Steelborn (The Steelborn Saga #1)

Chapter One The Thief

CHAPTER ONE

THE THIEF

Reya Connery braced herself flat against the underside of the bridge, nothing beneath her but air.

Any minute now, she thought, fingers and soles digging into the floor beams. Sweat shone like a crown across her brow. Her eyes tracked a glistening bead as it plummeted to the cobblestones three stories below.

It was hardly the first time she’d risked her neck for a purse full of coin, but if she did her job correctly—and she always did—it would be the last. A strand of copper hair she could never quite bring to heel escaped from the elaborate braid tucked inside her hood, and she muttered a quiet curse when it fluttered into her line of vision.

“Careful, Red, or you’ll give yourself away,” Gavin goaded her, arms quivering as he strained to keep straight-backed between the stringers.

She would have given him a vulgar gesture were their limbs not all that held them perched above the streets of Edris.

“Where the rotting hell are they?” Zaim groaned on her other side. “I’m raining sweat.”

Reya pinched her eyes shut, breathing through her nose. It had been a long day, and she’d just cleaned her armor. However, if the two imbeciles beside her didn’t stop whining, she was prepared to clean it again, despite how difficult it would be to scrub their bloodstains from the leather.

She just had to get through tonight. Then she would be free.

Before she could tell them both to hold their tongues lest she remove them, a cacophony of bouncing chainmail and clattering hooves triggered a hyperawareness she felt everywhere. A caravan surrounded by armored and mounted Silver Guardsmen rounded the corner south of where they were hiding.

Finally.

The impressive convoy was exactly as her employer had described. Three carriages conjoined at the base, one in front of the other. Six sentries on horseback. Two more stationed on a platform at the rear. One armed driver.

Not enough to stop them.

Her words were little more than a puff of air: “On my mark.”

They had no ropes or grappling hooks. To land directly atop the caravan, they had to time their fall perfectly.

This would work. After all, it was her plan.

“Now.”

Against the starlit backdrop of the Rhiterran Empire’s famed capital city, three thieves dropped from the sky.

Reya plunged into the night, midnight-blue cloak whipping behind her like a banner of war.

Her stomach rose with the sudden weightlessness, but years of training kept her dinner down.

The caravan crossing under the overpass reached up to greet her.

Reya bent her knees as her boots hit the hood of the second carriage with a thud she felt in every limb, already palming two daggers from the arsenal of steel strapped across her hips and thighs.

Zaim landed onto the bench next to the driver, stole the reins, and shoved the poor man off before he even realized what was happening.

“Ambush!” one of the sentries shouted.

“On your left,” Reya said, and threw. Gavin crouched just in time to miss the blade that shot over his shoulder. She sent another flying, and another, aiming for the joints in the sentries’ armor: where the shoulder met the arm, the hip met the leg, and the jaw met the neck.

Two riders broke off from the convoy, while another lifted a signal flare.

Reya moved, dagger poised to sever the tendons in his wrist, but an arrow tore through his trachea first, saving her the trouble. Four more blue-cloaked figures appeared, sprinting across the rooftops alongside the caravan and unloading their quivers on the sentries.

A bolt whistled past her ear. With a hiss, she twisted with the kind of speed she’d earned through pain, glaring at the Silver Guardsman who had missed her cheek by a hair’s breadth.

He moved to reload, but not quickly enough.

Her dagger found its mark in the man’s eye, and he fell from his saddle with a choked scream, his white stallion cantering on without him.

Reya kissed the air in the horse’s direction, sending a silent wish on the wind that it would find its way out of the city and into the ancient wilds of the north.

Zaim whistled sharply in warning from the driver’s bench before snapping the reins.

Their spotters fell back, and Reya and Gavin braced themselves as the caravan jolted forward with renewed speed, the sleeping city a blur of color and light as they flew past. She felt every rattle of the wheels over the cracked stones.

To the Silver Guard, Reya and her cohorts were known simply as “those rotting assholes.” But the criminal world knew them as the Bluehoods.

