She Who Rides the Storm (The Gods-Touched Duology)
She Who Rides the Storm: Chapter 34

Knox waited until Anwei was off the roof to take the bow from his shoulder and pull out three more of the arrows she’d made for him, though these ones didn’t contain calistet. The first screaming workers had gone running toward the bright lights that marked the excavation mess area, and the ripples of panic had already begun. Noa and her friends lurched closer until their fire brushed the torchlight.

“He took us. Trapped us in between death and the eternal sky, sipping on our souls.…”

Shouts for help had brought guards, though the rattled commands Knox heard over the screams from the workers as they ran for the front gates were shaky at best.

“Save us from him. A thousand years under stone…”

Knox raised his bow as Noa ignited a second flame, her chant rising to a strangled scream.

Anwei’s dark aura flitted under the pavilion around the center of the compound. The guards gave the order to take aim with their bows, so Knox pulled the arrow back and let it fly to the dry grass behind Noa.

The arrow exploded with a loud squeal and a shower of sparks, sending a wave of heat through the air. Noa seemed to grow, unfolding as she threw down one of her blazing tethers. It erupted halfway between her and the crowd in a fountain of green fire.

Screams cut the air, feet pounding against the ground as workers fled, even the guards on the catwalks disappearing in a rattle of loose boards.

Knox took two more of the fire arrows and nocked them together. They arced over the top of the camp, then thunked into the wooden base of the main gates. Flames burst out to lick at the wood, but Knox didn’t stop to watch; he hopped off the roof on the far side and melted into the shadows as a group of workers sprinted past him. Pushing his aurasight until it strained, Knox looked in every building he could reach, inspected every flare of white for the shallowest hint of purple. He ran with the workers, circling around until he came upon where the director’s lodgings were.

No one was inside.

Knox checked the buildings on either side, but there were only tired archeologists who were peering out their windows for a look at what was the matter. The shapeshifter was supposed to be here. Lia had said it. The papers they’d stolen from the governor had said it.…

At the back of his mind, Anwei’s aura flickered by the tomb’s entrance. Then it went out.

Knox stopped dead, spinning toward the pavilion, trying to see and hear past the clamor of workers and of Noa and her friends’ crying as they herded people toward the main entrance.

But Anwei was gone. She hadn’t died or flown off or run away. Her aura had disappeared right over the tomb entrance. If she’d gone underground, then that meant the tomb itself was blocking her aura from him.

A substance that could block auras?

The director’s empty room behind Knox seemed to grow, to echo, to roar. If the shapeshifter wasn’t aboveground, and the tomb walls could somehow hide an aura…

Knox dropped his bow and ran for the pavilion, breath caught in his throat.

Anwei climbed down the ladder. The tortured ghost cries and clamor of shouts dimmed as if she were going underwater. Breathing in carefully, Anwei searched for a hint of nothingness that would say the shapeshifter had been down in the tomb, but the air smelled only sweaty and stale. Her nose filled with the nutty cinnamon-brown scent of new wood mixed with the dusty gray of old, the cocktail of odors peeking from behind the heavy scent of stone. Hushed pricks of color punctuated the hulking weight of the tomb’s smell—gold, silver, jewels, and paint. And…

Anwei breathed, filling her lungs. And something. A familiar something she couldn’t place.

She hopped to the ground and took out her lantern, flint, and steel. Once the wick was lit, she held up the lamp, replaceing the tomb much as Lia had described. A main room with a doorway that led to nothing, a hole in the floor. Anwei went down the ladder, and the something scent grew stronger—worse than any kind of aukincy, worse than poison because it wasn’t so blatant. It waited at the bottom of the ladder, prickling in her throat like a knife.

Her last step off the ladder was almost too careful, the rug under her feet muting the smell. Lia had said there was something wrong with this room and that the rugs were there to protect workers, but it was like nothing Anwei had ever smelled before—an impossibility, like a spider milking its own poison, then waiting in a web to throw it. She pulled her medicine bag to hang across her chest so she could easily reach her herbs or the explosives she’d brought, but for the first time in her life, Anwei couldn’t smell the answer to this poison. Her herbs were helpless.

A sudden movement caught the corner of her eye. Anwei stopped dead.

Silence.

As she lifted the lantern toward the place where she’d seen the movement, her golden light bled across a section of carved stone, a lizard head snarling at her from the body of a human man. Anwei put a hand to her chest, laughing to herself. The light must have touched the carving to make it look as if it were moving.

She followed the carpets to the doorway Lia had told her about, not even the smallest glow from her lantern penetrating the black beyond it. A stairway. Then a room where the door slams shut, the ceiling lowers, and the center of the floor has fallen away. Anwei pulled out the coil of rope she’d brought in preparation. At the bottom of the stairs, she knotted one end of the rope around the golden column inside the stairwell and looped the rest over her shoulder. The ceiling on the other side of the doorway was low—lower even than Lia had said, making Anwei wonder if she and the aukincer’s son hadn’t been the last people to trigger it. She went down on her hands and knees, forced to crawl just to get inside. There were baskets filled with rock and shards of pottery clustered around the entrance, making it difficult to slide into the room. Anwei held up her light once she was inside, the relief of Calsta on the ceiling glaring at her through her mask of gold. The center of the floor, where there was supposed to be a pedestal with a hole around it, was solid, a relief glittering darkly in the light. Anwei paused, looking around to make sure she hadn’t gotten it wrong, but there was no pedestal, no hole. Only the nameless god staring up at her.

