“Stand up, I’ll show you something,” Li Min said. There was a shuffle of fabric and feet in the dirt as Sophia did. “Assume your usual stance.”
When Sophia slid her left leg back, angling her right half forward, Li Min clucked her tongue and reversed it, her fingers gliding along Sophia’s skin, clasping, just for a moment, around her small wrist. “Fighting is all angles, yes? Altering your stance so your good eye is set back might help; however, I think you’d feel most comfortable switching back and forth quickly, like this—”
Li Min danced from side to side, quick and light on her feet as she circled Sophia, constantly adjusting her stance so her left eye, which she had shut to demonstrate this to Sophia, was never in front for long.
“It looks like you’re dancing,” Sophia said, voicing Nicholas’s own awe. After a moment, she attempted to replicate the movement. Her face fell at her initial clumsiness, but soon she seemed to match Li Min step for step. And she was smiling.
“It feels a little ridiculous,” Sophia admitted, as they returned to the blanket and relinquished her blade again.
“You’ve not had time to become used to it,” Li Min said, placing a soft hand on Sophia’s wrist. “It will get better with time. You should know that there are countless stories of warriors who’ve borne a similar injury and overcome it. One general from my land was said to have been shot in the eye with an arrow. Rather than crumble, he pulled the arrow out, and ate the eye off it.”
“That’s disgusting, even for me,” Sophia said, laughing. “And you know it’s far more likely he did crumble and scream like a child. But who can blame him?”
“There is no doubt in my mind about that,” Li Min said, and for a while, they seemed content to play a game of trying to avoid the other catching their gaze. The slow drift of fingers across the blanket, easing closer and closer with each soft breath.
He was about to close his eyes and turn again to give them privacy when Li Min said, “There is still such a shadow on your face. What is troubling you?”
Rather than pull away, Sophia slid her hand lightly up along the other girl’s arm, drawing her loose sleeve up to touch her pale skin. She leaned forward, so close that, for a moment, Nicholas was sure she might rest her forehead against Li Min’s shoulder. “Did you mean what you said, about seeking revenge? That there’s no way to survive it?”
A deep sigh. “After I escaped the Shadows, I wanted nothing more than to grow strong enough to return and butcher them, as they had done my mother and my sister. It was enough to sustain me for years. I fed on the anger, bathed in fury, prayed with malice. But one morning, a woman on my ship asked me what I would make of my life after I had taken my revenge for their lives. I had not pictured anything beyond it. To me, it was a destination, and I had let it become a final chapter in my story. That realization made me decide the best revenge of all was to not willingly squander my gift of survival, but to live with the strength I had fought for and won.”
“But—” Sophia began, struggling to master her voice. “How do you live with it—the anger? The shame?”
Shame. Nicholas felt something rise and lodge in his throat.
Li Min’s hand stilled from where she had raised it, hovering just above Sophia’s tangled dark hair.
“No matter how hard I try,” Sophia continued, “I can’t forget it. It never leaves me. Its hands are hot around my neck.”
“Because one moment in life does not define a person,” Li Min said. “Without mistakes and misjudgments we would stagnate. It is no shameful thing to be beaten when outnumbered, not when you were brave enough to try. Nor is a scar or injury something to despair over, for it is a mark that you were strong enough to survive.”
“But it’s beyond me. The mistake didn’t end with me.” Sophia turned her head in Nicholas’s direction, as if trying to see whether he was still asleep. “I feel…we were in no way friends, but I feel sore about Linden. Responsible for what happened to her. His sad bastard face isn’t helping matters, either.”
“That’s understandable,” Li Min said, an odd quality to her voice. Her free hand cupped around Sophia’s, turning her palm up to rest in her own. She did not speak again until Sophia looked up and met her gaze. “But she had made her own decisions that brought her to that point.”
Had she? As far as Nicholas saw, Etta had never had a true choice from the moment Sophia Ironwood had entered her life.
