Shimmer and Burn Page 4

  Surprise gives way to a half laugh of incredulity as Alistair grabs for my wrists. I easily block him, sliding an arm across his throat and pinning his hand to the wall by his head. His smile fades. “I’m not here to hurt you,” he says, “I’m here to help you.”

  “Like you helped me that night? Like you helped Thaelan and my sister!?”

  “Exactly like I helped you that night,” he says. “You think that I couldn’t have caught you if I wanted to? I gave you an out, Faris; I gave you a chance.”

  My knuckles strain around his wrist; a quick snap and I could break it, and the temptation is excruciating. “Where was their chance?”

  “I’m an executioner, not a god,” he says flatly. “Your sister was screaming loud enough even Perrote could have tracked her in the dark. And blessed Saint Thaelan wouldn’t”—he chokes as I apply more pressure against his throat—“leave her behind.” He arches an eyebrow, arrogant even as color drains from his face. “He lacked the same survival instincts as you. As me.”

  Rage explodes through me and I press my entire weight against his. “He was a better man than you will ever be!”

  “He was a liar,” Alistair wheezes. Sweat breaks out above his lip. “He broke his vows to the Guard, he kissed one girl while betrothed to another, and he turned his back on his family, his commanding officers, his king. Saint Thaelan—”

  I strike him, hard as I can, loosening my stranglehold in the process. Alistair’s head rolls away from my blow and he snorts, using his free hand to tentatively touch the side of his mouth. “Not bad,” he says, still rasping. “It certainly earns me money every night down at the Stone and Fern.”

  My blood turns to ice. He goes to the tavern? He watches me? Bets on me with the same money the king paid him for killing Thaelan?

  I raise a hand to hit him again. With a practiced move, he twists my arm behind my back, wrestling me to my knees. Dark hair hangs over his eyes “I’m not just a pretty face, Faris; I can fight if that’s what you want.” Swallowing, he adds, “But I’d rather not spill more blood.”

  “Then why are you here?” I growl. My nose is bleeding again and I wipe at it, humiliated. I was supposed to be iron, unbreakable, reunited with Alistair Pembrough with a blade in one hand, his throat in the other, and nothing between us but his apologies to eulogize his death.

  Instead we’ve barely begun and he’s already taken control.

  Releasing me, Alistair snaps a handkerchief from the pocket of his coat and offers it, making a face when I refuse. Sighing, he rakes his hair back into place and adjusts his waistcoat, giving the handkerchief a sour look before his eyes fall to the coins spilled across the floor.

  “Is this all you have?” he asks, gesturing. “God Above.” Laughing, he picks up a copper tretka and bounces it across his palm. “I didn’t even know they made them this small.”

  I hate him. I hate his arrogance, his entitlement; the birthright that gave him inherent power over a Brim rat like me when I know I’m just as strong.

  Rising to my feet, I wipe my nose again, edging toward my bedroll.

  “It’s not there,” he says, dropping the tretka before standing, sliding his hands into his pockets.

  Frowning, I nudge the bedroll aside with my boot, confirming: My knife is gone. He’s been here long enough to have gone through my things. If he was at the fight tonight, he knows what happened between me and Reed, and yet he waited until now to face me, when he knew I’d be powerless.

  When he knew he would win.

  Blood echoes in my ears, shivering through my veins until I’m shaking with fury. I force my fingers into fists at my sides, taking a position of defense. I’m battered and I’m bruised but I am not broken, not if this is the only chance I’ll have.

  The glass from the window.

  “Thaelan used to talk about you,” Alistair says, and I freeze like a rabbit caught in the terraces. “Never by name, of course; he was too selfish to share that, but then, no name was ever needed. You were perfection to him.” He scoffs, shaking his head. “I called him a liar. I knew the girl he was going to marry and she did not have gold hair and pale eyes and skin like velvet. No such creature could exist.”

  My mouth dries; no such creature does exist. After ten years of working the fields like my father, my skin has never been soft, my hair more dross than any gold, and yet, that was Thaelan’s gift: brightening everything and turning the ordinary into more.

