HarperVoyagerUK Class of 2022 Sampler

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2022 E XC LU S I V E PREVIEW

Start your Voyage and get your first taste of some of 2022’s biggest new releases…

DAUGHTER OF THE MOON GODDESS Sue Lynn Tan A RIVER ENCHANTED Rebecca Ross THE EMBROIDERED BOOK Kate Heartfield THE BLOOD TRIALS N.E. Davenport THE FINAL STRIFE Saara El-Arifi HER MAJESTY’S ROYAL COVEN Juno Dawson BABEL R.F. Kuang THE BOOK EATERS Sunyi Dean

DAUGHTER OF THE MOON GODDESS Sue Lynn Tan Coming January 2022

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here are many legends about my mother. Some say she betrayed her husband, a great mortal warrior, stealing his Elixir of Immortality to become a goddess. Others depict her as an innocent victim who swallowed the elixir while trying to save it from thieves. Whichever story you believe, my mother, Chang’E, became immortal. As did I. I remember the stillness of my home. It was just myself, a loyal attendant named Ping’Er, and my mother residing on the moon. We lived in a palace built from shining white stone, with columns of mother-of-pearl and a sweeping roof of pure silver.

Its vast rooms were filled with cinnamon-wood furniture, their spicy fragrance wafting through the air. A forest of white osmanthus trees surrounded us with a single laurel in its midst, bearing luminous seeds with an ethereal shimmer. No wind nor bird, not even my hands could pluck them, they cleaved to the branches as steadfastly as the stars to the sky.

My mother was gentle and loving, but a little distant, as though she bore some great pain which had numbed her heart.

Each night, after lighting the lanterns to illuminate the moon,

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she stood on our balcony to stare at the mortal world below.

Sometimes I woke just before the dawn and found her still standing there, her eyes shrouded in memory. Unable to bear the sadness in her face, I wrapped my arms around her, my head just coming up to her waist. She flinched at my touch as though roused from a dream, before stroking my hair and bringing me back to my room. Her silence pricked me; I worried that I had upset her, even though she rarely lost her temper. It was Ping’Er who finally explained that my mother did not like to be disturbed during those times.

“Why?” I asked.

“Your mother suffered a great loss.” She raised a hand to stall my next question. “It’s not my place to say more.”

The thought of my mother’s sorrow pierced me. “It’s been years. Will Mother ever recover?”

Ping’Er was silent for a moment. “Some scars are carved into our bones— a part of who we are, shaping what we become.” Seeing my crestfallen expression, she cradled me in her soft arms. “But she is stronger than you think, Little Star. Just as you are.”

Despite these fleeting shadows, I was happy here, if not for the gnawing ache that something was missing from our lives.

Was I lonely? Perhaps, though I had little time to fret over my solitude. Every morning my mother gave me lessons on writing and reading. I would grind the ink against the stone until a glossy black paste formed, as she taught me to write each character with fluid strokes of her brush.

While I cherished these times with my mother, it was the classes with Ping’Er that I enjoyed the most. My painting was passable, and my embroidery dismal, but it did not matter when it was music I fell in love with. Something about the way the

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melodies formed, stirred emotions in me which I did not yet comprehend—whether from the strings plucked by my fingers, or the notes shaped by my lips. Without companions to vie for my time, I soon mastered the flute and qin—the seven-stringed zither— surpassing Ping’Er’s skills in just a few years. On my fifteenth birthday, my mother gifted me a small, white jade flute that I carried everywhere in a silk pouch that hung from my waist. It was my favorite instrument, its tone so pure even the birds would fly up to the moon to listen— though part of me believed they came to gaze at my mother, too.

Sometimes, I caught myself staring at her, entranced by the perfection of her features. Her face was shaped like a melon seed and her skin glowed with the luster of a pearl. Delicate brows arched over slender jet-black eyes which curved into crescents when she smiled. Gold pins gleamed from the dark coils of her hair and a red peony was tucked in one side. Her inner garment was the blue of the noon sky, paired with a white and silver robe that flowed to her ankles. Wrapped around her waist was a vermilion sash, ornamented with tassels of silk and jade. Some nights, as I lay in bed, I would listen out for their gentle clink, and sleep came easy when I knew she was near.

Ping’Er assured me that I resembled my mother, but it was like comparing a plum blossom to the lotus. My skin was darker, my eyes rounder, and my jaw more angular with a cleft in the center. Perhaps I resembled my father? I did not know; I had never met him.

It was years before I realized that my mother, who dried my tears when I fell and straightened my brush when I wrote, was the Moon Goddess. The mortals worshipped her, making offerings to her each Mid-Autumn Festival— on the fifteenth day of the eighth lunar month—when the moon was at its bright-

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est. On this day they would burn incense sticks for prayer and prepare mooncakes, their tender crusts wrapped around a rich filling of sweet lotus seed paste and salted duck eggs. Children would carry glowing lanterns shaped as rabbits, birds, or fish, symbolizing the light of the moon. On this one day a year I would stand upon the balcony, staring at the world below, smelling the fragrant incense which wafted up to the sky in honor of my mother.

The mortals intrigued me, because my mother gazed at their world with such yearning. Their stories fascinated me with their struggles for love, power, survival— although I had little comprehension of such intrigues in my sheltered confines. I read everything I could lay my hands on, but my favorites were the tales of valiant warriors battling fearsome enemies to protect their loved ones.

One day, while I was rummaging through a pile of scrolls in our library, something bright caught my eye. I pulled it out, my pulse leaping to find a book I had not read before. From its rough stitched bindings, it appeared to be a mortal text. Its cover was so faded I could barely make out the painting of an archer aiming a silver bow at ten suns in the sky. I traced the faint details of a feather within the orbs. No, not suns but birds, curled into balls of flame. I brought the book to my room, my fingers tingling as they clutched the brittle paper to my chest.

Sinking down on a chair, I eagerly turned the pages, devouring the words.

It began as many tales of heroism did, with the mortal world engulfed by a terrible misfortune. Ten sunbirds rose in the sky, scorching the earth and causing great suffering. No crops could grow on the charred soil and there was no water to drink from the parched rivers. It was rumored the gods of heaven favored

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the sunbirds, and no one dared to challenge such mighty creatures. Just when all hope seemed lost, a fearless warrior named Houyi took up his enchanted bow of ice. He shot his arrows into the sky, slaying nine of the sunbirds and leaving one to light the earth— The book was snatched from me. My mother stood there, flushed, her breaths coming short and fast. As she gripped my arm, her nails dug into my flesh.

“Did you read this?” she cried.

My mother rarely raised her voice. I stared blankly at her, finally managing a nod.

She released me, dropping onto a chair as she pressed her fingers to her temple. I reached out to touch her, afraid she would pull away in anger, but she clasped her hands around mine, her skin as cold as ice.

“Did I do something wrong? Why can’t I read this?” I asked haltingly. There appeared nothing out of the ordinary in the story.

She was silent for so long, I thought she had not heard my question. When she finally turned to me, her eyes were luminous, brighter than the stars. “You did nothing wrong. The archer, Houyi . . . he is your father.”

Light flashed through my mind, my ears ringing with her words. When I was younger, I had often asked her about my father. Yet each time she had fallen silent, her face clouding over, until finally my questions ceased. My mother bore many secrets in her heart which she did not share with me. Until now.

“My father?” My chest tightened as I spoke the word.

She closed the book, her gaze lingering on its cover. Afraid that she might leave, I lifted the porcelain teapot and poured her a cup. It was cold, but she sipped it without complaint.

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“In the Mortal Realm, we loved each other,” she began, her voice low and soft. “He loved you, too— even before you were born. And now . . .” Her words trailed off as she blinked furiously.

I held her hand to comfort her, and as a gentle reminder that I was still here.

“And now, we are parted for eternity.”

I could barely think through the thoughts cramming my head, the emotions surging through me. For as long as I could remember, my father had been no more than a shadowy presence in my mind. How often had I dreamed of him sitting across from me as we ate our meals, strolling beside me beneath the flowering trees. Each time I awoke, the warmth in my chest dissolved to a hollow ache. Today, I finally knew my father’s name, and that he had loved me.

It was little wonder my mother appeared haunted all this time, trapped in her memories. What had happened to my father? Was he still in the Mortal Realm? How did we end up here? Yet I gulped back my questions, as my mother wiped her tears away. Oh, how I wanted to know, but I would not hurt her to ease my selfish curiosity.

T IME TO AN IMMORTAL was as rain to the boundless ocean.

Ours was a peaceful life, a pleasant one, and the years passed by as though they were weeks. Who knows how many decades would have swept by in this manner if my life had not been tossed into turmoil, as a leaf torn from its branch by the wind?

It was a clear day, the sunlight streaming through my window. I set aside my lacquered qin, closing my eyes to rest. As before, silver flecks of light drifted into my mind, tugging and

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teasing at me—just as how the scent of osmanthus drew me to the forest each morning. I wanted to reach out to them but recalled my mother’s stern warning.

“Don’t go near them, Xingyin,” she had pleaded, her skin ashen. “It’s too dangerous. Trust me, they will fade.”

I had stammered my promise to her then. And over the years, I had kept my word diligently, too. Whenever a glint of silver beckoned to me, I thought furiously of other things— a song or my latest book—until my mind cleared and they faded away.

Yet it was harder each time, the lights blazing brighter, their call more tantalizing. The urge to reach out, almost overwhelming.

How brightly they glittered today, as though sensing my wavering resolve, the restless churning in my blood. I had felt this more often of late, a part of me yearning for . . . something which had no name. A change, perhaps. But nothing ever happened here. Nothing ever changed.

The lights did not seem dangerous. Was my mother mistaken? She had cautioned me against countless things, as harmless as climbing a tree or running through the halls, maybe recalling such perils from her mortal childhood. I drew closer to the radiance in my mind. Closer than I had ever been before.

Something clutched at me, dragging me away—was it fear or guilt? But reckless now, I tore through it as though it were cobwebs. I was at the brink, teetering on the edge. A current raced through my veins, whispers coiling between my ears. Leaning forward, I reached out— only to see the shimmering silver scatter as the starlight at dawn.

My eyes flew open, my senses tingling. I had no idea how long I sat there, lost in a daze. Beyond my window, the evening sun infused the sky with threads of rose and gold. The thrill gone; remorse sat like a stone in my chest. I had broken my

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promise to my mother. And worse yet, I wanted to do it again.

Those lights were not dangerous, they were a part of me— I knew that now with startling certainty. Why had she warned me from them? I will ask her, I decided, rising to my feet. I am old enough to know.

Just as I reached the entrance, a strange energy thrummed through the air, raising the hairs on the back of my neck. Immortal auras—unfamiliar to me— shifting and mingling as the clouds in the sky. I could not tell how many, although one seemed to blaze brighter than the rest, far stronger than my mother’s or Ping’Er’s.

Who had come here?

As I flung the doors open, my mother flew into my room. I stumbled back, knocking into a chair. Did she discover what I had done? Was she here to scold me?

I hung my head. “I’m sorry, Mother. The lights—” She grasped my shoulders. “Never mind that, Xingyin. A visitor has arrived. She mustn’t know you’re here. That you’re my daughter.”

My pulse raced at the thought of meeting someone new.

Then, her meaning sank in— as did her tone— and my excitement crumpled like a sheet of paper. “You don’t want me to meet your friend?”

Her arms fell away from me, the planes of her face hardening until they seemed carved from marble. “Not a friend. She is the Empress of the Celestial Kingdom. She doesn’t know about you, nobody does. And we can’t let them find you!”

Her words—tumbling out in a rush— startled me, despite the excitement which sparked within. I had read the Celestial Kingdom was the mightiest of the eight immortal lands, nestled like a precious teardrop at the heart of the realm. Its emperor

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and empress lived in a palace that floated upon a bank of clouds, from where they governed over the Celestials and mortals, and watched over the sun, moon, and stars. In all our time here, they had never deigned to visit our remote home, so why now?

And why did I have to hide?

A strange flutter in the pit of my stomach spread icy tendrils through my core. “Is something wrong?” I asked, hoping she would deny it.

She touched my cheek gently. “I’ll explain everything later.

For now, stay in your room and don’t make a sound.”

I nodded and she left, shutting the doors behind her. Only then did I realize my mother had not answered my question. I opened a book, dropping it down again, after reading the same line thrice. My fingers plucked a qin string, but then pinched it to muffle the note. As I stared at the closed doors, a burning curiosity engulfed me, consuming my fear. Slowly, I walked toward it, sliding it open a crack. Just one look at the Celestial Empress and I would return to my room. When would I get another chance to see her, one of the most powerful immortals in the realm? And she might even be wearing her Phoenix Crown, said to be crafted from feathers of pure gold and embellished with a hundred luminous pearls.

As silent as a shadow, I tiptoed down the long corridor that led from my room to the Silver Harmony Hall—the grandest room in our Pure Light Palace—with its marble floor, jade lamps, and silk hangings. Wooden pillars set into ornate silver bases added a touch of warmth to its pristine elegance. This was where I had always imagined we would entertain our guests, although we never had one until now.

Just around the corner, a soft voice drifted through. I strained my ears to listen.

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“Chang’E, have you been well?” The Celestial Empress’s cordial address surprised me. She did not sound so very fearsome.

“Yes, Your Celestial Majesty. Thank you for your concern.”

My mother’s voice was unnaturally bright.

A brief silence followed this exchange of courtesies. Crouching down by the wall, I craned my neck to peek into the room.

My mother knelt on the floor, her head bowed low. While across from her, seated in my mother’s own chair, had to be the Celestial Empress.

She was not wearing a crown, but an elaborate headdress crafted with jeweled leaves and flowers which clinked as she moved. As I stared at it— enthralled— a bud unfurled, blossoming into an amethyst orchid. Over her fingertips glinted pointed gold sheaths, curved as the claws of a hawk. The silver embroidery on her violet robe caught the fading light streaming through the windows. Unlike my mother’s delicate and calm aura, hers was strong, pulsing with heat. She was dazzling, but her glossy lips against her white skin made me think of freshly spilled blood on snow.

As befitting her exalted position, the empress had not come alone. Six attendants stood behind her— along with a tall immortal man, his complexion darker than the rest. Flat pieces of amber adorned his black hat, his inky robes were fastened with a bronze sash, and white gloves covered his hands. I knew nothing of the Celestial court, but the way he carried himself seemed to indicate he was of a higher rank than the others. Yet there was something about him I did not like, and as his pale brown eyes sliced across the room, I recoiled, pressing my back against the wall.

After a brief pause the empress spoke again, her voice now cooler than a piece of unworn jade. “Chang’E, a peculiar shift

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was detected in the energy here. Are you cultivating a secret power or harboring a forbidden guest, violating the terms of your imprisonment?”

I stiffened, my shoulder blades clenching at the haughty way she spoke. An eagerness seemed to coat each word as though she reveled in the idea of my mother’s wrongdoing. Empress or not, how dare she speak this way? My mother was the Moon Goddess, worshipped and loved by countless mortals! How could she be a prisoner? This place was more than our home; it was her domain. Who lit the lanterns each night? Who did the trees sway and sigh for as she walked past? How could she do anything here that wasn’t her right?

“Your Celestial Majesty, there must be some misunderstanding. My powers are weak, as you are aware. And no one else is here. Who would dare come?” my mother replied steadily.

“Minister Wu. Share your discovery,” the empress commanded.

Footsteps shuffled forward. “Earlier today a significant shift in the aura of the moon was detected. Unprecedented, in all my years of study. This can be no coincidence.”

In his smooth voice, I sensed an undercurrent of excitement.

Did he relish my mother’s troubles, as the empress seemed to?

Anger seared me at the thought, despite my prickling unease.

That rush in my veins earlier when I had touched the lights, the whispering in the air . . . had that somehow drawn them here?

“I hope our leniency has not made you bold,” the empress hissed. “You were fortunate before, to have been imprisoned here in comfort for stealing your husband’s Elixir of Immortality. You escaped the lightning whip and the flaming rod then.

But that will change if we discover you’re engaging in further deceit. Confess now and we might be merciful,” she lashed out,

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shattering the tranquility of our home.

My fist flew to my mouth, smothering my gasp. I had never asked my mother how she ascended to immortality, sensing it caused her pain. Yet ever since I read the tale of the sunbirds, one question kept winding through my mind: Where was my father? To hear he had been bestowed the elixir, and my mother was accused of stealing it . . . something twisted in my gut. The empress was wrong, I told myself fiercely, burying a treacherous kernel of doubt.

My mother neither flinched nor denied these vile accusations. Was she accustomed to such treatment from the empress?

As I peeked into the room again, she folded over to press her forehead and palms to the floor. “Your Celestial Majesty. Minister Wu. Perhaps this phenomenon was caused by the recent alignment of the stars. The Azure Dragon’s constellation has entered the path of the moon, which may have distorted our auras. When it passes, things will return to normal.” She spoke like a scholar who studied the skies, though I knew she had no interest in such matters.

A long silence followed, punctured by a rhythmic tapping. I grimaced at the thought of those pointed gold sheaths sinking into the soft wood of the armrest.

“That may be so, but we will come again. You have been left alone for far too long.”

I was glad for them to leave, despite the threat that lurked beneath the empress’s tone like a silk cord yanked tight. Unable to bear listening to more, I crept back to my room and lay on the bed, gazing out through the window. The sky had darkened into the elusive violet-gray of dusk, when the last of day gives way to night. My mind was numb, though I still sensed when those unfamiliar auras faded away. Moments later, my mother pulled

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the doors apart, her face whiter than the stone walls.

My doubts vanished. I did not believe the Celestial Empress.

My mother would never have betrayed my father. Not even for immortality.

I scrambled up from the bed, coming to her side. I was almost as tall as her now. “Mother, I heard what the empress said to you.”

She threw her arms around me, clutching me tight. Against her shoulder, I sagged with relief that she was not angry, though her body was taut with strain.

“We don’t have much time. The empress could return at any moment with her soldiers,” she whispered.

“What can they do? We did nothing wrong.” My stomach roiled, an unpleasant sensation. “Are we prisoners? What did the empress mean about the elixir?”

She leaned back to look into my face. “Xingyin, you’re not a prisoner here. But I am. The Celestial Emperor bestowed the Elixir of Immortality upon your father, for killing the sunbirds and saving the world. Houyi did not take it, though. There was just enough for one and he did not want to ascend to the skies without me. I was with child, our happiness seemed complete.

And so, he hid the elixir, only I knew where.”

Her voice broke then. “But my body was too weak to bear you. The physicians told us that you . . . that we would not survive the birth. Houyi did not want to believe them, he did not want to give up—bringing me to one after the other, searching for a different prognosis. Yet deep down, I knew they spoke the truth.” She paused, a tautness around her eyes like she was reaching into her memories, those which hurt. “When he was called to battle, I was left alone. The pains began then—far too early, in the deep of night. Such agony tore through my body,

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I could barely cry out. I was so afraid of dying, of losing you.”

As she fell silent, the question burst from me, “What happened?”

“I took the elixir from its hiding place, uncorked its stopper, and drank it.”

In the stillness of the room, all I could hear was the beating of my own heart. My hands were no longer warming my mother’s but were as cold as hers.

“Do you hate me, Xingyin?” she asked in a shaking voice.

“For betraying your father?”

The empress’s words were true. For a moment I could not move, my insides curling at the revelation. If my mother had not taken the elixir, perhaps we might have survived. My family, unbroken. Yet I knew how much she loved my father, how greatly she mourned his loss. And no matter what, I was grateful to be alive.

I swallowed the last of my hesitation. “No, Mother. You saved us.”

Her gaze was distant, veiled in memory. “Leaving your father ripped away a part of me. Though I must admit I did not want to die. Nor could I let you die. Only later did I learn that gifts from the Celestial Emperor came with unseen strings. That such decisions were not for mortals to make. The emperor was enraged that it was I who became immortal instead of your illustrious father. The empress accused me of using trickery to obtain immortality which I had not earned.”

“Did you explain?” I asked. “Surely if they knew it was to save us—” “I dared not. The empress seemed hostile, as though she bore some grudge against your father. She even accused him of ingratitude for spurning the emperor’s gift. I knew then she had

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sought to punish rather than reward him for killing the sunbirds. She would not hesitate to harm you. How could I tell them of your existence? To shield you from their wrath, I kept your birth a secret. I confessed my theft. As punishment, I was exiled to the moon— an enchantment cast upon me which binds me here for eternity. I cannot leave this place, no matter how much I want to.” In a low voice, she added, “A palace you cannot escape is a prison nonetheless.”

I struggled to breathe, my chest heaving like a fish flipped out of the water. I had thought our lives so peaceful, so safe from all the dangers in my books. To learn we had incurred the wrath of the most powerful immortals in the realm shook me to my core.

“But why did the empress come today, after all this time?”

“Our auras emanate from our lifeforce, the core of our magic—those lights you see in your mind. Since you were born, we did our best to conceal your power. Despite our efforts, the empress sensed you today.”

My throat closed tight. “I didn’t know. This is all my fault.”

How stupid and reckless I had been! Because I was bored I had ignored my mother’s warning, broken my promise, and hurled us into the gravest of danger.

“I am to blame, too. I told you not to reach for your magic, but I should have explained why—that it might alert the Celestial Kingdom to your presence.” She sighed. “It would have happened eventually; with every year you grow stronger. If they find you, our punishment will be severe— I have no doubt. I fear less for myself, but what they would do to you, an immortal child who was never meant to be.”

“What can we do?”

“The only thing we can. You must leave this place.”

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Fear glazed my skin like ice forming over a lake. To never see my mother again . . . I was suddenly afraid to let go of her.

“Can’t I stay with you? I’ll hide. Train me, so I can help.”

“We can’t. You heard the minister’s words. They will be watching us even more closely now. It’s too late.”

“Maybe you convinced them, maybe they won’t come back.”

A desperate plea, a childish hope.

“I may have bought us a little time. But the empress would not have come on a whim. They will return. And soon.” Her voice thickened, clogged by emotion. “We can’t protect you.

We’re not strong enough.”

“But where will I go? When will I see you again?” Each word was a blow, giving shape to the forming nightmare.

“Ping’Er will bring you to her family in the Southern Sea.” She spoke brightly now, as though trying to convince us both. “I hear the ocean is beautiful. You will have a good life there, free from the cloud that hangs over us.”

Ping’Er had shared with me all she knew of the lands beyond, stirring my imagination, which hungered for adventure.

The great sea was divided into four domains stretching from the eastern shore to the southern ocean, from the cliffs in the west to the waters in the north. I had been transfixed by her tales of the creatures who lived in the glittering cities underwater or upon the golden shores. How I had dreamed of exploring them.

Yet never had I imagined fleeing my home to do so. What use were adventures when there was no one to share them with?

Her hand closed around mine, dragging me back to the present. “You must never tell anyone who you are. The Celestial Emperor has informants everywhere. He would take your very existence as an unforgivable insult.” She spoke urgently, her eyes boring into mine until I choked out my promise to her.