It must have closed again. Well, Lia told me how they opened it the first time. Touch the nameless god, the floor falls in.… Anwei looked around once more, trying to take in all the things that were different from what Lia had said. The ceiling was much lower than she’d made it sound, the hole was gone, and there were cracks in the ceiling and wall, chunks of rock missing from the far side, where a fabric sheet had been hung in the corner, hiding the worst of the damage.

Lia didn’t mention that, either.

Someone had been down here.

Anwei stared at the sheet, a breeze pushing at the fabric from the inside, making it flutter. A breeze? That meant there was another way out of the tomb Lia didn’t know about. Maybe another way in and out of the whole compound. Which meant… Maybe the snake-tooth man won’t be here? What would they do if he wasn’t?

But then she shook her head. I have to do my part here. None of it will work without the sword. So Anwei crawled toward the center of the room, where the nameless god waited. The room smelled… wrong. Like no stone she’d ever smelled before.

The lantern light flickered over the banned god’s arms and legs, his face so calm and benevolent. He held a man in his lap who was holding a golden shield. This was the god who had apparently touched her? The one every Devoted had hunted, befouled, destroyed? Anwei paused, looking him over as if something made of stone could speak. Could confirm the snake-tooth man had been his monster, a thing he had allowed to destroy her life.

She could almost feel an emptiness underneath the nameless god’s image, as if whatever made the shapeshifter empty lurked on the other side. Anwei shook her head, unwinding the rope from her arm. Whatever was down there was a thing made by men, not by stone gods, no matter whom the Warlord had chosen to blame.

Chest clenching, Anwei crawled closer to the vines twisting around the nameless god like snakes. Lia had said the moment anything touched him, the floor would—

A furious scratching of stone echoed through the tomb.

Anwei curled down around her lantern, almost burning her wrist on the heated metal when she blew it out. The scratching came again, this time with the sound of pebbles showering the stone floor.

It was coming from the hallway.

Clutching the medicine bag to her chest, Anwei pulled the scarf around her neck up over her nose and mouth, and groped for the packet of calistet she’d diluted to make Knox’s arrows. Her fingers were slippery with sweat inside her gloves.

A footstep dragged across the gravely floor. And then another.

“Anwei?” Knox’s voice echoed.

“Calsta pin you to the sky, Knox.” She swore, sliding the poison back into her bag and pulling down the scarf. “You scared me. I thought we were meeting outside. Where’s the snake-tooth man?”

Now that she was paying attention, she could feel Knox’s presence in her head. It had been muted, far away until he’d walked within sight of the doorway. Now it was once again a warm glow approaching opening. Warily, as if he could see something she couldn’t. “Is he down here?” she hissed.

“I’m not sure.” Knox’s glow crouched down in the awful dark and crawled toward her. “He’s not aboveground that I can see.”

“Well, what do you see now?” Anwei tried to tamp down her relief, ashamed of herself for being frightened.

“There’s something about this stone that hides auras.”

Fumbling for her lantern, Anwei found the flint and steel once again and lit the wick. A bloom of light pushed back the darkness, washing across her friend’s face. “You think he’s waiting down there?”

Knox nodded, his face like stone.

“It blocks auras. Does it block my sense of smell, do you think?” Anwei had known replaceing the snake-tooth man down here in the dark was a possibility, but she hadn’t thought through how it would feel to face him on her knees, palms sweating. Talking nonsense was easier than facing it. “I couldn’t smell the poison in the governor’s study until it was out of the drawer.”

“I don’t know. It could.”

Anwei’s teeth ground against one another. “Well, I guess we should go down.”

Once Knox had stuck his foot into the rope’s loop, Anwei forced herself forward and touched the nameless god’s relief.

The ceiling began to groan, lowering so it touched Anwei’s back, then forced her down onto her belly. The pedestal started pressing up from the floor into her shoulder.

“Anwei? Are we sure—”

She caught a whiff of sea, and then the floor fell out. They slid headfirst into the opening. Knox’s arms were around her, and she clung back, the rope giving an awful snap as it caught their weight. They swung, and Anwei slammed into a wall before they swung back the other way.

A loud crack rang in her ears as the spiked stones Lia had warned them about slammed into each other above them, the crash making the walls shudder. She twisted to see and then wished she hadn’t, the thick columns’ points covered in old blood. Even as she watched, they ratcheted back into place above.

“Are you all right?” Knox yelled.

“Are you all right? Are you all right? Are you all right?” Knox’s voice echoed, but then somehow it wasn’t Knox’s voice, instead turning into a slippery, slithering thing. Knox held her close, his arms so tight around her, she could hardly breathe. “Anwei?”

Anwei’s fingers were numb, barely holding on to the rope. She’d dropped the lantern, and her head screamed. And the odd smell she couldn’t place…

“I’m okay.” Anwei swallowed, trying to get her bearings as they kept swinging. The lantern was still merrily burning below them somehow, illuminating sea-carved rocks. And there was a rush of air, water—

“Are you all right? Are you all right? Are you all right?” The echo swelled again, prickling Anwei’s skin. Her nose curdled with a musky, wet, animal smell. She’d smelled it only once before. Looking down at the flickering lamp, Anwei thought she saw something move.

