Chapter 7
Seven
Fieran
The Nightwalker met me at the edge of the lower city, in the narrow street behind the spice merchant’s warehouse, where the cobblestones were old enough to be uneven and the lamplight didn’t quite reach all the shadows, even when it should have.
A deliberate location on both our parts.
One didn’t meet a Nightwalker in a well-lit room if one could avoid it.
Darkness was where they were comfortable, and a comfortable Nightwalker was less likely to turn lethal.
He stepped out of a shadow that shouldn’t have held anyone.
“You look well,” he said by way of greeting. “Slaying monsters and causing problems for the queen seems to agree with you.”
Betraying the queen seemed to agree with him. It certainly pleased me. “Why did you ask for a meeting? Are you in danger?
Every time we met was dangerous for him, and I feared losing my contact. A Nightwalker willing to rebel—or even capable of doing so to any extent, given the enchantment—was a gift. I didn’t hold his life lightly.
Riven had been feeding me information out of the queen’s household for three years, for reasons that were his own.
He was lean, almost slight. The Fae always carried more strength than seemed possible in their frames, and he was no exception.
The queen’s enchantment was reflected in the glossy, impenetrable sheen of his gaze, though he had slipped her enchantment enough to rebel.
“The queen has tasked Clan Obsidian with an interesting mission.” He reached into his coat and produced a folded sheet. “A knife. Old work, pre-Accord if the art is accurate. Capable of severing magical bindings.”
I took the sheet. It portrayed a knife, rather crudely rendered—the queen had killed quite a lot of her own Fae at this point, and apparently several of the ones with more artistic flair—marked in old runes, which Riven had decoded into plain language in the margins.
The knife had a name in old Fae that translated roughly to the unmaking edge.
I didn’t trust any turn this fortuitous, and I glanced beyond him into the shadows, waiting for the queen’s trap to spring. “This cannot be real.”
“Then the queen is sending Obsidian on a fool’s errand for some reason.” He shrugged, disinterested.
“She wants it for herself,” I said.
“That is the implication of sending a clan to retrieve it.”
“Or she wants it destroyed.”
Riven said nothing, which was his way of indicating I was not even worth disagreement.
He was probably right. The queen collected instruments of power the way some people collected trinkets.
The knife could sever enchantments. The runes suggested it would not sever everything—not bindings taken on by ancient magic, like the marriage bond—but enchantments inflicted on others, like those on Tay.
But perhaps there was more to it than that. Perhaps this was so important now because she could envision a way to undo my tie to Cara. Could it be used to cut away a dragon mark?
I held that thought for one moment and then set it aside. Useful, but not the most urgent thing. There was the faintest sound, and my head snapped up.
“Hold,” Riven said, raising a hand to my arm. He didn’t touch me; Nightwalkers touched no one without drawing their blood, or at least, that was the legend. Which they likely spread themselves.
He spoke toward the shadows. “You are ready to be known?”
“You brought a friend to our party?” More Nightwalkers were losing their loyalty to the queen? What a fascinating and useful bit of information.
“I’ve brought my accomplice.” Riven glanced back toward the shadow, which I was almost certain contained nothing, and then it contained a second figure, stepping forward with the unhurried ease of nightmares. “She’s on your side.”
The woman who emerged into the narrow reach of the lamplight was lithe and dark haired. She moved silently, but when she saw my face, she studied my face with the careful attention of someone trying to place a half-familiar thing.
Tesa.
Ander’s Tesa.
Dead for four years. Dead in the conflict that had fractured Ander’s history into the before and after, that had remolded him.
I had imagined her face in my own nightmares, bloodied, afraid, eyes staring blankly.
So unlike the lively woman I had known. For a moment, I could not make sense of what I was seeing, could not fathom that my nightmares could have been lies.
Tesa’s voice was low and uncertain. “I think I know your face.”
“You may have seen me at court.” And not in the thousand memories that tried to play now.
Tesa raising a glass to me in a teasing toast, with Ander smiling affectionately at us both. Her holding a finger to her lips to warn me to silence as she crept behind Ander to tackle him.
She was always surprising him; he would pin her down and kiss her, with great focus no matter what I threw at them.
“No.” She frowned as if she were looking for something she had lost. “It’s something else.”
“How long have you been working for the queen?” I asked.
“Two years. Perhaps longer.” Something shifted in her expression, just briefly. “Memory is not always reliable.”
She had not asked my name. Riven had not offered mine or hers. Did she still know herself to be Tesa?
She was still studying me. She should have known me immediately.
A dozen memories continued to chase each other through my mind.
Standing around a bonfire together. Eating Ander’s cooking, which was truly the most regrettable thing about him.