“I mostly just worry about what will happen to him,” Sophia said. “Before, I wouldn’t have believed him capable of taking his vengeance out on Ironwood. Now I’m not so sure.”
Him.
Me.
Nicholas shifted on the ground, wishing he could use his right arm to brace himself.
Li Min nodded. “Earlier, I wanted to give him comfort, tell him that after the first death, there is no other. She has returned to the cradle of her ancestors, who shield her and protect her. But you can only say such things to people willing to hear them. He’s not there yet.”
It was like a hot blade sliding between his ribs. Nicholas pressed the back of his hand against his mouth.
“But what matters is what he believes, and he seems to be suffering not only a loss, but a questioning of faith and his path forward as well.”
“That seems to be going around these days,” Sophia said.
“It occurs to me that, while losing your eye has partially hindered your sight, the experience has allowed you to see through the lies you were raised to believe. You may go anywhere you like, so long as you take care, and you may be whoever you set your heart to be. There is true power in that, as you said to Carter before. Some of us are not so lucky—please do not take this for granted.”
“I won’t.” Sophia shifted, turning so she could brace a hand against the ground, trapping Li Min’s legs between her arm and the rest of Sophia’s body. She leaned forward, studying Li Min’s face as closely as Li Min examined her own. When she spoke again, the words were in that secret language between them, husky and low. The fire popped, devouring itself, and the small sound was enough of a distraction for Li Min to tear her gaze away, turning her head toward the distant city.
“You have been a good…friend,” Sophia said, softly. “Thank you.”
Li Min shook her head, rising out of the other young woman’s grasp. “I am not your friend, n shén, nor will I ever be in the way I want. I cannot be anything but what I am. Take care with your heart.”
“You don’t have to be alone, you know,” Sophia said. “You don’t have to keep making that choice. You talk about wearing the past with honor, but yours hounds you. You let it. You cannot let yourself accept that people would believe you. Help you.”
“You know nothing,” Li Min said, without a hint of anger. It was only frustration that wound itself through her words, an unmistakable ache.
It was a few moments later, as Li Min’s steps came toward him, that they both heard Sophia say, “And you should know, I wouldn’t go anywhere the two of you couldn’t follow.”
THEY WATCHED THE WEALTHIEST OF the city’s remaining gentlemen strutting like peacocks, and the ladies in all of their silk and pearls stepping off carriages and washing up the steps of the brick house before them, as if carried on a wave of high spirits and laughter.
Perched two roofs over, embracing the darkness of a new moon, Nicholas leaned forward as much as he dared, counting the latest batch of officers coming up the street. He might have thought them on patrol with the other regulars he’d seen, save for the inordinate number of decorations they’d lavished on themselves. It was a time of war, but the city had been occupied for months with little trouble, and the high polish of their boots, as if hardly used, seemed to prove that point. Their ceremonial swords caught the glow emanating from the three stories of windows. As the door opened for the guests, time and time again, it gave the effect of the sun rising over the streets.
“I can’t believe the bastard is throwing a ball,” Sophia snarled.
&
nbsp; “He has to keep up appearances in this era, if only to maintain his timeline,” Nicholas said. The hollow mouth at the center of his chest widened. It devoured the black mood in which he’d arrived in his natural era, devoured his anger, his pain, and now his heart. There was a freedom in this, too, in relinquishing decorum and manners, and giving himself over to the chill spreading through his veins.
The people on the streets below were going about their merry little evening, untethered by worry or fear. Those who weren’t entering the frivolities were making their way down the street, to one of the theaters putting on a production that evening.
I never took her to a play.
One more thought to feed the hollowness. He could not bear to think of her now, not on the cusp of doing something so vicious. Etta believed so doggedly in the good in him—that he was honorable, a man of merit and esteem. What would she see now, looking down at him? He was unrecognizable even to himself.
