The Sky on Fire

17. Something like a plan

17

SOMETHING LIKE A PLAN

When she finished dressing, Jaemeh led her into tunnels too small for a dragon to use—warren tunnels for human servants. She wondered how much of it was for convenience and how much was because it might well be a matter of life or death to stay out of sight from an angry dragon.

Tunnel systems aside, the room Jaemeh brought her to felt less like servants’ quarters than the drawing room of a wealthy manor house. The inscribed lamps hanging from the ceiling were lucent and if Anahrod squinted, it was easy to mistake the painted landscapes on the walls for glimpses of the surrounding mountains through open windows. The air was sweet, which she assumed was also the work of inscriptions, but if so, the magic hadn’t yet cleared the room of the aroma from lunch’s leftovers. Her stomach grumbled.

As cages went, it was one of the nicest she’d ever seen.

Of course, more important than elegantly carved furniture or finely woven silk rugs were the familiar faces.

Claw glanced up from throwing a pair of dice and did a double take. “Who the fuck are you?”

Jaemeh laughed.

“Someone who needs tea.” Anahrod made a flight line for the kettle, set over a candle flame to keep it hot.

“Wait. I know that voice. Jungle?” Claw sounded incredulous.

“What blinding brightness, to crest the mountain path, and see the sun,” Kaibren murmured.

Claw rolled her eyes. “How the hell was I supposed to know? I never saw her without the green paint!”

Anahrod had no comment for that, but she couldn’t help but smirk when Kaibren tapped on the table with the dice, distracting Claw with the fact that she’d just lost.

She poured her tea and focused her attention on Naeron and Ris, who’d both looked up from the paper they’d been studying but had yet to speak.

“Hi,” Anahrod said, because she was always witty like that.

And yet Ris gave her a warm smile, as if she’d said something clever after all, and gestured for Anahrod to take a chair. “Welcome back.”

Anahrod would’ve appreciated it if her memories of Ris had been flawed. If this reunion had revealed Ris to be less attractive and captivating than Anahrod’s recollections of the dragonrider.

Alas, no.

Ris’s hair was still a sultry mess of red curls spilling down her sides. She wore thin, tight green leather trousers tucked into tall black boots, and a white shirt barely darker than her pale skin. The shirt’s fabric was so sheer that the only reason her nipples weren’t on display was because of the green wool coat buckled on top. Bobbin lace shaped like leaves trimmed the coat’s hem and sleeves, just to make sure no one missed the wicked green jungle symbolism.

It was probably just as well that she didn’t see Gwydinion. Ris needed a “for adults only” warning sign.

Ris must have been the one who’d changed Anahrod’s clothes: their outfits matched .

“Suppose this proves Tiendremos knows about you and Peralon,” Anahrod commented as she sat down.

She contemplated kicking her feet up on the table, but she wasn’t dressed for it.

Jaemeh gave Anahrod an odd look but didn’t ask for clarification.

“I told you,” Ris said.

“Yes, but you didn’t lie, and that’s the surprising part.” Anahrod sipped her tea. “How did you find me?”

Ris waved a hand. “Inconsequential.”

“I disagree.”

“She’s right: it doesn’t matter,” Jaemeh said, with a note of finality. “Just know that we can find you again, whenever we need to.”

As if Anahrod could ever forget. “What do you want from me?” She saw no sense in wading in slowly.

“What I need you to understand is that—” Jaemeh began.

Claw leaned forward. “We’re robbing a dragon’s hoard.”

Jaemeh glared at Claw. “Do you mind?”

“No,” Naeron answered gravely, while Claw threw her head back and laughed.

When Claw recovered her composure, the young woman stage-whispered to Anahrod: “Seriously. Dragon’s hoard. We are gonna be so rich.”

Ris waved a hand lazily. “More specifically, since you’re the only person who’s ever successfully robbed a dragon’s hoard before, you’ll show us how you did it.”

Had Anahrod been in a better position to do so, she’d have slammed her cup down on the table or made some other dramatic gesture. Ris had just made a comment so outlandish that it called for a grand, over-the-top reply.