  Despite resenting the temptation of Alistair’s words, I crave more of Thaelan the way I crave the sunlight after too many months of winter. I have all my memories; I want more. The Thaelan I never got to see, hidden in the hours while he trained and played dutiful son.

  “But then I saw you that night,” Alistair says, and he takes a step closer, hands falling out of his pockets. “Standing in the tunnels, terrified. And I understood.” The shadows of the room muddy his eyes. “He was smart to protect you, Faris,” he says softly. “To keep your name from me. But your name is my weapon now, and I know exactly how to use it.”

  The threat chills me with its simplicity. This boy could destroy me with one single story told to the king about a third traitor in those tunnels that night. He could destroy Cadence.

  So why hasn’t he?

  “What do you want?” I ask.

  “A chance,” he says. “An out. The same I gave you. The same I gave him—”

  Twisting, I knock out a piece of glass from the broken window behind me and lunge, barreling him to the floor. Pinning him beneath my weight, I clutch the glass in my hand, ignoring the way it bites my own skin, angling it against his throat.

  He stares up at me, incredulous. “So then kill me,” he says. “That’s what you want, isn’t it? Cut my throat and settle the score.”

  “Don’t tempt me.”

  “It’s not much of a temptation if you’re resisting this easily,” he says flatly. Dust settles in his hair; his lip has started bleeding. But he’s calm, unresisting, blue eyes blazing even as my own hand shakes, the glass skating between his throat and the collar of his overcoat.

  Breathe, I tell myself. Think. But I’m exhausted from the fight, bruised inside and out. Shadows spin around me, dulling my vision, dulling my nerve.

  I shake away my hesitations, dipping the glass against his skin, drawing a line of ruby blood. This is what I wanted, I remind myself: This is how this ends.

  “Thaelan was my friend,” Alistair says softly.

  The sight of his blood is not as satisfying as I needed it to be, and I stare at it in accusation. Tears flood my eyes. “Then that makes you even more of a monster,” I say, voice breaking. “If not my sister, you could have at least saved him.”

  “How?” At last, a spark of anger to match my own. “What power do you think I have, Faris? Only the king grants innocence, and I assure you, his majesty is stingy in his absolutions. Do you know what this is?” Ignoring the glass at his throat, he rakes back the collar of his shirt, exposing a dark symbol on the soft slope of his chest, above his heart.

  It’s the king’s mark, branded with an iron so hot it cauterizes the flesh and leaves a scar. Threads of magic run between the raised lines of the brand, no more than smoke and shadow, like ink diluted in water. A loyalty oath, linking him to the king.

  “I mapped those tunnels long before Thaelan did,” Alistair says. “I planned my escape long before he even met you. I was going to be a doctor, Faris; I was going to save people. But then my father died with no other heir and I inherited the family business, and with it, the family obligation to the crown.”

  Disgust fills his voice as he tenses beneath me. “This oath binds me to the king. If Perrote pulls the right string, he could follow me anywhere I went—even beyond this kingdom. If he cuts the right string, I’m no better than your sister, taking his orders without question.” He releases his collar. “I told Thaelan where to look. I warned him that the tunnels shifted. Those tunnels were mine and I gave them to him. To you. You’re not the o
nly one who wants out.”

  Grabbing my wrist, he wrestles me onto my back. The glass slips from my sweaty hand and skids across the floor, out of reach. “You’re not in the fighting ring anymore,” he says, “and you are going to need more than nineteen silver kronets to save your sister. You’re going to need me, the same as he did.”

  I shake my head, refusing his logic. I know Thaelan and I were not the first to want to leave Brindaigel, but at least we tried. Mapping tunnels does not equate to following them, and Alistair had sixteen years to leave before his father died. So why didn’t he?

  I lash out with my knee, but Alistair anticipates the move and digs his own knee into my upper thigh, applying enough pressure that I cry out in pain.

  He swallows hard, eyes half hidden behind his hair. “I envied him,” he says bitterly. “Every night, he escaped this city. Every night, he’d sneak back into the barracks, more alive than when he left. And it wasn’t even magic, Faris.” His eyes meet mine. “It was you.”

  The fight drains out of me and I stare at him, stricken. Weak street light carves shadows in his face, hollowing his cheeks and thickening his mouth before the light shifts and his sharp edges return, a wolfish boy with eyes that devour.