“There’s a door here,” Knox said. “You still have the incendiaries?”

“Yes.” She craned her neck to see what he meant, the rope spinning. “Don’t listen to the voices, Knox. Can we get to the door?”

“The voices?” Knox shifted as another wash of whispers spread out underneath them. The words had changed to “It’s not all right. It’s not all right. It’s not all right.” He swore.

Swaying together, they made the rope swing them toward the door, and Anwei finally caught sight of it, the shapeshifter king’s ugly face snarling at them from the stone. The whispers flowed up higher, taking on a singsongy quality that tugged at Anwei’s chest. “I’m here. I need your help.” When she glanced below, her eyes had adjusted enough to see a single, sinuous coil of scaly skin only a few feet from the lantern. “Please help me!” it sang.

Knox reached out and snagged the stone doorframe with his hand. Groaning, he waited for Anwei to hop onto the ledge, her heart pounding. She reached out and caught the rope, and Knox grabbed the ledge with his other hand, then dropped to stand next to her. She wound the rope on a curl of stone jutting out from the relief, testing to make sure it wouldn’t break before letting go of it.

She caught the smell of stone, but it was wrong. Stronger somehow, changed into something more. But the smell of salt and scales was too sharp to dig deeper.

“I’m all alone, and it is so dark.…” The whispers echoed this new line, and Anwei caught sight of sinuous coils writhing between the rocks.

“I thought narmaidens didn’t come this far north.” Knox’s voice was rough. Anwei could feel it too, the pull of the words.

“I think it’s nesting ground. New babies. No fully grown adults here right now, or we’d already be down there,” she whispered, trying not to think of the fanged sea snakes. The last time she’d encountered one, the fully grown snake had lured three sailors off their ship before the crew realized what was happening. Narmaidens could get into your mind, take the saddest, most frightening images from your head, and sing them back to you inside your thoughts, planting themselves at the center of a story that had you believing that you needed to save them from your own worst fears. She’d heard only one line of song before plugging her ears, already bogged down with images of a young girl, alone, broken, and stranded in a storm that was filling her boat with water.

Anwei wondered what these little ones were singing to Knox now. It would be different for him, and she couldn’t feel it even through the bond. “Help me set the incendiaries before the mother comes back,” she whispered as a new wave of singing crowded inside her head. “Please, I’m scared down here in the dark.…”

Knox held out his hands, Anwei passing him two of the devices she’d made after Altahn had explained to her how it was done. She pulled out a spool of twine she’d treated with salpowder and linked the four packages together, then unspooled the rest of the twine, letting it hang loose from her hand. She grabbed hold of the rope, stuck her foot in the bottom loop, and let Knox ease in closer, sticking his foot into the loop beside hers. Once he was ready, Anwei launched back out into the darkness, holding the twine in her free hand.

“Please save me. I’ve done nothing wrong. They loved me. They were supposed to love me. But they left me here to die.…”

“What are they saying to you?” Knox whispered.

“That’s a very personal question, don’t you think?” she hissed back. “You want to know what I’m most afraid of?”

“No one else will come. The only person who loved me is dead. You have to help me.”

“I just thought if you were talking to me, I wouldn’t be able to hear them.”

Anwei could feel a thread of panic flowing from the bond, though she couldn’t feel any of what they might be saying to him. “Go back up, I’ll do this.”

She looped an elbow around the rope and groped for her flint while Knox climbed. When he stuck his head back up through the hole, he cleared his throat. “The room is tall again, but… the hole in the floor is closing, Anwei. Hurry up.”

Anwei swore. Lia had said it was still open when she left. Why was it closing so fast this time? She struck the fuse alight, then began to climb.

“Please.” The voice tore at her chest as she pulled herself up toward the chamber above, the sound of the fuse flickering in her ears. The voice sounded like her own, scared and young, begging for help as the waves knocked her little boat this way and that. She shut it out, trying to remember narmaiden teeth, their glowing eyes. There was no little girl who needed saving in this pit. And nothing could have saved Anwei back then anyway.

Knox grabbed Anwei’s arm and hoisted her past where the floor was closing. It clicked back into place, blocking out the narmaidens’ song. The ceiling had receded enough she couldn’t touch it even if she reached up over her head.

Boom. The floor trembled.

After a moment Knox looked at her. Anwei groped deep in her bag, fingers replaceing the wax candle she’d left in the bottom just in case. She lit it, and then in the dim light she extracted a packet she’d filled with rocks and threw them onto the nameless god. As the ceiling began to lower once again, something came up from the center through the nameless god’s mouth, and Anwei saw the pedestal Lia had mentioned, clearly this time. Keeping hold of the rope, Anwei ran across the nameless god to press against the pedestal once again, immediately ducking at the memory of the spikey columns. She ran back to Knox just in time for the floor to open and the columns to smash together right where she’d been standing.

Below them, in the flicker of lantern light, the lower door was still closed.

Scorch marks decorated the base where they had placed the explosives, and shattered bits of rock on the ground had peppered the doorway and walls, leaving long gray scratches in the gold-painted stone. But the door was still there.

“No.” Anwei put a hand to her cheek. “That’s not possible.” Grappling for her bag, she felt for the explosives she hadn’t used yet.

