Dance of Thieves

  When we finally had a moment alone, Jase swooped to the side and his lips met mine, easy, and a warm flush spread across my chest. “Do you see who your friend is dancing with?” he asked.

  I looked over his shoulder. It was Mason, and he didn’t look too happy with the situation. It wasn’t a dance that required much touching, a simple country jig that was common in many regions. But Synové was making plenty of missteps, and the Ballenger version had an extra hop or two. Synové playfully jabbed Mason’s ribs as they spun around. He offered a polite strained smile in return, acting like the cordial host, probably on Jase’s orders. She was radiant, her cheeks glowing with heat, her long locks shimmering in the lantern light like golden marmalade, swinging in rhythm with the zitaraes and flutes. I wished I could be her sometimes, jumping into every moment fully, her cheer covering the darkness that still lurked deep inside her.

  I spotted Wren too. “I’d worry more about Aram and Samuel,” I answered. I saw them farther away on either side of Wren, one of them trying to maneuver around her ziethe every time she turned.

  “They’re not safe with her?” Jase asked.

  “Of course not, but they probably think that’s half the fun.”

  Jase smiled and nodded in agreement.

  “What about us?” he asked. “Should we join them? We haven’t danced yet.”

  I had already deflected his question twice. A third time would be obvious. I couldn’t pretend that I hated to dance. I still remembered hooking my hands around his neck one night in the middle of the Jessop plain, dancing with him beneath a moonlit sky, the grass waving at our ankles, crickets accompanying the tune he hummed into my ear. I had told him I didn’t want the night to end.

  Now it seemed this night never would. My ankle had grown steadily worse. It was stiff and hot and, I was certain, swollen, but I didn’t dare peek at it beneath my dress. The medicine had worn off and the pain was circling around my leg like a spiked iron, every movement taking a bite out of my flesh. Even my thigh burned now. A thin line of sweat beaded at my hairline. When Jase commented on my damp back, I responded that the evening was warm.

  “All right,” I answered. “Let’s join them.” Maybe a short dance would be bearable and the subject would be dropped. No hopping, only swaying.

  We had only taken a few steps toward the brightly lit square strung with lanterns when Jase stopped. “What’s wrong?”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “You’re limping.”

  I looked at him and wiped some damp strands of hair from my brow. I forced a smile. “It’s only these slippers. They don’t fit well—”

  “Then take them off. Here, let me help you—” He started to bend down.

  “No!” I said, far too loudly. Sweat trickled down my back and pain was squeezing my skull now, and it occurred to me that maybe the dogs were diseased. What if—

  “Kazi.” Jase’s gaze was sober. He knew.

  Pivot, Kazi. He sees your lies.

  My foot gave way beneath me, and I stumbled forward but Jase caught my arm before I hit the ground. He muttered under his breath as he scooped me up—then spotted the bandage.

  I stared at it in horror. It was bloody.

  The wounds were seeping.

  “What the hell—”

  “Jase, please—”

  My face flashed with sickening heat, and Jase called for Tiago and Drake. He carried me down a dark path, away from the guests, ordering Drake to find the healer and Oleez. Doors slammed open against walls and a long hallway bobbed and weaved around me. Jase laid me down on a couch, then found a pillow to prop behind my head.

  “What happened?” he demanded. He was already unwrapping my ankle.

  I deliberated taking a chance with the truth—at least some version of it. Chills suddenly overtook me and then a violent cramp in my stomach doubled me over. Diseased. The dogs had to be diseased.

  Vairlyn, Jalaine, and two other women rushed in on Drake’s heels, and the room became a swirling chaos of questions.

  “It was the dogs,” I answered. “I was afraid to tell you. I’m sorry.”

  “Which dogs?”

  “Lower your voice, Jase!” Vairlyn ordered.

  “In the tunnels,” I said. “I—”

  “What were you doing in the tunnels?”

  Jalaine pushed Jase’s shoulder. “Mother said to stop yelling!”

  “This is my fault,” Vairlyn said. “I promised her you’d show her the vault this afternoon.”