They were far and above Rhiterra’s most dangerous outfit, helmed by Lennox Raulin, the empire’s ruling crime lord.

Reya preferred to work alone, as she so often did these days, but Lennox had insisted this job was too big for one person.

Do this, kiddo, and you and I will be square, Lennox had told her.

Come sunrise, for the first time in a decade, her days would be hers to decide.

“Eyes up,” Reya said with a nod to the rear, one hand on her steel as the two sentries on the platform—all that remained of the guard—began climbing toward them.

The Rhiterran imperial crest gleamed on their breastplates: an airborne eagle clutching a serpent in its talons, wings splayed around an eight-pointed star.

The scene was meant to symbolize the empire rooting out the world’s corruption.

The hypocrisy of it nearly made her roll her eyes.

The snakes were not slithering through the world King Rothmire was set to conquer; they were right here in his capital, getting rich.

Reya would know—she was one of them.

Gavin was already darting for his chosen target. Of course, he’d taken the smaller of the two men.

“Rotting coward,” Reya muttered, drawing her fighting knives and adjusting her stance as the caravan went over another divot on the road.

In the cold light of the two waxing moons, her opponent’s eyes raked along the feminine curves beneath her armor.

She could practically read his thoughts as he sized her up, smirking when he marked the delicate features on display above the navy strip of fabric obscuring the lower half of her face: the high, freckled cheekbones and emerald eyes rimmed with the deepest sapphire.

Despite how her body angled toward him in violent challenge, he did not deem her a threat.

That error of judgement would be his last.

“You know,” Reya said, “every man I’ve ever fought has looked at me with that same expression. And every single one has fallen just the same.”

She waited for him to make the first move.

The second he did, she knew he and his partner were not run-of-the-mill Silver Guardsmen.

These soldiers had been chosen to dispatch the worst kind of threats.

Size was his advantage, so speed would have to be hers.

She began a dance she could have performed in her sleep, sidestepping his swings again and again even as the carriage rattled beneath her boots.

Reya swept out her leg, hoping to bring him to his knees, but he anticipated her.

She was up again in an instant. Time slowed as he made to cut her in half, and she flew into a backbend, watching the soldier’s blade soar over her face.

Reya had to give him credit: He was lasting longer than most Silver Guardsmen who’d tried to kill her.

His overconfidence turned to frustration, and she grinned beneath her mask. The hem of her cloak whipped in a gust, moonslight flashing on the ruby-encrusted dagger that never left her side. The man’s jaw slackened as he realized who he was fighting.

She loved this part, when at last they saw her for the menace she was.

His controlled movements turned increasingly erratic with his rage as he lunged again into the place she’d been standing.

Reya feinted left and took the opening to drive her dagger up into his helmet.

But he caught her wrist and headbutted her—hard.

With a stream of curses so colorful she was certain her ancestors were looking down from the stars in shame, she put distance between them, dodging his thrusts by the sound of the blade cutting the air.

She curled and uncurled her toes, clenched and unclenched her fists, until the world slipped back into focus.

Reya could count on one hand the number of times that had happened to her in the last five years.

Cool air touched her lips, and she realized her mask had slipped; the fabric hung like a scarf around her neck. The soldier, smug with imagined victory, studied her face in enough light to describe it to a sketch artist. She didn’t bother fixing the mask. He would be dead in a minute.

Reya stowed her fighting knives and tugged her father’s sword from its sheath across her back; she could still feel the impression of his hand on the worn, leather-wrapped hilt.

Using the sword was like looking her father’s ghost in the eye. It hurt every time. But she savored the pain.

They collided, steel clashing and glinting in the moonslight as the caravan tore through the streets.

Reya dared take her eyes off him long enough to note the building they’d just passed.

He was a gifted fighter, but there was only one person in this All-Gods-damned city who could best her.

When they rounded a sharp corner, she was ready for it, crouching down to grip the side of the carriage’s roof.

She’d made the Bluehoods walk the route over and over again until they knew every turn, curve, and bump—when to brace, when to lean, and when to hold on.