Dance of Thieves

  One night, the queen had unexpectedly joined me. I remembered I had stared furiously at the lantern flame, focusing on it rather than her. I had felt shame for huddling in the dark. She sat on the floor next to me, the tunnel too small for us to stand.

  “I came here too,” she had said. “It was a dark, safe space for me. There were many days I feared would be my last here in the Sanctum. I was so afraid then. Some days, I’m still afraid. I have so many promises to keep.”

  “But you have kept your promises.”

  “Freedoms are never won once and for all, Kazimyrah. They come and go, like the centuries. I cannot grow lazy. Memories are short. It is the forgetting that I fear.”

  That was what I feared too.

  Forgetting.

  But none of this could I share with Jase.

  When he asked me if juggling was part of Rahtan training, I laughed it off and said it was just something I had picked up along the way.

  “What way is that?”

  Digging.

  I told him a friend taught me.

  “You have clever friends.”

  “Yes, I do,” I answered, offering no more information. I was self-taught. Desperation can be a good teacher, maybe the best teacher. I had to perfect new skills quickly—or starve. But his comment about friends made me think of Wren and Synové. They came to the Sanctum a few months after I did, both caught in scuffles with no immediate family to summon. Being the same ages and having known one another on the streets, we were naturally drawn together. After two years, Kaden, the queen’s Keep, had the final say on who would advance to Rahtan training. He had given us a long, stern look, trying to decide if all three of us would move on to the next level. Surprisingly, his wife, Pauline, had shot him a stern look in our favor. We’d trained and worked together ever since. I hoped they were safely tucked away, sitting tight, Synové entertaining Wren with the mundane details of the racaa. Yes, our plan had gone awry, but they were inventive and we had backup plans. By now they had probably figured out I wasn’t inside Tor’s Watch.

  “How much farther is the settlement?”

  “I’m not sure. I forgot to bring my map and compass. Why don’t you dig out yours?”

  “You think we’re still on course?”

  “Yes,” he answered emphatically. I wasn’t sure if he was annoyed that it was the second time I had asked or simply unhappy that we’d be walking into the Casswell settlement—and Vendan territory—whether he liked it or not.

  He continued to tell me more stories about Tor’s Watch that I had to admit fascinated me. I looked forward to them. This morning, he’d told me about Breda’s Tears, a series of seven cascading waterfalls in the Moro mountains. They were named for the goddess Breda who had come to earth and fallen in love with the mere mortal Aris. Their love was so great that new flowers sprang up in their footsteps, flowers more beautiful than any that the gods had ever created, and the gods became jealous. They forbade Breda from returning to earth, and when she disobeyed, they struck Aris dead. Her grief was so overwhelming that rivers of tears fell from the heavens, rushing down the mountains where they once walked, creating waterfalls that still flow to this day.

  “And there are flowers that grow at the base of those waterfalls, that grow nowhere else on the mountain.”

  “So it must be true,” I said.

  He smiled. “Must be. I’ll show you one day.”

  A clumsy silence fell. We both knew he would never show me, but his words had slipped out easily before he could stop them, as if he were talking to a friend.

  There were more awkward moments.

  Yesterday morning, I awoke to his arm slung over me, his chest nesting close to my back. He was unaware, probably seeking some warmth in his sleep. I lay there, not moving away, thinking about the weight of his arm, how it felt, the soft sound of his breaths, the heat of his skin. It was a reckless, indulgent minute, wondering what he dreamed of, and then sense flooded back in, and I carefully nudged his arm away before he woke up. I’d made a conscious effort not to touch him. I think he had done the same, but sleep had become its own thief, stealing away our intentions.

  As we walked, I plied him with questions, sprinkled carefully so they would seem offhand and casual, mostly about Tor’s Watch. I learned it was a sprawling complex of homes and buildings that housed the offices of the Ballenger business empire. Their income came from multiple sources, but he didn’t tell me what they all were. When I thought he sensed I was digging, I changed the topic to something else, but I did learn that a hefty portion of their revenue came from the trading arena, a large exchange where buyers and sellers from all over the continent came to trade goods. It began with the grain grown in Eislandia, but with more trade opening up between the kingdoms since the new treaties, the arena had tripled in size every year since.

  “Am I hearing this right?” I asked, laying on my thickest mocking tone. “You’re saying you have benefited from the new treaties?”

  “In some ways. But not so much that we’re willing to give up who we are.”

  He rubbed his bare finger just below the knuckle where his signet ring had once been. It was another tic I had noticed. He did it frequently when he talked of home. I imagined the struggle that had ensued when the hunter tried to take it from him. I was certain Jase hadn’t given it up easily. I supposed he was lucky he still had his finger at all.

  I pushed my hand into the bottom of my pocket and fingered the warm circle of metal and wondered if I should give it to him, but it seemed too late now. He would wonder why I had taken it in the first place, and especially why it took me so long to hand it over. The keys I had taken for survival. The ring was for an entirely different reason.

  In the year before the queen came, more of my stealing had become punitive. It was an angry tax I collected for answers I never received, and a retribution for all the fingertips of children taken by quarterlords and then fed to the swine. Most of the punitive thefts were for items that held no value. They could not fill a belly, but they filled me in other ways.