  “It’s Jase’s fault,” Jalaine snapped. “I told him she wanted a tour.”

  “Get out, Jalaine!” Jase shouted. “We have enough in here without you—”

  “I’m not going—”

  “Move aside. Give me some room.” A tall, thin woman elbowed her way in and pulled my dress higher, looking at my leg. “Yes, she’s definitely been bit by the ashti. Look at the spidering moving up her thigh. A servant is bringing my bag.”

  Jase’s attention jumped from the healer back to me. “The ashti are stationed well past the vault entrance. What made you go way out there?”

  “I was turned around. I—”

  “There aren’t signs that say vault, Jase!” Jalaine interrupted. “How would she know?”

  Another spasm gripped my abdomen and Jase was yelling again, this time at the healer, it seemed. At least I think he was. I couldn’t be sure. His lips moved out of sync with the sound I was hearing, echoing in long garbled ribbons.

  I writhed in pain, my fingers digging into my stomach. And then I saw Death squeeze into the crowded room, grinning, waiting in the corner, his bony finger pointing at me. You, you are next.

  “No,” I cried. “Not yet! Not today!”

  The spasm finally passed and I saw a hand swipe the air, hitting the side of Jase’s head. His mother. “You heard her! Move aside! Give the healer room to work.”

  The healer lifted a glass to my lips, encouraging me to sip a bitter blue liquid. I gagged as I choked it down.

  “This will help. There now, keep it down. Another sip. That’s right.”

  She used more of the blue powder to make a paste and applied it to the wounds on my leg. I heard her groan. “This one will have to be stitched. Eh, here’s another one. What were you thinking, girl? Here, take a sip of this now. It will put you out while I sew these up. The antidote should take effect soon. You’ll be fine by morning.”

  “Antidote?”

  “The dogs that bit you are poisonous,” Jase said. “Without the antidote, you would have been dead by week’s end. It’s a long and agonizing death.”

  Poisonous dogs?

  The thought became lost in a cloud of others, my lids growing heavy. The last thing I saw was a thin glint of steel and a thread being pushed through its eye.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  JASE

  Kazi’s head rested against my chest, deep in sleep as I carried her back to her room, but troubled words tumbled from her lips, Don’t hurt me … I have nothing … Please … don’t. She had mumbled similar words in the drawing room as the healer sewed her up. Please don’t hurt me. Her words had brought a crashing hush to the room.

  “Shhh,” I whispered as we turned down the last hallway, “no one’s going to hurt you.” By the time we reached her room, her expression had relaxed and she was silent, drawn into a deep, oblivious sleep. I still didn’t know how she hid the wounds from me for half the night. The bites alone had to be unbearable, but the poison—

  My mother walked ahead of me and threw open the bedroom door. I carried Kazi inside and laid her on the bed. She didn’t stir an eyelash. I looked for a pulse at her neck. It was the only thing that told me she was alive at all.

  “It’s the sleep elixir,” my mother said, as if she could read my mind.

  We both stood there for long, quiet minutes, staring at her.

  I knew what my mother was thinking too. Sylvey.

  Their coloring wasn’t the same, but in sleep, Kazi still looked
like her in many ways. Small, vulnerable, swallowed up in a sea of rumpled bedclothes. Sylvey was eleven when she died. I was the one who carried her from the ice bath back to her bed. She died in my arms.

  Hold my hand, Jase. Promise me you won’t let go, she had cried with the last of her strength. Don’t let them put me in the tomb. I’m afraid. I had thought it was only delirious words brought on by her fever.

  Stop talking like that, sister. You’re going to be fine.

  Promise me, Jase, don’t put me there. Not the tomb. Please, promise me.

  But I didn’t promise her. Her lips were peeling and pale, her eyes sunken, her skin clammy, her voice already a ghost, all signs that she was leaving this world. But I had refused to see. I wouldn’t accept that a Ballenger could die. Especially not Sylvey.

  Go to sleep, sister. Sleep. You’ll be fine in the morning.