Li Min had been still for so long, wrapped in that impenetrably dark cloak of hers, that Nicholas might have forgotten she was there at all if she hadn’t turned to look at him. He was beginning to suspect—and accept—that she was the sort who could measure, swallow, and digest a man and his mettle with a single look. Rather than feeling frustrated or startled by her merciless insight, he was almost relieved by not having to explain himself or attempt to put a name to the storm raging inside of him.
“Do not fight it,” she told him. “It will help you. Anger is simple. Anger will move you, if you find yourself faltering. If you cannot avoid the darkness, you must force yourself through it.”
Li Min held out something in front of him—a dagger, made of what looked like ivory. He took it from her gingerly, examining the dragon’s head carved into its hilt. The curved blade smiled in his palm.
“I’m a better shot,” he told her, trying to give it back.
“You can’t use a flintlock,” she said, pushing it back toward him. “Even with the music, someone is bound to hear.”
Fair point. He accepted the dagger again, testing its weight and the feel of the hilt in his hand. The knife he’d been carrying was dull by most weapons’ standards, and while it had accomplished what he’d demanded of it, a sharpened, well-made blade would make a better tool for…
Assassination. Nicholas rolled his shoulders back.
“Know a little something about this, do you?” he asked.
“After I escaped the darkness, before I was able to secure many types of jobs,” Li Min told him, “I had just one.”
He looked at her again, but her expression was blank.
“He is not a man, Carter, but a beast,” she said. “Do not waste your time on his heart. Slit his throat before he can say a word.”
It wasn’t Nicholas’s first time killing a man—the abhorrent pride in him wanted to inform of her of that. It was, however, his first time killing a man when not in defense of his own life, and that was a difficult thing to reconcile with his soul. Each second that passed seemed to grind him down to his raw, fraught essence. Now and then, he felt bewildered by the notion that he was here again, that it had come to this. This journey had begun here, in this very city, with a choice.
With a young woman.
He tucked the dagger into his belt, reaching up to touch the pendant and Etta’s earring beneath his shirt. Let the ends justify the means.
“Thank you,” he told Li Min. She had been a stranger mere days before. Now she was attempting to comfort him, when what he needed most was a voice of reason beyond the berating one in his mind. He would never forget it.
“That’s the minuet,” Sophia whispered, crawling back over the slight slant in the roof. “Do you want to wait until they’re a few more dances in?”
Ironwood’s balls always began with a minuet, during which he danced with a lady of his choosing. The focus of all of the attendees would be on the dancers congregated on the first floor of the old house, gliding around the card tables, trays of food, and hothouse flowers. Even Ironwood’s bevy of guards might be distracted long enough for Nicholas to make his entrance on the third floor.
He shook his head. The time was now, or he’d never muster the strength.
THE HOMES ALONG QUEEN STREET—SPARED BY THE FIRE TO the west of Broad Way—were tall, proud creatures that might have been transplanted from the streets of London’s gentry. The old Ironwood house, by virtue of the man’s ego, was a rose among daisies, his own palace from which to rule an empire of centuries. Its endless series of windows, and the natural attention it drew, of course, made it damned hard to creep up on if one made one’s approach from the street.
Rope, tied to the chimney of the neighboring house, tossed with a hastily procured grappling hook onto Ironwood’s roof, made the task easier—but only just. Without the use of his right hand, Nicholas had to hook his right arm and both legs over the rope, and inch forward with an agonizing, awkward slowness. Sophia followed at a determined pace, and he found his expectations disappointed when Li Min didn’t walk across the rope like a cat, but deigned to cross it like a mere mortal.
The rope was cut free, a section falling slack against the neighboring house. The remaining length was tied to Ironwood’s chimney. Li Min used it to walk down the back of the house and then along its walls, passing between the windows with practiced ease. Suddenly, Nicholas had no problem seeing her at home on a pirate ship.
She disappeared from their sight, but he heard her negotiating a window below them.