“Fuck, no,” she said instead, with feeling. “I’m not helping you.”

Anahrod couldn’t quite believe what she was hearing. A pair of dragons and their riders had both signed on for this ? That made no sense at all. Unless…

“Which dragon?” Anahrod had a terrible suspicion.

There was an awkward pause.

“Neveranimas.” Jaemeh watched her reaction closely.

Anahrod stood and started for the door.

“Anahrod, darling—” Ris called out to her. “Be reasonable. We’re not asking you to do something you’ve never done before. We’re not even asking you to steal from a different dragon than you have before.”

Anahrod froze and slowly turned around.

She knew what the dragons had accused her of doing. It was difficult not to know when dragonriders had screamed it from the literal mountaintops seventeen years earlier. There was just one tiny problem.

She was innocent.

Anahrod should’ve seen this coming. The reason these people were so interested in a living Anahrod Amnead, instead of the easier-to-handle dead version, was suddenly all too clear.

Anahrod wanted to point out the many flaws with this plan, most obvious of which was ever believing Neveranimas’s accusation. How ridiculous, how absurd, to think a girl no older than Gwydinion had broken into the most heavily defended vault in all Yagra’hai and stolen so much as a breath of air.

But she thought about what Jaemeh had said, back on the Crimson Skies . That the only reason Tiendremos wanted her alive was because he thought she was the “real” Anahrod Amnead. That had made little sense before.

Now, it did.

She didn’t think admitting her ignorance of Neveranimas’s security measures would be good for her continued longevity, however, so she replied: “You think she hasn’t fixed the flaw in her security? It’s been seventeen years.”

“If she can,” Ris said. “It’s not necessarily easy to update security inscriptions.”

“A grave may do fair work to keep a secret when a gag no longer binds,” Kaibren said, which was a quote from a Dollagh Ser play.

“Sometimes killing the witnesses is easier than changing the locks,” Claw translated unnecessarily. Kaibren gave the much younger woman a fond look.

Anahrod didn’t have to fake the headache. It had come on with a vengeance. “You expect me to believe that two dragons—dragons!—want to rob the queen of Yagra’hai? What could be worth that kind of risk?”

“Love,” Ris said.

Anahrod gave her a look.

“Love,” Ris repeated. “As in I would love to be rich. Wouldn’t you?”

Jaemeh laughed. “My dragon’s motive is less greed than ambition. Neveranimas has been a naughty girl, and this is going to allow Tiendremos to swoop in, reveal her corruption, and fly away with her job.” He added, “Although for my part, I too would like to be exceedingly rich.”

Anahrod abandoned tea and table in pursuit of fixing herself lunch. “Neveranimas, you said. And what, exactly, are we stealing?” She kept her voice steady.

She’d scream into a pillow later.

Jaemeh visibly relaxed. “Her hoard, obviously.”

Anahrod paused in the middle of piling up a plate with food. “I take it she’s finally changed her hoard?”

Even when Anahrod had been a candidate, Neveranimas’s persistent apathy for upgrading her hoard had been a tiny scandal. Neveranimas had hoarded books . Yes, the dragon equivalent of books, but since dragons didn’t think dragonstones were valuable, and humans weren’t allowed to own them, they were interesting paperweights.

“Oh no,” Ris said, “she hasn’t changed her hoard. But you didn’t steal from her hoard, only from her vault. She’s cleverly hidden what she really hoards from everyone, because under no circumstances can she allow her fellow dragons to know that she’s been hoarding diamonds for the last hundred years.”

Anahrod nearly dropped her plate.

Everyone knew who hoarded diamonds in Yagra’hai, and it wasn’t Neveranimas. The dragon king, the real, actual chosen Son of Eannis, the First Dragon, Ivarion: he hoarded diamonds.

Or he had . Since Ivarion was trapped in a cursed slumber, his hoard theme was off-limits: he wasn’t dead but also couldn’t be dueled.

As a result, nobody hoarded diamonds.

“Eannis,” Anahrod whispered. “You’re not stealing her hoard because it’s not her hoard. She’s stolen Ivarion’s hoard ?”