  The smallest, most useless thing I ever stole was a shiny brass button that made the Tomac quarterlord so very proud. It protruded from his belly among a long line of shiny buttons on his jacket, a rare treasure he had bought from a Previzi driver. To me, they looked like fat golden rivets holding his belly in place. Stealing the middle button had ruined the entire showy effect. I had stalked him for a week, knowing just when he would pass down one small, crowded alley, throngs shoving against him, and I was there, my cap pulled low, my small curved blade in the palm of my hand. He didn’t know it was gone until he reached the end of the alley, and I heard his bellowing screech. I had smiled at the sweet sound. It was all the supper I needed.

  Jase’s ring was just as useless to me as that button had been, and I had stolen it for the same reason. It was a symbol of power, a legacy they revered, and in one quiet move I had relegated it to the bottom of my dark, dirty pocket.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  JASE

  She had an intense curiosity, and I was happy to feed it with stories about Tor’s Watch, but when it came to her own life her words became reserved and calculated. Being chained to someone hour after hour, day after day, gives every pause a hidden weight. I dwelled on the details she wouldn’t share.

  What had her life been like in Venda? Or maybe, more precisely, what had they done to her? She was not the result of happy, content parents. It was like she’d been held prisoner in a cellar her whole life. She flinched at sun and an open sky. As soon as we hit the Heethe plateau, she kept her eyes straight ahead on some distant point, her focus like steel, her shoulders rigid, like she carried a heavy pack on her back. When I pointed out an eagle soaring above us, she barely gave it a glance.

  I turned the conversation back to something that she seemed confident about—being a soldier. She told me about the various weapons that were forged for the Rahtan, the knives, ziethes, swords, rope darts, crossbows, and more. The fortre
ss Keep assessed what best suited their strengths. Her sword and knives were presented to her by the queen when she became Rahtan.

  “Have you ever used them?”

  She raised a brow. “You mean, have I ever killed anyone? Yes. Only two so far. I try to avoid it if I can.”

  If I can. She said it so casually, unruffled, the same girl who I had to coax riddles from each night so she could sleep under an open sky.

  “Who did you kill?” I asked.

  “Raiders,” she answered. A frown pulled at the corner of her mouth as if she was still disgusted by the encounter. “We were rear guard on a supply train. They didn’t see us hanging back. That was the point. But we saw them. What about you? Have you ever killed anyone?”

  I nodded. Far more than three, but I didn’t tell her how many and I was glad she didn’t ask.

  More than once, she caught me studying her. I tried to focus on the landscape, but my eyes drifted back to her again and again. She fascinated me, her contradictions, her secrets, and the girl that sometimes surfaced from beneath her tough soldier exterior, like when she spotted the wish stalks on the bank. The girl who forgot who I was and pressed a wish stalk to my ankle. In another world, another circumstance, I think we might have been friends. Or more.

  I knew that I spent more time wondering about her than I should.

  I scanned the foothills ahead, trying to concentrate. Trying to push my mind back to where it should be. I had ridden this way before but had never walked it all on foot—especially not barefoot, chained, and half starved. It was hard to judge distances. How much farther was it? Was there any chance of getting back before they sealed the tomb? What was going through all of their minds? Where the hell is Jase? No doubt search parties had been sent out, but no body had been found. I was certain that the Rahtan with Kazi were in my brothers’ custody by now, being interrogated. Mason could squeeze information out of anyone, but even Kazi’s companions wouldn’t have any hunch about what had happened to us. They couldn’t have known about the labor hunters any more than Kazi and I had.

  Her comment, I saw the damage myself, kept resurfacing in my mind, the burning of the fields and the theft of all the settlers’ livestock. We had meant to scare them off. They had to leave. Our visit hadn’t been pleasant. The short horn had been a warning, a chance for them to gather up their things and move on, but that was all we took. Who took the rest?

  Gunner was impulsive, his temper quicker than mine, and the days of standing vigil at our father’s bedside had left all of our emotions ready to snap. Gunner had always voiced his objections about the settlers more loudly than any of us—but I was sure he wouldn’t go off on a rampage without my approval, even if at that time I hadn’t officially been Patrei yet. He deferred to me in these matters. But if not him, who? Were the settlers or Kazi lying?

  That was another reason my father gave for naming me Patrei. I was usually good at spotting lies, better than my brothers. But being able to discern lies didn’t necessarily reveal the truth. That took more digging—and I wanted to know what her truths were.

  Dammit.

  I wanted to know a lot more about her, and that was only asking for trouble. I needed her and the other Vendans out of my life sooner rather than later. Hopefully, we wouldn’t be chained much longer.

  I glanced at her, tireless, her dark lashes casting a determined shadow beneath her eyes, her warm skin glistening, my gaze lingering far too long.

  Maybe some trouble was impossible to avoid.

  * * *

  “What’s this?” I heard the trepidation in her voice as if she already sensed what was hidden in the half-mile-wide river of blinding sand.

  We had crested a knoll, and I had misjudged when we would reach it. It was midday and the sands would be scorching and we were bootless.