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Leaning toward me then, she fastened something around my neck. A gold necklace with a small jade disc. It was the color of spring leaves, with a carving of a dragon on its surface. My fingers rubbed the cool stone, feeling a thin crack in the rim.

“This belonged to your father.” Her eyes were as dark as a moonless night. “Don’t tell anyone who you are. But never forget either.”

She held me close, stroking my hair. I kept my head down— cowardly—not wanting to see her leave, wishing this moment could last forever. Her knuckles brushed my cheek once, and then there was nothing except an aching emptiness.

Sinking onto the floor, I wrapped my arms around my knees.

Oh, how I wanted to scream and howl, and beat my fists against the floor. My hand flew to my mouth, muffling my hoarse sobs, but my silent tears . . . I let them stream down my face. In the single night it took the moonflower to bloom and wither, my life had been upended. My path, which had seemed a straight road, had taken a turn into the wilderness— and I was lost.

The room was dark, night had fallen. The moon was still cloaked in shadows as the lanterns had yet to be lit. Moonrise would be late in coming tonight.

Urgency jolted me into action. I did not wish to be discovered if Mother and Ping’Er would be punished. While death was rarely inflicted upon immortals, the empress’s threats of lightning and fire made my body clench in terror.

Ping’Er helped me wrap my belongings into a wide piece of cloth. “Not too many, and nothing too fine to avoid arousing suspicion.” Her eyes were rimmed red, but seeing my stricken expression, she added, “You’ll be safe in the Southern Sea, as well-hidden as one star in the heavens. My family will look after you and teach you all you need to know.”

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She knotted the ends of the cloth, forming a bag that she slung over my shoulder. “Are you ready?”

I would never be. Yet numb to everything, I nodded. What else could I do? I could not even blame the vagaries of fate when it was I who had brought this upon us.

As Ping’Er and I hurried through the entrance, heading east into the osmanthus forest, I glanced back, one last time. Never had my home seemed more beautiful than in this moment when I was pressing each curve, each stone into my mind. The thousand lanterns illuminated the soil, the silver roof tiles reflected the stars. And on the balcony where I had stared at the world below, there stood a slender figure in white.

My mother’s gaze was not fixed on the Mortal Realm, but on me, her fingers lifted in farewell. Ignoring Ping’Er’s urgent tug on my sleeve, I sank to my knees, folding myself over to press my forehead to the ground. My lips moved in a silent vow: that I would return, that I would set my mother free. I did not know how, but I would try with everything that was in me. This would not be our end. As I followed Ping’Er toward the cloud which would carry us away, something deep in my heart fractured . . . never to be whole again.

A RIVER ENCHANTED Rebecca Ross

Coming February 2022

CHAPTER 1

I

t was safest to cross the ocean at night, when the moon and stars shone on the water. At least, that’s what Jack had been raised to believe. He wasn’t sure if those old convictions still held true these days.

It was midnight, and he had just arrived at Woe, a fishing village on the northern coast of the mainland. Jack thought the name was fitting as he covered his nose; the place reeked of herring. Iron yard gates were tinged with rust, and the houses sat crooked on stilts, every shutter bolted against the relentless howl of the wind. Even the tavern was closed, its fire banked, its ale casks long since corked. The only movement came from the stray cats lapping up the milk left for them on door stoops, from the bobbing dance of cogs and rowboats in the quay.

This place was dark and quiet with dreams.

Ten years ago, he had made his first and only ocean crossing. From the isle to the mainland, a passage that took two hours if the wind was favorable. He had arrived at this very village, borne over the starlit water by an old sailor. The man

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had been weathered and wiry from years of wind and sun, undaunted by the thought of approaching the isle in his rowboat.

Jack remembered it well: his first moment stepping onto mainland soil. He had been eleven years old, and his initial impression was that it smelled different here, even in the dead of night. Like damp rope, fish, and woodsmoke. Like a rotting storybook. Even the land beneath his boots had felt strange, as if it grew harder and drier the further south he traveled.

“Where are the voices in the wind?” he had asked the sailor.

“The folk don’t speak here, lad,” the man had said, shaking his head when he thought Jack wasn’t looking.

It took a few more weeks before Jack learned that children born and raised on the Isle of Cadence were rumored to be half wild and strange themselves. Not many came to the mainland as Jack had done. Far fewer stayed as long as he had.

Even after ten years, it was impossible for Jack to forget that first mainland meal he had partaken of, how dry and terrible it had tasted. The first time he had stepped into the university, awed by its vastness and the music that echoed through its winding corridors. The moment he realized that he was never returning home to the isle.

Jack sighed, and the memories turned to dust. It was late.

He had been traveling for a sennight, and now he was here, defying all logic and ready to make the crossing again. He just needed to find the old sailor.

He walked one of the streets, trying to whet his recollection as to where to find the dauntless man who had previously carried him over the water. Cats scattered, and an empty tonic bottle rolled over the mismatched cobbles, seeming to follow him.

He finally noticed a door that felt familiar, right on the edge of town. A lantern hung on the porch, casting tepid light over a peeling red door. Yes, there had been a red door, Jack recalled.

And a knocker made from brass, shaped like an octopus. This

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was the fearless sailor’s house.

Jack had once stood in this very place, and he nearly saw his past self—­a scrawny, windswept boy, scowling to hide the tears in his eyes.

“Follow me, lad,” the sailor had said after docking his boat, leading Jack up the steps to the red door. It was the dead of night and bitterly cold. Quite the mainland welcome. “You’ll sleep here, and then come morning you’ll take the coach south to the university.”

Jack nodded, but he hadn’t slept that night. He had laid down on the floor of the sailor’s house, wrapped in his plaid, and closed his eyes. All he could think of was the isle. The moon thistles would soon bloom, and he hated his mother for sending him away.

Somehow, he had grown from that agonizing moment, putting down roots in a foreign place. Although truth be told, he still felt scrawny and angry at his mother.

He ascended the rickety porch stairs, hair tangling across his eyes. He was hungry, and his patience was thin, even if he was knocking at midnight. He clanged the brass octopus on the door, again and again. He didn’t relent, not until he heard a curse through the wood, and the sound of locks turning. A man cracked open the door and squinted at him.

“What do you want?”

At once, Jack knew this wasn’t the sailor he sought. This man was too young, although the elements had already carved their influence on his face. A fisherman, most likely, by the smell of oysters, smoke, and cheap ale that spilled from his house.

“I’m looking for a sailor to carry me to Cadence,” said Jack.

“One lived here years ago and bore me from the isle to the mainland.”

“That would be my father,” the fisherman replied harshly.

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“And he’s dead, so he can’t take you.” He made to shut the door, but Jack set his foot down, catching the wood.

“I’m sorry to hear that. Can you guide me?”

The man’s bloodshot eyes widened; he hacked up a laugh.

“To Cadence? No, no I can’t.”

“Are you afraid?”

“Afraid?” The fisherman’s humor broke like an old rope. “I don’t know where you’ve been the last decade or two, but the clans of the isle are territorial, and they don’t take kindly to any visitors. If you are fool enough to go and visit, you’ll need to send a request with a raven. And then you’ll need to wait for the crossing to be approved by whichever laird you’re seeking to bother. And since the lairds of the isle are on their own time frame . . . expect to wait a while. Or even better—­you can wait for the autumnal equinox, when the next trade happens. In fact, I would recommend you wait until then.”

Wordlessly, Jack withdrew a sheet of folded parchment from his cloak pocket. He handed the letter to the fisherman, who frowned as he glanced over it by lantern light.

Jack had the message memorized. He had read it countless times since it arrived the previous week, interrupting his life in the most profound of ways.

Your presence is required at once for urgent business. Please return to Cadence with your harp upon receipt.

Beneath the languid handwriting was his laird’s signature, and beneath it was the press of Alastair Tamerlaine’s signet ring in wine-­dark ink, turning this request into an order.

After a decade with hardly any contact with his clan, Jack had been summoned home.

“A Tamerlaine, are you?” the fisherman said, handing the letter back. Jack belatedly realized the man probably was illiterate but had recognized the crest.

Jack nodded, and the fisherman studied him intently.

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He endured the scrutiny, knowing there was nothing extraordinary about his appearance. He was tall and thin, as if he had been underfed for years, built from sharp angles and unyielding pride. His eyes were dark, his hair was brown. His skin was pallid and pale, from all the hours he spent indoors, instructing and composing music. He was dressed in his customary gray shirt and trousers, raiment now stained from greasy tavern meals.

“You look like one of us,” the fisherman said.

Jack didn’t know if he should be pleased or offended.

“What’s that on your back?” the fisherman persisted, staring at the one bag Jack was carrying.

“My harp,” Jack replied tersely.

“That explains it then. You came here to be schooled?”

“Indeed. I’m a bard. I was educated at the university in Faldare. Now, will you carry me to the isle?”

“For a price.”

“I already said I’d pay you well.”

“I don’t want your money. I want a Cadence-­forged dirk,” the fisherman said. “I would like a dagger to cut through anything: ropes, nets, scales . . . my rival’s good fortune.”

Jack wasn’t surprised by his request for an enchanted blade.

Such things could only be forged on Cadence, but they were created with a steep price.

“Yes, I can arrange that for you,” Jack said after only a moment of doubt. In the back of his mind, he thought of his mother’s dirk with its silver hilt, and how she kept it sheathed at her side, although Jack had never once seen her use it. But he knew the dagger was enchanted; the glamour was evident when one didn’t look directly upon the weapon. It cast a slight haze, as though firelight had been hammered into the steel.

There was no telling how much his mother had paid Una Carlow to forge it for her. Or how much Una had, in turn, suf-

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fered for rendering the blade.

He held out his hand. The fisherman shook it.

“Very well,” the man said. “We’ll leave at daybreak.” He went to shut the door again, but Jack refused to remove his foot.

“We must go now,” he said. “While it’s dark. This is the safest time to make the crossing.”

The fisherman’s eyes bugged. “Are you daft? I wouldn’t cross those waters at night if you paid me a hundred enchanted dirks!”

“You must trust me on this,” Jack answered. “Ravens may carry messages to the lairds by day, and the trade cog may glide on the first of the season, but the best time to cross is at night, when the ocean reflects the moon and the stars.”

When the spirits of the water are easily appeased, Jack added inwardly.

The fisherman gaped. Jack waited—­he would stand here all night and all of the next day if he had to—­and the fisherman must have sensed it. He relented.

“Very well. For two Cadence dirks, I will carry you across the water tonight. Meet me by my boat in a few minutes. It’s that one, in the berth on the far right.”

Jack glanced over his shoulder to look at the darkened quay.

Weak moonlight gleamed on the hulls and masts, and he found the fisherman’s boat, a modest vessel that had once been his father’s. The very boat that had originally carried Jack in his first crossing.

He stepped down the stoop, and the door latched behind him. He momentarily wondered if the fisherman was fooling him, agreeing to simply get Jack off his porch, but Jack walked briskly to the quay in good faith, the wind nearly pushing him down as he strode over the damp road.

He lifted his eyes to the darkness. There was a wavering trail of celestial light on the ocean, the silver path the fisher-

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man needed to follow to reach Cadence. A sickle moon hung in the sky like a smile, surrounded by freckles of stars. It would have been ideal if the moon was full, but Jack couldn’t afford to wait for it to wax.

He didn’t know why his laird had summoned him home, but he sensed it wasn’t for a joyous reunion.

It felt as if he had waited an hour before he saw a firefly of lantern light approaching. The fisherman walked hunched against the wind, a waxed overmantle shielding him, his face trapped in a scowl.

“You had better be good to your word, bard,” he said. “I want two Cadence dirks for all of this trouble.”

“Yes, well, you know where to find me if I’m not,” Jack said, brusquely.

The fisherman glared at him, one eye bigger than the other. Then, conceding, he nodded at his boat, saying, “Climb aboard.”

And Jack took his first step off the mainland.

The ocean was rough at first.

Jack gripped the boat’s gunwale, his stomach churning as the vessel rose and fell in a precarious dance. The waves rolled, but the brawny fisherman cut through them, rowing the two of them farther out to sea. He followed the trail of moonlight as Jack suggested, and soon the ocean became gentler. The wind continued to howl, but it was still the wind of the mainland, carrying nothing but cold salt in its breath.

Jack glanced over his shoulder, watching the lanterns of Woe turn to tiny flecks of light, his eyes smarting, and he knew they were about to enter the isle’s waters. He could sense it as if Cadence had a gaze, finding him in the darkness, fixating on him.

“A body washed to shore a month ago,” the fisherman said,

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breaking Jack’s reveries. “Gave us all a bit of fright in Woe.” “I beg your pardon?”

“A Breccan, by the woad tattoos on his bloated skin. His blue plaid arrived shortly after him.” The man paused in his speech, but he continued to row, the paddles dipping into the water in a mesmerizing rhythm. “A slit throat. I suppose it was the work of one of your clansmen, who then dumped the misfortunate soul in the ocean. To let us clean up the mess when the tides brought the corpse to our shores.”

Jack was silent as he stared at the fisherman, but a shiver chased his bones. Even after all these years away, the sound of his enemy’s name sent a spear of dread through him.

“Perhaps one of his own did it to him,” Jack said. “The Breccans are known for their bloodthirsty ways.”

The fisherman chuckled. “Should I dare to believe a Tamerlaine is unbiased?”

Jack could have told him stories of raids. How the Breccans often crossed the clan line and stole from the Tamerlaines during the winter months. They plundered and wounded; they pillaged without remorse, and Jack felt his hatred rise like smoke as he remembered being a young boy riddled by the fear of them.

“How did the feud begin, bard?” the fisherman pressed on.

“Do any of you even remember why you hate each other, or do you simply follow the path your ancestors set for you?”

Jack sighed. He just wanted a swift, quiet passage over the water. But he knew the story. It was an old, blood-­soaked saga that shifted like the constellations, depending on who did the retelling—­the east or the west, the Tamerlaines or the Breccans.

He mulled over it. The current of the water gentled, and the hiss of the wind fell to a coaxing whisper. Even the moon hung lower, keen for him to share the legend. The fisherman sensed

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it as well. He was quiet, rowing at a slower pace, waiting for Jack to give the story breath.

“Before the clans, there were the folk,” Jack began. “The earth, the air, the water, and the fire. They gave life and balance to Cadence. But soon the spirits grew lonely and weary of hearing their own voices, of seeing their own faces. The northern wind blew a ship off course and it crashed on the rocks of the isle. Amid the flotsam was a fierce and arrogant clan, the Breccans, who had been seeking a new land to claim.

“Not long after that, the southern wind blew a ship off course, and it found the isle. They were the Tamerlaine clan, and they too established a home on Cadence. The island was balanced between them, with the Breccans in the west and the Tamerlaines in the east. And the spirits blessed the work of their hands.

“In the beginning, it was peaceful. But soon, the two clans began to have more and more altercations and scuffles with each other, until whispers of war began to haunt the air. Joan Tamerlaine, the Laird of the East, hoped she could stave off conflict by uniting the isle as one. She would agree to marriage with the Breccan laird as long as peace was upheld and empathy was encouraged between the clans, in spite of their differences. When Fingal Breccan beheld her beauty, he decided that he, too, wanted harmony. ‘Come and be my wife,’ he said, ‘and let our two clans join as one.’

“Joan married him and lived with Fingal in the west, but as the days passed Fingal continued to delay on formally reaching a peace agreement. Joan soon learned that the ways of the Breccans were rigid and cruel, and she couldn’t adapt to them. Disheartened by the bloodshed, she strove to share the customs of the east, in hopes that they might also find a place in the west, granting goodness to the clan. But Fingal became angry with her desires, thinking she would only weaken the west, and he

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refused to see Tamerlaine ways celebrated.

“It wasn’t long until the peace was hanging on by a fragile thread and Joan realized Fingal had no intention of uniting the isle. He said one thing but enacted another behind her back, and the Breccans began to raid the east, stealing from the Tamerlaines. Joan, longing for home and to be rid of Fingal, soon departed, but she made it only as far as the center of the isle before Fingal caught up with her.

“They quarreled, they fought. Joan drew her dirk and cut herself loose from him—­name, vow, spirit, and body, but not her heart, because it was never his. She bestowed a tiny nick upon his throat, the very place where she had once kissed him in the night, when she dreamt of the east. The small wound swiftly drained him, and Fingal felt his life ebb away. When he fell, he took her with him, forcing his own dagger into her chest, to pierce the heart he could never earn.

“They cursed each other and their clans, and they died entwined, stained in each other’s blood, in the place where the east meets the west. The spirits felt the rift as the clan line was drawn, and the earth drank the mortals’ blood, strife, and violent end. Peace became a distant dream, and that is why the Breccans continue to raid and steal, hungry to have what is not theirs, and why the Tamerlaines continue to defend themselves, cutting throats and piercing hearts with blades.”

The fisherman, leaning toward the tale, had ceased rowing.

When Jack fell silent, the man shook himself and frowned, returning to his oars. The sickle moon continued its arc across the sky, the stars dimmed their fires, and the wind began to howl now that the story was over.

The ocean resumed its billowing tide as Jack set his eyes on the distant isle, his first glimpse of it in ten long years.

Cadence was darker than night, a shadow against the ocean and the starry sky. Long and rugged, it stretched before them

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like a sprawled dragon sleeping on the waves. Jack’s heart stirred at the sight, traitor that it was. Soon, he would be walking the ground he had grown up on, and he didn’t know if he would be welcomed or not.

He hadn’t written to his mother in three long years.

“You’re a deranged lot, that’s what I think,” the fisherman muttered. “All this nonsense and talk of spirits.”

“You don’t revere the folk?” Jack asked, but he knew the answer. There were no faerie spirits on the mainland. Only the patina of gods and saints, carved into the sanctuaries of kirks.

The fisherman snorted. “Have you ever seen a spirit, lad?”

“I’ve seen evidence of them,” Jack replied carefully. “They don’t often reveal themselves to mortal eyes.” He inevitably recalled the countless hours he had spent roaming the hills as a boy, eager to snare a spirit amid the heather. Of course, he never had.

“Sounds like a bucket of chum to me.”

Jack made no reply as the vessel glided closer.

He could see the golden lichens on the eastern rocks, luminescent. They marked the Tamerlaine coastline, and Jack’s memories surged. He remembered how things that grew on the isle were peculiar, bent to enchantment. He had explored the coast countless times, to Mirin’s great frustration and worry. But every girl and boy of the isle had been drawn to the whirlpools and eddies and secret caves of the coast. In the day and in the night, when the lichen glowed, golden as leftover sunlight on the rocks.

He noticed they were drifting. The fisherman was rowing, but they were angled away from the lichen, as if the boat was hooked to the dark stretch of western coast.

“We’re sailing into Breccan waters,” Jack said, a knot of alarm in his throat. “Here, row us that way.”

The fisherman heaved, directing the boat the way Jack

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instructed, but their progress was painfully slow. Something was wrong, Jack realized, and the moment he acknowledged there was trouble, the wind abated and the ocean turned glassy, smooth like a mirror. It was quiet, a roaring silence that raised his hackles.

Tap. The fisherman ceased rowing, his eyes wide as full moons.

“Did you hear that?”

Jack lifted his hand. Be quiet, he wanted to say but held his tongue, waiting for the warning to come again.

Tap. Tap. Tap. He felt it in the soles of his shoes. Something was in the water, clicking its long nails on the underside of the hull. Testing for a weak spot.

“Mother of gods,” the fisherman whispered, sweat shining on his face. “What is making that racket?”

Jack swallowed. He could feel his own perspiration beading his brow, the tension within him taut as a harp string as the claws beneath continued tapping.

The mainlander’s scorn had caused this. He had offended the folk of the water, who must have gathered in the foam of the sea to hear Jack’s legend. And now both men would pay for it with a sinking boat and a watery grave.

“Do you revere the spirits?” Jack asked in a low tone, staring at the fisherman.

The man only gaped, and then a flicker of fear crossed over his face. He began to turn the boat around, rowing with great heaves back to Woe. “What are you doing?” Jack cried.

“I go no further,” the fisherman said. “I want nothing to do with your isle and whatever haunts these waters.”

Jack narrowed his eyes. “We had an agreement.”

“Either jump overboard and swim your way to shore, or

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you’ll be coming back with me.”

“Then I suppose I’ll have your dirks forged three-­quarters of the way. How would you like that?”

“Keep your dirks.”

Jack was speechless. The fisherman had almost hauled them out of the isle’s waters, and Jack couldn’t go back to the mainland. Not when he was so close to home, when he could see the lichen and taste the cold sweetness of the mountains.

He stood and turned in the boat, carelessly rocking it. He could swim the distance if he left his cloak and leather satchel of clothes behind. He could swim to the shore, but he would be in enemy waters.

And he needed his harp. Laird Alastair had requested it.

He quickly opened his satchel and found his harp within, hiding in a sleeve of oilskin. The saltwater would ruin the instrument, and Jack was struck by an idea. He dug deeper into his bag and found the square of Tamerlaine plaid, which he hadn’t worn since the day he left the isle.

His mother had woven it for him when he was eight, when he had started to get into fistfights at the isle school. She had enchanted it by weaving a secret into the pattern, and he had been delighted when his nemesis was rewarded with a broken hand the next time he tried to punch Jack in the stomach.

Jack stared at the scrap of seemingly innocent plaid now.

It was soft when draped on the floor but strong as steel when it was put to use guarding something like a heart or a pair of lungs. Or in this desperate case, a harp about to be submerged.

Jack wrapped his instrument in the checkered wool and slid it back into its sleeve. He needed to swim to shore before the fisherman dragged him farther away from it.

He shed his cloak, embraced his harp, and jumped overboard.

The water was bitterly cold. The shock of it stole his breath

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as the ocean swallowed him whole. He broke the surface with a gasp, hair plastered to his face, chapped lips stinging from the salt. The fisherman continued to row farther and farther away, leaving a ripple of fear on the surface.

Jack spat in the mainlander’s wake before turning to the isle. He prayed the spirits of the water would be benevolent to him as he began to swim to Cadence. He set his eyes on the glow of the lichen, trying to pull himself to the safety of the Tamerlaine shore. But the moment he treaded the ocean, the waves rolled and the tide returned with a laugh. He was drawn under, jerked by the current.

Fear coursed through him, pounding in his veins until he realized that he broke the surface every time he reached for it.

By the third lungful of air, Jack sensed the spirits were toying with him. If they wanted to drown him, they would have done it by now.

Of course, he thought, struggling to swim as the tide pulled him under again. Of course, his return wouldn’t be effortless.

He should have expected this sort of homecoming.

He scraped his palm on the reef. His left shoe was ripped from his foot. He cradled his harp with one hand and stretched out the other, hoping to find the surface. Only water greeted him this time, rippling through his fingers. In the dark, he opened his eyes and was startled when he saw a woman, darting past him in the water with gleaming scales, her long hair tickling his face.

He shivered and nearly forgot to swim.