“Please, I’m all alone. My family didn’t want me. No one wants me.…”

Knox’s hands came down on her shoulders, pulling her back a step. “What if—”

“We have to get through, Knox.” She darted away, fumbling to get her flint and steel out again. “No sword means no money, which means no border crossing. And if he is in there somehow—”

“What if Patenga built himself a tomb that only a shapeshifter could open?”

Shapeshifter. The word hissed through the air.

“No, Knox.” His hands were on her shoulders again, soft and solid all at once. “You don’t understand. I can’t. Maybe I could have back before…”

“Before what?”

Anwei couldn’t make herself speak, memories of home, of the little shop she’d worked in with her mother, her father. Her mother’s slightly crooked front teeth, her father’s long, smooth braids.

Knox’s hands on her shoulders tightened, and the spot that he’d taken in her head seemed to flare, warm and bright. The bond between them seemed to deepen, as if he were reaching across it. “I said I could help maybe. I know the magic is in you.”

“I thought you said it wasn’t magic.”

Knox took her hand, squeezing it tight. “Please, Anwei. You don’t have to be scared. I’m going to be here for whatever happens. Please, just try.”

“Please, don’t hurt me,” the narmaidens sang. “I didn’t know it was inside me.”

Anwei closed her eyes, her scars burning. But Knox’s hand seemed to calm the storm roiling up inside her. I’m going to be here for whatever happens. He’d been here since the moment she found him. He wouldn’t leave her. Not like everyone else.

Something whisked across her vision, though her eyes were closed. Something purple and wispy like smoke. She knew she was seeing something that Knox could always see, as if the bond between them was forging them together to form something new.

The purple haze around Anwei condensed, and a warmth inside her grew out from her core, climbing out from her chest, down her arms and legs. Fusing her to that bit of Knox inside her head.

Suddenly she could smell it. Not just the stone. But the way pieces of stone fit, bits of a puzzle bonded together instead of one solid whole. Behind the sheet there was an awful crack in the rock. Below them, the door and the burial chamber behind it were completely solid, immovable. She couldn’t even see past them to what was inside.

Anwei looked at Knox. He was glowing, the bits of light scattering across him like the spark of flint against steel. The gold running through him reached out to twine around her, as if she were stealing his energy. But a line was running from her toward him as well, replacing spots of gold with hints of purple. Knox gasped, and suddenly it was like he was touching every inch of her.

Anwei’s mind was too full. She grabbed madly for Knox’s hand, as if he could somehow keep her from getting lost, forcing her mind toward the burial chamber so far below them.

Break, she told it.

It didn’t move.

Something fell behind the sheet in the corner, jerking Anwei out of the trance. She found Knox’s arms wrapped tight around her, the only thing keeping her upright. Both of them stared toward the darkness of the corner.

The candle snuffed out.

And then a slithering sound, like scales against stone.

It wasn’t the narmaidens.

“You dare disturb my rest.” The voice crumpled like old leaves and rot.

Anwei groped for her bag and pulled out her packet of calistet, but there was nothing to see, nothing to smell, nowhere to look. Just dark, dark, dark all around them. Knox’s hand closed tight around her waist, holding her close. She could feel him reaching out with that golden glow in his mind, straining to replace the source of the noise.

Something shifted behind the sheet, the bulk of a large creature waiting for them just out of sight. Knox’s arms stiffened around Anwei, and suddenly the nothing smell was all around her, so strong her knees buckled.

It was coming from Knox.

Anwei’s insides shriveled. But he doesn’t have the sword. A frantic protestation that didn’t matter because it was happening anyway. I would have known if he’d found it in the shed.

All the gold and purple light around them was sucked back inside of him, and the bond between them was stabbed through with thorns of ice. A low growl filled the room, growing louder and louder every second until it roared in Anwei’s ears, leaving no room for any thought.

“I’ll eat you whole!” the voice snarled, the darkness coming alive.

Anwei grabbed Knox’s hand and pulled him toward the stairs, but he stumbled like his legs were heavy. The sword wasn’t here, but somehow Knox was still not himself. She lurched away from the voice, only it was everywhere, all around them, inside of her, tearing her apart. “Get out of here!” she screamed at Knox, pushing him up the stairs. “Go!”

Light seemed to explode out from every side, as if Calsta had mounted her storm and brought them the sky. Anwei clenched her eyes shut in the assault of smells—fire and stone and poison.

A sharp sting wheeled across Anwei’s side like the crack of a whip just as they made it through the doorway. She staggered off the carpets, her hand coming down on the carved, supplicating face of a worshipper at Patenga’s feet. The stone crumbled between her fingers, and the poison seemed to leap up from the floor and out from the wall, coating her hand and shoes.

Knox’s hand closed over her other wrist. The spot where Knox was in her head, which had only moments before been warm, now grabbed at her with razor-sharp fingers, radiating an inhuman nothingness that screamed murder.

Anwei tore her wrist free and ran for the ladder, a numbness spreading up her arm from where she’d touched the wall. Hand over hand, she forced herself up to the top of the ladder and rolled out onto the ground, panting. Shouts cluttered her ears, punctuated by a deep, fiery boom that shook the ground under her.

Knox exploded out of the tomb behind Anwei. She scrambled to her feet and ran toward the side gate, where they were supposed to meet Noa and the others, crashing into workers headed in the opposite direction. Now the numbness was spreading over her feet and up her ankles, as if the poison had sunk through her shoes. Knox was just behind her, stalking her. Anwei could feel that black void reaching for her, begging to consume her.

