Chapter One
hand
snuffed out the light. I leaned over the edge of the greenhouse
trellis, wooden beams creaking beneath me. The
guards, as they had done every night I’d been spying, left soon as Lord
del Aer tucked his daughter in, and they followed him through the halls
of his estate. His daughter’s room was left unguarded except for the
ones patrolling the grounds. He couldn’t comprehend
someone killing his child to get at him.
I could.
I could because of him.
Lord Mattin del Aer was a good father and a terrible leader.
North Star. Deadfall. Riparian. Caldera. Winter.
The
five secret names of the Erlend nobles who allowed Nacea to be
destroyed by shadows. I knew only North Star, Caldera, and Winter by
their real names—Gaspar del Weylin, Mattin del Aer, and Nevierno del
Farone. I heard his name in my nightmares of the massacre he’d caused. I
felt it on my skin every time I wore my Opal mask. I tasted it every
time I muttered the last words my targets would ever hear.
Caldera. Caldera. Caldera.
The fourth Erlend lord on my list to kill and only the second one to die.
I
had carved their names into the inside of my mask. Our Queen had named
me Opal, her assassin and protector, and given me leave to kill my list.
I’d the whole of the Igna court to help me hunt them down.
And the hunt was on.
He
was predictable as an Erlend. He rose at dawn, flipped through reports
sent to him from the other traitor Erlend lords who’d seceded from Igna
barely two months ago, woke his daughter for breakfast, and
spent the day with a series of advisers, guards, and tutors, each more
boring than the last. He did not hear his citizens’ concerns or worries.
He
didn’t talk to them at all, just told them war was upon us and the time
to take up arms and reclaim Erlend was now. Didn’t even speak to them
in person to draft them. The flyers went up overnight, and
the rangers from North Star’s stronghold up north went out hunting for
dodgers the next day.
War.
Again. Always. Never ending so long as North Star and his Erlend lords
still clung to power and greed. There’d been no attacks yet. Only the
dead, stripped of clothes and skin and life, strung up across
the trees near the border.
We figured they were folks speaking out against the war. Wasn’t much left of them to identify.
Wouldn’t be much of Caldera left either after I was done with him.
Caldera’s
daughter snored. I slid a knife from its sheath, slipping the point
beneath the glass pane of her window. She slept on, and I pushed the
window up, the oil I’d squeezed into the tracks last night
keeping it quiet. A paper shade or shutters would’ve been easier, but
this worked just as well. They’d wonder how I entered with no shades cut
or shutters broken. They’d think the killer a shadow.
I
looked like one at least. The Left Hand of Our Queen—Emerald, Amethyst,
Opal, and Ruby—were her royal assassins and named for the rings she
wore. And I, the new Opal, had been gifted six masks. Three of
bone white and three of pure midnight blue, the sort of purplish black that made you think of deep caves and missing stars. I’d carved my list into each one.
North Star. Deadfall. Riparian. Caldera. Winter.
The
Erlend nobles who’d let the shadows tear my family to shreds, who’d ten
years to atone for hundreds of thousands of deaths and done nothing,
would know me as I knew them.
Bitterly.
Painfully. A wound so raw it still ached in the night when the dark
twisted like mage shadows. They’d made my whole world a nightmare.
And I would be theirs.
Caldera’s
daughter shifted, blankets tumbling to the floor, and I crawled into
her room, knife slicing through the leftover smoke of her reading
candle. The key to her father’s study, one of only two, hung
from the chain round her neck. I unhooked the chain from her head and
took the key. I had to return it.
It
would be better, Our Queen had said to me, one hand clutching my chin,
if Caldera’s fellows thought no doors or locks or guards could keep them
safe.
“Let
Erlend think we have made shadows anew and sent them after the nobles
who betrayed us,” she’d said. “After all, they made you the same way
they made the shadows—through violence and fear.”
I’d not given her an answer, didn’t think she’d deserved one yet, not with so many deaths staining her soul, but she was right.
I was Our Queen’s Honorable Opal, and I would kill Caldera as she saw fit.
If I did, she’d let me have the other lords on my list, and I wasn’t passing that up.
North Star. Winter.
They would be mine and mine alone.
I
tucked the blanket back around Caldera’s daughter and left. I could
comprehend killing his kid to get at him, but I wasn’t him. Caldera’s
daughter was no more at fault for her father’s deeds than Elise
was for hers, and only Caldera was dying tonight.
The
hallway outside her room was empty. I pressed my ear to the door of his
study, the only room with a lock on the outside and inside. Nothing.
Too thick for me to hear through and too thick for folks to
hear Caldera scream. I unlocked it, muffling the click with my hand,
and darted inside. The mechanisms reset behind me.