The waves eventually had enough of him and coughed him out on a sandy stretch of beach. That was the only mercy they gave him. On the sand, he spluttered and crawled. He knew instantly that he was on Breccan soil, and the thought made his bones melt like wax. It took Jack, half of his face coated in sand, a moment to rise and gain his bearings.

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He could see the clan line. It was marked by rocks that sat in a row like teeth on the beach, running all the way into the ocean, where their tops eventually descended into the depths.

It was roughly a kilometer away, and the distant glow of the lichen beckoned him to hurry, hurry.

Jack ran, one foot bare and frigid, the other squishing in a wet shoe. He wove around tangles of driftwood and a small eddy that gleamed like a dream about to break. He crawled under a rock arch, slipped over another boulder that was crinkled with moss, and finally reached the clan line.

He hefted himself over the rocks damp from sea mist. With a gasp, he stumbled onto Tamerlaine territory. But he could finally breathe, and he stood on the sand and made himself inhale, deep and slow. For a moment, it was quiet and peaceful, save for the rush of the tide. The next moment Jack was knocked off his feet. He hit the ground, harp flying. His teeth went through his lip, and he struggled beneath the weight of someone manhandling him.

He had forgotten all about the East Guard in his desperation to reach Tamerlaine land.

“I have him!” called out his attacker, who actually sounded more like a zealous lad.

Jack wheezed but couldn’t find his voice. The weight on his chest lifted, and he felt two hands, hard like iron manacles, latch themselves to his ankles and drag him across the beach.

Desperate, he reached out to recover his harp. He had no doubt that he would need to show Mirin’s plaid to prove who he was, since the laird’s letter had been in his cloak, now abandoned in the rowboat. But his arms were too heavy. Fuming, he relented to being toted.

“Can I kill him, captain?” the lad who was dragging Jack asked, all too eager.

“Maybe. Bring him yonder.”

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That voice. Deep as a ravine with a trace of mirth. Terribly familiar, even after all these years away.

Just my fortune, Jack thought, closing his eyes as sand stung his face.

At last, the dragging ceased, and he lay on his back, exhausted.

“Is he alone?”

“Yes, captain.”

“Armed?”

“No, sir.”

Silence. And then Jack heard the crunch of boots on the sand and sensed someone looming over him. Carefully, he opened his eyes. Even in the dark with nothing but starlight to limn the guard’s face, Jack recognized him.

The constellations crowned Torin Tamerlaine as he stared down at Jack.

“Hand me your dirk, Roban,” said Torin, to which Jack’s shock morphed into terror.

Torin didn’t recognize him. But why should he? The last time Torin had seen and spoken to him, Jack had been ten years old, wailing, with thirteen thistle needles embedded in his face.

“Torin,” Jack wheezed.

Torin paused, but the dirk was in his grip now. “What did you say?”

Jack held up his hands, sputtering. “It’s me . . . Jack Tam . . . erlaine.”

Torin seemed to turn into rock. He didn’t move, blade poised above Jack, like an omen about to fall. And then he barked, “Bring me a lantern, Roban.”

The lad Roban scampered away, then returned with a lantern swinging in his hand. Torin took it and lowered the light, so it would spill across Jack’s face.

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Jack squinted against the brightness. He tasted blood on his tongue, his lip swelling almost as much as his mortification, as he waited.

“By the spirits,” Torin said. The light finally receded, leaving splotches in Jack’s sight. “I don’t believe it.”

And he must have seen a trace of who Jack had been ten years ago. A malcontent, dark-­eyed boy. Because Torin Tamerlaine threw his head back and laughed.

“Don’t just lie there. Stand up and let me get a better look at you, lad.”

Jack reluctantly obeyed Torin’s request. He stood and brushed the sand from his drenched clothes, wincing as his palm burned.

He delayed the inevitable, afraid to look at the guard he had once aspired to be. Jack studied his mismatched feet, the cut on his hand. All the while, he felt Torin’s gaze bore into him, and eventually he had to answer it.

He was surprised to discover they were now the same great height. But that was where their similarity ended.

Torin was built for the isle: broad shouldered and thick waisted, with sturdy, slightly bowed legs and arms corded with muscle. His hands were huge, his right one still casually holding the dirk’s hilt, and his face was cut square and anchored with a trim beard. His blue eyes were set wide, and one too many spars had left his nose crooked. His hair was long and bound back by two plaits, blond as a wheat field, even at midnight. He wore the same garments Jack remembered him by: a dark woolen tunic that reached his knees, a leather jerkin studded with silver, a hunting plaid of brown and red draped across his chest, held fast by a brooch set with the Tamerlaine crest.

No trousers, but not many men of the isle bothered with them.

Torin sported the customary knee-­high boots made from un-

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tanned hide, shaped to his legs and held in place by leather thongs.

Jack wondered what Torin thought of him in return. Perhaps that he was too skinny, or looked weak and scrawny. That he was too pale from sitting indoors. That his clothes were drab and terrible, and his eyes jaded.

But Torin nodded his approval. “You’ve grown, lad. How old are you now?”

“I’ll be twenty-­t wo this autumn,” said Jack.

“Good, good.” Torin glanced at Roban, who stood nearby, scrutinizing Jack. “It’s all right, Roban. He’s one of us. Mirin’s boy, in fact.”

That seemed to shock Roban. He couldn’t have been older than fifteen, and his voice cracked when he cried, “You’re Mirin’s son? She speaks of you often. You’re a bard!”

Jack nodded, wary.

“It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a bard,” Roban continued.

“Yes, well,” Jack said, with a twinge of annoyance, “I hope you didn’t break my harp at the clan line.”

Roban’s lopsided smile dimmed. He stood frozen until Torin ordered him to recover the instrument. While Roban was gone, humbly searching, Jack followed Torin to a small campfire in the maw of a sea cave.

“Sit, Jack,” Torin said. He unbuckled his plaid and tossed it across the fire to Jack. “Dry yourself.”

Jack caught it awkwardly. He knew the moment he touched the plaid that this was one of Mirin’s enchanted weavings. What secret of Torin’s had she woven into it, Jack wondered with irritation, but he was too cold and wet to resist it. He draped the checkered wool around himself and stretched his hands out to the fire.

“Are you hungry?” Torin asked.

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“No, I’m fine.” Jack’s stomach was still roiling from the voyage across the water, from the horror of being on Breccan soil, from nearly having every tooth knocked loose by Roban. He realized his hands were shaking. Torin noticed as well and extended a flask to Jack before he settled across the fire from him.

“I noticed you arrived from the west,” Torin said with a hint of suspicion.

“Unfortunately, yes,” Jack replied. “The mainlander rowing me to the isle turned coward. I had no choice but to swim, and the current brought me to the west.”

He took a bracing sip from the flask. The heather ale was refreshing, stirring his blood. He took a second swallow and felt steadier, stronger—­owing, he knew, to consuming something that had been brewed on the isle. Food and drink here boasted flavor tenfold over mainland fare.

He glanced at Torin. Now that they were in the light, he could see the captain’s crest on his brooch. A leaping stag with a ruby in its eye. He also noticed the scar on Torin’s left palm.

“You’ve been promoted to captain,” said Jack. Although that was no surprise. Torin had been the most favored of guards from a very young age.

“Three years ago,” Torin replied. His face softened, as if his old recollections were as close as yesterday. “The last time I saw you, Jack, you were yea high, and you had—­” “Thirteen thistle needles in my face,” Jack finished drolly.

“Does the East Guard still hold that challenge?”

“Every third spring equinox. I have yet to see another injury like yours, however.”

Jack stared at the fire. “You know, I always wanted to be one of the guard. I thought I could prove myself worthy of the east that night.”

“By falling on an armful of thistles?”

“I didn’t fall on them. They were shoved into my face.”

22 A RIVER ENCHANTED

Torin scoffed. “By whom?”

By your lovely cousin, Jack wanted to reply, but he remembered that Torin was fiercely devoted to Adaira and most likely thought she was incapable of being so fiendish.

“No one important,” Jack replied, despite the glaring truth that Adaira was the Heiress of the East.

He almost asked Torin about her, but thought better of it.

Jack hadn’t envisioned his childhood rival in years, but he now imagined Adaira as wed, maybe with a few bairns of her own, and as even more beloved than she had been as a youth.

Dwelling on her reminded Jack there was a gap in his knowledge. He didn’t know what had been happening on the isle while he was away, steeped in music. He didn’t know why Laird Alastair had summoned him. He didn’t know how many raids had occurred, if the Breccans were still a looming threat when the ice came.

Emboldened, he met Torin’s stare. “You meet every stray who crosses the clan line with instant death?”

“I wouldn’t have killed you, lad.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

Torin was quiet, but he didn’t break their gaze. The firelight flickered over his rugged features, but there was no regret, no hint of shame in him. “It depends. Some stray Breccans are truly fooled by the spirits’ mischief. They misstep and they mean no harm. Others are scouting.”

“Have there been any raids recently?” Jack asked, dreading to learn if Mirin had been lying to him in her past letters. His mother lived close to western territory.

“There hasn’t been a raid since last winter. But I expect one will come soon. Once the cold arrives.”

“Where did this most recent raid happen?”

“The Elliotts’ croft,” Torin replied, but his eyes were sharp, as if he were beginning to piece together the lack of Jack’s

REBECCA ROSS 23

knowledge. “You’re worried about your mum? Mirin’s farm hasn’t been raided since you were a lad.”

Jack remembered, although he had been so young he sometimes wondered if he had dreamt it. A group of Breccans had arrived one winter night, their horses turning the snow muddy in the yard. Mirin had held Jack in the corner of their house, one hand pressing his face into her chest so he couldn’t see, the other wielding a sword. Jack had listened as the Breccans took what they wanted—­winter provisions and livestock from the byre and a few silver marks. They broke pottery, overturned piles of Mirin’s weavings. Quickly they went, as if they were underwater, holding their breaths, knowing they had only a moment before the East Guard arrived.

They hadn’t touched or spoken to Mirin or Jack. The two of them were inconsequential. Nor had Mirin challenged them.

Calm she had been, inhaling long draws, but Jack remembered hearing the pulse of her heart, swift as wings.

“Why have you come home, Jack?” Torin asked quietly.

“None of us ever thought you would return. We assumed you had created a new life for yourself, as a bard on the mainland.”

“I’m only here for a brief visit,” Jack replied. “Laird Alastair asked me to return.”

Torin’s brows arched. “Did he now?”

“Yes. Do you know why?”

“I think I know why he’s summoned you,” Torin said, his gaze drifting to Jack’s harp. “We’ve been facing a terrible trouble. It’s been weighing heavily on the entire clan.”

Jack’s pulse quickened. “I don’t see how I can do anything about the Breccans’ raids.”

“It’s not the raids,” Torin replied. When his gaze met Jack’s once more, his eyes were glazed, as if he had seen a wraith.

“No, it’s something much worse than that.”

Jack began to feel the cold creep into his skin. He was re-

24 A RIVER ENCHANTED

membering the taste of isle-­bred fear, how it felt to be lost when the land shifted. How storms could break at a moment’s notice.

How the folk could be benevolent one day, and malevolent the next. How their capricious natures flowed like a river.

This place had always been dangerous, unpredictable. Wonders bloomed alongside dreads. But nothing could prepare him for what Torin said next.

“It’s our lasses, Jack,” he said. “Our girls are going missing.”

THE EMBROIDERED BOOK Kate Heartfield Coming February 2022

CHAPTER ONE The Empress Is Unmoved – You, Lucky Habsburg, Marry – Charlotte Voices an Opinion – Death and Decay – The Embroidered Book – Sacrifices

If only Antoine could find a love spell. A potion, a ribbon, a ring. With the right magic, she’d open Mama’s heart, and save her sister from marrying the beast of Naples.

It’s not as if the Empress Maria Theresa, sovereign of half of Europe, is incapable of love. She loved Papa so fiercely that she tallied every minute she spent with him in her diary.

And after Papa’s death, the year before last, Mama loved her daughter Mimi enough to let her marry the man of her choice.

Charlotte says that Mama was just relieved that Mimi did fall in love with a man, since her only romance before that had been with her sister-in-law. But Charlotte is uncharitable.

It is undeniable that Mama shows no signs of bending when it comes to Josepha. Josepha must go to Naples. It has been decreed.

Bella gerant alii, tu felix Austria nube. The family motto. Let others wage war; you, lucky Habsburg, marry.

Even Antoine, who has not studied much Latin, knows nube is in the imperative case.

At her sigh, Mama looks up sharply.

KATE HEARTFIELD

Mama has brought Antoine and her sisters to do their needlework in the Porcelain Room today. All the unmarried archduchesses, except for pretty Liesl, who is away visiting cousins. The remaining girls work furiously, silently, like mice trapped inside a teacup. Shadow-coloured plaster vines climb creamy walls on indigo trellises, between masses of goldframed drawings.

Josepha is sixteen, which is very grown up, but she looks terrified. Her eyes go wide at Antoine’s sigh, but she doesn’t lift her head. She pokes her needle into the cloth in her lap.

Charlotte is slightly less grown-up at fifteen, but she looks angry. Dear Charlotte. She’s the only one who’s a match for Mama, and she thinks Mama hates her for it. But hasn’t Mama said she plans to send Charlotte to marry the heir to the French throne? The most important of all the alliances?

Only Charlotte could manage that, because she is just like Mama, though Antoine would never tell her that for fear of the look Charlotte would give her.

Antoine, at eleven, is still young enough to sigh and get away with it. She should be more prudent, though. Everything depends on Mama’s love.

‘Are you worried about your performance tomorrow?’

Mama asks Antoine.

‘No, Mama,’ she says with her best smile. ‘I’ve practised and practised. I just hope the ambassador likes it.’

The Neapolitan ambassador. The man who wants Josepha to marry his horrible king.

‘Don’t frown, Josepha,’ murmurs Mama. ‘Your forehead.’

Josepha smooths her expression, but her eyes go feral, like the cats the groom chased away from the stable last year.

She stares at the cloth, unable to see where the threads went awry.

‘You’ve pulled a thread clear through, Josepha,’ Mama says.

‘Ah. Thank you, Mama. I don’t know how I didn’t notice that.’

4

THE EMBROIDERED BOOK

‘Distraction is not a luxury we can afford,’ says Mama.

She sips her coffee, out of a cup the same colours as the walls.

Mama, as a young woman, drank coffee in secret, defying her father’s ban on the drink during the wars with Turkey.

Now Mama drinks coffee openly, because she is the Empress and can do what she likes. Only she will decide what can and cannot be done within the walls of Schönbrunn Palace in the year 1767.

Including everything her unmarried daughters do and think.

‘Josepha,’ Mama says, ‘I suspect you’re still nervous about your upcoming marriage. You should accept God’s will. Pray for the strength to do so.’

‘Yes, Mama,’ says Josepha. Her face goes white.

Charlotte coughs.

‘You have an opinion, Charlotte?’ Mama looks at her. ‘Say it plainly, if you do. I will have no coughers and tutters among my children.’

Charlotte looks at the white gloves in her lap, at the tiny knots of white silk thread in the monograms. ‘I have heard nothing good of King Ferdinand of Naples. People say he is a monster.’

‘He is a sixteen-year-old bachelor king,’ says Mama. ‘Of course he is a monster. His whole life he has been surrounded by flatterers and, and . . . Italians. He needs a good Christian wife to keep him away from the brothels and turn his mind towards his responsibilities, that’s all. And we need Naples on our side.’

‘Why me and not Amalia?’ Josepha whispers, her face red. ‘She is stronger than I am, and older. She is downright terrifying.’

‘Ferdinand refused her,’ Mama retorts. ‘He doesn’t want a wife five years older than he is. Not even Liesl, despite her beauty. Which is all to the good, as your brother and I have several possibilities in mind for Liesl. Anyway, Amalia will 5

KATE HEARTFIELD

do for Parma. We must all do our duty, Josepha.’ She pauses, and raises one formidable finger. ‘The current Empress of Russia began life as the shabby daughter of a shabby soldier in a shabby town. But her mother made her a good marriage.

And now Catherine rules an empire!’

‘Catherine rules because she had her husband killed and seized his throne for herself,’ Charlotte says with a little smile.

‘Well,’ her mother replies with a wave of her hand, ‘Russians.’ For Mama, it sufficed to say ‘Italians’ or ‘Russians’ to explain events in other lands. ‘And she would not have had a throne to seize, had she married some local count’s son who called her pretty.’

‘Mimi married the man she loves,’ says Charlotte, quieter, and without the smile.

Why test Mama? She’ll only anger her. Antoine holds her breath.

Nobody speaks for a moment; the only sound is thread moving roughly through muslin. Nobody disputes, least of all Mama, that Mimi has always been Mama’s favourite.

‘The circumstances were different,’ Mama mutters, her voice sinking so low that Antoine stops pulling her thread, to hear. ‘We need Naples, and Naples has a king of marrying age. Josepha will be queen of the lower half of the Italian peninsula, and Sicily besides. It is not such a terrible fate.’

Charlotte lifts the white glove she’s been embroidering, and looks at Antoine pointedly. Charlotte has been insisting on trying an enchantment to change Mama’s mind. Trying to direct Mama’s thoughts seems awfully dangerous, and Antoine has been arguing against it. But what choice do they have?

If only Antoine could find a love spell.

She starts to sigh again, and realizes halfway through, and tries to stop it, but it turns into a cough.

‘Goodness,’ Mama says, dropping her embroidery into her lap and raising both hands to God. ‘All my daughters are 6

THE EMBROIDERED BOOK

coughing today. I’ll have the cooks prepare my thyme tea for all three of you tonight. We can’t afford any more illness in this family.’

The first death Charlotte remembers was her brother Charles.

Smallpox. He was the same age Charlotte is now; he made desperate, horrible jokes right to the end, and she wishes that wasn’t how she remembers him.

Not long after that, their governess, Countess Ertag, was murdered.

The next death was her sister Johanna. Johanna and Josepha were a pair, just as Charlotte and Antoine are. There are so many siblings in the family that they stretch in age from Mimi, who’s now twenty-five, down to ten-year-old Max. And there some gaps, from deaths. So the children tend to be closest to one or two of their siblings who are nearest to them in age. Johanna and Josepha did everything together and were always merry.

Johanna didn’t even seem to mind being betrothed to Ferdinand of Naples; but then, she was young, and Ferdinand hadn’t yet made his reputation as a beast. The year after Charles died, smallpox took Johanna, two days before Christmas. Josepha took it hardest; since that time she’s never looked anything but afraid. And now she’s heading off to Naples in her sister’s place, if Mama gets her way.

The next death was their father’s. Two years ago, a messenger came to say Papa had died – suddenly, of a stroke – far from home.

Their brother Joseph lost both his wives to smallpox: the first, he passionately loved (while she passionately loved Mimi). The second wife, poor woman, he did not love at all; and now she lies in the family crypt too.

The girls are powerless over death.

But Mama was not. When Joseph’s second wife fell ill, so did Mama, but Mama got better. Let Antoine believe it was the ribbon enchanted ‘for mending’ they put under Mama’s 7

KATE HEARTFIELD

pillow; Charlotte knows it was sheer stubbornness. And when the Empress heard that her daughters had been crawling under hedges in the garden (they were looking for dropped coins, for sacrifices), she declared that Charlotte was an unfortunate influence on her younger sister. From then on, they were to see each other only at dinners or with other family present. Different governesses from then on, and different tutoring sessions, and rooms at opposite ends of the children’s wing.

They found ways of coping, of meeting in secret at night to talk about magic.

But they still have no spell that will save a life.

Charlotte opens Antoine’s door, softly and soundlessly, and steps in.

Antoine is standing at her dressing table, with a pewter powder box in her hand.

‘There you are,’ she says brightly. ‘Did you bring it?’

Charlotte nods, and pulls the book with the embroidered cover from the false pocket sewn inside her nightgown, the pocket that can hold a vast quantity of things (so long as each is, itself, a pocket-sized thing) and still seem empty from the outside.

Antoine kneels and sprinkles ash from the powder box.

‘I’m glad you have ash,’ says Charlotte, pulling the items for the sacrifice out of her pocket. ‘It’s been so hot lately that there’s nothing in the fireplaces and the kitchens are always crowded.’

‘Herr Bauer gave me some.’

‘Who?’ ‘The gardener. He puts ash into the soil around the roses.

He is very clever and shows me all the new roses he invents.’

‘People don’t invent roses,’ Charlotte says, before realizing she knows nothing about it; perhaps they do.

She opens the embroidered book. On the thirtieth page, there is the spell she needs, in her long-dead governess’s patient and frilly handwriting: 8

THE EMBROIDERED BOOK

For an item of clothing, reproducible and inexhaustible, to confer on the wearer persuasion of a listener’s mind beyond the natural, these proofs have been found: convaincre ➞ oonvainore ➞ ooovaioore ➞ oooaaioore ➞ oooaaiooue. For the prime magister, these were the sacrifices corresponding to the letters of power, in sequence dextral: ooo, for the love, an affection, written; aa, for the body, clippings of all fingernails; i, for the hope, a passing fancy or appetite, written; oo, for the second love, a fondness, written; u, for the memory, one jape or trifle, written; and at the last, e, for the treasure, a clipped groat.

‘It’s mostly writing this time,’ Charlotte murmurs. ‘You have pen and paper? I brought the other things.’

The other things are a velvet coin-purse filled with her own fingernail clippings and a small copper coin, with the shield of Austria on one side and ‘1 HELLER 1765’ on the other.

She doesn’t have a clipped groat, and she hopes this will do.

She goes now to Antoine’s dressing table, where her sister has laid a few scraps of paper, an inkwell, and a quill.

Charlotte has already decided on the hope: for chocolate cake tomorrow. A passing fancy or appetite. The memory, small as it is, is harder than she thought it would be: the people who used to tell jokes were Papa and Charles, and they are both dead, and she doesn’t want to sacrifice her memories of them. Finally, she remembers the way her little brother Max dramatically lifted his coat-tails to sit down at dinner the other day, in imitation of a certain cousin. She smiles and writes that down.

The loves are difficult. For the fondness, she writes the name of Mops, Antoine’s little pug. It’s hard to imagine not being fond of Mops, with his perpetually confused face and delightful little ears. The affection is a little trickier, but ultimately she settles on Lerchenfeld, her new governess. She’s been a good governess, even something like a friend.

Charlotte folds the papers, so that Antoine won’t see what she’s written. They do this to spare each other.

9

KATE HEARTFIELD

Into each point of the star, she puts her sacrifices, walking around twice clockwise so she can place them in order as they are in the spell.

Then Charlotte pulls the final item out of her pocket: the long white gloves with her monogram on them. Mama says it is a waste for the unmarried archduchesses to monogram anything; soon they will have new initials, once they’re married. But Charlotte likes to mark the things that are hers.

She steps gingerly over the ash lines of the star, places the gloves in the middle, and steps back.

‘I give these things,’ she pronounces.

