The Broken Kingdoms

“You need to be stronger.” Unspoken, the fact that I would be unable to count on his strength. “And my power won’t come at night. Not even to protect you.”

  “Oh,” I said, feeling stupid. “Right.”

  “Afternoon would be best. The sun will be unobstructed by the Tree then; that may provide some small advantage. I’ll do what I can to convince them not to take more of your blood before that.”

  I reached up to touch his face, then trailed my hand down to his shirt and the stiff spot there. “You died again tonight.”

  “I have died many times in recent days. Dateh is most fascinated by my ability to resurrect.”

  I frowned. “What…” But, no, I could imagine all too easily what Dateh had done to him. Searching my hazy memories of the days since Madding’s death, I realized this was not the first time Shiny had returned to the room dead, dying, or covered in gore. No wonder there had been no reaction from our captors when I’d blown a hole in him myself.

  There were so many things I wanted to think about. So many questions unanswered. How had I killed Shiny? I had had no paint that time, not even charcoal. Were Paitya and the others still alive? (Madding, my Madding. No, not him, I could not think about him.) If my plan succeeded, I would try to get to Nemmer, the goddess of stealth. She would help us.

  I would see Madding’s killers stopped if it was the last thing I did.

  “Wake me in the afternoon, then,” I said, and closed my eyes.

  14

  “Flight” (encaustic, charcoal, metal rubbing)

  THERE WERE COMPLICATIONS.

  I woke only gradually, which was fortunate, or I might have stirred and given myself away. Before I could do that, someone spoke, and I realized Shiny and I were not alone in the room.

  “Let go of me.”

  My blood chilled. Hado. There was tension in the air, something that vibrated along my skin like an itch, but I did not understand it. Anger? No.

  “Let go, or I call the guards. They’re right outside the door.”

  A quick sound of motion, flesh and cloth.

  “Who are you?” That was Shiny, though I hardly recognized his voice. It trembled, wavering from need to confusion.

  “Not who you think.”

  “But—”

  “I am myself.” Hado said this with such savagery that I nearly forgot myself and flinched. “Just another mortal, to you.”

  “Yes… yes.” Shiny sounded more himself now, the emotion cooling from his voice. “I see that now.”

  Hado drew in a deep breath, as shaky as Shiny’s voice had been, and some of the tension faded. Cloth stirred again and Hado came over to me, shadowing my face. “Has she shown any sign of recovery today? Spoken, maybe?”

  “No, and no.” Stiffer than usual, even for Shiny. The White Halls taught that the Bright Lord could not lie. I was relieved to hear that he could, though it plainly did not suit him.

  “Everything is different now. They’ll begin taking blood again tonight. Hopefully she’s strong enough.”

  “That will likely kill her.”

  “Look outside, man. Two weeks have passed since Role died. Two weeks until the Nightlord’s deadline—as he has so dramatically decided to remind us.” He uttered a soft, humorless laugh. I wondered what he meant. “Dateh has been a man possessed since he saw it. There’s no hope of my dissuading him this time.”

  Hado’s hand stroked my face suddenly, brushing my hair back. I was surprised at such a tender gesture from him. He hadn’t struck me as the type for tenderness, even to this small degree.

  “In fact,” he continued with a sigh, “if her mind doesn’t return—or hells, even if it does—I fear he’ll take all her remaining blood, and her heart, too.”

  Goose bumps prickled my skin. I prayed that Hado would not notice.

  He touched the buckle across my midriff, silent now with his own thoughts—and showing no inclination to leave. I began to worry. The sunlight felt strange on my skin. Thin, sort of. Did that mean it was late afternoon? If Hado didn’t leave soon, the sun would set and Shiny would become powerless. We needed his magic for this to work.

  “You are not quite yourself,” Shiny said suddenly. “Something of him lingers.” Hado stiffened perceptibly beside me.

  “Not the part that gives a damn about you,” he snapped, and got up, stalking toward the door. “Speak of this again and I’ll kill you myself.”