Anwei’s numb hand clenched as she ran, her fingers contorting and her arm going limp. She thrust her clean hand into her bag and pulled out one of the crackling sparklers she’d made for Noa, then lobbed it over her shoulder toward Knox, hoping it would distract him.

The movement made her stumble, and suddenly there were baskets all around her full of dirt and loose stone. Knox dodged the bloom of fire and continued after her, his walk slow and deliberate. Anwei darted around the closest shed and blasted through a stream of workers fleeing toward the front gates. The murderous sheen to Knox’s mind made her gag as she tried to run, the numbness of her hands and feet forcing her to lurch this way and that. She rounded a building and found Noa and her friends dancing just in front of the side gate, cackling and moaning as they twirled their flaming ropes.

Anwei tripped forward, her knees giving out and dumping her on the ground. Noa was right there, and yet a million miles away for all the good it did her. The circle of sparkling light their tethers made was just beyond Anwei’s reach.

Knox stepped in front of her, blocking the light.

“Knox…” Anwei swallowed, her eyes glazing as the poison, whatever it was, made its way deeper through her humors. Knox bent down and grabbed her by the shoulders, his cold hands like claws.

Anwei’s hand jabbed toward her medicine bag, but her arms wouldn’t work.

Knox reached for his shoulder, for the sword that wasn’t there. When his fingers closed on nothing, he froze for a second. Then he reached for the knife he kept at his belt. The icy awfulness of his mind was creeping into hers as if he meant to drink her down.

“Knox!” It was harder to get his name out this time, Anwei’s head swirling with the awful closeness they’d shared only moments ago. He’d told her to look inside. To forget the past. To trust him.

She’d done it. Years of armor, of hiding, of staying in her shell, stripped away. Anwei had reached out, let him hold her up.

And now…

Anwei’s scars burned.

Knox drew the knife, his fingers digging hard into Anwei’s shoulder. She reached vainly for anything—a tool, a rock, dirt—to throw in his eyes, but her bones were rubber. Useless. I can’t die this way. I won’t. She reached for what she knew was there inside her mind, the core of him, the warmth buried beneath the ice.

And there, huddled at the back, she found a little marble of heat, the touch of familiar thought. Knox froze, the knife in his hand twitching just as it touched her chin.

Please, Knox. I know you’re in there. Anwei shut her eyes, thinking of that golden glow around him, and the purple darkness that had been around her, the way they’d spun together.

A high-pitched, inhuman cry tore through the air. Knox dropped the knife, the hilt hitting Anwei’s sternum. The keening whinny repeated, followed by flickering echoes, like wolves on the hunt.

Not wolves. Auroshes.

Knox’s brow furrowed as his nothing scent faded into something warm and familiar and him again, though Anwei wasn’t sure if it was the auroshes that had brought him back or if she’d managed to reach him in his mind. Knox’s hands shook as he looked her up and down, as if trying to figure out how he’d gotten there. Fear jolted down Anwei’s spine that was not her own—embarrassment, anxiety, a whole cocktail of not-her-emotions. “She’s here. They’re all here.”

Anwei slumped against the ground, her muscles completely giving out. Knox had never changed into a nothing creature unless he was holding that blasted sword. It had been hidden under the floorboards out in the shed ever since the day Shale chased Knox back to the apothecary.

What was different about tonight? It had started after the voice screamed at them down in the tomb, right after they’d… bonded or whatever that was. She’d felt it in his mind like a shard of ice, as if the sword were inside him and not just a thing he carried. Anwei flinched as Knox grabbed her arms, trying to pull her up from the ground.

“Anwei? Anwei, what’s wrong? What happened?” His voice was panicked, as if he couldn’t even remember the knife he’d held to her throat only moments before. “You have to get up. The Warlord is here.”

The traces of god-given energy Mateo had drawn inside himself the moment he realized Lia was in danger wormed their way out of him, leaving him in a boneless heap in the front hall. Every episode he’d had before had started with weakness and ended with him waking up to a wooden medicine spoon in his mouth, but this one was different, his mind trapped inside as every other aspect of him bled away.

The familiar feeling of rage welled up (why him? He didn’t care much for Calsta or her Devoted; his life was dedicated to righting the wrongs done to the nameless god’s chosen, so how could the nameless god let this happen?), but it wasn’t enough to fill him.

At least Lia was safe.

The anxious shuffle of feet and abrupt explosion of orders told Mateo his father was in the room. But it was only when the liquids in the pot were bubbling that Tual began to mutter to himself, only snatches loud enough for Mateo to hear. “… can’t believe I was so stupid… but unless we replace it…”

Find caprenum. That’s what they had to do. Mateo clung to the thought.

The spoon brushed Mateo’s lower lip, but there was nothing in him to make his mouth open or to stop the dribble of medicine burning down his cheek. Tual tipped his head up and opened his mouth, dripping the liquid onto his tongue.

“She couldn’t have stayed. She couldn’t have.” Tual swore under his breath as he pulled the spoon back from Mateo’s face, then turned away so his mutters were too quiet to hear. Only a few more words filtered back over the bubbling of the aukincer pot. “… still linked all these years… proximity, though… I have to replace her. We’ll need to act quickly.” The words were edged with steel, every syllable razor sharp.

The energy hemorrhaging from Mateo’s aura slowed as the medicine worked its way down his throat and into his stomach. She couldn’t have stayed. Whom could his father mean? The Warlord? Lia? Neither of those made sense.