  “I’m a monster because that’s what I was bred to be,” he says. “I don’t expect forgiveness, but I expect you of all people to understand the cost of survival.”

  Releasing his hold on my arms, Alistair sits back with a soft exhalation, loosening his cravat before lightly touching the cut I made on his neck. He mutters to himself, wiping blood across his trouser leg with open disdain.

  I don’t move. I can’t. When I close my eyes, I’m thrown back to that gray spring morning when I looked up and saw Thaelan’s sweet face the color of bruises, the color of stone, the color of never again hearing his voice, seeing his smile, feeling his lips warm against mine.

  He told me it was an accident, finding those tunnels. That he mapped them alone. If he was friends with the executioner, why didn’t I know?

  I turn my head away from Alistair. He was right about that, if nothing else: Thaelan lived a double life, and I was only half of it.

  Alistair gives me a wary sidelong glance when I finally sit up, drawing my legs to my chest. “What do you want?” I ask at last, barely more than a mumble.

  “I want to offer you a job.”

  “I have a job.”

  “There’s no fruit to harvest come winter,” he says, “and there’s no more fights.”

  I stare at my feet, only inches from his. “I’ll find something else.”

  “Or you can hear me out.” Reaching into his coat, he withdraws a fist and offers it toward me. I keep my own hands holding tight to the folds of my skirt and, rolling his eyes, he tips a coin out to the floor. A golden kronet.

  “There’s forty-nine more of these and a letter with a royal seal that will release your sister into your care, her spell removed, no names or questions asked,” he says.

  My breath hitches in my throat. Greed unfurls my fingers; temptation draws them to the coin where they hover, debating. Five of these could buy back Cadence. Five seems so few, so deliciously possible, with more than enough leftover for a chance outside Brindaigel. If not in Avinea, then somewhere else, in one of the countries Thaelan used to whisper in my ear.

  But then reality returns and I retract my hand, furious at how easily swayed I am by the promise of gold.

  “Not interested,” I say, a lie that twists in my stomach with a warning that pride begets arrogance, and arrogance is a vice I cannot afford.

  Alistair stares at me, a muscle twitching at the back of his jaw, as if he wants to say something but knows he better not. Leaning forward, he retrieves the gold coin and pinches it between his fingers, holding it between us. I shy away from him, eyes tracking to the shard of glass just out of my reach, but his body blocks my path. “If you say no, I leave right now, like this never happened,” he says.

  “Is that a promise?”

  His fingers curl the coin into his palm and he lifts his eyebrows. “I know your name, Faris. I know where you work, I know where you live, I know where to find your sister, and I know where to find your father.” He shifts his weight, wetting his lips as he lowers his voice to a dusky whisper, forcing me to lean forward to catch his threats. “Maybe I’ll forget who you are,” he says. “Maybe I won’t. Maybe one night after too many glasses of wine, it’ll fall right out of me, that girl that nobody claimed: Cadence Locke. And there, hanging on its heels like an annoying burr I can’t shake, Faris will follow.”

  So this is how the king’s executioner kills. With manipulation and coercion and a smile as black as his soul.

  “I want to offer you a job,” Alistair repeats.

  “It doesn’t sound like I have much of a choice.”

  “There’s always a choice,” he says. “In this case, it’s whether you think I’m more likely to help you or hurt you.”

  My eyes meet his. “I knew that answer four months ago.”

  His jaw tightens: I’m testing his patience. His ego. Good.

  Or bad? This boy could kill me with his words, let alone his hands. I look away, to my own hands balled in bruised fists in my lap. I need these hands to conquer the world—

  Stop it, I command. Not here, not now, not while Thaelan’s murderer watches me for any sign of weakness to exploit. First commandment of the fighting ring: You don’t have to be stronger, you just have to last longer.

  But agreeing to anything Alistair Pembrough offers me would be treason. How can I even entertain the idea of an alliance with this boy, this monster—

  Because he knows the tunnels beneath the castle.

  I straighten my back and lift my chin. Cheap gestures that offer a small taste of control. “What’s the job?” I ask.