  With that he was gone, closing the door rather harder than necessary. And then Shiny was there, yanking at my midriff strap so roughly that I yelped.

  “This place has been chaos all day,” he said. “The guards are on edge; they keep checking the room. Every hour some interruption—servants bringing food, checking your arm, then that one.” Hado, I gathered.

  I pushed his hands away and fumbled with the midriff strap myself, gesturing for him to work on the leg straps, which he began to do. “What’s happened to get them all upset?”

  “When the sun rose this morning, it was black.”

  I froze, stunned. Shiny kept working.

  “A warning?” I asked. The words of the quiet goddess came to me, from that day in South Root. You know his temper better than I do. Not Itempas, as I had assumed then. With more of his children dead or missing, it was the Nightlord whose temper would be at the breaking point. Would he even wait the full month he had promised?

  “Yes. Though it seems Yeine has managed to contain his fury to some degree. The rest of the world can see the sun clearly. Only this city cannot.”

  So Serymn had been right in her prediction. I could still feel sunlight on my skin, just weak. There must have been some light remaining, or Shiny wouldn’t have bothered trying to free me. Perhaps it was like an eclipse. I had heard those described as the sun going black. But an eclipse that lasted all day and moved with the sun across the sky? No wonder the Lights were a-tizzy. The whole city would be in a panic.

  “How much time until sunset?” I asked.

  “Very little.”

  Gods. “Do you think you’ll be able to break that window? The glass is so thick.” My hands would not work as quickly as I wanted; I was still weak. But better than I had been.

  “The cot legs are made of metal. I’ve loosened one of them, which should serve well as a club.” He spoke as if that answered my question, which I supposed was an answer in itself.

  We got the straps undone and I sat up. There was no dizziness this time, though I swayed when I stood. Shiny turned away from me, and I heard him positioning the table in front of the door. This was to delay the guards, who would enter as soon as they heard Shiny break the window. Every second would matter once we began.

  There was a quick grunt from him, and a metallic groan as he worked the loose leg off his cot. As quietly as he could, he moved the broken cot in front of the door, too. Then we went to the window. I could still feel sunlight on my skin, but it was weak, cooling. Soon it would be gone.

  “I don’t know how long it will take for the magic to come,” he said. Or whether it will come at all, he did not say, but I knew he thought it. I was thinking it myself.

  “So I’ll fall for a while,” I said. “It’s a long way down.”

  “Fear alone has killed mortals in moments of danger.”

  The anger I’d felt since Madding’s death had never gone away, just quieted. It rose in me again as I smiled. “Then I won’t be afraid.”

  He hesitated a moment more but finally lifted the cot leg.

  The first blow spiderwebbed the window. It was also so loud, echoing in the partially emptied room, that almost immediately I heard men’s voices through the door, raised in alarm. Someone fiddled with the lock, rattling keys.

  Shiny drew back and heaved the cot leg forward again, grunting with effort as he did so. I felt the wind of the leg’s passing; a truly mighty blow. It finished the window, knocking out several large pieces. A startlingly cold wind blew into the room, plastering my smock to my skin and making me shiver.

  The gua
rds had gotten the door partially open but were impeded by the table and cot. They were shouting at us, shouting for aid, trying to jostle the furniture out of the way. Shiny tossed aside the cot leg and kicked out as much of the glass as he could. Then he took my hands and guided them forward. I felt the cloth of his smock, removed to cover the jagged edges along the bottom sill.

  “Try to push out, away from the Tree, as you jump,” he said. As if he told women how to leap to their deaths all the time.

  I nodded and leaned out over the drop, trying to figure out how best to push off. As I did so, a breeze wafted up from below, lifting a few stray strands of my hair. For an instant, my resolve faltered. I am only human, after all—or mortal, if not human.

  Deliberately, I summoned the image of Madding as he had gazed at me in that last moment. He had known he was dying, known that I was the cause—but there had been no hatred or disgust in his expression. He’d still loved me.

  My fear faded. I moved back, away from the window.