She takes a deep breath, pulls out a handkerchief and puts it to her nose. She can hear Antoine doing the same. But she smells nothing, sees nothing.

Perhaps the sacrifices aren’t worth enough. The coin is wrong, or the memory too trifling. Or they misunderstood the spell altogether. They’ve never tried this one before.

Then, small but real movement: the little pile of fingernail and toenail clippings darkens and shifts. The coin rusts and wears, going green and then bright orange and then brown.

The bits of paper become ragged and thin and, as with every spell, there is a horrible moment when the words come off the paper, in a stream of ink that rises into the air as if someone were tugging on them. Little currents of dark ink in the air, dissipating, gone. The paper itself is a pile of brown threads, and the pile of nail trimmings is now a kind of sludge. Everything goes brown, eventually. The coin, the paper, the nails.

It’s working.

Charlotte watches it all with her usual fascination. It distracts from the fact that she is losing things, including some she will not remember. No matter how small, these losses are deaths, unnaturally hastened. They have given death more than its due. But now she is fifteen, and she has need of important magic.

There it is at last: the smell of decay and death. They hold 10

THE EMBROIDERED BOOK

their handkerchiefs tightly to their faces, but the smell fills Charlotte’s nostrils anyway.

The coin lasts the longest. For several minutes, the pile of brown dust remains, smaller and smaller, until a breath of unseen wind takes it. The items in the points of the star are gone, as if they never were. She doesn’t care what they eat for dessert tomorrow, and Lerchenfeld is just an old sycophant in a bonnet. She glances at the pink-lined basket where Mops is snoring gently, disgustingly.

As for the memory, it was there – a moment ago – but it is gone. She can see her hand setting down the words, but her mind’s eye can’t make sense of what she wrote. Her breath catches – it always comes with lurch, this loss of memory – but she is fairly sure that it was nothing of any importance, this time.

The embroidered book is still lying open on the floor.

Charlotte closes it gently, gratefully. The stitches of the book’s cover are familiar to her fingertips: the hard knots at the centres of the forget-me-nots, the feathered chain stitch of the vine at the edge. She can even feel the slight change in the length of the stitches where her own work begins.

Countess Ertag was governess to both Charlotte and Antoine when they were young. She had been working on the embroidery for a book cover for months. A week before she died, she stitched the worked canvas onto the binding, and sat staring at it, resting her hand on it, as though it were the portrait of one dead.

‘It isn’t finished,’ Charlotte said; she was then nine years old. ‘Look, the bottom right corner is empty.’

‘I left that to finish later. See how I’ve left it open here, just a little flap? I’m going to put a poppy there, the same design as the petticoat I made for you last year.’

A week later, a servant found Ertag with her throat cut in her bed.

The children were not supposed to know, but Charlotte and Antoine overheard. They listened at keyholes. All of 11

KATE HEARTFIELD

Ertag’s posessions were found strewn about her room: her petticoats and prayer books and letters. Everything stained with blood. Her window, a palace window, wide open to the cold air.

Nobody talks about this now; Mama must have covered it all up.

The embroidered book was still in the needlework basket, which was in the nursery, so nobody noticed it. One day, Charlotte took it out, and flipped through the blank pages.

Then she closed it and laid her palm on the cover and sat with it, just as her governess had done.

‘Why don’t you finish it?’ Antoine suggested. Charlotte can still see Antoine as she was then, at six years old: her taffeta skirt spread around her on the nursery floor, her golden ringlets tumbling. Antoine has a way of making herself into a picture, of sticking in the memory that way.

And she has a way of being wise about things. Charlotte did finish the embroidery, in memory of her governess. She filled in the poppy, just as it was on her petticoat. She stitched the corner of the embroidered canvas to the binding. What would she do with those blank pages? What had Ertag intended to do? She’d opened the book again, idly, and then dropped it.

It had filled, somehow, with Ertag’s handwriting.

Spell after spell, written in a style that was nothing like the way Ertag spoke.

And on the first page, a five-pointed star drawn in golden ink, with the word ‘cindres’ written across the bottom, and in each point of the star, a word: ‘l’amour’, ‘le corps’, ‘l’espoir’, ‘la mémoire’, ‘le trésor’.

This was a book Ertag kept secret, and Ertag was killed, her possessions examined. Charlotte and Antoine have never told anyone about the book, and never will. They don’t even need to discuss it. They simply know.

The spells are written confusingly. There are dozens of them – it’s hard to say how many, as some have variations, 12

THE EMBROIDERED BOOK

and it’s difficult to say where one leaves off and another begins. Some spells stretch on for pages of notes and commentary, even bizarre drawings. Only thirteen of the spells make the slightest sense; with the rest, Charlotte and Antoine aren’t sure what item one is meant to enchant or how. The sisters haven’t even tried all thirteen that do make sense – there is one for a shroud to remember the dead, which Antoine finds frightening even to read. And some of the ones they’ve tried, they can’t make work.

Still, they’ve enchanted dolls and ribbons and silk fans.

They can remember a pretty speech without memorizing it, cause a twinge in each other’s hands, and cool a hot ballroom, a very little bit, on a summer night.

Now they can add one more spell to their list of successes: the spell for an item of clothing that makes the wearer persuasive to listeners.

‘It worked!’ Antone stands up and claps her hands. The smell of rot lingers, but they know it will be gone in minutes.

‘It worked,’ Charlotte agrees, plucking the gloves off the floor.

‘Are you sure this is a good idea?’ Antoine asks, flopping onto the bed. ‘Remember what happened when you enchanted Wolfgang Mozart’s shoe.’

One of the first spells Charlotte ever managed. ‘I do remember. He tripped, which was just what I intended. So the spell worked perfectly. And the little beast got plenty of attention, not to mention mollycoddling from you, so it did him no harm.’

‘He could have tripped in front of a carriage, or off a cliff.

You promised me then—’ ‘Believe me, Antoine, I won’t do any harm to anyone. I’m trying to prevent harm, remember? Do you really want Josepha to go off to marry that horrible boy?’

Antoine bites her lip. ‘Just be careful.’

‘I will be. And anyway, unlike Mozart’s shoe, I’ll be the one wearing these. I’ll be the one in control.’

13

KATE HEARTFIELD

Charlotte pulls the gloves onto her arms, one after the other. They look just the same as they did, but now they are enchanted. Now they have power.

‘Tomorrow,’ Charlotte vows, ‘we’ll make Mama see reason at last.’

14

THE BLOOD TRIALS N.E. Davenport Coming April 2022

Chapter One I slam the shot glass down on the table. The amber liquid stopped burning on its way down my esophagus three swallows ago. I’m on my sixth shot. I think. I blink, and the room tilts. I cling to the latest shock of euphoria that floods my system. Triple distilled Mareenian whiskey with legalized boosters is a glorious thing.

I don’t wipe the miserable look that steals onto my face in time.

My friends glimpse it.

“You good?” Selene asks.

I snicker at the irony. Usually, I’m the one looking after her when we’re partying.

“We should call it quits,” Zayne slurs. He stands up, adamant, only to sway and flops back onto his barstool.

Selene snorts into the ale she’s been sipping alongside the

3

shots. “Lightweight.”

She’s not wrong. Zayne is only drinking so much tonight to indulge me. I insisted we celebrate with one last hurrah before Commencement in the morning busts up our trio. And they leave me behind.

Selene and Zayne will be declaring Praetorian, throwing in their bids to become one of the most fearsome and respected soldiers of the Republic. I’m not declaring anything. I’m doing what the psymedics who conducted our exit evals suggested and taking a year off. It’s been three months since my grandfather’s death, and according to the professionals, I’m still struggling at finding healthy ways to cope. Unprovoked brawls have become my friend. I’ve stopped attending most classes and combat training blocks, filling that time with parties and drinking.

I grip the edge of the table, cursing the fact that while I still have a nice buzz, my euphoria is gone. The extra, numbing punch that boosters pack is fleeting, until you reach a certain threshold, and then the boosters drop you into oblivion. Oblivion is what I’m seeking tonight. The crooked room means I’m almost there.

Our waitress, a petite girl with red hair a shade lighter than Selene’s, saunters up to the table. “Can I get you another round?”

Her green eyes framed by short, dark lashes don’t stray from Zayne. She’s been eyeing him all night. She angles her body so he gets an eyeful of her cleavage.

He grins, taking notice and flashing twin dimples. “Sure, Leslie.” The way her name slips off his tongue is both an assertion and

4

invitation. Selene and I roll our eyes at the same time. Zayne’s ash blonde hair, blue gaze, tanned complexion, and boyishly handsome features make him more than attractive. They make him gorgeous. He knows it and every girl he comes across knows it.

Leslie blushes while nibbling coyly on her bottom lip.

Ha! She’s coy my ass. The slow way Zayne’s half-lidded eyes rove over her curves is exactly the thing she was angling for each time she came over.

“What time does your shift end?” he says.

She pauses, pretending she has to think about it. “One.” “I’ll wait on you. Escort you home.”

I roll my eyes again.

She blushes redder and emits a breathy, “Okay.”

“Drinks,” I butt in with the demand. “We’ll take two more rounds.” Two should get me to where I want to be.

“How about one more and we call it quits?”

I stare at Selene like she’s sprouted horns. “Since when does Selene Rhysien, party girl of our academy class, cut a night short?”

She and Zayne exchange a look. I bristle because the look is about me.

“Commencement is tomorrow,” Zayne says, slipping into his usual rule-following form. “We all need to be coherent, upright, and not nursing head-splitting hangovers in the morning. It’s probably wise to cancel the drinks and head to the barracks.”

Fuck that noise. I hiss in a breath at the pounding that kicks up in my head. The tilted room starts spinning. A glum, victori-

5

ous smile twists my lips. “I think it’s too late for me to avoid any of that.” I laugh like it’s no big deal. “It’s not like tomorrow is as important for me as it is for you guys.

“Bring two more rounds only for me,” I tell Leslie in case I need an extra push over the ledge. “My friends do need to be done for the night.” I, however, don’t. Who cares if I make it to Commencement at all? I won’t have family present eager to see me graduate from Mareen’s most prestigious academy, and there’s no grand next step for me afterward.

“You need to be done too,” Selene says without the tact Zayne used.

Our waitress watches the exchange awkwardly.

“Let’s compromise.” Zayne, of course, is ever the diplomat.

“We all have another round together then we all leave together.”

I glare at him.

He and Selene stare back at me, an unyielding and united front.

“Fine,” I lie, already thinking of ways to skirt around the promise. “One more round since apparently it’s gang up on Ikenna night.”

Leslie smiles in relief then makes her escape.

“For real, Kenna. We’re all leaving. I’ll drag you out of this bar if I have to.” Selene gives me a humorless look that tells me you know I’ll do it.

“Okay,” I say, exasperated. “We all leave together to get some rest for a Commencement ceremony that will mean nothing to me and everything to you.” Bitterness drips from my words. It

6

shouldn’t. The psymedics’ recommendation is a good thing. It allows me to keep numbing the pain by shirking all duty and indulging in reckless shit for the next year.

Embarking on my personal grand adventure early, I look around for Leslie, willing her to high tail her ass back to our table with the next round.

She reappears not a moment too soon.

I swipe up the full shot glass she sits down in front of me and toss it back. A new high instantly hits. The euphoric numbness lasts longer this time, perching me on the ledge of oblivion, but not yet pitching me over. My stupid system is purging the alcohol and boosters too damn fast.

I nod toward Leslie who’s taking the drink orders of rowdy Praetorians at an adjacent table. “Weren’t you planning on going home with Ms-I’m-pretending-to-be-coy-but-I’m-game?” I ask Zayne, trying to maneuver out of the promise my pushy friends muscled me into making.

But I don’t really care about his answer the moment I recognize the people at the table she’s serving. I instantly wish I didn’t look over at the Praetorians because it blows my high and sends me sprawling back from the ledge on my ass. The tiny symbol emblazoned in gold above the left breast pocket of their maroon dress coats marks them as belonging to Gamma cohort.

Grandfather’s cohort.

One of the guys sees me watching his crew. He salutes me with a raise of his glass before downing its clear contents. His chest-

7

nut brown hair is buzzed half an inch longer than an induction cut. He has dark cobalt eyes and a leanly muscled, powerful form shown off by the way his dress uniform is specially cut to his body. The tip of an inktat peeks from under the stiff, white collar of his coat. He’s attractive, but it isn’t his good looks I’m staring at.

It’s the wretched Gamma symbol. An ache blooms in my chest, and treacherous, unbridled thoughts of everything I’ve lost pummel into me like steel-fisted blows. My grandfather. Our plans for my future. My friends come morning. I don’t just need to be back on the ledge again, I need to be careening over it. But to do that, I’m going to have to stay in the bar and engage in a fresh bout of heavy drinking.

Which means ditching these two earlier than Commencement.

I need another shot.

“Isn’t your father expecting you at home tonight?” I remind Selene. Her father is a Tribune, one of the fourteen powerful generals who sit on the Tribunal Council and help govern Mareen.

His rank places her family among the great War Houses of the Republic, and it’s a long-standing tradition for their children to spend the night at home instead of the barracks on Commencement Eve. At dawn, breakfast feasts will be held by all the War Houses in honor of their graduates who will undoubtedly declare and be confirmed to the venerated Praetorian rank. I should be returning to Grandfather’s residence tonight. He and I do not hail from a War House, but I should be waking to an intimate break-

8

fast between the two of us in the morning.

Instead…

Selene shrugs. “He’ll get over it. I’ll be at Rhysien Manor by sunrise. If he wanted me in residence overnight so bad he would allow you and Zayne to sleep over with me. I’m not letting you stay in the barracks alone.”

I curtail a wince. After tomorrow, I won’t be a cadet anymore and I’ll have to move out of the barracks. The only other place for me to go will be Grandfather’s vacant apartments. I will be passing many nights alone then.

I lash out, mustering a bravado I don’t feel. Snorting, I say, “I can’t believe you wasted your breath asking.” It’s true--her Tribune General father would never abide me or Zayne sullying any of his private dwellings. I’m not the right skin color and Zayne doesn’t have the right pedigree. But she’s not her father, and she doesn’t deserve to bear the brunt of my fear and anger. It’s my baggage. Not hers.

Selene opens her mouth to say something in defense of her father then snaps it shut. Consternation creases her forehead, and she’s about to speak again when she’s cut off.

“You’re Amari’s get.” The derisive voice comes from behind me. Already disgruntled, I swivel to face whoever it belongs to and glower at the dark-haired male with a gold Alpha insignia stitched into his maroon dress coat.

I return a sneer as contemptuous as the one he’s giving me.

“No shit.”

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He towers over me with a superiority that’s meant to intimidate. Smug arrogance due to his rank makes him dismiss the threat laced through my stare. He’s confident he can kick my ass.

I’m confident he can’t. I was reared by the best combat mind Mareen has ever seen.

And I want this fight way more than he does.

The smile that carves onto the bastard’s chiseled face is cruel.

His features are flawless. That fact is about to change if he doesn’t march away from my table. The temper Grandfather jumped through painstaking hoops to help me tame is running hot. Since his death, I haven’t bothered much to keep it in check. What I’m hurtling headlong into doing is a million times brash and stupid.

It’s the perfect way to top off the night.

You’re better than this, Ikenna. Rise above. Be smarter. Those like us have too much at stake. Grandfather’s cautioning voice sweeps through my mind. I ignore it because if he really cared, he’d still be here. He wouldn’t have let himself die.

Zayne grabs my arm when I push back from the table. “Let it ride. He’s a Praetorian.”

Selene presses her mouth into a hard line. She doesn’t warn me to let things go. She doesn’t urge me on either. But the ire in her gray eyes and her clenched jaw says she wants to. She really, really wants to.

Zayne is right. What the hell am I doing? My response isn’t normal for a green cadet fresh out of a martial academy. Even the northern one. Praetorians are the deadliest, most specialized

10

soldiers of the Republic. Biochips enhance their already extraordinary skills. The implants elevate them from lethal to nearly unopposable. Me fighting the jerk runs too great a risk. I take a calming breath, letting better sense prevail for once.

The Praetorian’s grin spreads wider. “Listen to your friend.

Stay seated and stay in your place, akulu.” He spits the slur at me. It’s a word that benignly means the color black in the Khanaian tongue of Grandfather’s paternal people. When Mareenians speak it, though, it oozes their disdain and prejudice against those with darker skin.

And even that I can ignore. I’ve heard it so many times I let the slur roll off my back.

His eyes tighten from my lack of reaction. “It’s a damn good thing the Legatus Commander died so early,” the fucker drawls.

“Otherwise Mareen would have been stuck with an akulu occupying its highest office for decades longer. It’s a disgrace. Your grandfather was filth. I’m glad he’s dead. A full blooded Mareenian is Legatus now, as it always--” I lose it. One minute I’m perched on my stool trying to stay calm. The next my chest is heaving and my pulse races as my muscles tense for a fight. I surge to my feet as the spike of adrenaline surges through my blood. Call me whatever you want—sticks and stones and all that. But my indignation on Grandfather’s behalf blinds me to all sense of reason.

I strike out, faster than a lowly cadet should be able to move, catching the Praetorian off guard. I revel in the satisfying crunch

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of bones beneath my right knuckles. Blood spurts from the asshole’s nose. I rear back and punch him again in his broken septum. He wails, a sound you’d never expect to hear a Praetorian make, as he flies backward. I’m on him before he can pick himself up from among the fallen table and bar stools. I drive punch after punch into his pretty, porcelain face.

It’s better than the boosters.

Arms lock around me and drag me away. I assume it’s Selene or Zayne. I crane my neck to see that it’s neither. Another Praetorian from the asshole’s cohort is holding me. I struggle against his steel grip. His buddy finally peels himself off the floor with a grunt.

Asshole Number One glares at me through the eye that isn’t swollen shut.

I give him my best smile.

He steps toward me. He brandishes a combat-grade dagger in each hand. I laugh at the display that’s meant to terrify me. It’s an unhinged sound that’s sped a dozen miles past mad.

“Let her go!” Selene shouts behind me.

The noise of a scuffle tells me that she and Zayne have leapt out of their seats, and I look to see that a couple of the Praetorian’s Alpha Cohort buddies are restraining them.

“So, this is how it’s going to be?” I throw over my shoulder to Asshole Number Two who has my arms pinioned behind my back. “You’re going to hold me in place while your dickhead friend carves me up because otherwise he couldn’t beat me?” I

12

spit on his gleaming white shoes.

I stare back at the Praetorian I attacked, refusing to cower.

“No. It’s not.” The Praetorian from Gamma Cohort who saluted me steps between me and Asshole Number One. “Let her go, Chance,” he says to the guy holding me.

“Fuck you, Reed. Stay out of this. It’s got nothing to do with you.”

Reed rolls his shoulders then widens his legs into a basic combat stance. “I disagree. She’s Verne Amari’s blood and the Legatus Commander was a Gamma man.”

Eight other Praetorians from Alpha Cohort cluster to the left of me. In response, the four from Grandfather’s cohort that had been sitting at the table with Reed crowd around him. Gamma Cohort is outnumbered. I assess the one girl and four guys— five guys including Reed— and something about the way they all hold themselves, with the absolute confidence of coiled predators ready to strike, makes me put my money on their team despite the odds. Gamma Cohort has a long legacy of claiming some of the fiercest and most lethal Praetorians. Also, the proudest.

The bastard holding me grunts something unintelligible under his breath then shoves me at his buddy. I stumble forward from the force of it. “Just the two of them then. Since she thinks she’s tough enough to take on a Praetorian, they’ll settle this the way we do. One on one. Bitch got the drop on my man because he hesitated. Radson didn’t want to hurt her.”

If that isn’t the most ludicrous load of shit I’ve ever heard. I

13

didn’t get the drop on him. I didn’t sucker punch him. I’m simply faster. And probably stronger. And as well trained, if not more so. Grandfather made sure of it. I’ve been undergoing Praetorian-style strength conditioning and combat training since before I entered the academy.

The Praetorian in Grandfather’s cohort, Reed, looks at me with a raised eyebrow.

“It’s okay,” I say, brazen. “I got it.” I motion to Radson’s swollen left eye and broken nose. I’m a cadet. I’m nowhere close to his rank. I’m also so much more than that and good ole’ boy Radson decided to fuck with me on the right day. I smile at Radson while motioning him forward. Feeling the severe strain of my cheek muscles, I know I appear a little psycho. Maybe I’ve finally gone off the rails. Maybe today is the day that the psymedics warned me would come if I didn’t properly grieve. I can’t think straight, my emotions are whacked out, and good sense shattered to pieces about a minute ago when I took a swing at a Praetorian in a bar full of onlookers.

“Kenna, this is insane,” Zayne, straining against the guy still holding him, says.

“It is.” Selene agrees with him, but the tone of her voice says she wants somebody to kick the Praetorian’s ass in the worst way. The guy gripping her forearms holds them so hard purplish bruises darken her chalk-white skin beneath his fingers. She kicks at him, but with lightning quick reflexes, he darts his left shin back and out of reach. It doesn’t deter her. She keeps fighting to inflict

14

some kind of damage. She wants me to do the same.

Radson holds his combat daggers in a white-knuckled grip.

He angles the pair straight at me. He’s livid, and his ego took an armored transport size bruising. He’s itching to soothe over his male pride. Too bad for him, that’s not how things are about to go down.

“Without weapons,” Reed says. “Otherwise, we’re not doing this. She doesn’t have any, and it won’t be a fair fight.” Actually, I do. I’m always armed. I just haven’t felt the need to reach for them yet.

Radson looks to Asshole Number Two, Chance, who seems to be acting as Alpha Cohort’s leader.

He smirks, but nods to Radson.

Radson drops the daggers.

I don’t wait for him to reach me and throw the first punch. I close the distance between us and hammer a side kick to his upper torso. I lighten the force of the blow so I don’t crack a rib that could puncture a lung. Punctured lungs collapse and his biochip won’t circumvent a mortal wound. I’m not so far gone that my aim is to kill him. That would be more than reckless. He’s one of the Republic’s precious soldiers. It would be signing my own execution sentence. Though the raging inferno in his eyes makes it clear he means to kill me, I have to content myself with the fact that his ribs will ache like a bitch for weeks even with expedited healing.

He doesn’t allow me to land a second kick. He hurls four

15

punches at me in rapid succession. I dodge each one except the last. A right hook crashes into my left shoulder. It snaps out of socket. I shove aside the searing fire that explodes up and down my arm.

He attempts to inflict maximum damage and ram another punch into my dislocated shoulder. I dodge it, wrenching to the side and sweeping my leg out in a wide arc. He’s so focused on my upper body that he forgets to monitor my legs. I sweep his out from under him and he crashes to the floor. He springs back to his feet without the aid of his hands.

There are about seventy people in the bar in addition to the waitstaff, but none of them are going to get in between Praetorians fighting. They don’t have a death wish. Most of them stand around ogling the fight and casting pitying looks my way, despite the fact that I’m the one winning.