  She had relaxed in my arms then. I thought she was sleeping. My mother had stepped out of the room for only a few minutes to check on my brothers and sister who were sick too. When she came back, Sylvey was dead in my arms.

  My mother wiped Kazi’s brow with a cloth. “You were harsh with her,” she said.

  “I was only trying to get answers.”

  “I know.” She pulled a stool closer to the bed. “And you were frightened. I’ll sit with her. Go find your answers.”

  * * *

  The air was dank, as it always was here, as if the chilly breaths of the dead still hung here in the darkness, unable to escape. The tunnels were both sanctuary and prison, stuffy like the tombs that Sylvey had begged me to save her from. I listened to the silence, the solitary sound of my boots scuffling on the cobbles, and I imagined Kazi slipping through here undetected. The tunnel was deserted now except for guards at the entrance, but today when she had passed there had to have been dozens of workers passing through—and none had stopped her?

  Still, I looked at the wagons parked along the perimeter, the pallets, the shadows, all providing places to hide if you were careful, and it was only a spare number of paces from the workyard to the T where another set of tunnel systems branched off the main one. I stopped at the faded crest that marked the entrance, barely illuminated with lantern light, the only thing that indicated the vault was down this way.

  You were harsh with her.

  I remembered shouting, feeling out of control. One minute I had been thinking about dancing, and the next I was unwrapping a bloody cloth from her leg as she doubled over in pain. Right beneath my nose something was going on, and I hadn’t seen it. I was afraid to tell you. Had I refused to see it? I thought about her damp back. I had noticed the beaded line of sweat on her brow too. It’s the warm night. It wasn’t that warm, and there was a breeze. But I had accepted her explanation and let myself be distracted by other details.

  I went past the entrance to the vault and walked to the end where she had gone—so much farther out of the way. I turned the final corner and barked a command to dogs I couldn’t see. They came out of their alcoves to greet me, moaning and cooing, with their hind ends wagging, hoping for a scratch behind their ears. The ashti looked just like any other dogs, though closer to the size of a timber wolf—and sly. They could have killed her. They had killed before. Her reflexes had to be fast to escape them.

  The dogs kept intruders away, but most would-be trespassers were far more terrified of dying from their poisonous bite than from being torn apart. It was an unpleasant way to die, and not many had the antidote. It came from the far north where the dogs were from. Kbaaki traders had gifted them to us generations ago after we gave them refuge during a late winter storm. The milksap antidote didn’t grow here, and the Kbaaki still brought us a supply once a year when they made their pilgrimage to the south.

  I bent down, holding the torch closer to the floor. A stain had been smeared. She had taken the time to clean up the blood, trying to cover her tracks. Why?

  Mason’s words stung me over and over again, like a wasp that wouldn’t die.

  She can’t be trusted.

  I stepped up to the door and checked the lock. It was secure and appeared to be undisturbed. I turned and scratched each dog behind the ear, and they whined their appreciation.

  It was true—the vault wasn’t marked. You had to know where to turn, but what made her pass up two other passages and come all the way out here? Only curiosity? I had told her about the vault in the first few days we were together. She’d been fascinated by it, the idea of a shelter carved into a granite mountain and the history and stories that began there. Even though I knew she didn’t believe it all, I’d been happy she had taken a genuine interest. It wasn’t surprising that she wanted to visit the source of my claims, and I should have known by now that Kazi didn’t wait for permission for anything.

  Be sure to save time for a tour, Jase. Kazi wants to see the vault. Jalaine had tried to say it offhandedly as she left for the arena this afternoon, but her tone had been thick with pride. Kazi was Vendan, an outsider, and she wanted to see the vault. It was an acknowledgment that for us was a sign of respect. And for Jalaine, I guessed, it brought Kazi deeper into our inner circle—the vault was our beginnings, where our schooling began, the source of much of our history.