  He smirks and I hate him for savoring his victory. “Does it matter? You’ll be saving your sister. Buying your freedom. Escaping Brindaigel.”

  “While you stay behind, slave to the crown.” I snort, shaking my head. “Right.”

  “I already told you, I can’t leave—”

  “Nobody leaves Brindaigel,” I say flatly.

  Alistair stares at me. “Thaelan did,” he says at last. “And he wasn’t the first. Take this job, and maybe he won’t be the last.”

  The familiar longing swells through me, but I force it down and shake my head. “Your word is not good enough,” I say. “I need guarantees, money upfront, my sister’s immediate freedom—”

  Alistair laughs and I scowl at him. “I’m not joking,” I say.

  He palms the kronet, shoving it back in his pocket. “You’re not my only choice.”

  “But I am your first one.”

  His smile fades and he gives me an appraising look. “You are,” he says. “Your mother would have wanted it to be you.”

  I jolt forward, goose bumps erupting down my back. “What?”

  “I made my offer,” he says. “Will you take it?”

  “What do you know about my mother?”

  “Yes or no?”

  I tense, prepared to strike, but he shakes his head in warning. “Yes or no,” he repeats. “Final chance.”

  I stare at him, searching his face for any hint he might be lying. But even if he is, what choice do I have? I need that money; I need those tunnels.

  I need him.

  “Yes,” I say.

  “Good.” Alistair smiles. “This is going to hurt.”

  He grabs my shoulder, hard. A needle flashes in the light before biting into my neck. I cry out as he depresses the plunger, emptying a syringe of fluid into my veins. My blood slowly hardens into ribbons of ice until I’m frozen, staring at him in accusation before my body turns to stone and I shatter.

  And Alistair Pembrough holds out his arms and catches me.

  Five

  I WAKE WITH A BODY full of lead in a room full of diamonds.

  Not diamonds, only firelight reflecting off glass and an assortment of
iron instruments, their shapes blurred beyond recognition by the frost clouding my mind. Closing my eyes again, I catch the scent of smoke and charcoal beneath something sweeter, like ladies’ perfume, and something darker, like dead things left rotting in the gutter.

  The heat of the fire licks at my skin, thawing my body in bits and pieces: eyes, lungs, fingertips, toes. I feel each awakening in turn, wincing at the needling pain that lingers.

  This is not my bed; this is not my room.

  Where am I?

  I’m lying on a table, hard and unforgiving against my spine. To my right, I see Alistair sitting on the floor with his back to a curved wall of gray stone, darkened by age and water. Ignorant to my gaze, he lights a match and watches it burn to the tips of his fingers, grimacing as the flame touches his skin before he flicks it out and lights another. A cigarette dangles unheeded from the corner of his mouth. He’s removed his overcoat and his dark waistcoat hangs unbuttoned to the white shirt underneath, sleeves rolled to his elbows. Scars line his forearms like rungs of a ladder, too perfectly even to be accidental. Self-inflicted.

  Glancing up, he startles when he sees me, the cigarette nearly falling from his mouth. “She’s awake,” he says, standing.

  Movement rustles on my other side and I struggle to roll my head toward it.

  “Mild sedative my ass,” a girl says. “Good god, Pem, I thought you killed her.”

  “An executioner only kills when he intends to,” Alistair says darkly.

  The girl’s face falls into focus and I inhale, flooded with panic. Princess Bryn, the seventh heir to the throne of Brindaigel—and Alistair’s future wife. Their engagement was announced the day she turned sixteen, half a year ago, and they celebrated by being paraded through the kingdom in a carriage made of glass, flinging handfuls of copper tretkas into the crowd. We threw back flowers the guards had handed us moments before they arrived, but Cadence had kept hers, carrying it home cradled to her chest, out of view of the boys she often fought with. It had died a day later, the dyed petals faded to the color of ash.

  Bryn was beautiful from a distance, even more flawless up close, with golden skin and dark red hair combed high off her forehead, hanging in a knotted rope down her back. She smells warm, a silky blend of perfume and musk that hints at an evening of dancing. Freckles darken her shoulders and the bridge of her nose, half hidden beneath a layer of shimmering powder.