Radson and I circle each other, reassessing and recalibrating.

Grandfather taught me that everyone has a tell. Radson telegraphs his movements by shifting his weight to the side he’s going to strike with. He prematurely tenses the muscles he’s going to use. I shoot forward before a left hook can splinter my jaw and gift him a vicious roundhouse kick to the chest. Needing a good, cathartic fight— something that petty brawls with my academy peers hasn’t given me— I hammer kicks to his stomach, left hip, and knee. Bones pop and he curses as he falls to the ground.

He struggles to stand. He heaves himself a quarter of the way up before his shattered knee gives out. When he falls down, he

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stays down.

Sensing movement behind me, I spin around to the Praetorian that grabbed me when the fight first started. I re-center my weight, remaining light on the balls of my feet. He throws a punch that never connects.

Because Reed blocks it. “It’s over, Chance.”

Chance growls at me around Reed’s formidable stature. I meet his eyes with an unaffected, bored stare, goading him into fight two of the night. Fight one was the best time I’ve had in months.

My blood is still whooshing in my ears, adrenaline is at a peak, and the electric current of something much more dangerous yet thrilling surges in my veins.

My death gleams in Chance’s eyes. Praetorian cohorts operate as fiercely loyal units, and I kicked his friend’s ass and embarrassed him in the worst way. Allegiance to his cohort demands he answers that with retribution.

He’s welcome to try.

I crack my neck, ready to fight the whole of Alpha Cohort in one night.

Reed gives Chance his back and faces me. “Walk away. Go home.”

Home. I inwardly flinch at the word, though he could mean the barracks as much as Grandfather’s apartments.

“Kenna, let’s leave.” Selene touches my elbow. Zayne appears at my other side. I guess the Alpha cohort assholes restraining them finally let them go.

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As much as I want to fight the entire world, I let them pull me toward the exit. Standing in the bar among the Gamma Cohort team, Grandfather’s old team, and hearing the word home on Commencement Eve opens up a devastating dam of grief that threatens to drown me. I should be going home. I should be spending the night at Grandfather’s apartments, dressing for Commencement in the morning with his help, and being escorted to the ceremonial hall by him. But he won’t be at the apartments and he won’t be at Commencement. Selene will be among a legion of family. Zayne’s labourii parents will be in town from the Southern Isles to see their son become the first in their family to declare Praetorian.

Nobody will be at Commencement for me.

Selene emits a shrill whistle once we’re outside the bar. “I know the Legatus Commander taught you some killer moves, but damn. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anybody move like that. Not even him the times he conducted our training sessions. You were quicker than Praetorian-quick.”

I grimace as she, Zayne, and I crowd onto a steel bench curbside to wait for the public craft Zayne hails on his Comm Unit.

I didn’t mean to show off like that. Because while biochips give Praetorians extraordinary abilities, something detested by the Republic confers my abilities. With my high completely worn off, the full weight of what I did crashes into me. I didn’t get tangled up in some dumb squabble with a fellow cadet. I fought a Praetorian, and I put a good extent of my skill level on display. The

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Praetorians and everybody else that was in the bar are going to be talking about how fast and with how much prowess they saw Verne Amari’s granddaughter move. Grandfather would be incensed. Igniting that kind of talk is the opposite of everything he taught me.

In places like Mareen that suffer no love for the Pantheon, people like you survive by laying low in plain sight.

It’s the second time tonight his voice rings in my head. This time, it’s laced with censure. I’d been fully responsible for myself for all of three months and I was already massively screwing up.

I catch my shoulders slumping inward in shame and straighten them. Grandfather’s ghost doesn’t get to lecture me or make me feel further like shit.

I study the scarlet spots staining my hands, navy cadet jacket, and white pants. I’m positive all of the blood is Radson’s. I still inspect my knuckles for cuts because I really was an idiot tonight.

Magic signatures are left behind in the blood, that nagging echo of Grandfather’s voice scowls me.

A sleek, silver bullet train zooms by on the skyrail that runs from the inner sector of Krashen City out to the capital’s commuter quadrants. I let its soft susurration drown out the rest of how Grandfather would berate me. The sky sprawling above the train is cluttered with clouds that are a fitting oppressive gray.

Peeking between them are bright constellations that add splashes of color, yet do nothing to make me feel less bleak. The constellation that shines directly above me—Krashna’s Sword, com-

19

prised of ten indigo blue stars— finishes Grandfather’s lecture that I don’t want to hear. Krashen City is named after the ancient God of War that the Republic once patronized then eventually denounced. When it did, Mareen also quelled all citizens bearing any blessings from the gods.

All such citizens they knew about.

Our public craft sidles up to the curb. Zayne and Selene stand.

I lumber to my feet a moment later. A door made of one-way glass slides up as we approach the craft. I duck inside and slide all the way over to the opposite end of the plush burgundy seat so Selene can climb in next and Zayne after her.

“Your destination is Krashen Military Base—Cadet Barracks.

Precise time in transit is five minutes,” a robotic female voice informs us as the craft zooms away from the curb. It angles upward into the drab sky and carries us toward the skytowers in the distance. Erected from precious obsidian and refined glass, the base’s skytowers are monuments to Mareen’s military strength.

They stand sentinel over the Republic’s great capital city. They were originally raised in tribute to Krashna and are a stark contrast to the monochromatic, single-story, silver flats of the inner sector that were built centuries after the Tribunal Council renounced the god.

I eye one particular tower that twists into the air in a helix shape.

“Adjust destination to the Tribune General residences on base,” I direct the craft.

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“New precise time in transport is seven minutes,” it responds back.

“We’re staying at the apartments tonight?” Zayne’s slim eyebrows shoot up in surprise. I haven’t stepped foot inside Grandfather’s apartments since his death.

“We’re not. I am,” I say as plainly as possible. “Thank you both for being so supportive, but go be with your family,” I tell Selene, “and go enjoy your waitress,” I tell Zayne. “I promise this isn’t about me trying to drink myself into a stupor,” I add before either can protest. In a rare moment which I allow myself to be vulnerable, I openly share my misery with my friends. “Spending tonight by myself is the last thing I want to do. But as hard as today is, Commencement tomorrow is going to be harder when the option of passing nights in the barracks with you guys is torn from me. I think I might fare better if I go ahead and rip the bandage off before I’m more of a mess.”

“I understand.” Selene’s voice is soft. She scoots closer to me and hooks her arm through mine. “Are you sure about us not staying though?”

“Because we can,” Zayne says. “But if what you want is to be alone, we will respect it. We’re here for you and whatever you need to cope better.”

Selene frowns at him, but then nods.

“I’m sure.” I’m not sure at all. However, I insist to them that I am. They’ll be moving into the Praetorian Compound tomorrow without me and embarking on a new life. I need to get used to

21

doing things without them. And they need to get used to not having to babysit me. # I walk off the elevator and down the hall with confident steps, but once I arrive at the entry to Grandfather’s apartments, my hand shakes as I raise it to the biolock, where a beep confirms I’ve passed the first security check. I almost snap my eyes shut so I can’t pass the second. I force myself to stare into the electric white laser so it can scan my retinas. The second beep sounds.

The palladium doors slide apart to reveal a too quiet interior and all the oxygen vanishes from the hall because I’m back to being ridiculous.

I stand in the hall of the skytower that contains the Tribune General residences frozen in place. “You can do this, Ikenna. It’s your living space now. Walk inside.” The pep talk fails to get me moving.

I startle at the fall of footsteps on my side of the door. I turn in the direction of the elevator. A man with astute green eyes, matte brown hair shorn into a brush cut, and skin the same olive hue as Zayne’s stalks toward me. The elevator slides noiselessly closed behind him. Like the entry door, it requires submitting to a double set of bioscans. Aside from me and Grandfather, Rudyard Brock is the only other person with clearance for the three private floors that Grandfather’s residence spans. I face Brock with a scowl, making a note to revoke his unrestricted access.

“What are you doing here?” I’m too irritated at his presence to

22

address him with a deference befitting his Tribune General rank.

Instead of answering me, he nods toward the open doorway.

“Let’s go inside.”

“Why?” I say, automatically defensive. Brock was to my grandfather what Selene and Zayne are to me. He is also the Tribunal Council’s Spymaster with eyes and ears everywhere. I bet he’s already heard of my bar fight and tracked me here to upbraid me.

“It is Commencement Eve. I thought we’d honor the tradition of spending the night with family. And we also need to have a chat.” He says the last part neutral enough. But his mouth tightens at the corners and his eyes widen a fraction. That expression is the look Brock gets when he’s disappointed about something.

Well, he can take his current disappointment and shove it up his ass.

I want to be childish and demand that he leaves. These are my apartments now after all, and I don’t have to tolerate anyone inside them who isn’t welcome. But Brock deserves more respect than that, even if his insistence on trying to play a surrogate parent is too much.

I sigh and wave Brock inside. I enter behind him, trying very much not to trail him like a sullen child about to be scolded. Regardless of the respect I owe him, I am kicking him out if he goes too far.

As soon as I enter the great room, my eyes snap to the three wooden crescent moons that hang on the wall above the palladium door. Grandfather nailed them there. He never shunned

23

the Khanaian arm of his heritage and embraced many of its customs instead. Hanging crescent moons on Khanaian lintels supposedly grants protection when leaving and returning home.

Those moons afforded no such thing to Grandfather. He died in his bedroom, under their watch. Instead, they probably damned him.

I make a mental note to take them down. Clearly, they’re useless.

Brock points to the sofa upholstered in gold Mareenian silk.

It’s an antique with silver, claw-footed legs, and Grandfather, a man who enjoyed the luxuries he worked his ass off for, paid a fortune for it. “Have a seat, Kenna,” Brock says.

Only four people on the whole planet of Iludu calls me Kenna—well, three, now. Selene, Zayne, Grandfather, and Brock.

Grandfather raised me from birth, and Brock was there as his wingman for most of it. Since Grandfather’s death, I’ve pretty much pushed all of his efforts to be supportive away. And his using that name grates on me.

I cross my arms and lean against the wall. “I don’t need a stand-in for Grandfather.” It’s something I’ve had to remind him of often in the last few months. And, okay, maybe I’ve been being petulant and immature, but Brock thinks he can tell me how to grieve and that is not a thing he gets to do.

“Are you sure? Someone has to look after you in Verne’s absence, since you insist on landing yourself into all the trouble you can find.” His voice is terse, but he makes a good effort to keep

24

most of the ire from it, which is why I don’t kick him out—yet.

“A Praetorian, Kenna. For the Republic’s Sake, you got into a bar fight with a Praetorian? Oren Radson could have killed you.”

No, the fucker actually couldn’t have killed me, but Brock doesn’t need to know that. Grandfather kept his confidence about many things, but the Pantheon-Blessed gifts I harbor wasn’t one of them. The aberration might have been too much for even his brother-in-arms to abide.

I motion down the length of myself. “I survived the fight intact.”

A long-suffering stare is his answer to that. “You’ve spent the last three months trying your level best to demolish all you’ve accomplished at the academy over eleven years of training. Are you proud of that? Because Verne wouldn’t be. You’ve worked so hard to have the top marks to be able to declare Praetorian tomorrow and your stunt tonight could’ve fucked it up.”

Okay, now he’s getting dangerously close to being shown the door. “It no longer matters if I make Grandfather proud, does it?

He isn’t here. Just like you weren’t there, tonight. I was defending myself in the bar. That asshole came for me first.” Yet, as hard as I try—all the indignation I feel--I can’t shake all of the nagging shame his words produce. I also can’t shake how his reference to Grandfather makes my throat constrict tight and ignites a sharp, acute pain in my chest. He’s right. Grandfather would be embarrassed by my behavior. Grandfather trained me better. Grandfather raised me better. I should be better. Stronger. And yet, I’m

25

not, and I have no idea how to be.

And here’s Brock, a living reminder of all that.

“I understand your challenges, Kenna,” he says. “But you must be smarter. Stunts like tonight place a target on your back. Don’t give your enemies more ammunition.”

I almost laugh at the speech coming from him; he has the Republic’s sacred trinity of legacy, lineage, and pale skin. What does he know about targets on backs? “I don’t need you to tell me the tight line I’m walking with Grandfather gone or the added scrutiny I’m under. I’ve lived with people hating me for who I am my whole life.” It’s a hatred that’s bullshit. But Mareen’s bigotry is so ingrained, especially among the upper strata of society, there’s nothing I can do except deal. Or leave, which I refuse to do, because the Republic is my home. I have a right to exist here and make a life here just like everyone else.

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About the Author Nia “N.E.” Davenport is a Science Fiction/Fantasy author who has a penchant for blending science and magic. She possesses undergraduate degrees in Biology and Theatre, as well as Master of Arts degrees in Secondary Education and Public Health. When she isn’t writing, she enjoys vacationing with her family, skiing, and being a huge foodie. You can find her online at www.nedavenport.com, on Twitter @nia_davenport, or on Instagram @nia. davenport, where she talks about binge-worthy TV, fun movies, and great books. She lives in Texas with her husband and kids.

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THE FINAL STRIFE Saara El-Arifi Coming June 2022

A Duster is built for labour. Their submissive nature, which I believe to be an element of their blue blood, means they are best suited for the plantation fields. Ghostings, stripped as they are of communication, make the best servants, their translucent blood a clear indicator of adaptability—although a Duster may be substituted if needs must, given the rarity of the former. Embers, continue to be the superior race, proving without a doubt that those with red blood are born to lead.

— Extract from On Race and Colour by Hamad Al-Olar, Warden of Knowledge year 378 of the Wardens’ Empire.

Stolen, sharpened, the hidden key, We’ll destroy the Empire and set you free, Churned up from the shadows to tear it apart, A dancer’s grace, a killer’s instinct, an Ember’s blood, a Duster’s heart.

— The plantation chant of the Stolen

1

Chapter One The Day of Descent # I have been searching for any trace of the Sandstorm to complete my tale. Though the Wardens claim to have killed them some years ago, I have no confirmation of where or when. It may be my ageing eyesight, but I can’t see the end of the story. The rumours are thin, wisps of smoke that I can’t grasp. I will continue to search. I will continue to hope.

— Notes found in Griot Zibenwe’s villa # Bang-dera-bang-dera-Bang.

The drumbeat still thrummed through Sylah’s veins as she weaved her way back home.

The raw pink of dawn promised a blistering heat, and Sylah tilted her head and basked in the sun’s rays. The trinkets in her braids chimed.

She ran her tongue over the joba seed tucked between the gap in her front teeth. The warmth induced by the seed was dissipating, leaving her cold. Hugging her arms to her chest she noticed for the first time she held an empty bottle of firerum. She threw it at the wall of a derelict villa, which was filmed with blue sand. It had been a strong wind last night. At times its pounding had even eclipsed the drums.

But not the drumbeat in her memory.

Bang-dera-bang-dera-Bang.

The sound came again and with it an unmistakable tremor

2

of fear that woke people from their beds. Now Sylah listened and realised she knew the cadence of the rhythm and it wasn’t the from the song in her mind. It was the pounding of the Starting Drum indicating the beginning of a trial.

It was the sound of death.

Bang-dera-bang-dera-Bang.

Dredge-dwellers began to seep out of their decrepit homes and stream towards Dredge Square. Sylah found herself being carried along in the current.

The Square was full of Dusters and Ghostings, blurryeyed from a night of drugs, sex or alcohol. Or in Sylah’s case, all three. A dozen Officers of the Wardens’ Army stood to attention in front of the Rack, the wooden device used for executions. Like ripe bruises, the Army’s purple uniform was enough to instil fear in anyone north of the Ruta River—anyone without red blood.

Sylah spotted Hassa in the crowd and pushed her way towards her.

“How’s it hurting?” Sylah greeted the Ghosting girl.

Like the beetle she had been named after, Hassa was small with dark eyes. Her eyes were unusual for a Ghosting, as theirs were usually light-coloured, matching their grey-brown skin—a feature of their translucent blood. But it didn’t matter if you were a Ghosting or Duster, everyone who lived in the Dredge had the same hollowed-out look. It was a mandatory uniform, an expression of squalor and poverty enforced by malnutrition and childhood labour.

You look like shit. Have you even slept? Hassa signed.

Sylah ignored Hassa’s observation and pointed towards the Officers. “Have you seen this guy’s talent?”

Hassa followed Sylah’s gaze to the Officer with the Starting

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Drum strapped to his chest. He was beating the rhythm with absolute dedication, his muscles clenching and releasing with military precision.

He was born to play the drums. Hassa agreed.

Sylah snorted. “Bet he wanted to join the Playhouse, but his mother made him enlist in the Warden’s Army. Poor little Ember.”

Hassa smiled, revealing the spongey flesh of her severed tongue. Her tongue, like her severed hands, had been taken from her at two mooncycles, like every Ghosting in the Empire. Their limbs and tongues were cut off and sent to the Wardens to tally against the number of Ghosting births. A penance for a rebellion four hundred years old. As a result, Ghostings had developed a complex language that used all elements of their body. It was a subtle language, one invented in defiance to the rulers that still condemned them.

The drum stopped, though the vibrations of dread rippled out for moments afterwards. The Captain, identified by his striped green kente epaulettes, stepped forward.

“In the name of the four Wardens, blessed by Anyme, our God in the Sky, we bring forth the accused.”

A prisoner in shackles was brought forward between the Officers’ ranks. Sylah inhaled sharply between her teeth. “A Griot.”

They raided his villa a few strikes ago, no warning. Hassa signed. He told his last story last night.

Sylah vaguely remembered a Griot entering the Maroon, but she had been preoccupied with chewing a record number of joba seeds.

“What did they get him for?”

Writing letters.

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“Bastards.”

Bastards, Hassa agreed. The sign used her left wrist against her shoulder in a slashing motion.

Sylah scowled up at the podium where the Officers stood.

How she hated them and everything they represented—fear, oppression, pain. She rubbed her neck as the Captain continued.

“The accused deliberately and maliciously plotted and engineered acts of rebellion against the Wardens’ Empire through the written word. A crime punishable by death. May Anyme be our guide. May Anyme absolve you of your sins.”

The Griot’s head hung low, his grey locs trailing the dirt in front of him.

“We pronounce you guilty of treason.”

Sylah muttered, “They’re always guilty.”

Hassa nodded sadly. The trials always ended the same way.

A hush fell over the crowd as a Ripper was spotted.

Rippers were Dusters, forced to turn on their own kind. It was their job to turn the lever that separated the two jaws of the Rack. Their uniform was deep blue. Less washing that way.

Sylah shivered and ran her tongue over her teeth probing for any residual joba seed juice, but the husk was dry. She spat the remains of the seed onto the ground.

“Ach.” Hassa bared her teeth at the globule on the ground.

It’s turning your teeth Ember.

“Ember?” Hassa signed the word again. Sylah had been learning the Ghostings’ language since she’d met Hassa six years ago, but she still stumbled now and then. “Ah red,” the difference in the two words were separated by an additional turn of the elbow. “Well, I don’t care.”

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You should. The drug is very bad for you, it could kill you.

The sign for kill was a wrist across the throat. For some reason the gesture made Sylah smile.

It’s not funny.

Sylah met Hassa’s stare and reached into her satchel at her waist. She pulled out her final seed and, with precision, squished it into the gap between her front teeth. The bitter juice took effect immediately and she closed her eyes for a blissful moment.

The euphoria vibrated through her veins faster than the tidewind. The feeling was so loud, so all-encompassing, that she was carried away from the scene before her.

But she’d seen enough rippings to know what happened next.

The prisoner would be chained to the rack’s wooden bed with four manacles separating their limbs wide. Then the Ripper would turn the lever, and with each turn spread the wooden bed—and with it, the prisoner’s limbs—even wider. First you would hear the prisoner’s joints popping, then the cartilage tearing. Eventually, the skin would rupture, blue blood dripping.

Sometimes a larger chain was wrapped around their midriff, so that their limbs were left intact, but their vital organs cleaved apart with each click, click, click of the lever.

Embers were never subjected to the horror of a ripping; their trials involved courtrooms and juries. Although occasionally Embers would cross the Ruta River to watch those who had been condemned for doing something particularly nasty. The rack was tilted towards the audience for this very purpose. Nothing better than a family outing to watch a rapist get ripped to shreds.

If Sylah were in charge the rippings would be the first thing to go, the racks broken, the splinters scattered like confetti.

6

Sylah opened her eyes, her blissful contentment at odds with the horror: Fourteen turns of the rack and the Griot was still alive.

Sylah whistled low. “This Griot’s got some real stomach.”

A laugh burst out of her. “Well, no, I guess he hasn’t.” She waved to the entrails on the ground.

People around her murmured sounds of dissent.

“Oh fuck off, it’s not like you haven’t seen it before. They do it once a mooncycle.”

Sylah, Hassa tugged on Sylah’s arm, Be quiet, you’re going to draw the Officer’s attention.

But the joba seed saturated Sylah with confidence.

“Why should I be quiet? What’s the point when it could be any of us next?”

Hassa turned on Sylah and pushed her backwards through the crowd. Though Sylah stood two handspans taller than Hassa, the joba seed robbed her of her stability and Sylah drifted backwards like a feather.

Sylah, get up. Hassa was standing over her.

“When did you get up there?” The warmth of the joba seed enveloped her, and as exhaustion settled within her bones she lay backwards, her plaits fanning out.

They were braided with trinkets—fragments of a family she no longer had and that carried with them the frayed threads of memories and so were cherished above all else. Some she wove lovingly in her hair each mooncycle. Others, a leaf, a melon rind, had simply appeared uninvited and masqueraded as a valued token.

Two sheer pebbles of glass, dangling from her fringe. The mottled remains of a woven scarf that had been absently stroked

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to tatters. Strands of a bow string and a quill knotted side by side at the end of two braids. The shell of a sandsnail behind her ear.

When she tilted her head, her hair clacked like aching bones knocking together.

The skeleton of all the pieces of her.

No lice though. Sylah was proud of that.

The braids were shorter, the hair coarser, angrier, where they frizzed around the scar that ran ear to ear across the back of her neck. A puckered smile from the Officers that had cut her.

That had cut them all down in the end.

She rubbed the keloid skin absently. Six years and still the scar refused to fade.

Hassa kicked Sylah in the shin.

“Ow, go away. Can’t you see I’m sleeping?”

Sylah, you can’t sleep here.

“Why not?”

Because you’re in the middle of the street.

Sylah turned her head left and right, and saw, through the molasses of her daze, that she was indeed in the middle of the street. The crowds from the Ripping had already begun to disperse, some stepping over Sylah without a qualm.

Sylah, get up. Hassa offered her wrist and Sylah took it reluctantly.

As much as she wanted to sleep, the Officers were still on patrol and despite her earlier outburst, Sylah didn’t want to be their next victim. Though sleeping on the streets wasn’t an offence, she was sure the Officers wouldn’t simply step over her.

And their boots were heavy.

Come on, let’s get you home.

