Chapter 2
Hadalyn was a busy kingdom, and growing steadily by the day as more travellers and refugees abandoned poorer places to seek some sort of security.
Not that Hadalyn offered much of a reprieve from the poverty that plagued Kastonia and the continental kingdoms – especially as it grew larger – but its reputation gave people hope.
The people still believed that dragons slept beneath Castle Grey and that, one day, they would ask the gods to stop punishing the world and bless them with food, and goods, and easy lives.
Arla knew it was stupid. The gods didn’t exist. How could they when the world was going to shit?
And the dragons that had once served them? They were just children’s stories to scare them into obedience.
She had heard the tales – everyone had. How the dragons had gone to sleep almost a century ago.
How the gods had stopped being so prominent, too.
And then there were the stories of magic-wielders and how not long after the dragons went to sleep, those with magic in their blood became fewer and fewer until there were none left.
Something had changed then, apparently. Where magic had once been openly accepted and seen as a blessing, it was condemned.
People had been killed for what their blood represented.
Killed for the potential power they could wield over kings and queens.
But Arla had never once seen even a whisper of magic, and the gods had never made themselves known to her, either.
It was nonsense. All of it.
The streets of Hadalyn were busy that morning, and Arla scoffed at a ragged old lady, her back stooped with age, wearing a gold brooch that was probably worth more than the entire wooden shack out of which she had shuffled.
It wasn’t the gold that bothered her, though, it was the symbol forged from the metal: a flame encased in a heart.
A dragonhart. It seemed the old religions were as alive as ever.
Too many people were in the streets – too many since the last time Arla had walked them in the daylight.
She knew these streets as if their secrets were inked on her skin; had spent hours lurking in the shadows and dragging unsuspecting thieves into the darkness.
It was ironic, really, that she would be the one to rid Hadalyn of thieves, when she had spent the first few years in the king’s service stealing from folk just to be able to afford the silk for the dresses she would wear to court.
Though Arla was paid handsomely now as King’s Assassin, she was no stranger to the ache of a hungry stomach or the bite of cold hands.
The money had only begun to suit her well once she had made it into the King’s Guard, and now as his assassin, it served her very well indeed.
Arla knew the ladies in the royal court were often jealous of the new silk dresses she would be seen in each week, or the hordes of books that would be delivered in her name, under the pretence they were for the royal library.
But she didn’t care. She had killed and clawed and fought her way to where she was now.
If she wanted lavender oil in her bath after a day of swinging blades and firing arrows, she deserved it.
Just as she deserved to have her hair cut and her nails shaped by Halos.
Arla smiled as she reached her friend’s door, ignoring the urge to pocket the leather pouch dangling temptingly from a man’s belt as he passed by her a little too close.
It would be his own fault, really; he had made it easy for her.
But Arla knew how desperate people were for money, and even she could not steal from the citizens of Hadalyn, not anymore, and no matter how stupid they were.
Halos had placed a bell above the door since Arla’s last visit, and she wondered if that meant there had been trouble with thieves. The thought left a bitter taste in her mouth.
The bell had done its job, though, and as a teetering toddler crossed the floor of the busy shop at a speed that was unnatural for such little legs, Arla’s eyes met Halos’s amber ones across the heads of two old ladies.
‘Arla Reinhart.’ Halos grinned, scooping the child, Neb, up in her arms as she made her way towards her friend.
‘It has been a while, hasn’t it?’ Arla laughed, stroking the hair of Neb’s twin, Ettie, who had materialised at her feet. Neb and Ettie had grown since Arla had last seen them, and she regretted that she had not visited them in so long that she was shocked they recognised her.
‘Look at you,’ Halos fussed, with one hand picking up untamed coils of hair that had grown long enough to now end below Arla’s breasts. ‘Arla, for the gods’ sake, you should come by more often.’
Arla chuckled, squeezing Ettie’s hand in hers as the little girl pulled her towards the back of the shop behind her mother.
Halos placed Neb on the floor and dragged a cushioned chair out, gesturing for Arla to sit.
The chair looked new and barely used, and it eased something in Arla’s heart to know that Halos could still afford new furniture for her shop despite having to raise the twins by herself.