“See?” Ris nudged Jaemeh. “I told you she was smart.”

“That’s the beauty of this entire situation,” Jaemeh said. “She can’t say a word to anyone. Neveranimas can’t tell people we’ve taken her diamonds because that would be a confession.”

That was, simply put, rock wyrm shit. On so many levels.

Anahrod scoffed as she started to eat, angrily stabbing at her food with her knife. “Tell me you aren’t so na?ve as to think she needs to tell the truth to come after you. Because she doesn’t.” She rubbed her forehead. “And if you steal all the diamonds, how is your Tiendremos supposed to prove she committed any crimes? If you’re going to lie to me, could you at least keep your story straight?”

Annoyance flickered over Jaemeh’s features before he forced a smile. “We’re not lying. Tiendremos doesn’t need to recover all the diamonds. Just enough to prove she did, in fact, steal them. She gets kicked out; he takes over. We walk away with massive quantities of diamonds.”

“So many diamonds,” Claw said, “that we’ll be able to hide places she’ll never catch us.”

Anahrod sighed to herself. These were educated people, or at least street-smart people. Surely someone had explained the scarcity principle to them. If they started throwing around an entire dragon hoard’s worth of diamonds, an entire dragon hoard’s worth of diamonds would soon prove worthless.

She looked up from her meal for just long enough to say, “So, what happens when Ivarion wakes up?”

“What are the odds of that?” Jaemeh laughed. “And if he woke up, he’d be rampant and the whole damn city would have to fly over to the Cauldron to put him down. He won’t be trying to collect his diamonds.”

Anahrod continued eating. The food was good enough. She wondered if they had a human kitchen hidden away somewhere in Tiendremos’s lair or if they’d sent down to Duskcloud.

She felt everyone watching her eat, waiting for her to finish.

Anahrod paused. “So, what is this plan of yours?”

Ris caught her lower lip in her teeth and looked away, smiling.

“Plan?” Jaemeh spread his arms. “We couldn’t plan before we found you. Now we can. You just need to”—he leaned back in his chair—“tell us how you did it last time.”

Her pulse throbbed in her ears, turning the world silent and then loud in too-quick measures. She let her knife clatter down to the plate.

“No,” Anahrod said.

“No?” Jaemeh gave an incredulous look.

“Did you forget what the word means so soon?” Anahrod said. “ No . If the only reason your dragon hasn’t murdered me is because of what I know, what motivation do I have to tell you?” She raised a hand to forestall the dragonrider’s objection. “Right now, he could turn me in with no suspicion falling on him. If you want my help, I need reassurance my life isn’t measured in how long I can keep a secret.”

Ris started laughing.

“Damn it!” Jaemeh slammed the top of the table, tumbling a crystal scale Naeron had been spinning on its edge. The dragonrider turned on Ris. “This isn’t funny!”

“Oh, but it is,” Ris commented airily. “It’s our fault. Aren’t we the ones who insisted on summoning Anahrod the Wicked from the depths of Hell? Yet we’re surprised when the daughter of Zavad has claws.”

Kaibren raised a glass of wine. “Five times toll the bells for Zavad’s sins, four times toll the bells for the southern winds.”

Jaemeh gave the man an annoyed glance.

“She’s not being unreasonable.” Whether Claw was translating or commenting was unclear. “Just common sense to ask for more than our word that we won’t cut her lines the moment we don’t need her anymore.”

“Easy enough for you to say,” Jaemeh growled. “You’re not the one who has to explain this to Tiendremos.”

“Neither are you,” Ris said, and in response to his incredulous look, added, “If she’d started to tell you, I’d have stopped her. You can’t know the plan, Jaemeh.”

“Excuse me?” He leaped from his chair, his face reddening.

Ris leaned on the table with both arms, smiling, but her green eyes had a lethal, sharp look to them. “Jaemeh, Jaemeh, Jaemeh. My team and I are going to take our share of the diamonds, leave Yagra’hai, and never be seen again, but you and Tiendremos? You’re staying. That means when—not if, but when—Neveranimas questions Tiendremos, it is vitally important for the safety of both Tiendremos and yourself that he not know anything.” She bopped him on the nose. “Which means you can’t know anything.”