Then Mateo remembered the papers he’d found, his father’s search for Basists. What if he’d found a Basist here? A woman whom he’d warned to leave, perhaps, because of the Warlord’s imminent arrival?

Not a new son, but a daughter. A daughter who would obey when Tual pointed at whom she was to marry. A daughter who wasn’t dying.

The rage in Mateo felt as if it had gained a life of its own, growing in a hot, spewing mess to fill his whole skin. The incessant sucking at his essence was easing but did not go away. It felt like a bottomless chasm that hungered for him. It felt like nothing.

We’ll need to act quickly. Tual had said it with such rancor. Whom was he going to act against?

Not knowing left Mateo cold in the chest. When he could finally open his eyes, his father was crouched next to his bed, worry lines stark on his face.

“If you keep frowning like that, you’ll start to look your age, Father,” he croaked, unwilling to share the awful concoction of anger and fear battling for his soul. What if his father planned to run? To give up and leave the country, caprenum or no. “You haven’t given up on me, have you?”

“Oh, my boy.” Tual scrubbed a hand through his hair, leaving the carefully combed part awry. “You know I’d give anything for you to stay here with me. You’d give anything, wouldn’t you? To live.”

The tendril of hope stretched almost to breaking. You know I’d give anything for you to stay here with me. But there wasn’t anything Mateo could give up, not in life, not in death, not to any god.

Mateo forced his head up from the bed to meet his father’s eyes, searching them for any hints. Tual only looked sad, anxious. But Mateo knew his father well enough to know the outside didn’t always represent what was going on in his head.

Mateo’s words felt like fire in his humors, strength in his muscles. “I would give anything. Take anything. Do anything if it means I continue breathing.”

Knox was hardly breathing. One moment he’d been down in the tomb, his mind entwined with Anwei’s, the feeling of it still a bonfire that reached to his fingertips and toes. Sky Painter. Storm Rider. But there wasn’t time for centering himself. How had he gotten to the open area before the refuse gate? Anwei sagged against him as if she were made of hollow bones. She was empty-handed, no sword, nothing from the tomb at all.

“Anwei?” He cast his mind out, looking for some clue as to what could have happened, but there wasn’t anyone close by, no auras but Noa’s and her backup ghost dancers and the streams of frightened people trying to get out of the flaming compound gates. He pushed farther, looking for the purpled aura that was the point of all this, but there was nothing to replace. The shapeshifter was gone. Something had happened down in the tomb. But what? “Anwei, talk to me!”

An inhuman scream split the air, horribly familiar, as if it were an echo of one he’d heard in a dream moments earlier. A second scream followed, the auroshe demanding a fight with the first. Knox froze when he cast his mind wider and saw the auras. Bright gold. Five of them. They were in the fields, streaking toward the compound.

The Warlord and four other Devoted, full to the brim with Calsta’s power. They closed in on the compound as if they could feel him quivering behind the walls, a mouse caught in their trap.

But what had happened to Anwei? She wasn’t moving.

He scooped her from the ground and ran past the packed hills of dirt flanking Noa and the others, their chants burning the air. “You cannot wake our master!” Noa screamed with fiendish delight just as Knox got to the gate. Anwei was heavy, her head flopping to the side as he set her down against the wall, frantically looking for the broken lock Lia had promised him. “You cannot wake our master! He will come for us all!”

The gate was locked. And not just with the latch Lia had described, but reinforced across the wall in five different places. They’d fixed it.

He knelt by Anwei, frantically attempting to hold her up straight. She was alive, he could feel it inside him, but something was terribly wrong. “What do I do, Anwei? What happened to you? I don’t know how to pick locks, and they’re coming.”

“I touched the poison.” Her head lolled to the side, her braids a wall between the two of them. “Something was down there.”

I was down there, Willow whispered.

Knox brushed the braids back from Anwei’s face, her skin too hot. Two of her collar buttons had broken, leaving her neck bare. Light-colored scars cut through her skin along her collarbones on both sides. “Please, Anwei. Tell me what you need.”

“Corta,” she mumbled.

Letting Anwei sag forward against his shoulder, Knox wrenched open her medicine bag, spilling the envelopes inside. One crunched when he picked it up, the rank, acid stench of corta blossoming in his nose. He tore it open and held it up to Anwei’s face.

“Our master!” Noa chanted in her singsongy ghost voice, edging back toward the gate. She and the dancers were supposed to dive behind the piles and out the gate while Anwei gave an explosive finish as the shapeshifter Patenga. Instead they’d be cornered against the locked gate and killed, one by one. “The king will make you wish you’d never been born!”

The corta leaves seemed to twitch inside the envelope. Suddenly they flew up into the air and crumbled to powder, forming a haze around Anwei’s face like a cloud of gnats. Knox dropped the envelope with a yelp as Anwei breathed in deep, her back arching against the wall’s wooden slats. He stared at her, holding his hands over his nose and mouth, wondering if the powder itself would attack him the way it seemed to be doing to Anwei. “Anwei? Are you all right?”

Anwei’s head jerked back, slamming into the wall. She gasped for air, her eyes suddenly wide. Knox grabbed her shoulders, coughing as bits of corta stung in his nose. “Anwei?”

Noa had started again. “These years we slept underground, feeding him. Now he will come for you.” The ghosts were about to pull back, expecting the explosive display to cover their retreat. And the gate wasn’t open.