‘I try, but you know how things are. The king’s had me running halfway across Hadalyn every evening—’
‘Arla,’ Halos interrupted, handing the twins a carved wooden horse to keep them occupied. ‘I don’t pretend to understand what it is that keeps you in the king’s employment, but I hope you realise it’s not always their fault – the people he sends you after, I mean.’
Arla sighed, running a hand through her tangled hair.
This was why she hadn’t made time to come and see Halos.
Her friend didn’t understand. She made Arla look at herself the way other people looked at her.
Funny, that for an assassin whose identity should have been unknown even to those closest to her, most people in Hadalyn could recognise her if they came face to face.
It was something she knew bothered Cyrus, but she didn’t care.
She enjoyed the look of panic that flashed across the faces of her victims when they realised who had come for them.
She hated that she enjoyed the job at all.
‘I have nowhere else to go, Hal. The king offered me a chance and I took it.’
‘Didn’t,’ Halos said, her voice light and her eyes averted as she prepared the jasmine-scented soap for Arla’s hair.
‘You didn’t have anywhere else to go. You do now, Arla.
The money you earn would buy you one of those lovely cottages on Grey Hill and you could get a job that doesn’t involve killing people. ’
Arla sighed. How quickly they had fallen back into this old routine: Halos too good to harm anyone, and Arla too wicked to care.
‘I’m good at my job,’ Arla muttered, tipping her head back into the basin so Halos could wash the dirt and gods knew what else from her curls.
‘It’s not a good thing, Arla. People die at your hand.’
‘I know.’ It was barely a whisper against the argument with which she couldn’t help but agree.
Arla wished she didn’t enjoy hurting people or handing out justice in the name of the crown, but it gave her someone to blame.
And when the Kastonians were not readily available, she would take her parents’ deaths out on the citizens of Hadalyn.
What sort of a person did that make her?
‘Horse,’ a tiny voice said beside her, pressing the wooden carving into Arla’s empty palm.
Ettie was a beautiful child, with her mother’s amber eyes and dark hair and skin, and an innocence that Arla wished would stay safe within the toddler forever.
Her brother wasn’t any different; two children born into a world that was crumbling, into a world where they would have to fight to earn a place at the table. All of it was wrong.
‘I take it this isn’t a social visit. You’re off out again, I presume?’ Halos asked, wringing the water from Arla’s now clean hair.
‘I wish it was a social. Cyrus has stuck me with that Kastonian prick from the palace. We’re off to the northern border in the morning,’ Arla said, forcing the words through her teeth and squeezing the wooden horse tighter as she thought of Hark and his infuriatingly handsome face.
In another life, if he hadn’t been born with Kastonian blood, she might have learned to like him.
‘Oh, Arla, don’t pretend to be so miserable. I certainly wouldn’t mind being huddled next to a campfire with Hark Stappen.’ Halos laughed, scrunching Arla’s damp curls before taking her left hand and inspecting her broken nails.
‘He’s arrogant, and rude, and seems to think that being an ambassador makes him not only more important than me, but untouchable.’
‘I’d be careful, if I were you. I’ve heard he’s just as good as you with a sword, if not better, and I wager he’ll be a darn sight better at other things than some of the other men you’ve taken to your bed.
The last one wasn’t even a noble, I heard!
’ Halos teased, and Arla couldn’t help the snort of laughter that escaped her.
Her friend laughed, too. ‘Let’s have dinner tonight. It’s been so long since I saw you last, and if you’re heading out again…’
An ache grew in Arla’s chest. She was a terrible friend.
When was the last time she had made time to swim with Halos in the Canus River that wound past her old home and by the palace?
They had spent hours and hours together in the clear, deep water when they were growing up, learning to swim and dive and forgetting about the world if only for a little while.
Arla swallowed. ‘Dinner sounds good.’
‘Perfect. Early though, because the twins have to be asleep before the sun goes down or there’ll be hell to pay tomorrow,’ Halos said, holding Arla’s hand flat as she moved to press a blade against the callouses Arla had spent years hardening.
Arla snatched her hand back before the blade could bite into the rough ovals.