Jaemeh paused, then exhaled and dropped back down into the chair. “Fuck.” He waved a hand. “I’m sorry. You’re right. Damn it. Of course you’re right. We shouldn’t know the details.”

“Exactly. Please relay to Tiendremos that I have everything handled. Anahrod’s smart. She’ll help us.” Because her options would be grim if she didn’t went unsaid.

Jaemeh nodded. He gave Anahrod one last appraising look before he nodded and left the room.

No one said anything.

Then Kaibren exhaled in relief and Claw visibly slumped in her seat. “Fucking finally!” she said.

“Restrain your joy until we can guarantee he can’t hear us,” Ris murmured. “Kaibren, would you be so kind?”

The man grabbed his satchel from the back of his chair. He shut the door before pulling a roll of silk cloth from his bag and gluing the unrolled fabric to the door seam. Each fabric section had been painted with a complicated inscription of interlocking black lines, curving and crossing over each other in unpredictable ways.

Anahrod couldn’t tell what spell was inscribed on the cloth, but she suspected it prevented eavesdropping. Given how he placed the fabric over the door seam, a ward against entry seemed likely, too.

When Kaibren finished—and he hadn’t taken long—Ris turned to Anahrod with a broad, pleased smile on her face. “Beautifully done, my dear. I was a little worried when you were dropped into this without time to study, but what could I do? Neither Jaemeh nor Tiendremos would let you out of their sight. But you were perfect.”

“I’m so glad you approve,” Anahrod growled.

“If I didn’t know better, I honestly would’ve thought that you had broken into Neveranimas’s vault.” Ris had a cheeky look in her eyes. She knew what kind of writhing tidefisher net she’d just dropped in Anahrod’s lap.

Anahrod glared. “If you’re already aware that I don’t know how to rob Neveranimas, why am I here? ”

Claw rolled her eyes and fished at her belt for a bag of coins, which she tossed at Naeron. He caught the bag without looking up.

Anahrod ground her teeth together. “You made a bet?”

Claw pointed at her using a small, pointed knife, too slender to be used for eating. “What of it, Jungle? I’m from Grayshroud. I’d make a bet against the sun rising if I could find the right odds.”

“I’ll remember that next time I’m low on funds.”

Claw grinned. The scars pulled on the edges of her smile, warping it out of shape. “You do that and see where it gets you. Anyhow, we were betting on how you’d respond to Ris admitting she doesn’t need you to get past the Five Locks. I thought you’d take longer to ask the important question, honestly.”

Anahrod stared at the group warily. “Shall I repeat the question, then?”

Ris’s grin could have lit up the night sky during the dark hour. “Not necessary. You, my lovely, are here for two reasons. First, as bait: Tiendremos only signed on to help us because we convinced him we had a way to locate you, and that only you know the secret to breaking into Neveranimas’s vault. Second, as distraction: I don’t expect Tiendremos to be as graceful about us keeping him in the dark as Jaemeh just was, but if Tiendremos thinks he already knows the answer, then he won’t go nosing around.”

Anahrod studied Ris. “The ‘answer’ being that I’m Anahrod the Wicked, who everyone knows already stole from Neveranimas once before?’”

“Exactly. If Tiendremos knew the entire story, he’d stop being cooperative, and I’m sad to say we need him.” Ris shrugged, a “what can you do” gesture. “Just to be crystal clear here: we are still robbing Neveranimas. Diamonds are still happening.”

Anahrod drank the rest of her tea. It was excellent tea, perfectly brewed. She worked her tongue against the back of her teeth.

“You realize Tiendremos will betray you at the earliest opportunity, right?” Anahrod swept her gaze over the entire group. “If he really wants to prove Neveranimas stole Ivarion’s hoard, catching you in the act makes his case foolproof.”

Ris waved a hand. “We know. It’s already handled.”

“Glad to hear it,” Anahrod said. “Now, would somebody mind explaining one more time why you had to find me ? Because you could’ve hired any actor off the street to pretend to be Anahrod Amnead and your marks wouldn’t have known the difference.” Ris still wasn’t telling Anahrod everything. She could feel it.

“Read her in.” Naeron had pulled a foreign coin from his newly gained bag of winnings and was now spinning that instead of the original Seven Crests scale.

“Naeron, it’s a little early—”

“She’s the fifth. She needs to know.” Naeron stopped the coin spin by placing his hand palm down against the edge. He looked up.

Anahrod blinked. He was angry .

Ris seemed taken aback as well before her expression hardened into something more determined. She stared out at nothing for a moment.

No doubt rearranging her lies.

“Fine.” Ris sighed.

And said nothing.

The whole table waited. Finally Claw said, “You want me to tell the story? Since you can’t find the words for the first time in your whole damn life?”

Ris waved her off with an irritable flick of her wrist. “Have you ever heard of the Five Locks?” She directed the question at Anahrod.

“You mean besides Claw mentioning it one minute ago?” Anahrod said. “Yes. It’s Neveranimas’s vault.”

“No,” Naeron said. “Not a what. A who.” His anger had ebbed, but still lurked behind his dark eyes.

Ris said, “The Five Locks was a human division, living in Yagra’hai, specializing in security systems for dragon hoards. No dragon would dream of hiring another dragon for such a job, so it’s a human-only field of study.”

Ris leaned back in her chair and, predictably, kicked her boots up onto the table. “This was around a hundred years ago. Ivarion had just gone rampant and fallen into a coma, leaving Neveranimas as regent. She decided to build a new vault for herself. So, she hired the entire division. All five families.”

Given that the Five Locks Division no longer existed by the time Anahrod had been sent to Yagra’hai, she could already tell this story didn’t have a happy ending.

“They did their job brilliantly,” Ris explained. “It’s probably the most heavily secured dragon hoard on the entire continent. They were paid… and then the families began having ‘accidents.’”

“Fatal ones, I gather?”

“Oh, you’ve heard this story?” Ris was still smiling, but it seemed more feral than friendly. “Anyway, what was that saying, Kaibren? ‘A grave will keep a secret when a gag no longer binds’?”

Kaibren didn’t correct her, although it looked like a struggle.

Ris continued: “Neveranimas took it to heart. She wasn’t content with just the men and women who’d worked on the project, either. She went after the whole division, down to the smallest child.”

Anahrod closed her eyes.

“Those who could, ran and hid. Some fled to the Deep, others to the slums of various cities in Seven Crests. The Five Locks vanished as anything other than a misapplied nickname for the treasure vault of their murderer.”

The story was tragic and horrible, but she could only think of one reason Ris was explaining it now. Anahrod opened her eyes again. “The Five Locks built a back way into the vault?”

Claw whistled.

Ris’s eyes gleamed with pleasure. “Creating a security system like that—it was a huge job. Full of testing, modification, retesting. There came a point in the project where they could no longer safely enter the vault to perform those tests without Neveranimas personally disabling the security. But she didn’t like all the interruptions. So yes, they made a key. In fact, they made five.”

“One key,” Naeron corrected. “Five parts.”

“All right, yes. Five parts,” Ris allowed.

Kaibren quoted: “Then sent I each part to a different quadrant, for I knew your word was as green as jungle and twice as fickle.”

“Yeah, that’s a good point,” Claw said.

A pause followed.

Ris rolled her eyes. “Translation, please. If you must do this, don’t be coy.”

“Give the man a break. He’s an artist.” Claw pulled out several knives at this point and began cleaning them. “Anyway, he said that they must have been concerned that some too-greedy member of the division might try to swipe a copy of the key and come back later. So, they split the key up into five parts and gave each part to a different family. That way, they could only open the vault if everyone agreed.”

Anahrod raised both eyebrows. “You got all that from what he just said?”

“Of course I did.” Claw crossed her arms over her chest. “He quoted a line from The Ice at the End of the World, the closet play by Terren Podgra. And it’s from the scene where a dying Meinwen tells Cledragh that he’s split the treasure map into four pieces and hidden each piece in a different location because he always knew Cledragh would betray him. Given the context? Had to be about splitting the key to keep everyone honest.”