  Shiny said over the guards’ shouts, urgently, “Oree, you must—”

  “Shut up,” I whispered, and took a running dive through the opening, spreading my arms as I flew into the open air.

  Roaring wind became the only sound I could hear. My clothes flapped around me, stinging my skin. My hair, which someone had tied back into a puff in an effort to control it, broke the tie and clouded loose behind me. Above me. I was falling, but it did not feel like falling. I floated, buoyed on an ocean of air. There was no sense of danger, no stress, no fear. I relaxed into it, wishing it would last.

  A hand swatted at my leg, jarring me out of bliss. I turned onto my back, lazy, graceful. Was that Shiny? I could not see him. My plan had failed, then, and we would both die when we struck the ground. He would come back to life. I would not.

  I reached up, offering my hands to him. He caught them this time, fumbling once, then drawing me close and wrapping his arms around me. I relaxed against his warm solidity, lulled by the rushing wind. Good. I would not die alone.

  Because my ear was against his chest, I felt him stiffen and heard his harsh gasp. His heart thudded hard once, against my cheek. Then—

  Light.

  By the Three, so bright! All around me. I shut my eyes and still saw Shiny’s form blazing before me, thinning the darkness of my vision. I could feel it against my skin, like the pressure of sunbeams. We streaked toward the earth like things I had imagined but would never see with my own eyes. Like a comet. Like a falling star.

  Our descent slowed. The wind’s roar grew softer, gentler. Something had reversed gravity’s pull. Were we flying now? Floating. How far had we fallen, how much farther to go? How long before the sun was gone, and—

  Shiny cried out. His light vanished, snuffed all at once, and with it went the force that had kept us afloat. We fell again, helpless now, with nothing left to stop us.

  I felt no fear.

  But Shiny was doing something. Twisting, panting with effort or perhaps the aftermath of his magic. I felt us turn in the air—

  And then we hit the ground.

  15

  “A Prayer to Dubious Gods” (watercolor)

  SOMEONE WAS SCREAMING. High, thin, incessant. Irritating. I was trying to sleep, damn it. I turned over, hoping to orient my ears away from the sound.

  The instant I moved my head, nausea struck with stunning speed and force. I had enough time to open my mouth and drag in a loud, wheezing breath before the heaves came. I vomited a thin stream of bile, but nothing more. I must not have eaten for some time.

  My stomach seemed determined to dry heave nevertheless, regardless of my lungs’ need for air. I fought the urge, my eyes watering and head pounding and ears ringing, until at last I managed to draw in a quick half breath. That helped. The heaving slowed; I breathed more. At last the clenching in my gut ceased—though only for the moment. I could still feel the muscles there trembling, ready to resume their onslaught.

  Finally able to think, I lifted my head, trying to figure out where I was and what had happened. The ringing in my ears—which I had mistaken for screaming—was loud and incessant, maddening. The last thing I recalled was… I frowned, though this made the pain worse. Falling. Yes. I had leapt from a window of the House of the Risen Sun, determined to escape or die trying. Shiny had caught me, and—

  I caught my breath. Shiny.

  Beneath me.

  I scrambled off him, or tried to. The instant I moved my right arm, I screamed, which touched off another spate of stomach heaves. I fought through the pain and the retching, dragging myself off him with my left arm, which was still sore from infection and whatever the Lights had inserted to draw my blood. Still, the pain in that arm was nothing compared to the agony in my right, and the clenching of my belly, and the shooting pains in my ribs, and the roiling grinding hell of my head. For a few moments I could do nothing but lie where I was, whimpering and helpless with misery.

  At last the pain faded enough for me to function. When I finally struggled to a half-upright position, I tried again to assess my surroundings. My right arm would not work at all. I reached out with my left. “Shiny?”

  He was there. Alive, breathing. I brushed his eyes, which were open. They blinked, the lashes tickling my fingertips. I wondered if he had decided to stop speaking to me again.

  That was when I realized my knees and the hip I sat on were soaking wet. Confused, I felt the ground. Brick cobbles, greasy and thick with dirt. Cold dampness that grew warmer, closer to Shiny’s body. As warm as—

  Dearest gods.

