The Instruments of Revival (A Vow of Blood and Tears #2)

Prologue

It was the unusual silence of the night that woke Anto.

Curled in the back of the smithy with Letti nestled against his side like a fawn, he opened his eyes and listened, frowning.

It was a cool night, the best time to sleep near the forge that still threw off heat, he and his little sister denning down in old oilcloth blankets and pretending to be bear cubs.

Anto knew that at twelve he was too old to pretend to be a bear cub, old enough that his father had promised him a sword by his next birthday, but Letti had tugged his arm and begged him not to leave her out there alone, and Anto had relented.

It wasn’t like it hurt anyone to pretend he’d stolen a dripping honeycomb and found a den for the winter, the other boys would never know, and besides…the cubby behind the forge was a nice den.

It was brick and stone, the floor covered in poky bits of scrap iron rather than the cozy earthen tunnel of their imaginations, lined with moss and loam and autumn leaves.

But sleeping out here with Letti was better than being packed into the one-room house, with their new little brother grizzling and crying all night.

Ma had deep purple circles under her eyes most days, and Da no longer whistled when he came out to the yard in the morning, but Anto assured Letti that this would pass.

It had been much the same when she was born, and he had suddenly found himself making way for a new child underfoot in a house that had once felt much larger.

At least in the smithy it was only night-sounds they heard, rather than crying, and Letti didn’t snore at all.

She was all legs and elbows and missing teeth and cold toes, and Anto would never admit it out loud, but if he went to bed and she wasn’t clinging to his back like one of the tiny monkeys they’d seen in a merchant’s wagon, he knew that sleep just wasn’t going to be as restful.

But there were no night-sounds tonight.

Anto shifted, his foot kicking out, and something metallic scraped on the brick floor.

He’d forgotten the game of Lord’s Castle Letti had set up earlier, using bits and pieces of iron from his father’s scrap bucket in place of the polished ivory and ebony pieces used by real Lord’s Castle players.

The merchants who came south from Port Coran sometimes played a round or two with the village gamblers, and Anto loved times like these, when they rolled through in their colorful wagons, carrying monkeys and Castle boards and golden swords and Nord runes and all other manner of magical things with them.

But the stories they traded were the best. Tales of their beastly lords, the Wolf War, sometimes even tales from across the sea: the Veil of Mist no man returned from, the wild and hungry forests of the Southern Expanse where few merchants dared to tread, and the fabled city of gold, ruled by a woman with a lion’s face.

He wished he could sneak out to the caravan now and beg a story. It was impossible to sleep with that silence pressing on his ears.

All the twisted bits of iron were scattered around their ‘den’, and Anto just knew that if he got up in the dark he’d end up with a nail in his foot. He sighed, and immediately wished he could withdraw that breath into his lungs, steal the sound back from the air.

His sigh was loud tonight.

There were no singing crickets, no soft judgments from the owls, not even the occasional rustle of something larger creeping its way through the forest surrounding Lonmire.

The River Nicla, an ever-present murmur in the background of their lives, was subdued and silent, as though the water itself had gone still.

His father’s low snores had stopped. Even Tasos, the baby, was quiet.

Anto sat up slowly, listening hard, his shoulders aching. He’d served as a true apprentice today, helping his father unload crates of iron ingots, until the man had appeared in the door of the smith’s yard.

Oddly, this was where Anto’s thoughts settled as he listened to the silence. The stranger had been a nobleman, with deep blue eyes and golden hair and a velvet coat, but there was something…wrong about him.

The man had been as thin as a scarecrow. Scary-thin, caked in dirt and reeking foully, and young, though deep lines had been chiseled around his eyes and mouth.

He had called upon Da, asking to store a small shipment of jarred sardines in the fish-drying shed, his limbs jittering and shaking, eyes bulging at odd moments, lips twitching when he grinned too widely.

And when the stranger smiled at Anto, Da had quickly hurried him out, standing between his son and the nobleman. Later, Da had told him that the man might have smoked jara root or drank glaze, the thick liquid that made men prone to both violence and strange urges, but Anto didn’t think so.

Because, while Da had taken the stranger’s crate to the drying shed, accepting a gold coin for the storage fee that he’d later split with the fishmonger whose shed it was, the stranger had found Anto again.