  “Sand,” I answered.

  “That is not sand,” she said.

  Not entirely. The bones were visible, small, broken, and mostly human. Dull, pitted teeth, the occasional whole vertebrae resting on top like a white lily on a shining alabaster pond. “It’s called Bone Channel,” I said. “They say the sand streams from a city that was destroyed in the flash of the first star. We can’t cross it barefoot in the heat of day.”

  Shimmers of heat rippled upward. Kazi stared at it like she could see the ghosts entombed in the sand trying to claw their way to shore. Her attention rose to the distant foothills on the other side and the ruins that topped them—our first potential shelter—but a burning graveyard lay between us.

  “Our shirts,” she said. “We can wrap them around our feet.” She began unbuttoning her shirt. “Take yours off too. We’ll need them both.”

  “We can wait until night—”

  “No,” she said. “I’m not sleeping out here in the middle of nothing when there are ruins in sight.”

  She took off her shirt and ripped it in half. She had a thin chemise on beneath it, and I was both hoping she would and wouldn’t remove it too. Devil’s hell, get hold of yourself Jase.

  “Your shirt,” she reminded me.

  I wasn’t eager to rip it in half, but I didn’t want to wait until nightfall for the sands to cool either, and with the heat of summer we didn’t really need the shirts for warmth.

  We wrapped our feet with several layers of fabric, tying them securely. We stepped out, the sand still feeling like a furnace beneath us, but the fabric did the job, keeping our feet from blistering.

  It was harder to walk with the knotted fabric pulling at our ankles, but we synchronized our steps. I tried to make conversation, thinking of other legends to tell her, but I was distracted. It wasn’t that I had never seen a bare-shouldered woman before, or one so scantily clad, but somehow this felt different. She’s a soldier, I reminded myself. Rahtan. One who held a knife to my throat and was prepared to use it. It didn’t help. Halfway across I said, “Tell me a riddle.”

  She looked at me, surprised. “Now?”

  I nodded.

  She thought for a moment, her hand gliding over her abdomen, then said,

  “The less I have, the more I grow,

  I swirl and twirl and make a show.

  You can’t ignore me, though hard you try,

  I growl, and scream, and wail, and cry.

  I roost in darkness, but my bite is seen,

  In rib and cheek, and wrist so lean.

  With fierce teeth, and sharper claw,

  None can escape my ruthless maw,

  But a strutting hen can strike me down,

  With its pretty legs in feathered gown.”

  My stomach told me the answer to this one. Talk of chicken legs made the beast curled in my gut lift its sorry head. “Tonight,” I said. “I promise, the beast will be fed.”

  She didn’t seem to hear my reply. Her right brow lifted, her gaze turned puzzled. She looked past me over my shoulder. “What is … that?”

  I turned. In the distance, stark against a clear blue sky, a single cloud exploded upward. It wasn’t just any cloud. I had seen this kind before, but only when I was on safe high ground. It was a fat, bulging arm radiating miles into the sky, its muscles flayed open, purple and full, like a rampaging monster.

  “Run,” I said.

  “But—”

  “We’re in a wash. Run!”

  She trusted the urgency in my voice and ran, but we were still a long way from the other side. Silver fingers of water began shining in the distance, crawling toward us. “Faster!” I yelled.

  Our steps pounded the sand and the fabric on her feet began unraveling, flapping loose at her ankles, but there wasn’t time to fix it. In seconds, we saw the frothing wall of water coming toward us, a deadly churning wave. She kicked the fabric loose. “Keep going,” she yelled, but I saw the agony in her face as she ran across the scorching sand. I scooped her into my arms and doubled my pace, my heart thudding in my chest, the wall getting closer, its roar like an animal bearing down, the trickling silver fingers already clawing at my ankles.

/>   We made it to the other side, but the water was rising, already to my knees, and we still had to make it up the steep bank. I set her down, water now up to our waists, sucking to pull us into the current. The soft soil slipped beneath our feet, rain now pouring over our heads too. But we climbed, clawed, the water rising with us, both of us stabbing our walking sticks into the ground, stumbling, falling below the water, grabbing each other’s hands, and we finally made it to the crest, stumbling and pulling ourselves over the top of the embankment just before the wall roared past us. We collapsed, lying on our backs, gasping for air, rain pounding the ground around us, and then she chuckled. The chuckle turned to a string of long breathless laughs, and I laughed along with her. It was relieved, feverish laughter, like we had just slayed a monster that already had us in its jaws.

  And then our laughter subsided, both of us spent from our dash across the channel, and the only sound was the slap of the rain. The heat of the wet soil steamed up around us, and I turned my head to look at her. Her eyes were closed, strings of hair clinging to her cheek, drops of water collecting in the hollow at her throat, a small vein pulsing in her neck.

  I sat up and reached for one of her feet to look at the sole. She flinched at first, but then let me touch it. I gently brushed my thumb over the skin. There were already blisters forming. I reached in my pocket and pulled out a wish stalk. I chewed it, then pressed it to her foot.

  “Does that help?” I asked.

  She blinked, her eyes avoiding mine, her chest rising in an uneven breath, then finally she answered, “Yes.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN