Chapter Six
Six
He carried the arrow and windblade as we took the path that meandered back to the abandoned house. We found Galen standing with the horses, scanning for threats. Nik told him what we’d found.
“Shooting at the assassin or you?” Galen wondered.
“Whichever he could manage,” Nik said, and gave him the weapon and arrow.
“We need to tell his family,” I said.
“We’ll handle that,” Nik said. “You’ve fulfilled your obligations.”
I shook my head. “It should come from someone they’re familiar with—at least a little. Not a stranger from the capital. Not soldiers with swords.”
He sighed, then looked at Galen. “Stay here with Tommen. I’ll send soldiers back to help and deal with the rest of it.”
Galen nodded and, for once, didn’t argue.
Nik climbed onto Grim with practiced ease, then offered me a hand. I took it, and he hauled me up behind him as if I were light as air.
“Wait,” I told him, then looked up at the Anima who still circled the house. “We’ll take care of him,” I said quietly. “Tommen and those who caused his death.”
For a moment longer they watched, measuring the truth of my promise. Then their circling slowed, the Aether diminishing. They raised faint hands in goodbye and disappeared into a fall of stars.
Like a response from Terra itself, a warm breeze ran through the woods, rustling the leaves.
“They’re gone,” I said quietly. “They’re satisfied we’ll help him.”
“I felt it,” Galen said with a hint of awe in his voice. “I felt them leave. There was…a lightness.”
I looked back at Nik and found his gaze fixed on me, his brow furrowed. “Who are you?” he asked. And there was surprise and suspicion in the question.
Never be noticed.
“No one,” I said. “Just a girl who sees ghosts.”
We rode back to the district in silence.
Nik didn’t push Grim for speed, but it also wasn’t a leisurely walk.
We had news to deliver, and it needed to be given as quickly as possible.
He stopped when we reached the imperial soldiers who waited near the gatehouse.
We dismounted, and he turned over Grim to their care and gave them instructions.
Then we walked to the blacksmith’s shop and the tidy wooden house beside it.
Telling Tommen’s widow of his death was as horrible as I’d imagined.
Turns out it didn’t matter that I was less of a stranger than the prince’s bodyguard; death was an insult either way.
There’d been arguments, refusals, and then cold devastation.
She was joined by relatives—sisters by either blood or marriage—who sat with her and worked to calm her body-racking sobs. We waited nearby in awkward silence.
One of the women offered a coin for delivering the news.
“No need,” Nik said, and folded her fingers gently over the coin. “We’re sorry for bringing death into your home.”
“You aren’t the first. They had three daughters; they’ve lost them all within the last two years. The traveling sickness.”
The Anima circling at the abandoned house—they’d been three daughters mourning their father.
“I’d been worried,” the widow said.
“Worried?” Nik asked, shifting his gaze to her. “About what?”
“He’s been gone for two days,” said one of the women who’d joined her. “She’s been worrying since he left.”
“Where did he go?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” his wife said. “He was excited about earning extra coin. I don’t know what it was for, but he said we’d be able to fill the storehouse. We’d have enough to see us through the lean times.”
“He made good on that promise,” Nik said, and offered the pouch he’d found in the house.
“What’s this?” the other woman asked. When she looked inside, her lips trembled.
The house was nicer than most in the district, with real glass in the front windows and colorful tapestries decorating the walls. But there’d be no more income from the forge, and there would undoubtedly be more lean times.
“He earned this for you,” Nik said.
The widow’s eyes were red and devastated, but she pursed her lips and managed—by bearing down hard—to keep her composure. “You’ll bring him to me?”
“I’ve made the arrangements,” Nik said. “And we’ll find the person who did this.”
“Does it matter?” one of the other women asked. “He’s gone.”
“Of course it matters,” said his widow. “Justice should be done, even if it doesn’t bring him back.”
“We’re very sorry for your loss,” Nik said. “If you need anything, you can tell the guards at the palace. The prince will help any way that he can.”
The women gave each other knowing looks. “Those in the palace don’t care much for us,” the widow said. “The last prince let the traveling sickness take us; he couldn’t be bothered to leave the palace, did no good for us in the meantime.”