  He was alive. His magic had saved us—not completely, but enough to soften our fall. Enough that when he had turned us in the air, orienting so that he would hit the ground first, we had both survived. But if I was this injured…

  My fingers found the back of his head, and I gasped, jerking my hand back. Gods, gods, gods.

  Where the hells were we? How long had we been lying here? Did I dare call for help? I looked around, listened. The air felt cool and misty with deep night. Fat drops of water touched my skin now and again with the intermittent gentleness that was rain in Shadow. I could hear it, a light drizzle all around us, but in the immediate vicinity, I heard nothing, no one. I could smell a great deal, though—garbage and fermented urine and rusting metal. Another alley? No, the space around us felt more open. Wherever we were, it was isolated; if anyone had seen us land, sheer curiosity should’ve brought them to find us.

  Shiny had begun to gasp irregularly. I put my hand on his bare chest—he had removed his shirt in the House—and almost drew it back, repelled by the unnatural flatness of his torso. Yet his heart still beat steadily, in contrast to the bubbling, jerky breaths that he was struggling to draw in. At this rate, his natural death might take an agonizingly long time.

  I had to kill him.

  Panic gripped me, though that might have been queasiness, too. I knew it was foolish. It wasn’t as though he would stay dead, and when he returned to life, he would be whole. It was, as Lil had concluded, the easiest way to “heal” him. It wouldn’t even be the first time I’d done it.

  But it was one thing to kill in the heat of anger. Doing it in cold-blooded calculation was a whole other matter.

  I wasn’t even certain I could kill him. My right arm was useless, dislocated or broken, though thankfully it seemed to be going numb. Everything else hurt. I might’ve survived the fall better than him, but that didn’t make me whole. At the very least, I would need two working arms to break his neck.

  All at once it hit me: I was lost in some part of Shadow, helpless, with a companion as good as dead. It was only a matter of time before the Lights came looking. They knew Shiny, at least, would come back to life. I was sick, injured, weak. Terrified. And, damn it all, blind.

  “Why the hells is everything so hard with you?” I demanded of Shiny, blinking away tears of frustration. “Hurry up and die!”

  Something rattled nearby.

  I gasped, my heart leap
ing in my chest. Frustration forgotten, I pushed myself to my knees and listened hard. It had come from my right, somewhere above me, a quick metal sound. Water falling on exposed pipe, maybe. Or someone searching for us, reacting to the sound of my voice.

  On my hands and knees, I quickly felt around me. A few feet to my left I found wood, old and splintery. A barrel, its binding rings rusty, one side staved in. Above it another, and then something that felt like a wide, flat piece of roof-shingle planking, leaning against the barrels. Jammed against it, a rotted-out crate.

  I was in a junkyard. The only junkyard anywhere near the Tree was Shustocks, in Wesha, where all the area’s smiths and carters dumped their useless materials and carriageworks.

  The roof planking formed a kind of lean-to against the barrels, with a narrow space underneath. As carefully as I could, I pushed the planking farther back, praying there was nothing balanced against it that would fall and give us away—or crush us. Nothing happened, so I felt around more, finally crawling under the planking to inspect the space.

  Just enough room.

  I backed out and got to my feet, and nearly fell again as another retching spasm took me. The pain in my head was truly awful, worse than it had ever been. I must’ve hit my head in the fall—not enough to break it, but certainly enough to rattle things around inside.

  Another sound from the same direction, something thumping against wood. Then silence.

  Panting my way through the pain, I stumbled back to Shiny’s body. Hooking my good hand into his pants, I leaned back with my hips and pushed with my legs and whimpered through my teeth as I dragged him back, inch by inch. It took everything I had to get him into the little hiding space, and he did not fit well. His feet stuck out. I crawled in beside him, panting, and listened, hoping the rain would wash away Shiny’s blood quickly.

  Shiny groaned suddenly and I jumped, glaring at him in consternation. The dragging must have injured him even further. No choice now; if I didn’t kill him, he would give us away.