Anwei wrenched herself upright, Knox’s hands slipping from her shoulders, her eyes wide. Every inch of her shook. “The gate…” She grabbed at the bars, pulling against the locks. It didn’t budge. “I can’t pick these. I’ve never even seen a lock like this.”

Knox set his hands next to hers, drawing deep on Calsta’s power when it still didn’t move. The bars bent a little under his strength, but the gate held.

“Maybe if we climb?” Knox rasped. There was no way Anwei could manage it, shaking the way she was. Maybe not even on a day when she felt well. Noa and the dancers definitely weren’t up for a climb, though Knox was less fussed about them getting caught. No one would hurt a second khonin, even if she did have a ghost posse.

Noa’s swinging lights extinguished, her voice a skin-prickling caterwaul. Anwei’s cue. Anwei turned toward them with a terrifying slowness, her arms outstretched, to stare into the last streams of terrified people who had been bottled inside the compound.

“Patenga,” they whispered when they saw her painted face. “Shapeshifter.”

The Warlord’s aura edged into the compound, the barred doors finally open. A different kind of agitation and tumult began as workers fled, ducking to escape the five auroshes storming through the flaming gates.

Knox dumped Anwei’s bag. He pulled out every single explosive packet Anwei had prepared and shoved them in between the bars on the gate, next to each locking mechanism.

“I’ll eat your souls!” Anwei screeched, her voice breaking painfully over the words. A shudder broke out across Knox’s skin. Willow chuckled inside his head. He threw one of the smaller sparklers so that it hit the top packet of explosives, igniting the outer protective layers in a shower of sparks and pops, which spread to the one below it and then the one below that. Smoke welled up around the gate, bringing tears to Knox’s eyes.

The Warlord was almost to the toolsheds just inside the main gates. The only things between her and them was the pavilion covering the rows of baskets, the artifact sheds, and the compacted dirt waiting to be carted out the smaller exit. There was no way she and the Devoted hadn’t seen Knox’s and Anwei’s auras.

But they weren’t coming straight toward them. How was that possible?

Knox grabbed Anwei around the middle and dragged her to the opposite side of the dirt pile, pressing hard against her when the explosives ignited. A white-hot flash rocked the ground, dirt peppering Knox’s back. Anwei gasped, though he took the brunt of the explosion. His ears singing only one high-pitched note, the air still clouded with dirt, Knox picked Anwei up in both arms and ran for the broken gap where the gate had stood. Noa and her friends pushed along behind him, giggles crackling across them like an electrical storm, as if they didn’t know lightning was about to strike.

Golden auras sputtered just past the buildings behind them, an auroshe’s whinny chasing after them.

“They went out the side gate!” a voice cried over the screams. “Find them!”

Lia stood stock-still, as if Master Helan wouldn’t be able to see her through his veil in the darkness. Betrayal felt like weight on her shoulders. “Did Tual Montanne invite you here?”

“No one knows I am here.” The spiriter’s veil ballooned out with the words. “No one will remember you were here either. At least, they won’t once I am done with them.”

Anwei’s mind was swimming with the corta flowing through her bloodstream. Knox’s arms were tight around her, sugarcane stalks blowing madly in the wind all around them, his heart pounding hard against his sternum.

Down in the tomb he’d been inside her skin and she inside his, the two of them twined together so tightly that it had felt blushingly close. And now he was setting her into the wagon’s hidden compartment, squeezing in next to her. His arms around her, his breath on her neck. The starlight winked out overhead as he pulled the door closed over them.

She shut her eyes, trying to ignore the trills running down her arms and back. Knox had disappeared in that tomb just as fast as those stars did behind the trapdoor; one moment the two of them had been joined together, and the next he’d been something else.

Like the night they’d stayed in Gretis. One moment he’d been lying close, and the next he’d been asleep on the floor. He’d almost thrown himself out a window rather than kiss her. She couldn’t lose Knox, and giving in to feelings of… anything… would crack them into pieces.

Anwei took a shallow breath, her mind catching on everything around her: the overwhelming smell of goat, the muddy brown of the clay stuck in her boots, the spicy-sweet green that was cut sugarcane on their clothes, the charcoal gray and black that was salpowder, and an acidic torched cinnamon of poison on her skin. She concentrated on those scents instead of Knox’s arms around her, burning through the last moments of clarity that the corta was going to give her. The poison was easier to pull apart now that it was on her skin, working through her body. It was meant to slow her down, make her sluggish and easy to catch. And eat, perhaps? She’d thought shapeshifters were only supposed to eat souls, but who really knew?

That voice down in the tomb. Anwei didn’t believe in ghosts, but she knew a good performance when she saw one. Was it possible the shapeshifter had been down there waiting for them? Even if the tomb hid his aura, how could he have hidden his nothing scent? And if the snake-tooth man had been down in the tomb the whole time, why hadn’t he attacked when Anwei first entered? He’d waited until the very end, when they’d been about to open the burial chamber.

Knox shifted behind her, his arm pulling tight around her ribs, her spine against him.

She whipped her mind into submission. The burial chamber…

An auroshe scream cut through the night, shouts carving through the harried breaths hot against her neck. “It’s her,” Knox whispered, not bothering to elaborate, and Anwei’s thoughts swam around whom he might mean. Even those were too blurry. “Stay quiet, they can hear even better than I can. And stay close to me if they open this up. Maybe we can—”

“What is going on here?” A woman’s voice cut through his almost-silent whispers, pitched so not even a Devoted would be able to hear.