Hassa began to lead the way through the Dredge towards

8

the Duster Quarter, Sylah resting her elbow on Hassa’s shoulder.

Are you going to go to the Descent later? Hassa asked.

Sylah growled low in her throat. For a moment she had forgotten it was the Day of Descent. But now she looked around and spotted the signs of the holiday sprouting like weeds in the streets. Limp kente cloth flags and dirty rope streamers were strung from roof to roof. The breeze carried the smell of candied plantains, boiled in sugar that had been hoarded just for the occasion.

But no matter how hard the bakers tried, the aroma couldn’t mask the Dredge’s pungent smell of unwashed bodies and filth. Even if you were lucky and the wind blew the other way, you’d get the acrid smell of raw latex from the rubber plantation fields outside the city’s walls. Depended if you preferred spoilt cheese or shit, really. Sylah barely noticed either scent anymore.

“The Descent? Ha! No. I’m not going to watch four people walk down some stairs and call it a festival.”

It’s not just four people walking down some stairs, it’s the changing of the government. The Disciples taking their holy seats as Wardens. Hassa’s eyebrows pulled her shaven head towards her ears as she frowned.

“Blah blah blah.”

It only happens every ten years. I don’t remember the last Descent Day. “Course you don’t, you were only seven.”

You were only ten, Hassa shot back, mischief alight in her dark eyes.

“Exactly, so I don’t need to go again. I remember it all.” In fact, she’d tried to forget it many times.

Sylah ran her tongue over her teeth. “Hassa, I’ve run out

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of joba seeds.”

I’m glad.

“I need to buy more.”

Sylah, I’m not trading with you anymore. You’re taking too much.

“It’s not for me, it’s for my friends.”

You don’t have any friends.

Hassa’s eyes were hollow. Sylah reached for them, and Hassa batted her away with her wrist.

Promise me, promise me you won’t take anymore this week.

“I promise.”

Hassa was visibly torn. Do you have any slabs?

Slabs were the currency of the Wardens’ Empire. They were made of whitestone and stamped with the faces of previous Wardens, just in case the citizens forgot who was in charge.

Sylah did not have any slabs. She’d lost another apprenticeship the night before, and she’d been drinking and chewing away her troubles all night.

“Trade?” Sylah offered.

Trading was the Ghosting way, more so than their roles as servants, because they chose to trade. Servitude to Embers was thrust upon them. Most traded and smuggled goods. Drugs, firerum, materials, kitchen utensils, if you needed it, a Ghosting could get it, and Hassa was one of the best.

Fine. What have you got to trade? Hassa turned to access her stash from her bag and Sylah stumbled as soon as Hassa let her go. The joba seed juice would thrum through her blood for some time yet.

“I have this,” Sylah pulled out the runelamp from her satchel. Blown from the azure sand of the Farsai desert, the

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lamp was a circular glass shell. It was no better than a fufu bowl without the bloodwerk that marked it: dark blood crafted into runes. Once activated the runelamp created a deep red glow that was used instead of fire torches.

Bloodwerk was what really set Embers and the rest of the citizens apart. Red blood, when written into specific strokes and dashes, had the power to manipulate and move objects. It was the true power that placed Embers above the rest of them.

Sylah, that’s broken.

“Shit, I must have smudged the runes in my bag.” She hadn’t, she’d found it that way. The chain of crimson runes had been damaged, rendering the lamp useless. Sylah had copied them down anyway, maybe one day she’d figure out how to bloodwerk.

She could then sell runelamps by the dozen, making her a lot of slabs.

And more slabs meant more joba seeds.

“Will you still trade it?”

No, I can’t sell this, Sylah. If you want to get the bloodwerk fixed, I will trade for it. Not until then. I hear a new Master of Blood has moved into the Duster Quarter. Doing penance, I’m sure.

“Oh, come on Hassa, you know every Master of Blood charges Dusters double.”

He charges Ghostings triple.

Sylah swore.

Find me something I can trade.

A couple of Ghostings emerged from their ramshackle villa and waved at Hassa. If the beige of their servant’s uniform didn’t set them apart, then the grey-brown pallor of their skin did. Ghostings had always seemed like beautiful dolls to Sylah.

Dolls whose hands and tongues the Empire had severed and then

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discarded at the bottom of their toy chest.

Hassa signed back to them, then turned to Sylah. I have to go, if I don’t see you at the Descent, I’ll see you at the Maroon later?

Sylah scowled, frustrated that her friend wouldn’t trade her for joba seeds. She’d have to find another dealer.

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Chapter Two It is my fervent belief that severing the hands and tongues of Ghostings benefits their wellbeing. Those whose wounds fester are weeded out young, their frail countenance discarded before they become a nuisance to their masters. Those who survive understand the power of pain and the importance of subservience.

— Journal entry from Aveed, Disciple of Duty # The Day of the Descent and Ascent were two of the few holidays Dusters and Ghostings were given. The Dredge would be emptying soon, everyone would be making their way up to the Wardens’ Keep to watch the four Wardens abdicate to their Disciples, their seconds-in-command. Sylah didn’t care for it. One Ember was the same as the next no matter who ruled. The ceremony would bring the Wardens’ decade-long reign to an end and start the reign of the new Wardens. The other holiday was the Day of Ascent in six mooncycles, once the new Disciples were determined through a set of trials. At least on that holiday Sylah could make some money betting on who’d win.

She hawked, her phlegm carrying the husk of the seed she had been chewing. Her last one. The ecstasy from the joba seed now slid her into a feeling of deep emptiness that felt like stepping backwards from a fire: you could see and smell the flames but their warmth was mere memory cooling on your skin.

Sylah needed to find something to trade, and quick. Not having any seeds in reserve put her nerves on edge. Hassa was wrong. She wasn’t having too much.

There was only one place in Nar-Ruta for Sylah to find

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something to barter: the empty villas that lined the outer streets of the Dredge. Villas that had once been full of Ghosting families, but that now stood empty as a disease known as the sleeping sickness decimated their numbers. The illness seemed to only affect those with translucent blood, stopping their hearts in their sleep. Dusters, not to forgo an opportunity—you had to take them where you could in the Wardens’ Empire—had begun to occupy the Ghosting villas they left behind.

And so the district that had once been known as the Ghosting Quarter became the Dredge. An amalgamation of the two blood colours and yet, somehow less than both. It was rare to find a business there that didn’t trade in sex, alcohol or drugs.

The houses in the Dredge were made of limestone, cheaper and less robust than whitestone which was the only substance used in the Wardens’ Keep and the Ember Quarter south of the Ruta River. The tidewind had sanded most of the unoccupied villas down to the bare bones of their foundations. Their skeletal remains lined the street as if it were a Ghosting graveyard.

But Sylah knew it for what it really was: a treasure trove.

Sylah entered the first villa on her right, stepping lightly over a crumbling doorframe into a common room thick with blue sand from the Farsai Desert and the night’s tidewind. Pushing around the rubble, wood, and debris, all she could find was a rusty old spoon. She pocketed it just in case.

The next villa was painted with the black cross of the sleeping sickness. Sylah reached out and touched it, her finger coming back black.

“Still wet.” Whoever had lived there had died of the disease that morning, and now no one could enter: The disease was said to be so contagious that their bodies had to be burned

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within moments of them dying even though it was a holiday.

Sylah looked to the horizon where smoke curled up to the sky beyond the city’s walls—a pyre.

Sylah sighed and swirled her tongue around her mouth.

The seed’s bitter juice had waned completely, leaving her with an aching gap between her teeth. The effect was fading faster and faster these days.

She took extra care searching the next villa, which, with more than three rooms, was bigger than most— once the home of a rich Ghosting, though a rich Ghosting was still poor compared to a Duster and utterly deprived by Ember standards.

“Ah!” In the third room, a picture frame nestled in the corner. Blue sand had burrowed into its furrows, but when she turned it over the painting was still intact.

A young family looked back at her. They were Ghostings, their grey-brown complexion captured in paint. But something was…different.

“One, two, three sets of hands...even the baby.” That meant the painting had been made before the Siege of the Silent. The picture was nearly four hundred years old, before the Ghostings started paying penance for an uprising against the Wardens. They had lain siege to the Wardens’ Keep for two mooncycles, rebelling against the Wardens’ rule. It took time, but in the end the Wardens recruited a squadron of ten-thousand soldiers, forming the first Wardens’ Army lead by the Warden of Strength.

Though the rebellion had happened centuries years ago, the Ghostings still suffered for their ancestors’ deeds.

Sylah’s fingertips ran up and over the strokes of paint until they found the corner of the canvas, and then she slipped her finger under the painting’s lip and pulled down, ripping it

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from the frame. Sylah surveyed her prize. The frame looked like oak, a tree that was hard to cultivate in the harsh weather of the Wardens’ Empire. If it was, it would be worth a lot.

Sylah smiled. Today was a good day.

As she got up to leave, Sylah stooped to pick up an aged piece of parchment next to her that had slipped out from behind the frame.

The parchment was old, but sturdy, the wording archaic and decorative. Her heart soared at the thought of more treasure but sunk just as quickly when she saw the words ‘Marion Sea’. It was just a map of the Empire.

Sylah splayed her hand across the illustration of the Wardens’ Empire. There it was, in the palm of her hand: The whole world. The capital city of Nar-Ruta lay to the south, its four quarters divided by the blue line of the Ruta River. A spiderweb of trade routes spread northwards out from the capital to the other twelve cities. Sylah traced her finger northward past the coal mines of Jin-Kutan and the salt flats of Ood-Lopah. Up, up her dirty fingernail went, to the north-west of the continent to the village of Ood-Zaynib, where she grew up.

“The Sanctuary,” she whispered. The Sanctuary was where she was raised.

Though the map didn’t show it, she could see the Sanctuary’s whitestone building ringed with sand dunes and fields rubber trees.

The Marion Sea surrounded the Empire. The sea was a death trap, and the map captured its dangers with jagged blue and black waves churning around the island. But Sylah had to laugh when she saw the grey drawing of the Tannin: The mythical sea creature was the subject of many children’s nightmares but few

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grown-ups believed in it.

And then her fingers ran along the jagged edge of one side. Half of it had been torn away.

But there in the top right corner, was that the swirl of another letter? The smudge of another land?

No, it couldn’t be, there was no more land beyond the Wardens’ Empire. The island was all that was left. Everything else had been consumed by the Ending Fire.

Sylah snorted: so not only was the map torn, it was inaccurate, too. She rolled it up and added it to her satchel. Maybe she could paint over the corner and trade it.

By the time Sylah had finished scavenging the usual joba seed dens were empty, the customers dispersed to the Wardens’ Keep to watch the Descent.

“Clockmaster, what’s the time?”

The clockmaster slumped on his stoop at the street corner, a bottle of firerum dripping amber liquid from his limp hand.

There was only one clock in Nar-Ruta and few had even seen it.

It stood in the cloisters of the Wardens’ Keep, and as the bell rang at each strike, the First Clockmaster would call out the time to the next Clockmaster in the chain. Sluggishly, with no urgency, the cry would travel through the Ember Quarter, across the Ruta River and over to the Duster Quarter, eventually making its way to the Dredge.

So, don’t ever expect a Dredge dweller to be on time.

There was one other place she could try—Maiden Turin’s.

She didn’t like dealing with the Maiden, but she had an aching hunger between her teeth that couldn’t wait until she next saw Hassa. She bit down on the familiar scars of her cheek, pulling in her already gaunt face. Blood flooded her mouth.

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# Maiden Turin’s villa was the largest in the Dredge. Years ago she had settled her business in walking distance of every tavern and seed dealer in the Dredge.

As soon as Sylah’s knuckles rasped against the wooden door, a Ghosting answered, her smile as manufactured as a rubber sole.

From the moment a Ghosting’s hands and tongue were severed, they were assigned a noble household where they would cook, clean, or do whatever else the Embers wanted. But some Ghostings were rejected by their Ember masters, for being ‘lazy,’ or for ‘spying,’ or some other ridiculous accusation, and simply thrown out on the streets to die.

So Maiden Houses like Turin’s sprung up, welcoming discarded Ghostings with open arms. Embers turned a blind eye—in fact, they were some of Turin’s most devoted clientele.

Sylah had often seen their shrouded carriages waiting outside the Maiden Houses, and she and Hassa had often made a game of throwing rotting fish through the windows.

“Sylah? Be that you?” Turin wrapped a silk overall across her bare body, her movements as calculated as a desert fox’s.

Her braids, woven tightly and precisely, fell to her waist, and her features were as bold as they were round. She jutted her chin at the Ghosting who had answered the door. “Go put on some coffee beans.”

“I’m just w-wondering—” Sylah stammered. Her body began to quiver, a symptom that often followed night of particularly heavy joba use. There was only one remedy: more joba seeds.

“You’re either in or out Sylah, no loitering on my doorstep.”

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Turin had already disappeared into the bowels of her home.

Sylah scratched the scar at the back of her neck and followed.

The living room hadn’t been cleared of the night’s revelry and the heavy musk of sex still clung to the shadows.

“I assume you’re here about a job? Heard you lost your apprenticeship at the Glasskeep?” Turin tossed her braids backwards, her silk overall slipping from her shoulder.

“No,” Sylah answered quickly, “I’m sorry, I mean, no thank you.” Working at the Glasskeep had been a disaster, which Sylah had only done in order to learn as many bloodwerk runes as possible from the runelamps she had to wash. And even though she was in need of work, she’d rather toil in the fields than work for Turin.

The Maiden leaned back in her chair and surveyed Sylah.

Her gaze was like a claw dragging along her skin and Sylah winced.

“We’re closed for the Descent, but I can make an exception for you. You’ve made me enough money in the Ring. What will it be, tall, small, old, bald?”

The Ghosting came in with the coffee. She used her foot to remove the leather harness off the table and plonked down the tray.

“I’m not here for a…a—” “Nightworker?” Turin offered. “Didn’t think this was your type of establishment, you should try Maiden Sefar down riverside.” She pulled out a radish leaf cigar, lit it and took a drag.

“Less...particular some might say.”

Sylah’s shaking fingers spun in knots on her lap. “Might you have any joba seeds to sell?”

“My, my.” Turin’s eyebrows lifted through the smoke.

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“I could trade you this frame.” Her offering looked pitiful next to the silver coffee set.

“That frame’s worth about half a slab,” Turin took a drag, her eyes shrivelling to half-moons. “It’s cheap rubber wood,” she exhaled a cloud. “Besides, trading’s not really my thing… I leave that to the rabble.” She gave a pointed look to the Ghosting who was pouring the coffee.

Sylah looked at the map in her bag. Maybe Turin would be interested in that? But then Sylah looked around at the lavish oil paintings that covered the walls. Probably not.

“When are you next fighting in the Ring?”

Sylah hadn’t realised how long the silence had stretched until Turin sliced it with the knife of her words. Sylah closed her satchel and replied, “Next week.”

“Marigold,” Turin barked.

The Ghosting with the counterfeit smile came out of a bedroom. With no voice and no hands, it was impossible for Ghostings to name themselves something convenient for Dusters and Embers to say. So Dusters and Embers chose a name for them, often after animals or flowers, things that the Ghosting servant reminded them of.

“Marigold, go and get my stash of joba seeds. The one for customers.”

Turin turned back to Sylah.

“Marigold’s one of my best you know. She likes the whip.”

Turin winked and Sylah dipped her eyes towards her coffee cup.

“I’m glad I’ve still got her. I’ve been losing nightworkers to the sleeping sickness for the last two years.”

“Oh, yeah?” Sylah hated small talk.

“Indeed. It’s strange how the sleeping sickness only kills

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off the weakest of the Empire.”

Sylah had nothing to say to that. While it was true that no Duster or Ember seemed to get the sleeping sickness, Turin’s attitude was all too common—that Ghostings were lesser than everyone.

They sat in silence until Marigold returned to the room holding a small packet. Too small a packet in Sylah’s opinion.

Turin held them out to her and Sylah snatched the joba seeds and put them into her satchel.

“How much is it?”

“Thirty slabs.”

Sylah swallowed her shock with a gulp.

“I don’t—” Turin smiled, “You have until the tidewind to pay me back.”

Midnight? Surely Turin knew that would be impossible.

The feeling of safety the seeds had given her was fading already like the smoke from Turin’s cigar.

“I c-can’t do that.” Sylah handed them back.

Turin closed Sylah’s hand over the packet of seeds.

“Why don’t you fight in the Ring tonight? Surely you could make some money that way?”

Sylah understood now. Turin always placed her bets on Sylah. But she wasn’t due to fight for another week. She’d have to go see Loot…

She nodded weakly.

“Thirty slabs, Sylah, before midnight. Don’t want to get caught in the tidewind now, do you?”

Sylah shook her head and slipped a joba seed out of the packet. She didn’t want to think about what would happen if she

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didn’t pay the Maiden back. The tidewind was the perfect coverup for any murders committed in the Dredge. But that was a worry for another time that the anticipation of her next joba seed smothered.

“May Anyme protect you.” The Maiden of the house waved her away with a blessing, the cigar smoke, like an extended talon, following her out.

Now creaking floorboards and the patter of bare feet were the only sounds in the Maiden House. Ghostings crossed Sylah’s path in diaphanous fabrics. Bandages, like flags of conquered armies, littered their skin—tokens of the type of clientele Turin catered to.

Coffee and bile and anger raged in Sylah’s throat. That’s the thing with having transparent blood.

No one could see you bleed.

22

HER MAJESTY’S ROYAL COVEN Juno Dawson Coming July 2022

Evil spirits observe silly, young girls who are more given to curiosity, and so more easily led astray by elderly workers of harmful magic.

The Malleus Maleficarum, 1486 I agree with whoever said [the Spice Girls] are soft porn.

They’re the antichrist.

Thom Yorke of Radiohead, 1997

1

25 Years Earlier…

The night before the summer solstice, five girls hid in a treehouse.

The shack, much too nice to call a shack, was sturdy enough, cradled in the arthritic branches of a three hundred year-old oak.

Below, in Vance Hall, preparations for tomorrow’s festivities were finalised, although it was more an excuse for the grown-ups to fetch up the dustier wines from the cellar two days in a row than it was a planning meeting. Their elders, quite some way past tipsy, truthfully hadn’t noticed the girls were absent.

Up in the tree, the youngest of the girls, Leonie, was upset because the eldest, Helena, said she couldn’t marry Stephen Gately from Boyzone. ‘I’m not playing,’ Leonie said.

A congregation of candles burned in the treehouse window, wax trickling off the ledge into lumpy stalactites. Skittish amber light danced up the walls, casting campfire shadows across Leonie’s face. ‘Why does Elle always get to pick first?’

Elle’s bottom lip quivered, her baby blue eyes filling with tears. Again. That was why Elle always got to pick first. She really could turn the waterworks off and on at will.

‘I think they can both marry Stephen,’ Niamh Kelly said, ever the peacemaker.

‘No they can’t!’ her twin sister said at the top of her voice.

‘How’s that going to work?’

Niamh scowled at her. ‘I don’t think we’re actually going to marry Boyzone, do you, Ciara? We’re ten!’

Helena said with authority, ‘When Elle is twenty, he’ll be thirty, so that’s OK.’ Leonie stood as if to leave the treehouse, her fists balled tight.

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‘Oh if you’re going to storm off like a kid, fine!’ said Helena. ‘You can both have Stephen. Poor Keith.’

Leonie nudged the trapdoor with her toe. ‘It’s not even that, Helena. It’s just a game. It’s stupid. Anyway, I said I’m gonna marry the Fresh Prince, so it don’t even matter.’

There was a moment of hush because they all knew what was really troubling her, for it troubled them all. The candles sputtered and there was a drunken hoot of adult laughter from inside the house. ‘I don’t wanna do tomorrow.’ Leonie said what she meant at last. She returned to the carpet and sat cross-legged.

‘My dad don’t want me to do it. He says it’s evil.’

‘Your dad is an eejit,’ Ciara bellowed.

Niamh, the elder of the Kelly twins by three-and-a-half minutes said, ‘In Ireland, we’re considered lucky.’

‘Is he saying my Grandma is evil?’ Elle added. ‘She’s, like, the nicest person in the whole world!’

It was harder for Leonie; the first in her line, at least in living memory, to exhibit the traits. How could Helena hope to understand? Her mother, her mother’s mother and all the Vance mothers before that had been blessed too. ‘Leonie,’ Helena said with the absolute certainty only a bossy thirteen year-old could possess. ‘Tomorrow is easy peasy, just like an assembly at school.

We’ll line up, swear the oath, Julia Collins will bless you, and that’s all. Nothing actually changes.’

She really emphasised the ak-shully, but they all knew, in the honesty of their hearts, that it was a lie. There were so few of them left now, fewer with every generation. This life, this oath, wasn’t like when Ciara cut her fringe with a pair of nail scissors. That soon grew out, but there was no turning back from tomorrow. The bell had sounded, and playtime was over. Leonie

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was only nine.

‘I’m nervous too,’ Elle offered, taking Leonie’s hand.

‘Me too,’ said Niamh who then turned to her sister.

‘I suppose,’ Ciara agreed reluctantly.

Helena brought one of the candles into the centre of the filthy old rug. ‘Here, form a circle,’ she said. ‘Let’s practice the oath.’

‘Ach, do we have to?’ Ciara groaned but Helena shushed her. She wasn’t intimidated by the twins, no matter how much the elders swooned over their potential.

‘If we know if off by heart, there’s nothing to be nervous about, is there?’

Niamh understood this would help Leonie and chastised her sister. The girls gathered around the candle and joined hands.

It’s hard to say how much was in their minds, but the girls would all later swear they felt a current flowing through their human circuit, sharing and amplifying their own latent gifts.

‘All together,’ Helena said, and they launched into it.

To the mother I swear To solemnly uphold the sacred sisterhood Her power is mine to wield The secret ours to keep The earth ours to protect An enemy of my sister is mine The strength is divine Our bond everlasting Let no man tear us asunder The coven is sovereign Until my dying breath.

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And they all knew it off by heart. Every single word.

The following night, they were allowed to wear their midnight black, velvet capes for first time. They smelled brand new, of the plastic they came wrapped in. Too long (you’ll grow into them), they lifted them up to stop the hems trailing along the undergrowth as they climbed Pendle Hill.

The procession snaked uphill into the heart of the thick forest that smothered the valley like a fur. They each carried a lantern jar to light the way, but the uneven path was a real anklesnapper by night. Eventually, charcoal trees parted to reveal a moonlit clearing, a flat boulder at its centre. There was power in this place, any fool could feel it.

It was scary for the girls, of course, to be surrounded by all the elders. A hundred of them, faces half-hidden by their hoods. Scarier still to watch each of them, in turn, approach the stone slab to leave their offering. They pricked their thumbs with a silver blade and deposited a tiny red pearl of blood into the yew tree cauldron. Julia Collins, her matronly face peering out from under her cowl, summoned the girls one at a time. They drank from the chalice until their eyes turned black and, when that happened, she dipped her finger into the yew bowl and drew the mark of the pentagram on their young foreheads.

