twelve at the start of the year, but with no one to say so, she’ll celebrate her birthday with the king instead, two months too soon.

  A desperate sob wrenches loose and I crush it into silence against my arm. Dirty blond tangles fall across my shoulders and I stare at them in accusation. Why haven’t I sold my hair yet? That’s another kronet in my hand. Am I that selfish, that vain, to cling to my hair while Cadence suffers? Why? Because Thaelan used to spread it across the grass and tell me it was beautiful?

  A board creaks ahead of me. In a flash, I’m on my feet, a hand braced to the wall. The air around me shifts, displaced by an unfamiliar smell.

  Cigarettes.

  “I don’t pay my father’s debts,” I say, drying my cheeks with the sleeve of my dress. The taste of metal fills my mouth as I edge toward my bedroll and the blade I keep beneath it. “Any business with him can be handled at the Stone and Fern Tavern.”

  “Liar,” a man says, amused.

  I hesitate, wary. “Who are you?” I demand, squinting through the gloom.

  A shadow draws closer, head and shoulders, and then trousers that fit close to the leg, a manner favored by men who don’t need to move fast or move often.

  A nobleman.

  Ghostly fingers lift a cigarette to lips curled in a smirk. Dark hair and blue eyes and a face that haunts my nightmares. “Hello, Faris,” he says.

  Alistair Pembrough.

  The king’s executioner.

  Four

  I’VE DREAMT ABOUT THIS DAY, practiced for it every night.

  The day I kill the boy who killed Thaelan.

  Lunging, I barrel Alistair back, both hands locked around his throat. He stumbles before slamming against the opposite wall, cigarette falling to the floor. We’re matched for height, an advantage I exploit as I squeeze, furious that he caught me off guard.

  That he saw me crying.