A Devoted.

Her.

The Warlord.

Anwei’s fingers curled tight around Knox’s wrists. Stay here, she pled silently at Knox. Don’t disappear again.

It would fall to Noa, a job Anwei knew the high khonin to be capable of. She thanked all the stars in the sky that they’d brought her along.

“Wh-wheel’s bad, Your Warlordship… ma’am.” The actor they’d left sitting on the wagon seat stuttered as he spoke, an admirable mask of fear. Or maybe it wasn’t difficult to mime fear when speaking to the head Devoted of the Commonwealth.

A dry, reptilian nicker set the hairs across Anwei’s arms and neck prickling. Knox’s arms tightened around her, his face buried in her shoulder. His breath was against the side of her neck, her ear. Anwei swallowed, clenching her eyes tighter. The tomb. She made herself think it, forced the thought to replace the tickle of Knox’s hair. Something had been down there. It had smelled familiar and had filled her to the brim, as if it had been waiting for her since the day she escaped Beilda, still bleeding. Like… not home, exactly. Like something inside her she couldn’t place. That was why she couldn’t give in to Knox’s breath sending shivers down her arms. Because no matter how much it seemed like people might care about her, Anwei knew better than to trust people who knew what she was.

“Your wheel is bad?” The auroshe sniffled at the wagon’s wooden slats.

Noa’s voice piped up, her native Elantin accent layered on thick. “Yes, and our shipment was due before dark, Your Lordship. I don’t suppose you could help us?”

“I’m sorry for your trouble, but I’m afraid we lack the supplies and time to help.” The Warlord sounded… dry. Unsure. Faint, even, as if there was only a very small person to fill her larger-than-life armor. “You haven’t seen anyone on the road? Or in the fields?”

The Warlord—all the Devoted—were supposed to see auras. Knox had spent many moments curled in the shadows, as if he meant to disappear rather than let himself be found. How many times had they argued in the past week over Anwei’s aura and how the Devoted would know what she was?

But clearly they didn’t know. Why didn’t they know?

“Some wagons went by not too long ago. Didn’t so much as slow down when we waved for help. Could you at least help us boost the wagon off the bad wheel? Our lifter broke when this one”—a thunk reverberated through the wooden boards just over Anwei’s face as Noa must have aimed a kick at one of her friends—“let the goats chew on it.”

She was certainly taking this well. Lying to the Warlord’s face. Anwei wanted to smile, but her face wasn’t quite working.

“What is wrong with these goats?” Another voice inserted itself.

“We like to keep them comfortable on the journey. They don’t fuss so much if they’re subdued, you know,” one of the dancers piped up.

“Well, may Calsta’s light shelter you from her storm. I’m sorry we can’t be of more help.”

The sound of leather boots in stirrups, the creaking of saddles and swishes of tails. Hooves on the dirt. Then they were gone.

Knox waited a long, long time to speak. Long after the last auroshe scream had faded. After the wagon—which wasn’t really broken—had lurched back onto the road. “I thought…” His whisper broke, his arms so tight around Anwei’s ribs that she had to squirm away. “I couldn’t carry you fast enough… and I was sure… Devoted don’t ask questions when they see a Basist’s aura.”

The trapdoor overhead pulled open, and there was Noa grinning down through the gap. “You didn’t tell me we were going against the Warlord herself!”

Anwei tried to sit up, but every muscle in her body was tired, her mind sluggish and slow. Knox pulled away from her, his hands gentle as he tried to help her up too. “Anwei got hurt. We need to get back to Chaol as quick as we can.”

Chaol? What about the exchange with Shale?

They had no sword.

What about Lia?

They had no money.

Noa’s face swam in front of Anwei’s eyes, a rush of nausea flooding Anwei’s stomach when the girl leapt back into the driver’s seat. Serious for once. If coming face-to-face with auroshes and the sky-cursed Warlord herself didn’t faze Noa, at least the prospect of Anwei being hurt did. A little rush of warmth threaded through Anwei’s chest at her friend’s concern. She was glad to have her there, just as she had been at the beginning. A bit of class and a bit of outlandishness—just enough to make their team complete.

Knox tried again to coax Anwei up from the floorboards, but she waved him off, and he gave the sugarcane fields another fearful look.

He didn’t reach for the sword, though.

“I thought she was coming for us,” he whispered. “Why else would the Warlord have come straight to the compound?”

It had been pure panic gushing from Knox’s pores as they’d run—he’d practically melted at the sight of Roosters alone the week before. But still Knox had carried her. Stood inside the gate while they came, when he and Anwei both knew he could have climbed it and escaped by himself.

Knox had risked getting caught just to make sure Anwei wasn’t found.

He’d helped her to do magic down in that tomb. And then the sword or the shapeshifter or something had changed him. But he’d come back to her from the nothingness.

Knox had stayed. Even though he knew what she was. He was watching her now as the wagon bumped into Chaol. The same direction the Warlord’s auroshe had gone.

Anwei let herself feel the press of his hands against her wrists, the weight of his attention, for a split second, too scared to let herself think more than that. To want more than that.

Knox wasn’t like her family. He did know what she was, and he’d stayed.