Next to her, Kaibren nodded sagely.

Ris pinched the bridge of her nose. “Remind me why I keep you around again?”

“No choice,” Naeron murmured. “Need her.”

“Yes, thank you for reminding me.”

“Yeah? Well, I hate you, too, water-for-brains. Go choke on Zavad’s dick.” Claw huffed and continued cleaning her knives.

Ris ignored her. “As I was saying, each family took one key. There are only two ways to open the vault—Neveranimas, or all five keys.”

“Blood family,” Naeron added.

Ris made a face. “Yes. That. Only blood descendants of the original five families can make the keys work. Another security precaution. And that”—she waved at Anahrod—“is why you’re really here.”

They couldn’t be talking about her first mother’s side of the family, because Anahrod wasn’t a blood descendant of her first mother. Her second mother, with her ring-house ancestry and impoverished roots, had been the one to carry Anahrod to term. She was much more likely to be a descendant of survivors who had gone into hiding.

That side was just Anahrod and her mother, wherever she was.

Ris wasn’t done talking. “Even that’s not the only reason you’re here. We also need the key. We have three of the swords and we know where the fourth is located, but we still need the fifth. Yours.”

“Swords?” Anahrod choked out a laugh. “You said keys. When did we switch to talking about swords?”

Claw made a swiping gesture through the air with a knife, while Ris said, “The swords are the keys. They mimic Neveranimas’s claws.”

“Well, I don’t have—” Anahrod glanced down at the sword at her waist.

“No, it’s not that sword,” Ris said. “I’d hoped that you’d still have the sword when we found you in the Deep, but I’ll settle for knowing what happened to it.”

Ris wore a strange expression, and Anahrod gazed at it for a long moment before recognizing it: anxiety. She was telling the truth about needing the swords. The plan fell apart—irretrievably, irrevocably broken—if Anahrod’s answer was The sword was melted down or It shattered and the pieces were thrown out to sea or I gave it away …

Oh.

Anahrod slouched in her seat. Her stomach felt tight and heavy. “Why would you think that I’m the one who has it?”

“Because I’ve looked!” Ris said. “I’ve studied your whole family. Even your father, who’s working as a damn sausage cart vendor right here in Duskcloud, by the way, just on the off chance that he somehow took the sword in the divorce. Your second parent used to have it—and the last anyone remembers seeing the blasted thing was just before you were dragged away to be executed. Are you telling me you didn’t take it?”

Anahrod started laughing. Oh, Eannis…

The laughter became a wild and out-of-control thing. She laughed harder when she saw the furious, impatient look on Ris’s face. Distantly, past the laughing and the tears and the hiccupping need for air, Anahrod noted that she’d finally touched on something Ris cared about. This was important to the dragonrider.

Ris had explained it, hadn’t she? No matter what excuse Ris gave Jaemeh, her real motivation was simpler:

Revenge.

Four other people sat at the table; Naeron had called Anahrod the fifth. That meant that Ris, too, was descended from the families that Neveranimas had tried to destroy.

Exactly none of which changed just how screwed they were.

“Yes,” Anahrod. “I had the damn sword.”

She’d been running away. Anahrod hadn’t thought Neveranimas wanted to kill her, just force her into a bond. Anahrod had snuck home to steal her second mother’s folding box, the food in the pantry, and that damn antique sword on the wall. She’d never questioned the sword’s provenance. It had been in her family—her second mother’s side of the family—for generations.

The city watch never even searched her. She was thrown overboard with the folding box—and its sword—still tucked into her coat.

She was in danger of losing herself in laughter again, but the punchline was too good. Such a magnificent joke.

“Oh, Ris,” she said, wiping her eyes. “I told you it was a mistake to kill two of Sicaryon’s men, but who knew the consequences would bite your heels so soon?”

The redhead turned even paler. “What do you mean?”

Anahrod pushed her plate away from her. She was no longer hungry. “I mean that Sicaryon has your fifth sword, and I know that for a fact, because I’m the one who gave it to him.”