“This prince intends to be different,” Nik said.
“We’ll see,” said one of the women, her thin brow arched high with doubt.
“You aren’t alone,” I said in the silence that followed.
They all looked at me, as if surprised to remember I was still in the room.
I’d felt the pinch the moment I’d entered and could see the faint outline of Tommen and their daughters hovering near, the grief in their eyes mirroring hers.
The girls clung to their father, and he held their hands now.
All still grieving, but no longer alone in that grief.
Despite the circumstances, I felt a stab of jealousy about their reunion. I’d never seen my parents’ spirits. Luna hadn’t been able to find them, so they must have already passed over into Oblivion. I knew I shouldn’t begrudge them the peace of that world, but that didn’t ease the jealousy much.
“They’re with him,” I told the women. “And they’ll always be with you.”
I breathed deeply as we stepped outside again. I needed air untainted by tears and sadness. Maybe Nik did, too, as we were both quiet for a moment.
“They were in the room?” he eventually asked. “Tommen and his daughters?”
I nodded. “They tend to come back when they haven’t had a chance to say goodbye.”
“Is it true—what they said about the former prince?”
“Yeah. The traveling sickness tends to come in late summer, when the winds blow in from Vhrania. It arrives every few years, and it spreads fast. Crops can’t be tended, and people go hungry.
The prince did nothing to help; he stayed in the palace and feasted with his friends while strongholders starved.
People begged at the gates for rice, flour, beans. At best, they were turned away.”
He paused. “And at worst?”
“They were beaten. There was always some charge—they threatened the prince or spread lies about people dying. But mostly that was nonsense.”
“I’m sorry the stronghold went through that.”
He sounded sincere, but what did that matter now? “Don’t be sorry; feelings don’t help. Tell your prince to make good on his promise.”
I looked around, my gaze falling on the nearby brick forge that squatted beneath a wooden shelter. Today, the forge was cold, the hammers silent.
“This is probably where he earned those coins,” I said, walking on the brick path toward it, expecting Nik to follow.
The workspace was tidy, with anvils, buckets, and tools neat and ready for another day’s work.
Horseshoes and hammers hung from hooks on the timbers that supported the roof.
I walked to the table, where I found drawings on scraps of linen and bits of parchment for what looked like tools or garden or kitchen implements.
“Anything?” Nik asked, stepping beside me.
I pushed the pile at him. “See if there’s anything useful in there. Metalwork isn’t my area.”
He began flipping through the drawings. “And what is?”
“Puzzles,” I said, then crouched, looked under the table, felt the heavy wooden legs for anything unusual. I found no hidden compartments, so I rose again and surveyed the area. “I like to figure things out.”
“And what do you figure about our blacksmith?”
“He runs a shop. He makes things, sells them. If someone wants something made, they can bring him the coins here. He doesn’t need to go to an abandoned house outside the stronghold to make the exchange.”
“Maybe he made something he doesn’t want others to know about.”
“Exactly. So what does a blacksmith not want others to know about? And since we know he likes to draw plans, where does he keep the plans for secret projects?”
“Not on his person,” Nik said. “He wouldn’t want to be found with them.”
We combed through tools and baskets, lifted and lowered things, checked loose bricks and tiles. Still nothing.
“Fox.”
I looked back. Nik held up a small stone statue of a Terran god carrying a small hammer. Tommen probably would have asked it for hot fires and pure metal. Nik turned it over, revealing the hollow in its base. He gave it a shake…and a cylinder of parchment fell onto the table.
I carefully unrolled it and put tools on the edges to keep it flat. It was a drawing, but not of anything I recognized. A piece of metal that forked at one end, surrounded by symbols I didn’t recognize.
“It’s a tang,” Nik said. “The part of a sword blade that extends into the handle.”
I pointed to the words. “This looks like the Enshrined Monks’ language.” They were acolytes who lived within shrines and spent their time praying to their particular gods and seeking their wisdom. “Can you read it?”
He looked at it. “No.”
“So Tommen was working on a secret weapon and inscribing the tang with arcane words. Tommen kept the plans, or one of them, tucked away from everything else. Maybe he finished the weapon and was at the house to deliver it.”