Caldera
was talking to himself. He gestured to the windowless walls, hands
flying through the air and back to me. A map twice as tall as me and
even longer detailed the continent in deep forest greens, wheat
yellow, and spring-water blue. The sliver of coastal land to the east
of Erlend was labeled as Erlend too, but instead of rolling green hills,
the cartographer had scratched it out in black and labeled it Fallow.
Only the northernmost tip of Nacea, the little
snaggletooth of land embedded in North Star’s mountain range home, was
green. It was labeled as Erlend.
“Absurd!”
Caldera flung the letter he’d been reading aside and ran his fingers
through his long, light hair. “That woman is absurd.”
I
walked up behind him till I was close enough to taste the gold-cold
scent of his gilded form and the lantern behind me cast three flickering
shadows against the wall. He froze.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “You won’t have to deal with her much longer.”
He shrieked and tried run. I grabbed the back of his shirt and yanked him down, sending him flailing to the floor.
“No
one can hear you, Caldera.” No windows. No guards. No threat of being
interrupted since the only two keys to the door were in this locked
room. “No one is coming to help.”
He crawled to his knees and pulled a chair between us. “How did you get—”
I pulled out his daughter’s key.
“How
well do you know your daughter?” I dropped it, let it clatter between
us, and pulled out a second knife. “I watched the shadows you let loose
in Nacea flay my family. I know every bloody part of them.
Do you know what your daughter’s bones look like?”
He
whimpered and I lived, furious and alive, Sallot Leon, auditioner
Twenty-Three, and Opal all crushed together by his hands. He didn’t know
fear like me. He didn’t know anything.
“Please,” he said. “Please, I don’t know anything. Don’t kill me.”
I
leapt over the chair and grabbed him, dragging him to the center of the
floor. He was tall and broad, healthier and heavier than most folks I’d
fought, and he ripped from my grasp once. I let him know freedom
for a breath.
“Help!”
He stumbled into the wall, knocking over a lamp and leaving the room at
the mercy of one single candle. “Help me!” He pounded against the door.
I laughed, and it echoed between my mouth and mask. The sound died too quick to be natural.
“You’re
Caldera. Your old flame Lena told me. No one likes you.” I leaned over
him, and my two shadows flickering at my feet followed. “She only nodded
when I said you’d been responsible for killing a whole
country. Said it sounded like you. Was it you?”
Lena
was one of the only Erlend nobles to stand with Igna and pledge her
loyalty to Our Queen again, and she’d given me Caldera’s name. He’d
tried to marry her once, to get ownership of her land back when
they’d both been Erlend and Erlend land could only be inherited by
Erlend lords, and he’d told her his secrets to make her fall in love.
“It wasn’t my idea.” He choked on the words.
I stepped on his ankle. “But you agreed to it.”
“I’m
sorry.” He flinched. “I’m sorry. I am. I have been since it happened,
all those people. I didn’t want to, but they made me.”
“Who?”
I asked, and when he shook his head, no names ready, I pulled out my
knife. “Who went by the names Riparian and Deadfall?”
“I don’t know.” He raised his arms like a shield. “I don’t know. Other than North Star, we never shared.”
He took my silence for consideration. “I’ve regretted it since. What do you want? Whatever you want, it’s yours.”
“You’ve
nothing I want.” I took his tear-streaked face in my hands. “Apologies
won’t bring my family back. They won’t clear the shadows from my mind.
They won’t change anything at all except the weight of
your guilt.”
I pulled him up.
“And it’s not heavy enough for what you did.”
I jammed my knife into his chest, watched his last breath leave his lips, and dropped him.
“If you were sorry,” I said to his corpse, “you’d not be doing it again.”
The
gaping wound in my soul that never healed and ached with each breath
only grew deeper at the sight of him. Each breath was cold and empty, a
sharp pain between my heart and ribs. I was split—the Sallot
Leon that could’ve been if Nacea stood whole, one that knew all of
their nation’s rituals and words, and the Sallot Leon that was, one that
knew only the press of five names against their face and the fractured
bones that came from offering mercy. I’d let
Winter live at Elise’s request, and he’d thrown me from a window. Folks
devoted so deeply to themselves never changed.
They stole and stole and stole.
“Nothing
can fix this.” I rifled through his desk and shelves, turning over
every scrap of paper for anything Our Queen would find useful. “Nothing
can help me, but I can help the world.”
Erlend had reduced us to nothing, to casualties in a ledger. They would do it again. I couldn’t let that happen.
A
fake wall shifted under my fingers. I pried the thin wood away from the
bottom of his desk drawer and shoved my hand into the space. Papers
crinkled. I grabbed them all.
Scraps and envelopes heavy with broken seals tumbled to the floor. I bent to pick them up.
Not seals. Not wax. An ear.
A tattered, runed human ear.