  Without the vault, none of us would be here. It was nothing but a dusty, mostly abandoned relic now. Nash and Lydia still did some transcribing there, as we all had once done, but I hadn’t been inside in months. In spite of the broken, decayed furnishings, it was still remarkable in many ways, the natural filtration of the mountain still providing fresh air and water, but beyond that it was uninhabitable, partly by design. It was meant to be remembered as it once was.

  It’s Jase’s fault.

  I returned to the main house. Servants were still clearing the gardens after the party, all the guests now gone or retired to Greycastle. Wren and Synové had all but ripped Kazi from my arms when they burst into the drawing room and saw her. There was no trust there, and they assumed the worst until they saw the healer and Kazi’s stitched wounds. Then an expression of guilt washed over them. They knew she had been bitten, but they too had said nothing. Of course, they had no way of knowing that the dogs’ bites were deadly. Once assured she would be fine, they allowed a crew to escort them back to the inn.

  I opened the door to Kazi’s room. My mother still sat on the stool, and Oleez was in the chair on the other side of the bed. I noted that Kazi’s dress had been removed and replaced with a nightgown, and her hair had been unbraided from the top of her head, falling in loose waves across her pillow.

  “I’ll sit with her now,” I said. “You can go.”

  Once they were gone, I walked over and looked down at Kazi, still lost in her drugged dream world, her chest rising in reassuring soft breaths.

  You were watching my chest?

  I remembered when she caught me in this confession, how I had tripped over my words trying to explain, as if I was twelve years old. We had both distrusted each other then. That day already seemed like a hundred years ago.

  I kicked off my boots and eased down on the bed beside her, pulling her close. She nestled in with a gentle murmur, her arm locking around mine.

  You’ve infected me with a poison that I don’t want to flush out.

  I lay there next to her, and even though the healer assured me she would be fine, I pressed my fingers to her wrist, feeling the thrum of her pulse.

  I can’t promise you any tomorrows.

  And that was all I wanted.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  KAZI

  When I had stirred in the predawn hours this morning, it was to a memory, a scent, a touch. Jase. He was kissing my neck; we danced beneath the moon; he pressed a wish stalk to my ankle; he was whispering about tomorrows. But when I opened my eyes to reach out for him, he wasn’t there, and the nightmare of the night before flooded back in. Had I dreamed it all?

  The horrible, cramping pain was gone, but when I wiggled my toes there was a stiff ache. I remembered Jase’s anger an
d his accusing questions, and when he walked through the door with a breakfast tray a few minutes later I braced myself for the worst. Instead, he set the tray on a side table and didn’t mention the last part of the night at all, but the strain of what he wasn’t saying showed in his stiff movements.

  “Jase, about last night…”

  “I’m sorry for shouting,” he said, “especially since you were in so much pain. I should have warned you about the dogs. Maybe then you wouldn’t have slipped past the guards.”

  Ah, there it was. An accusation couched in an apology. “I didn’t slip past the guards, Jase. I walked past them, and they didn’t stop me. I guess with all the activity they didn’t notice me. I didn’t know I needed permission to visit the vault. Do I?”

  A thousand questions swirled behind his eyes. He looked back at the tray, pouring me hot tea. “I plan to take you right now. Are you up to it?”

  Now? I knew my answer had to be yes. I quickly wolfed down my breakfast, and we left for the vault. I still had a limp, but it looked worse than it felt. Jase slowed his pace as we walked.

  We turned down the first passageway and stopped about twenty yards in when we reached an enormous steel door. He spun the wheel in the middle of it, and it seemed forever before a loud thunk, chink, and whoosh sounded, like a hundred locks had slipped out of place.

  “Stand back,” he advised.

  The door appeared far too large for him to pull back on his own—it was twice his height and wide enough for two wagons to pass through—but it moved easily at his touch. It swung open and open, like the endless maw of some ancient hungry beast, and revealed a dark cavern behind it. The musty age of the world behind the door reached out, gripping me with anticipation. If ghosts walked anywhere, it was here.

  “Hold on,” Jase said, and he slipped inside. I heard some stirring, and then a flicker of light was followed by a burst of illumination that lit the entire cavern with an eerie yellow glow.