She had retrieved the burnt meat from my hand behind his back—she was gifted at sleight of hand—and tried to feed it to Rees, but Rees had rejected it, so we had been caught.
Ander had declared us both ungrateful wretches.
She had loved him. She had loved me, because Ander and I had been like brothers. One came with the other.
None of that was in her face now. Only the shadowy confusion of knowing someone but not being able to place them in time.
“The knife,” I said, returning to Riven. “When does Obsidian move?”
“Obsidian inconveniently does not share their plans with me. You’ll have to do some work yourself, shifter.”
“Very well. I thank you for the information.”
“You’ll owe me.”
“I owe you much, Riven. I intend to repay you with freedom and more.”
“I was in her guard when the queen hosted a spy this morning whose news left her in wrath,” Tesa announced eagerly.
She still had the directness of someone who had grown accustomed to making herself useful at any cost, and other memories tried to rise up like ghosts.
We had been three orphans together once.
“The spy had found something in the Low Fae court of King Nez.”
“Nez,” I repeated. He was a Low Fae lord, dangerously loyal to my mother. Or so I had thought.
“He has been keeping this knife a secret from the queen.” Her gaze rose to mine. “She immediately summoned Obsidian’s first. She implied violence in the retrieval would not be undesirable.”
“Why would she send Obsidian and not the Nightwalkers?”
“She must desire discretion. She ordered Obsidian to ride, not fly. She doesn’t want Nez to receive any warning.”
I considered her reasoning before I began on the problem.
She only had so many Nightwalkers at her service; mortals could not be transformed.
I hadn’t known until I saw Tesa that any but the Fae could serve as Nightwalkers.
“Horses also let her create the appearance she wasn’t involved at all. Obsidian could be bandits.”
“They’ll have to journey through orc territory,” Riven observed.
“Always a pleasure.”
Even dragons dreaded dealing with orc territory; they had taken to catapulting rocks into the air at passing dragons.
Their king Braegan could not seem to get a hand on them.
I’d have to plan how to steal the knife from either Nez or Obsidian; if my mother needed it, I needed it more.
But I was curious about Tesa. “How did you come to serve in the queen’s household? ”
Tesa’s brow furrowed, slightly. “I was chosen to serve in her personal guard.” She paused. “I was—” Another pause. She did not recover from that one.
“Before that.”
The frown deepened, the expression of someone trying to read a passage they know they recognize and finding the letters have rearranged themselves. “I was elsewhere.”
“Where?”
Something in her gaze sharpened. “You ask as if you know the answer.”
“I ask because I’m trying to understand your history.”
“My history.” She repeated the words with a slight emphasis. Her gaze was steady. “You’re asking because you want to know what I know.”
She was intelligent. She had always been intelligent. That, at least, the queen had not touched.
“Yes,” I said. “I’ve seen you before. It was years ago, though. You weren’t a Nightwalker. You were just a girl.”
Tesa had never been quite just a girl. But it was close enough.
“I don’t remember everything. There are many gaps. If you can fill those gaps, I’d appreciate it.”
I looked at her face—this face that Ander had mourned for four years, that had become part of the architecture of his grief, that had turned him into something else—and I understood with a clarity that was cold and specific what I was looking at.
Forgetting was time and distance and the natural drift of things imperfectly held.
This was something that had been done to her.
And yet through whatever enchantments had been woven into her flesh and soul, she had still rebelled.
She had reasons she could not remember for betraying the queen.
If she remembered enough, she would have reasons for betraying me.
“I will find all I can about what’s been done to you and will report back,” I promised.
Her face shifted with relief, and I wanted to curse myself. If Ander knew she was alive, he would race to her. But it was the wrong time.
Once Cara was claimed by Lightbringer—once we had the knife—it might be time. Ander would be impossible to restrain if he knew she was alive.
“The knife,” I said to Riven, and my voice was exactly what it had been. “I need to move before Obsidian reaches it. I need all the intelligence you can gather.”
“You’ll have it.”
I looked once more at Tesa. She was watching me with that open, trusting steadiness. “We’ll speak again.”
I meant it. I didn’t say in what capacity.
I walked three streets before I let myself fully think about it.
If the knife could truly sever attachments, there was a path through this new tangle of thorns.
The queen had brought Tesa close because she intended to use her against Ander. That was the only reason to keep Tesa alive. My mind spun through the timing.
If I told him she was alive, it would not be a gift. Telling Ander she was alive, while she was altered and shaped by the queen’s enchantments, was cruel.
If I had the knife in hand…if I could bring her back, changed, but once more Tesa…I could repair some part of what I had done to him.
Most of all, the queen was only enraged by what troubled her plans. That meant I needed that knife.
Clan Obsidian was already moving toward it. I would have to move faster.