“Rather handy, isn’t she?” Sophia said with clear appreciation, leaning over the edge of the roof to watch her at work. Nicholas gripped the back of her dark jacket to keep her from tumbling off the ledge.
A tug on the rope told him it was safe to descend, but Sophia, who was to keep watch, stopped him. She seemed to be struggling to speak; her mouth twisted as though she’d tasted something bitter.
“You’ll be all right…won’t you?” she asked after a long moment.
“I’ll be quick, at least,” he said.
“Seems unfair,” she said as he began to edge down, gripping the rough rope. “He deserves a worse end than you’ll be able to give him.”
“If something happens—”
Sophia gripped him by the collar of his shirt. “Nothing is going to happen.”
Nicholas nodded. “Understood, ma’am.”
Sophia used the rope to ease him down just enough for Nicholas to swing his legs forward through the open window. Li Min reached out, pulling him the rest of the way through the frame.
His memory of the house’s layout had served him well, after all. Li Min took a candle from the wall of the servants’ staircase, leaning around the landing to ensure no one was coming. Though they were inside the house now, the staircase was so insulated, set so far apart from the house’s grandeur, that even the lively music seemed muted.
It was remarkable, he thought, how swiftly memory could cut a man. It was the air, the way it seemed to sour in his lungs, the familiar creaks of the floor, that upset his stomach. This was a house in which all things were eventually extinguished, even hope. Whatever composure he’d summoned took a lashing as he stood there; for a moment, he was too tense to think about moving, too afraid that he might see his mother’s ghost walking up the stairs toward him.
Nicholas felt Li Min’s eyes on his face, trying to take the measure of his response. He didn’t turn toward her. The bile in the back of his throat stung and burned, but he swallowed it, ashamed that standing within this house’s walls was enough for his past to begin nipping and tearing at his resolve.
He had thought he’d known hatred, but he had not realized it lived in this place like a fine coat of dust. The familiarity of it was devastating; in all the many ways he had changed, the house hadn’t. Even now, the shadows seemed to grasp at him, pulling at his skin, as if to remind him, You belong to me. You will always belong to me.
It would always claim a piece of him he would never have back.
I
need to leave this place. Finish what he had come to do, and leave.
“Signal if you need assistance,” Li Min said. “If his death causes any of us to be orphaned, find your way back to Nassau in this year. We will regroup.”
He nodded, sliding the dagger she’d given him out of his belt. He couldn’t think of the consequences of this just yet. The passage they’d come through, to the north of the city, would likely collapse—but what else might? For decades, time had revolved around Ironwood himself, and there was no way to predict what might happen once the center of that control collapsed.
He began to climb the stairs. They were shorter than he remembered, but spoke to him each time he put his weight on them, reminding him why he was there, what he needed to do. For the first time, he was glad he had a blade instead of a flintlock. Perhaps he’d give the old man a cut for every year he’d stolen from her life.
Etta.
Ironwood never liked to see his servants and slaves unless they were performing a specific task in a particular room. Each floor had a narrow servants’ hallway built into it, connecting to the hidden staircase, and each bedroom of this floor had a door disguised as part of the wall.
Nicholas was careful, achingly careful, and waited at the top of the stairs for any sign of a servant. But the entire house was occupied with seeing to the needs of the men and women below; he would need to enter the old man’s bedchambers and wait. If time had been an ally and not an enemy, he might have waited until the man was asleep and do it then, but the wasted hours would only provide more opportunity for his own body to fail him. Even now, he felt as if his head were stuffed with feathers; his vision was blurring at the corners. It had to be now. Once the task was completed, Sophia would drop a rope down from the roof for him to escape by.
It was simple, but even simple plans were prone to unexpected disasters.
Nicholas navigated forward, ignoring the squeaks and rough brushes of the mice scampering past his ankles. From the other side of the wall, he heard two men—guards—muttering to each other about the amount of food they’d eaten, and knew the next door would be the one he was looking for.