He’d told Anto there was a coin for him too, if he delivered a message.

Anto had taken the sealed envelope and slipped out right under his parents’ noses. The caravan was five miles away, camped to the south of the village, but that was nothing for a motivated smith’s apprentice of twelve.

The envelope stank as badly as the man himself, but was sealed with a proper wax seal, and Anto didn’t pry it up out of curiosity.

He couldn’t read the shaky, heavily-flourished name on the envelope, but there was a ‘lai’ in the middle, and it was best not to get involved in the business of the high nobility.

The caravaneer took the envelope, and when Anto returned to Lonmire, he received the promised payment.

But it was a coin of a kind he’d never seen before.

The metal was smooth, almost silky to the touch, and so intensely black it seemed to absorb light rather than reflect it.

If he tilted it just right, he could make out a strange sheen of colors moving through the darkness: the greens and purples and yellows of a bruise.

It was tucked into Anto’s pocket, until the next time the caravan came through and he could ask what it was, and what it might be worth.

Maybe it could buy a sword, or his own hammer.

Maybe, and Anto would never admit this plan out loud, he would have some left over to buy Letti one of those dolls from Nordrin, the kind with a painted porcelain face and little silk clothes and tiny leather boots that were laced with real ribbons, but best of all, a key in the back that wound the doll so she’d move her arms and legs.

It had all been so strange. The smith and the fishmonger had been paid in gold and Anto in strange black metal, and then the nobleman with a lai in his name had left.

No horse. No carriage. He’d simply walked out on his own feet, across the bridge and into the wilds where the faerie mounds loomed like idols. Da and the wheelwright had whispered about it over supper, their faces set in wary frowns.

And now Anto woke with his shoulders and back still aching, and the silence pressing in on his ears, his thoughts lingering on that odd man.

He sat there, ramrod straight and tense, listening with all his might.

When the first muffled thump came from outside the smithy, he relaxed at once.

It was still full dark, the moon gleaming outside the window.

The fishermen would be up soon, making their way to the Nicla to throw out the nets for the morning rise, or the bakers were preparing the morning loaves.

Then came a man’s voice, cursing once in a soft voice.

The silence returned as though it’d never been broken, and Anto’s body thrummed with tension. He got to his knees, holding a hand out to sweep the iron bits away, looking towards the window.

Something was watching them through the glass.

Anto froze, heart hammering in his throat, as he stared back at the pale face.

White as the grave, long and stretched. Eyes like an owl’s, black teardrops, too large to be real.

It watched him, hungering.

A tiny sound drew Anto back to himself, and he looked around to find Letti sitting straight up, staring at the face.

It contorted. It smiled, but not like it knew what a smile was.

It looked like the things the elders spoke of, the reason they were never to touch the faerie mounds.

But this was not a story. It was real. It was here.

It lifted a long finger to the glass. The sharp reek of ammonia filled the air, but Anto didn’t give a damn. He threw himself over Letti in a crouch, his little sister’s fear-piss soaking into his knees, and dragged the thick blanket over them both.

She was rigid and trembling, and Anto pressed his hand over her mouth when he felt her lungs fill.

“Don’t scream,” he whispered, barely above a breath.

They were surrounded by iron. Cold iron. In all the stories, the hero had cold iron.

Nothing came for them. Nothing ripped off the blanket and took them to strip their flesh and crack their bones.

There was only the sound of their frantic, sawing breaths, and a long hiss of air, and then…

And then, the sound of footsteps.

One pair. Then another.

Then ten. Twenty. Fifty.

What sounded like the shuffling feet of the entire village.

The feet shambled, slipped, careened. It became a susurrus of unending sound, dry and dusty and somehow dispirited, a thousand whispers amplified to a mindless roar.

Anto felt Letti choke on a cry beneath his palm; his knees burned, his back ached, but he remained her shield, even under the muggy, reeking oilcloth that trapped their breath in a stifling cloud.

Even when the sound of shuffling feet died out and the silence reigned supreme.

Even as the long hours of the night passed and his lungs begged for fresh air.

He guarded her, stalwart and shaking and terrified, until the sun rose on a village emptied of souls.