And as the clock dolefully struck one in the village far in the distance, they stopped being girls, and finally became witches.

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BABEL:

Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution R.F. Kuang Coming August 2022

CHAPTER ONE Que siempre la lengua fue compañera del imperio; y de tal manera lo siguió, que junta mente començaron, crecieron y florecieron, y después junta fue la caida de entrambos.

Language was always the companion of empire, and as such, together they begin, grow, and flourish. And later, together, they fall.

Antonio de Nebrija, Gramática de la lengua castellana # By the time Professor Richard Lovell found his way through Canton’s narrow alleys to the faded address in his diary, the boy was the only one in the house left alive.

The air was rank, the floors slippery. A jug of water sat full, untouched by the bed. At first the boy had been too scared of retching to drink; now he was too weak to lift the jug. He was still conscious, though he’d sunk into a drowsy, half-dreaming haze.

Soon, he knew, he’d fall into a deep sleep and fail to wake up again.

That was what had happened to his grandparents a week ago, then his aunts a day after, and then Miss Betty, the Englishwoman, a day after that.

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His mother had perished that morning. He lay beside her body, watching as the blues and purples deepened across her skin. The last thing she’d said to him was his name, two syllables mouthed without breath. Her face had gone slack and uneven.

Her tongue lolled out of her mouth. The boy tried to close her filmy eyes, but her lids kept sliding back open.

No one answered when Professor Lovell knocked. No one exclaimed in surprise when he kicked through the front door– locked, because plague thieves were stripping the houses in the neighborhood bare, and though there was little of value in their home, the boy and his mother had wanted a few hours of peace before the sickness took them too. The boy heard all the commotion from upstairs, but he couldn’t bring himself to care.

By then he only wanted to die.

Professor Lovell made his way up the stairs, crossed the room, and stood over the boy for a long moment. He did not notice, or chose not to notice, the dead woman on the bed. The boy lay still in his shadow, wondering if this tall figure in black had come to reap his soul.

“How do you feel?” Professor Lovell asked.

The boy’s breathing was too labored to answer.

Professor Lovell knelt beside the bed. He drew a slim, silver bar out of his front pocket and placed it over the boy’s bare chest.

The boy flinched; the metal stung like ice.

“Triacle,” Professor Lovell said first in French. Then, in English, “Treacle.”

The bar glowed a pale white. There came an eerie sound from nowhere; a ringing, a singing. The boy whined and curled onto his side, his tongue prodding confusedly around his mouth.

“Bear with it,” murmured Professor Lovell. “Swallow what

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you taste.”

Several moments passed. The boy’s breathing steadied. He opened his eyes. He saw Professor Lovell more clearly now; could make out the slate-gray eyes and curved nose–yinggoubi, they called it, a hawk’s beak nose–that could only belong on a foreigner’s face.

“How do you feel now?” asked Professor Lovell.

The boy took another deep breath. Then he said, in surprisingly good English, “It’s sweet. It tastes so sweet…”

“Good. That means it worked.” Professor Lovell slipped the bar back into his pocket. “Is there anyone else alive here?”

“No,” whispered the boy. “Just me.”

“Is there anything you can’t leave behind?”

The boy was silent for a moment. A fly landed on his mother’s cheek and crawled across her nose. He wanted to brush it off, but he didn’t have the strength to lift his hand.

“I can’t take a body,” said Professor Lovell. “Not where we’re going.”

The boy stared at his mother for a long moment.

“My books,” he said at last. “Under the bed.”

Professor Lovell bent beneath the bed and pulled out four thick volumes. Books written in English, spines battered from use, pages worn so thin that the print was barely still legible. He flipped through them, smiling despite himself, and placed them in his bag. Then he slid his arms under the boy’s thin frame and lifted him out of the house. # In 1829, the plague that later became known as the Asiatic Cholera made its way from Calcutta across the Bay of Bengal to the Far East–first to Siam, then Manila, then finally the shores of

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China on merchant ships whose dehydrated, sunken-eyed sailors dumped their waste into the Pearl River, contaminating the waters where thousands drank, laundered, swam, and bathed. It hit Canton like a wave, rapidly working its way from the docks to the inland residential areas. The boy’s neighborhood had succumbed within weeks, whole families perishing helplessly in their homes.

When Professor Lovell carried the boy out of Canton’s suburbs, everyone else on his street was already dead.

The boy learned all this when he awoke in a clean, well-lit room in the English Factory, wrapped in blankets softer and whiter than anything he’d ever touched. These only slightly reduced his discomfort. He was terribly hot, and his tongue sat in his mouth like a dense, sandy stone. He felt as though he were floating far above his body. Every time the professor spoke, sharp pangs shot through his temples, accompanied by flashes of red.

“You’re very lucky,” said Professor Lovell. “This illness kills almost everything it touches.”

The boy stared, fascinated by this foreigner’s long face and pale gray eyes. If he let his gaze drift out of focus, the foreigner morphed into a giant bird. A crow. No, a raptor. Something vicious and strong.

“Can you understand what I’m saying?”

The boy wet his parched lips and uttered a response.

Professor Lovell shook his head. “English. Use your English.”

The boy’s throat burned. He coughed.

“I know you have English,” said Professor Lovell. It sounded like a warning. “Let me hear it.”

“My mother,” breathed the boy. “You forgot my mother.”

Professor Lovell did not respond. Promptly he stood and brushed at his knees before he left, though the boy could scarcely

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see how any dust could have accumulated in the few minutes in which he’d sat down. # The next morning the boy was able to finish a bowl of broth without retching. The morning after that he managed to stand without much vertigo, though his knees trembled so badly from disuse he had to clutch the bed frame to keep from falling over.

His fever receded; his appetite improved. When he woke again that afternoon, he found the bowl replaced with a plate with two thick slices of bread and a hunk of roast beef. He devoured these with his bare hands, famished.

He spent most of the day in dreamless sleep, which was regularly interrupted by the arrival of Mrs. Piper–a cheery, round woman who plumped his pillows, wiped his forehead with deliciously cool, wet clothes, and spoke English with such a peculiar accent that the boy always had to ask her several times to repeat herself.

“My word,” she chuckled the first time he did this. “Must be you’ve never met a Scot.”

“A...Scot? What is a Scot?”

“Don’t you worry about that.” She patted his cheek. “You’ll learn the lay of Great Britain soon enough.”

That evening, Mrs. Piper brought him his dinner–bread and beef again–along with news that the professor wanted to see him in his study. “It’s just upstairs. The second door to the right. Finish your food first; he’s not going anywhere.”

The boy ate quickly and, with Mrs. Piper’s help, got dressed.

He didn’t know where the clothes had come from–they were Western in style, and fit his short, skinny frame surprisingly well– but he was too tired then to inquire further.

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He trembled making his way up the stairs; whether from fatigue or trepidation, he didn’t know. The door to the professor’s study was shut. He paused a moment to catch his breath, and then he knocked.

“Come in,” called the professor.

The door was very heavy. The boy had to lean hard against the wood to budge it open. Inside, he was overwhelmed by the musky, inky scent of books. There were stacks and stacks of them; arrayed neatly on shelves and messily in precarious pyramids throughout the room, some strewn across the floor, others teetering on the desks that seemed arranged at random within the dimly lit labyrinth.

“Over here.” The professor was nearly hidden behind the stacks. The boy wound his way tentatively across the room, afraid the slightest wrong move might send the piles tumbling.

“Don’t be shy.” The professor sat behind a wooden desk piled over with books, loose papers, and envelopes. He gestured for the boy to take a seat across him. “Did they let you read much in Canton? English wasn’t a problem?”

“I read some.” The boy sat gingerly, taking care not to tread on the volumes–Richard Hakluyt’s travel notes, he noticed–piled up by his feet. “We didn’t have many books. I ended up rereading what we had.”

For someone who had never left Canton in his life, the boy’s English was remarkably good. He spoke with only a trace of an accent. This was thanks to an Englishwoman–one Miss Elizabeth Slate, who the boy had called Miss Betty, and who had lived with his household for as long as he could remember. He never quite understood what she was doing there–his family was certainly not wealthy enough to employ any servants, especially not a

8

foreigner–but someone must have been paying her wages because she had never left, not even when the plague hit. Her Cantonese was passably good, decent enough for her to make her way around town without trouble, but with the boy, she spoke exclusively in English. Her sole duty seemed to be taking care of him, and it was through conversation with her, and later with British sailors at the docks, that the boy became fluent.

He could read the language better than he spoke it. Ever since the boy turned four, he had received a large parcel twice a year filled entirely with books written in English. The return address was a residence in Hampstead just outside of London–a place Miss Betty seemed unfamiliar with, and which the boy of course knew nothing about. Regardless, he and Miss Betty used to sit together under candlelight, laboriously tracing their fingers over each word as they sounded them out loud. When he grew older, he spent entire afternoons poring over the worn pages on his own.

But a dozen books were hardly enough to last six months; he had always read each one so many times over he’d nearly memorized them by the time the next shipment came.

He realized now, without quite grasping the larger picture, that those parcels must have come from the professor.

“I do quite enjoy it,” he supplied feebly. Then, thinking he ought to say a bit more, “And no–English was fine. Is fine.”

“Very good.” Professor Lovell picked a volume off the shelf behind him and slid it across the table. “I suppose you haven’t seen this one before?”

The boy glanced at the title. The Wealth of Nations, by Adam Smith. He shook his head. “I’m sorry, no.”

“That’s fine.” The professor opened the book to a page in the middle. “Read out loud for me. Start here.”

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The boy swallowed, coughed to clear his throat, and began to read. The book was intimidatingly thick, the font very small, and the prose proved considerably more difficult than the breezy adventure novels he’d read with Miss Slate. His tongue tripped over words he didn’t know, words he could only guess at and sound out.

“The par…particular ad-advantage which each col-ocolonizing country derives from the col…colonies which par… particularly belong to it, are of two different kinds; first, those common advantages which every empire de…rives?” He cleared his throat. “Derives…from the provinces subject to its dom… dom…”1 “That’s enough.”

He had no idea what he’d just read. “Sir, what does–” “No, that’s alright,” said the professor. “I hardly expect you to understand international economics. You did very well.” He set the book aside, reached into his desk drawer, and pulled out a silver bar. “Remember this?”

The boy stared, wide-eyed, too apprehensive to even touch it.

He’d seen bars like that before. They were rare in Canton, but everyone knew about them. Yinfulu, silver talismans. He’d seen them embedded in the prows of ships, carved into the sides of rich men’s palanquins, and installed over the doors of warehouses in the foreign quarter. He’d never figured out precisely what they were, and no one in his household could explain. His grandmother called them rich men’s magic spells, metal amulets carrying blessings from the gods. His mother thought they contained trapped demons who could be summoned to accomplish their 1. In Book IV, Chapter VII of Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith argues against colonialism on the grounds that defense of colonies is a drain on resources, and that the economic gains of the monopolistic colonial trade are an illusion. He states, surprisingly, that “Great Britain derives nothing but loss from the dominion which she assumes over her colonies.” This view was not widely shared at the time.

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master’s orders. Even Miss Betty, who made loud her disdain for indigenous Chinese superstition and constantly criticized his mother’s heeding of hungry ghosts, found them unnerving.

“They’re witchcraft,” she’d said when he asked. “They’re devil’s work, is what they are.”

So the boy didn’t know what to make of this yinfulu, except that it was a bar just like this one that had several days ago saved his life.

“Go on.” Professor Lovell held it out towards him. “Have a look. It won’t bite you.”

The boy hesitated, then received it in both hands. The bar was very smooth and cold to the touch, but otherwise it seemed quite ordinary. If there was a demon trapped inside, it hid itself well.

“Can you read what it says?”

The boy looked closer and noticed there was indeed writing– tiny words engraved neatly on either side of the bar–English letters on one side, Chinese characters on the other. “Yes. “ “Say them out loud. Chinese first, then English. Speak very clearly.”

The boy recognized the Chinese characters, though the calligraphy looked a bit strange, as if drawn by someone who had seen them and copied them out radical by radical without knowing what they meant. They read: 囫圇吞棗.

“Húlún tān zăo,” he read slowly, taking care to enunciate every syllable. He switched to English. “To accept without thinking.”

The bar began to hum.

Immediately his tongue swelled up, obstructing his airway.

The boy grasped, choking, at his throat. The bar dropped to his lap where it vibrated wildly, dancing as if possessed. A cloyingly sweet taste filled his mouth. Like dates, the boy thought faintly,

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black pushing in at the edges of his vision. Strong, jammy dates, so ripe they were sickening. He was drowning in them. His throat was blocked, he couldn’t breathe– “Here.” Professor Lovell leaned over and pulled the bar from his lap. The choking sensation vanished. The boy slumped over the desk, gulping for air.

“Interesting,” said Professor Lovell. “I’ve never known it to have such a strong effect. What does your mouth taste of?”

“Hongzao.” Tears streamed down the boy’s face. Hastily he switched to English. “Dates.”

“That’s good. That’s very good.” Professor Lovell observed him for a long moment, then dropped the bar back into the drawer.

“Excellent, in fact.”

The boy wiped tears from his eyes, sniffling. Professor Lovell sat back, waiting for the boy to recover somewhat before he continued. “In two days, Mrs. Piper and I will depart this country for a city called London in a country called England. I’m sure you’ve heard of both.”

The boy gave an uncertain nod. London existed to him like Lilliput did; a faraway, imaginary, fantasy place where no one looked, dressed, or spoke remotely like him.

“I propose to bring you with us. You will live at my estate, and I will provide you room and board until you’ve grown old enough to make your own living. In return, you will take courses in a curriculum of my design. It will be language work–Latin, Greek, and of course, Mandarin. You will enjoy an easy, comfortable life, and the best education that one can afford. All I expect in return is that you apply yourself diligently to your studies.”

Professor Lovell clasped his hands together as if in prayer. The boy found his tone confusing. It was utterly flat and dispassionate.

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He could not tell if Professor Lovell wanted him in London or not; indeed, this seemed less like an adoption and more like a business proposal.

“I urge you to strongly consider it,” Professor Lovell continued.

“Your mother and grandparents are dead, your father unknown, and you have no extended family. Stay here, and you won’t have a cent to your name. All you will ever know is poverty, disease, and starvation. You’ll find work on the docks if you’re lucky, but you’re still small yet, so you’ll spend a few years begging or stealing. Assuming you make it to adulthood, the best you can hope for is back-breaking labor on the ships.”

The boy found himself staring fascinated at Professor Lovell’s face as he spoke. It was not as though he had never encountered an Englishman before. He had met plenty of sailors at the docks; had seen the entire range of white man’s faces from the broad and ruddy to the diseased and liver-spotted to the long, pale, and severe. But the professor’s face presented an entirely different puzzle. His had all the components of a standard human face– eyes, lips, nose, teeth, all healthy and normal. His voice was a low, somewhat flat, but entirely human voice. But when he spoke, his tone and expression were entirely devoid of emotion. He was a blank slate. The boy could not guess his feelings at all. As the professor described the boy’s early, inevitable death, he could have been reciting ingredients for a stew.

“Why?” asked the boy.

“Why what?”

“Why do you want me?”

The professor nodded to the drawer which contained the silver bar. “Because you can do that.”

Only then did the boy realize that this had been a test.

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“These are the terms of my guardianship.” Professor Lovell slid a two-page document across the desk. The boy glanced down, then gave up trying to skim it; the tight, looping penmanship looked nigh illegible. “They’re quite simple, but take care to read the entire thing before you sign it. Will you do this tonight before you go to bed?”

The boy was too shaken to do anything but nod.

“Very good,” said Professor Lovell. “One more thing. It occurs to me you need a name.”

“I have a name,” said the boy. “It’s–” “No, that won’t do. No Englishman can pronounce that. Did Miss Slate give you an English name?”

She had, in fact. When the boy turned four, she had insisted he adopt a name by which Englishmen could take him seriously, though she’d never elaborated which Englishmen those might be.

They’d chosen something at random from a children’s rhyming book, and the boy liked how firm and round the syllables felt on his tongue, so he harbored no complaint. But no one else in the household had ever used it, and soon Miss Betty dropped it as well.

The boy had to think hard for a moment before he remembered.

“Robin.”2 Professor Lovell was quiet for a moment. His expression confused the boy–his brows were furrowed, as if in anger, but one side of his mouth curled up, as if delight. “How about a surname?”

“I have a surname.”

“One that will do in London. Pick anything you like.”

The boy blinked at him. “Pick…a surname?”

Family names were not things to be dropped and replaced at whim, he thought. They marked lineage; they marked belonging.

2. I killed Cock Robin.

Who saw him die?

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“The English reinvent their names all the time,” Professor Lovell said. “The only families who keep theirs do it because they have titles to hold onto, and you certainly haven’t got any. You only need a handle to introduce yourself by. Any name will do.”

“Then can I take yours? Lovell?”

“Oh, no,” said Professor Lovell. “They’ll think I’m your father.”

“Oh–of course.” The boy’s eyes cast desperately around the room, searching for some word or sound to latch onto. They landed on a familiar volume on the shelf above Professor Lovell’s head–Gulliver’s Travels. A stranger in a strange land, who had to learn the local languages if he wished not to die. He thought he understood now how Gulliver felt.

“Swift?” he ventured. “Unless– “ To his surprise, Professor Lovell laughed. Laughter was strange coming out of that severe mouth; it sounded too abrupt, almost cruel, and the boy couldn’t help but flinch. “Very good.

Robin Swift you’ll be. Mr. Swift, good to meet you.”

He rose and extended his hand across the desk. The boy had seen foreign sailors greeting each other at the docks, so he knew what to do. He met that large, dry, uncomfortably cool hand with his own. They shook.

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THE BOOK EATERS Sunyi Dean

Coming September 2022

Chapter One

Devon By Day Present Day There is a strain of weirdness in the soil of England that will never be ploughed out.

—C. L. Nolan ❖❖❖ These days, Devon only bought three things from the shops: books, booze, and Sensitive Care Skin-cream. The books she ate, the booze kept her sane, and the lotion was for Cai, her son. He suffered occasionally from eczema, especially in winter.

There were no books in this convenience store, only rows of garish magazines. Not to her taste, and anyway she had enough books to eat at home. Her gaze skipped across the soft porn, power tools, and home living publications down to the lowest strata, where children’s magazines glowed pink and yellow.

Devon ran short, ragged nails across the covers. She thought about buying one for Cai, because he seemed to like reading that kind of thing at the moment and decided against it. After tonight, his preferences might change.

She walked to the end of the aisle, linoleum squishing beneath her heeled boots, and set her basket at the checkout. Four bottles of vodka and a tub of skin-cream.

The cashier looked at the basket, then back at her. “D’you have ID?”

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“Pardon?”

“Do you, have, any ID?” he repeated, slowly, as if to someone hard of hearing.

She stared. “I’m almost thirty, for Christ’s sake.” And looked every year of it, too.

He shrugged, crossed his arms. Waiting. Wasn’t much more than a kid himself, maybe eighteen or nineteen, working in the family shop and trying to follow all the rules.

Understandable, but she couldn’t oblige. Devon didn’t have any ID. No birth certificate, no passport, no driver’s license; nothing. Officially, she didn’t exist.

“Forget it.” Devon shoved the basket at him, bottles clinking.

“I’ll get a drink somewhere else.”

She stalked out, annoyed and flustered. Hordes of teenagers bought booze from other corner shops all the time. It was a daily occurrence around here. That someone would choose to card her, so clearly an adult, was ridiculous.

Only after she’d crossed the badly lit street did she realise that she’d left without buying the skin cream. It was a small failure, forgetting the lotion, but she failed Cai so constantly in so many different, myriad ways that even this tiny mistake was sufficient to wring her insides with fresh anger.

She considered going back for it, then checked her watch.

The time was pushing 8pm. Already in danger of running late.

She would just have to apologise to her son about his skin cream.

Besides, eczema was nothing compared to his hunger.

Much more important to feed him.

Newcastle-upon-Tyne was a pretty enough city, if a little touristy for Devon’s liking. This time of year, the sun set at 4pm and the sky was already fully dark, the lamps abuzz. The lack of

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ambient light suited her mood. Compulsively, she checked her phone with its short list of contacts. No texts. No calls.

She slunk past a row of decrepit terraces. Passer-by drifted up and down the pavement. A tight knot of people huddled outside one of the houses, drinking and smoking. Music leaked through curtainless windows. Devon took a left off the main street to avoid the crowds.

There were so many things to remember when she was out and around humans. Feigning cold was one of them. Thinking of it, she drew her coat tight around her, as if bothered by the chill. Walking with sound was another. She scuffed her feet with deliberate heaviness, grinding gravel and dust beneath her heels.

Big boots helped with the plodding tread, made her clunky and stompy like a toddler in adult wellies.

Her vision in darkness was another awkward one. Having to remember to squint, and to pick her way across a detrituslittered pavement that she could see with perfect clarity; having to feign a fear she never felt, but which should have ruled her.

Solitary human women walked with caution in the night.

In short, Devon had always to act like prey, and not like the predator she had become.

She picked up the pace, keen to get home. The maisonette flat she rented (cash only, no questions) occupied a squalid space above a tire shop. In the daytime it was noisy, reeked of oil, and filled with the conversation of customers. The evenings were quieter, if no less foul-smelling.

Down the alley, up the stairs to the back entrance. There was no street-facing door, but that was a good thing. Meant she could come and go by dark side-streets, unwatched by curious eyes—and so could her visitors, when she had them. Privacy was essential.

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Devon fished out a set of keys, hanging around her neck on a lanyard. The cord was entangled with a brass compass on a steel chain. She shook the lanyard free, slotted the key in, and wrestled briefly with the lock before stepping inside.

Since neither she nor her son required light, the flat sat in perpetual dark. It saved on the energy meter and reminded her a little of home, back when home had been welcoming: the cool unlit calm of Fairweather Manor, with its shade-tinted hallways and shadow-layered libraries.

She was expecting human company, though, and so flipped on all the lights. Cheap bulbs flickered into anaemic existence.

The flat contained only a claustrophobic living space, a small kitchenette with fold-out table, a bathroom veering off to the left, and a locked bedroom to her right where her son spent much of every day. She dropped her bag by the door, hung her coat on a hook, and clunked across to his room.

“Cai? Are you awake?”

Silence, then the faintest of shuffles from within.

“No lotion, sorry,” she said. “They were out. I’ll get some tomorrow, aye?”

The shuffling stopped.

Always, she was tempted to go in and offer comfort of some kind. By the three-week mark, starvation would have ravaged him to thinness, his suffering spiralling into unbearable agony as his body began to produce toxins. The madness already gnawed his mind, incurable except through his next feed, and even after feeding, the craving would remain ever-present. He would either sit in a corner, huddled up and unresponsive, or else attack her in a frothing rage.

