Wicked Endeavors

Prologue

Present Day

M ARISOL V INYET WAS IN EXILE FOR THREE MONTHS before she was allowed a visitor.

Rumors claimed that the list of requests to meet her had grown embarrassingly long after only a day.

She was a cautionary tale of what happened to those who challenged the Trident.

She was a failed revolutionary whose unjust cause had been thoroughly annihilated.

She was a disgraced noble, a magic thief.

A whispered warning.

A knife in the dark.

But Marisol Vinyet was also a nineteen-year-old girl with midnight eyes and a story to tell. Everyone wanted to be the one to hear it.

He had killed for the chance.

The Council had exiled the scourge of witchkind to the man-made islet of Santesa, visible from the coast of Coventry.

Before her arrival, it had been uninhabitable.

Since then, they had added a vegetable garden, a copse of fruit trees, and a tower that provided shelter.

Anything else the prisoner might need was brought to her in a small boat steered by a rotating staff of welks, as those without magic were called.

If she never saw the same nonmagical people twice, then she couldn’t turn them to her cause.

Though it was unclear, even now, exactly what her cause was. That was one of many things he hoped to find out.

The sun hung directly overhead, suspended in a cloudless sky.

A crafter from House Vida conjured a breeze to shove their boat across the whispering tides.

A morpher from House Cambio checked his body and satchel for weapons, turning the fabric transparent until they located nothing but his money, which they took, and his pocket watch, which they didn’t.

Even her room—on the top floor of an endless spiral staircase—had two more witches in it, all dressed in black so he wouldn’t know what their powers were until they had to use them.

He supposed that was the point.

Marisol Vinyet sat on the edge of her bed, wearing a simple white cotton gown with puffed sleeves.

Her legs were daintily crossed at the ankles, her feet bare.

Her thick hair had been pulled into a low ponytail, curls creeping around her shoulders.

She looked like what she was: a teenage girl.

The most dangerous teenage girl in the Alban Peninsula, but a teenage girl all the same.

“Hello,” she said. “It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

“The pleasure,” he replied, gaze sweeping the area, “is entirely mine.”

They’d given her a twin-size bed, which was placed opposite the only window.

Bars blocked her view of the blueberry sky.

She had a desk and a chair, a stack of paper and a fountain pen, a gas lamp and a fraying rug that gave the illusion of coziness.

The door he’d come through locked from the outside.

He sat at the desk, withdrawing a pad and pen from his bag. “Thank you for agreeing to see me. I’m sure you know that this is the kind of story that can build a reputation.”

Marisol Vinyet smiled, and his breath caught in response.

That was the kind of smile that people fought wars for and wrote poems about.

The kind of smile that drove people to madness in their desire to preserve it.

It had been far too long since he’d seen that kind of smile, and he was unprepared for the unfiltered radiance of it.

“I do know a thing or two about reputations,” she said. “I also know why they’ve let you come.”

“Do you?”

Marisol gazed toward the window, her smile dying quietly. “It’s time for my execution.”

The guards seemed unsurprised by her conclusion, which she delivered with the straight-backed posture of a soldier.

Whatever her cause, she had accepted that she might die for it long ago—and she wanted her last words to mean something.

He thought of the wide-eyed biographer whose throat he had cut and whose body he had sunk in the river.

This story would have taken that man from cheap serial literature to prestige narrative nonfiction, if he’d lived long enough to write it.

“I don’t know where to start. All the times I imagined this…” Her lips twitched. “Well, not this exactly . I knew I’d want to tell someone the truth of me, but I didn’t think it would be you.”

His fountain pen glided across a new page of his notebook like a dancer improvising a routine. Once he’d filled half the lined paper with preliminary notes, he met Marisol’s gaze again.

“Well, it’s me,” he said. “And, for the record, I highly doubt that the story you’re about to tell me is the truth.”

“It’s my truth. Isn’t that all that matters?” Before he could form a reply, Marisol was turning to the nearest guard. “Could you get us both some tea? Black is fine.”

He expected the guard to laugh—or to simply ignore her. She was a prisoner, not a guest. A convict who carried herself like aristocracy was still in chains. But the guard crossed to the door and disappeared down the stairs.

Marisol shrugged in response to the question he hadn’t asked. “We’ve been trapped here long enough to reach an understanding.”

“And what is it that they understand?”

“I’m harmless.” Her brows lifted imperiously. “And I like tea.”

Soon, a silver tray was set on the desk.

Two cups, a small kettle. Containers of sugar, honey, milk, and cream.

A bag of black tea leaves sat on the floor of each cup.

They mixed their own, and he only half expected his beverage to be drugged.

He still drained the whole thing, because no one here would hurt him.

They could. But they wouldn’t.

“I still don’t know exactly where to start,” Marisol said, swirling more honey into her tea.

Her long lashes lowered, giving her a look of lazy contemplation.

Steam caressed the lovely lines of her face.

“But I guess the story you really want begins a year and a half ago, the day I first met Gaspar Ruiz.” Her expression hardened, as perilous and distant as the peaks of a mountain. “The man who ruined my life.”