“Someone paid him, took the weapon, killed him anyway. And maybe the practitioner was an Enshrined Monk, or has a friend of the cloth.”
Of which there were probably hundreds in Carethia. The stronghold had three major shrines—for Terra, the Aetheric, and Oblivion—and dozens of smaller ones.
I grabbed a scrap of parchment and a stick of charcoal and sketched out the symbols as quickly as I could. “I might know someone who can help translate.”
Brows lifted, he waited for more. I’m sure he was used to getting answers.
“Not even the prince can afford that information,” I said, then folded the paper and slipped it into my tunic. “But I’ll let you know what I learn.”
We searched the rest of the smithy but found nothing more. It began to rain, sheets of water pouring over the roof, a curtain between us and the rest of the world. With the sun now hidden, the air had gone chilly, and I crossed my arms to preserve the heat.
Nik moved to stand beside me. For a few heartbeats of gods-blessed silence—and no death or attacks or Aetheric conspiracy—we watched the rain fall.
My thoughts were as scattered as the raindrops.
Imperial guard or not, it was comforting to stand beside someone who’d seen the same things today and understood how I was feeling.
But his nearness was…powerful. I was almost too aware of him, of how he smelled of leather and sunlight.
Of the visible strength in his crossed arms. He was a force, and the soldiers who stood beside him in battle—or had to stand against him—surely knew it.
“Thank you for your help today,” he said. “I didn’t think a garden trip would be quite so…eventful.”
“No lies,” I said. “I can deal with running and death and danger, but not lies. You knew there was a chance it wouldn’t be a meander through the garden. You’re looking for an assassin, and you brought me along in case I could lead you to him.”
He was quiet for a moment. “You’re right. There was a possibility.”
“I knew it, too, and I came anyway. But there would have been danger even if I’d stayed in the stronghold.”
“Meaning what?”
“He could be looking for more Anima to control, humans to possess. And maybe also for humans whose skills would be useful to him.”
Alarm flashed in his eyes. “You think you might be a target?”
“We’re all targets until he’s put away. So help your prince and his new stronghold, and stop the person who wants to destroy it all.”
When the rain slowed, we walked back to the gatehouse. Galen had already returned and waited while his horse drank from the communal trough, now brimming with rainwater.
“All is well?” Nik asked.
“The cart is en route,” Galen said.
Nik nodded, then shifted his gaze to me. “Come with me—with us—to the border tomorrow.”
I could hear Galen’s groan from several feet away.
“What border?”
“The one your stronghold exists to protect. The Vhranian border.”
Vhrania. Land of hard winds and windblades and never-ending grasslands. And of the Zephyrii, a community of Vhranians who moved across their country as the seasons changed, navigating the plains by the moons and stars.
“Why in the gods’ names would I do that?”
“The bandit’s blade was Vhranian; the arrow pretended to be.
I want to know why, and I have friends there.
If the practitioner learned his craft across the border, my friend would know.
And you know how to find Aether. I don’t like putting you at risk again, but you have an undeniable set of skills. ”
Galen muttered something.
There could be danger, but there’d be danger even if I stayed. And my hunger to leave the stronghold—and see what lay beyond it—was powerful.
I knew Wren would object. I’d be crossing a border with imperial guards, entering a foreign land where I didn’t speak the language. If something happened, I’d have no one but the prince’s soldiers to rely on. And gods only knew how reliable they’d be.
But I still had cards to play. “I want to bring Wren.”
“Why?”
“She has skills. And she speaks Vhranian.” Mostly insults and curses, but it wasn’t exactly a lie.
“All right,” he said.
“The Lady’s going to want a lot of coin. More than today, since it will take longer and Wren will be gone, too. Send her a message and make it fancy. Put—I don’t know—a seal and a ribbon on it.”
“Soldiers don’t do fancy.”
I rolled my eyes. “Then borrow the prince’s seal, or have him send it. If she thinks she’s doing the prince a favor, she’s more likely to say yes.”
Because dangers be damned: I would absolutely ride out of the stronghold tomorrow.