Impossible to know which reaction she’d get and so, fingers

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shaking, she checked and double-checked the bolts instead of going in. One on the top and one on the bottom, both solid things she’d installed herself, and the regular lock. The room had no window, courtesy of its awkward layout in relation to the shop; no additional security needed there. For once. Barring up windows was such a pain.

Someone knocked at the entrance to her flat. She jumped, felt chagrined, then checked her watch. Ten past eight; bang on time. Just as well she’d not gone back for the lotion.

Devon went to let in her guest. He had a name, but she would not allow herself to think it. Better to consider only his role, his profession: the local vicar. He needed to be no more and no less.

The vicar waited anxiously on her doorstep, wearing a mustard jumper that might have been fashionable forty years ago.

He had kind eyes, a quiet demeanour, and impressive patience with his quarrelsome congregation. Not touchy-feely with kids and no severe personal problems that she could find after two weeks of intense stalking. Everyone had small vices and little problems, always, but that was a given, and she could cope with the small stuff. They were only human, after all.

“Thanks for coming.” Devon hunched herself smaller. Be uneasy, be reluctant, and above all be vulnerable. The sure-fire act that suckered them every time. “I didn’t think you would.”

“Not at all!” He offered a smile. “As I told you on Sunday, it’s no trouble.”

Devon said nothing, looking sheepish and fiddling with the compass round her neck. She’d done this conversation or some variation of it so many times, tried all kinds of lines, and found it was better to let them take the initiative. Probably she

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should have put on something more feminine to look even more unthreatening, but she despised dresses.

“May I come in?” he ventured, and she feigned embarrassment for her rudeness, stepping aside.

His gaze snagged on the dilapidated interior. Devon couldn’t really blame him. She gave the usual, awkward apologies for the state of the flat while he gave the usual demur reassurances.

That ritual completed, she said, “My son is in a bad way.

I spoke to him earlier, and he didn’t answer. You may not have much luck, I’m afraid.”

The vicar nodded, lips pursed with concern. “If you are happy for me to try, I will see if I can speak to him.”

Devon clenched her teeth to hold back a hysterical giggle.

As if talking could solve problems like this. Wasn’t the vicar’s fault, she’d been the one to say that Cai had depression, but hysteria crept up on her nonetheless.

The vicar was still awaiting a response. She managed a tight nod, hoping he’d read her emotions for the right kind of conflicted, and led him to the locked door.

“Is this where he is?” the vicar said.

“In here, yes.” Devon pulled the keys from her pocket.

“You lock your son in his room?” He sounded shocked, and she could feel the weight of his judgement as she undid each bolt.

No doubt he thought she had something to do with Cai’s present mental state.

If only he knew.

“It’s complicated.” Devon turned the final key and paused, aware her heart was racing. “I need to ask you something.”

“What is it?” The vicar was wary, his senses alert to a danger that his eyes could not perceive.

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Didn’t matter. He’d been lost the moment he stepped inside.

She met his gaze. “Are you a good person?” The question that consumed her, every time. Every victim. “Are you kind?”

He frowned, considering his words. Trying to understand what reassurance she sought, not that he had a cat’s chance in hell of guessing. Still, his hesitation was its own reassurance. The bad ones lied, quick and smooth—or worse, brushed it aside, sometimes with humour. Only those with a conscience would stop and evaluate her question.

“None of us are truly good,” the vicar said, at last. He put a hand on her shoulder, so gently, so kindly and she almost threw up on the spot. “All we can do is live by the light we are given.”

“Some of us don’t have any light,” Devon said. “How are we supposed to live, then?”

He blinked. “I—” Devon caught his wrist, wrenched the door open, and shoved him in. The vicar wasn’t frail but Devon was far stronger than she looked and had the element of surprise. He stumbled forward, startled and gasping, into the darkness of Cai’s room.

Devon yanked the door shut and held it hard.

“I’m so sorry,” she said, through the keyhole. “I’m just doing the best I can.”

The vicar didn’t answer. He was already shouting and thrashing.

Really, it was pointless to apologise. Victims didn’t want your sorry-so-sorrys when you were hurting them, they wanted you to stop. Devon couldn’t oblige, though, and apologies were all she had these days. Apologies, and booze.

The noise of the vicar’s muffled struggling trickled away in a minute or less. She could never decide which was worse:

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the wailing, or the silence. Maybe they were equally bad. After a moment of dithering, she let go of the doorknob. No point locking up. Cai wouldn’t be dangerous, not anymore, and better to make sure he could leave his room if he wished.

The flat oppressed, mildewed walls crushing her spirit to flatness. After so many days of ravenous hunger, her son would need to sleep off his feed. In the meantime, she wanted a drink and there was no vodka in the house.

No, wait. She still had a half-bottle of whiskey, left behind by the previous person who’d ‘visited’ her home. Devon didn’t like whiskey, but right now she liked being sober even less. A couple minutes of rifling through the cabinets turned up the errant alcohol.

Bottle in hand, Devon locked herself in the bathroom and drank into oblivion.

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Chapter Two

A Princess Of The Magic Line 22 Years Ago She was a princess of the magic line. The gods had sent their shadows to her christening.

—The King of Elfland’s Daughter, by Lord Dunsany ❖❖❖ Devon was eight years old when she met her first human, though she did not realise what he was at the time. Or rather, she did not realise what she was.

Growing up, there had only been the Six Families, scattered across different regions of Britain. Devon’s family was the Fairweathers, whose estate was wedged between low-lying hills in the wilds of the North Yorkshire Moors. Uncle Aike was the patriarch of their manor because he was the wisest, even though he was not the oldest. Under him were a succession of other aunts and uncles ranging from barely adult to discreetly ancient.

And under them were the seven Fairweather children, of whom all except Devon were boys. There were very few women around, for girl-children were rare among the Families. The uncles outnumbered the aunts, just as the brothers outnumbered their sister, and no mothers were in residence at the time. Devon’s own mother was an unremembered face, having long since moved on to another marriage contract.

“You’re the only princess in our little castle,” Uncle Aike

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would say with a wink. Tall and grey-haired, his hobbies included folding his lanky frame into comfortable chairs and drinking copious quantities of inktea. “You get to be Princess Devon. Just like in the fairytales, eh?” He would make a little flourish with his hands, a smile crinkling up the corners of his mouth.

And Devon would laugh, put on a crown made from braided daisies, and run around the yard in her tattered lace dress shouting I’m a princess! Sometimes, she tried to play with the aunts, because if she were a princess then they ought to be queens. But always, the grey-haired women withdrew from her with anxious glances to hide in their fusty bedrooms. Devon eventually decided they were boring and left them alone.

The house itself was a ten-bedroom building, three levels high. It might have been quite ordinary for manors of that type if not for the haphazard collection of parapets, extensions, tile roofs, and Gothic flourishes. (“Courtesy of your Great Uncle Bolton,” Uncle Aike had said, once. “Architecture was his, ah, treasured pastime.”)

Beneath the ground, more levels sprawled with delightfully twisted passageways. Devon knew every nook and corner, from the dark sublevel halls to the sun-filled music rooms of the upper floors.

And the libraries. Like the other Families, the Fairweathers’ libraries had a flavour all their own: vintage books stitched from carefully-aged leather—the darker, the better—with textured, embossed covers. When opened, the brown-edged pages flaked in soft, dry puffs, smelling faintly of March rain. One bite and Devon’s bookteeth could sink straight through those covers and chewy strings of binding, tongue alive with the acidic tang of inktinged paper.

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“Biblichor,” Uncle Aike liked to say, rolling the word in his mouth. “That is a word which means, the smell of very old books.

We love biblichor, here. And other old things.”

“Everything in the house is old,” Devon giggled. Like the paintings in the downstairs dining room; four hundred years old, apparently. “I think you’re very old!”

Uncle Aike always laughed, was never offended. “Maybe I am, princess, but you’ll never make it to my age with that tongue of yours!”

That tongue of yours. Lots of people commented on Devon’s tongue. She stuck it out, sometimes, inspecting it in the mirror.

There was nothing special about her tongue that she could ever see.

The land they lived on stretched vast to the eyes of a child.

Rocky hills couched moorland, full of hollows and peat bogs. In summer, when the moors bloomed purple with heather, Devon chased rabbits and grouse birds. Twice she found otters, whose little fangs looked like her own growing bookteeth. In winter, the grass dried up and crisped with frost. She built snowmen with her brothers and they ran together, ever barefoot, through the hillocks and valley forests.

And then, one January morning, eight-year-old Devon went out on her own in search of snow buntings and red fox vixens. She had heard the foxes barking in the night and hoped to catch a glimpse of one scampering across the snow, like flame racing across paper.

She’d hardly gone three hundred yards, crossing into the small wood behind the house, when an unfamiliar noise snagged her attention. Someone was crashing through the trees and snow with loud, clumsy steps. No one at Fairweather Manor walked so

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heavily and Devon, intrigued, went to investigate.

A man she didn’t recognise slogged and huffed through freshly fallen snow. He was of indeterminate Adult Age, with dark hair and warm brown skin, his chin fully bearded. A curling black moustache framed his nose. Weirdly, he wore heavy boots, long trousers, funny knitted things on his hands, and bizarre puffed clothes that buttoned up to his chin. Another knitted thing sat on his head.

It took her a moment to recognise his gear as gloves, coat, and hat. They were things she knew from stories but had never seen on a real person. He looked so different from adults on the estate, who were rather paler and mostly dressed in dusty old suits. She wondered briefly if he was a knight of the Six Families, but knights usually travelled in pairs, on motorcycles, with a dragon in tow. He had no partner and no dragon and definitely no motorcycle.

She circled behind and tapped his shoulder.

“Hi,” she said, and snickered when he nearly fell over with shock. How had he not seen her? All that fabric must have muted his senses.

“Holy—!” He checked himself, took a breath. Frost dusted his dark sideburns, and hems of his flared trousers were soaked from melted snow. “Goodness, you’re quiet.”

Devon was utterly delighted. It’d been at least two years since she’d managed to sneak up on anyone. “Are you one of my cousins?” She skipped around him in a circle. “I haven’t seen you before. Why aren’t you in a car? I thought all the cousins came in cars.”

“Cousin? No, I don’t think so.” For some reason, he kept staring at her bare feet and knees, and her sleeveless linen dress.

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“Aren’t you cold, love?”

“Cold?” She stopped in her tracks, puzzled. “What do you mean?”

She knew about cold from eating all the right books. Cold was what made snow happen, instead of rain, just like in the Snow Queen story.

It was snowing now, light flakes landing on her arms and filling in her footprints. And it felt different from heat: balmy, instead of spikey. But cold was a part of the world and its seasons, a sensation detached from reaction. Not something that you had to do anything about.

“Strong kid,” he said, eyebrows raised. “You know, I have a little boy about your age. He’s not nearly so fond of the cold.

But no, to answer your question, I’m not a cousin. I’m a guest, I suppose.”

Now that, Devon understood. “You’re very rude, then,” she said, hands on hips. “If you really are a guest to the house, you’re supposed to tell me who you are and where you’re from.”

Non-Cousin people existed in the world: humans, who ate revolting animal flesh and dirty plants they plucked from the soil.

But guest or not, Family or not, everyone had to show what Uncle Aike called basic courtesy.

“Is that so?” A tentative smile. “Very well, my apologies.

I’m Amarinder Patel, or ‘Mani’ for short. I’m a journalist from London. Do you know London?”

Devon nodded. Everybody knew London. That was where the Gladstones lived, far down south: the biggest, richest, and most powerful of the Families. She’d met some of their visiting cousins, once.

“And you are?” Mani’s smile stabilised, became more genuine.

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“I’m Devon Fairweather of the Six Families,” she informed him. “All of this land belongs to Fairweather Manor.”

“The Six Families?” he echoed.

Devon gave up being polite. “What’s a jerna… jernaliss?”

If he wasn’t going to do the right words, then neither would she.

“Jour-na-list,” he said, with slow emphasis. “The investigative kind. That means I do research and go chasing strange stories.

Sometimes, the things I discover appear on the telly. Isn’t that exciting?”

“What’s the telly?”

Another pause, shorter this time. He was learning to hide his surprise. “Devon… interesting name, by the way… I actually came here in search of your family. There are rumours about a remote clan living in the moors. I was hoping I could write a story—” “A story? Like, a new one?” Devon was immediately interested. “Can all jour-na-lists write stories?”

“Well—” “Will you write one just for me?” Questions burst from her in an excited flurry. “Can I eat it when you’re done? I’ve never had a story written for me to eat!”

The smile slid from his face, like melting snow from a roof.

“Eat it?”

“Is that how stories are made? I always wondered but Uncle Aike said he’d tell me when I was older. How do you write a story?

I can’t write a story. Will it be a book when you’re finished? Do all stories become books?”

“You can’t write?” he said, bewildered.

“Huh? Of course not!” She goggled at him. “How can we write?” If bookeaters could write, they wouldn’t need other

14

people’s books. The uncles had told her that.

Mani let out a slow breath. “I see.” He turned up the collar of his coat. “Do you have a mum or dad?” When she looked confused, he added, lips twisting, “Someone who looks after you.

A grown-up.”

“Oh. D’you mean Uncle Aike?” Devon said, trying not to let her disappointment show. Uncle Aike got all the visitors. “I guess I could take you to him.” She knew the stranger wouldn’t be wanting to see the aunts, because nobody ever wanted to see the aunts.

“Sure.” Mani said, darkly. “Let’s meet your Uncle Aike.”

Devon skipped through the snowdrifts, disappointment giving way to self-consolation. So what if the visitor wanted to see Uncle Aike? She’d found him first. Ramsey would be so jealous. Her other brothers, too, but she didn’t like them as well as Ramsey; most were much older and very boring and didn’t play with her so much. Anyway, she would rub it in Ramsey’s face all week. Maybe two weeks.

The forest thinned rapidly into rocky hills whose hard edges were softened with frost. The house unfolded into view, giving the illusion of a pop-up children’s book, the ancient parapets jutting uncomfortably against failing winter light. A few of Devon’s brothers played football in the front gardens. None of them paid any attention to her except Ramsey, who looked over in pure astonishment. Devon took smug pleasure in his shock.

“No power source, no crops, no adequate clothing for any of the children, yet they have modern cars on the drive.” Mani was muttering into a small black device with a red flashing light.

“Can’t help but wonder what they eat. Insular and isolated, either way. Could this be the source of those old local legends?” He

15

caught her staring and smiled disarmingly.

“Follow me!” Devon said, and tugged him, strangely reluctant, beneath the yawning archway into the entrance hall beyond.

A once-rich carpet lay tattered and flat over a rough-hewn stone floor. Crystalline light fixtures hung darkly immaculate, barren of candle or bulb. If they’d ever been lit, Devon had never seen it. The rooms they passed contained low couches or polished wooden tables, the chandeliers and lamps also unused. Walls were thickly lined with shelves, unending shelves. The scent of biblichor suffused everything.

She took a sharp left at the end of the hallway and skipped into the drawing room, Mani trailing after. Several of her uncles were gathered around a particularly large oak table, playing a game of bridge and drinking inktea. The moment Devon and her prize visitor walked in, all conversation ceased. Every head swivelled their way.

“Uncle!” Devon said. “I found a guest!”

“So you have.” Uncle Aike set down his fan of cards. “Who are you, sir?”

“Amarinder Patel, freelance journalist,” Mani said, and extended a hand. “I was looking—” “This is private property.” Uncle Aike rose slowly. When not stooping, he stood comfortably over six feet. “You are not allowed to be here. Journalists in particular, are not welcome.”

Devon looked on, bewildered. She had never seen her favourite uncle so unfunny. So lacking in Basic Courtesy.

Mani lowered his hand. “I’m sorry, I would have called in advance, but I wasn’t even sure you and your family lived here.

There’s no listed phone number on the land registry, no names on

16

the electoral register—” “Quite so.” Uncle Aike leant forward, knuckles pressed to the table. “Did it occur to you, Mr. Patel, that perhaps we have no wish to be contacted? Least of all by a journalist. Private citizens are entitled to private lives.”

The air seemed to thicken, stifling Devon’s questions.

Something was happening that she didn’t understand, though nobody seemed to be mad at her.

Mani adjusted his glasses. “Very well, I’ll see myself out.”

But Uncle Aike pointed to an empty seat and said, “Nonsense. Done is done, and you are already here. Take a seat, please.” A muscle jumped in his cheek. “This is what you have come for, yes? To find the members of my Family? Well, come and speak to us, and we shall converse like adults.”

“I…” Mani fidgeted with his small black machine, turning it over and over in his hands. To the perspective of this fully human man, he had entered a dark and sombre room lined with crumbling tomes and populated by looming, pale-faced men in old-fashioned suits. Not a situation for the faint of heart.

But after a moment, his professionalism and rationality must have won out. Mani edged over and sat down, squashed between Uncle Bury and Uncle Romford.

“Dev, my dear.” Uncle Aike did not take his eyes off the journalist. “Go and play, yes? We will be a little while, having a chat with Mr. Patel.”

“But…” Devon glanced mournfully at the table, where her guest sat rigid. She always had to leave when the grown-ups talked, and it was never fair.

Uncle Aike shifted his gaze towards Devon, shoulders and face softening a little. “Tell you what. Take yourself up to my

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room, little princess, and find one of the special edition fairytales.

But off the lowest shelf, mind. Nothing naughty, aye?”

“Oh! I will, I will!” Devon scampered out of the room in excitement. Though fairytales were all she ever ate, some were better than others and the special edition ones in her uncle’s study tasted exquisite: the crisp gold bindings, ribbon bookmarks, bright illustrations with multi-hued inks. An explosion of colour and sparkles, words dangling and lingering on the palate.

The last thing she heard before darting up the stairs was her uncle saying, “Romford, shut that door, if you please.”

She forgot all about them by the time she reached the top of the stairs. Uncle Aike’s study occupied a smallish room on the east wing, and it was here she headed.

Devon slipped in soundlessly. These walls held Renaissance paintings and an eclectic selection of instruments, including a Chinese lute, none of which Devon had ever heard her uncle play.

Gifts from ‘eaters in other countries, back when travelling abroad had been a little easier. Too much paperwork, nowadays.

A desk and some chairs made for a cosy sitting area; a kingsized bed took up much of the remaining floorspace. The windows had long since been boarded over on the inside and fitted with yet more shelves. The closest shelf housed multiple copies of various Arthurian legends; those were usually given to her brothers. Full of stories that girls didn’t need to know.

Below that was a row of fairytales. Beauty and the Beast, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, and Snow White. Various others. All stories of girls who sought and found love, or else who fled their homes and found death. She could almost hear him saying, The lesson is in the story, my dear. That was the shelf her uncle had specified.

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Devon had other ideas.

She dug out the little wooden stool her uncle kept under the bed and dragged it over. She could, if she stood on her toes, just reach the tallest shelf, which was much more exciting.

From this vantage point she couldn’t see what books were there, but it didn’t matter. All of those books were forbidden, and thus desirable. Even the most diligent of children got tired of the same meal, day in and day out; she couldn’t miss the chance to try something different.

Her fingers closed around the edge of a paper-bound spine and Devon pulled the book free, nearly losing her balance. Joy at her success made her giggle fiercely. Her uncle would be cross if he found out, and she might have to eat nothing except boring dictionaries for a whole week, but the excitement of something forbidden seemed worth the risk.

She sat on the stool and examined her prize. Jane Eyre was stamped across the binding in a perfunctory script. The red leather cover was embossed with an illustration of a young woman surrounded by flowers. The printing date meant that the author was long dead. A shiver ran through her. That words could remain, printed anew and afresh long after the original writer had died, never failed to amaze. Devon flipped it open at random.

Something of vengeance I had tasted for the first time; as aromatic wine it seemed, on swallowing, warm and racy: its afterflavour, metallic and corroding, gave me a sensation as if I had been poisoned.

How delightfully naughty, how ungirlish and un-princesslike! The idea that vengeance might taste like a particularly

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exciting book was deeply intriguing. This novel, whatever it was, would surely be far more interesting than the usual fairytale.

She opened her mouth, teeth unsheathing—and halted. A strange urge came over her to not eat the book at all, but simply to pocket it. To read it, in fact, which was possible to do, if a little wrong.

Reading was a shameful thing. We consume written knowledge, her aunts and uncles had said so many times.

We consume and store and collect all forms of paper flesh as the Collector created us to do, clothed as we are in the skin of humankind. But we do not read, and we cannot write.

Which was fine, except that everybody knew the Collector was never coming back. The bookeaters would live and die without ever passing on their gathered information to the Collector’s unknowable data vaults. She couldn’t see the purpose behind their purpose.

Besides, taking a book from the top shelf was already wrong. It couldn’t hurt to be just a little bit wronger.

One sin beget another; the decision was made in an instant.

Devon stuffed the book inside her shirt to take it back to her own room, over in the west wing. She picked her way through the loft to the other side of the manor then climbed down, slipping into her room. By the time she’d read a chapter and hidden the stolen copy of Jane Eyre under her mattress, nearly an hour had passed.

She re-emerged into the hallway, straightening her dress and trying not to look criminal. The manor was very quiet, even for a wintry afternoon. The aunts were likely up in their sequestered quarters, from which they rarely emerged. The only sounds were the raucous yelling and shouting of her brothers milling outside but even that seemed muted, and more subdued than when she’d

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brought Mani past.

Wait, the journalist! How had she forgotten about her guest? Devon took the steps two at a time and half-sprinted back towards the drawing room.

But her guest was already gone. In fact, the drawing room was empty except for Uncle Aike, who sat by the fireplace with his feet on a stool. He looked up as Devon entered, and waved her over. “Come in, love. Have a seat.”

She snuggled into the chair next to her uncle. “Where’s the jour-na-list?”

“Mr. Patel is resting, in a room in the cellar.” Uncle Aike had the gentlest hands, never snagging or tugging as he fingercombed through Devon’s tangles. “Tomorrow morning, knights will come to take him away.”

“Away?” She had only met knights once. They’d been serious and scary, not at all nice or funny like her uncle. “Where to?”

“The coast of North Yorkshire,” he said, after a moment of hesitation. “To Ravenscar Manor. The patriarch there has a use for humans and will pay good money for a well-educated one.”

“Oh,” Devon said, crestfallen that another house would get to steal her guest. “I wanted him to stay.”

“I’m sorry, princess. I know you did. But I’m afraid Mr. Patel was not a pleasant man. He wished to tell stories about us to other people.”

“Stories are good things. Aren’t they?”

“Not all stories are good things, no.” Uncle Aike kissed the side of her head. “You only have the right books to eat in this house, because we only give you the right stories, appropriate for a little princess. However, some stories are certainly bad, and your poor Mr. Patel would have written very bad stories.”

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Devon mulled that over. “Does that mean he was a broken writer?”

“Of a sort. Yes, that is a good enough description.”

“Oh, I see! Are the Ravenscars going to fix him, Uncle?”

“They certainly will, love,” said her uncle, gazing into the fire. “They certainly will.”

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