But the third . . .
“This one.” I tap it. “Built into a hill. Defensible. Nearby stream. Easy tunneling for a quick escape. And look”—I point to the other side of the hills—“towns remote enough that he could send men there for supplies and he wouldn’t attract much notice.”
We set off immediately, two Black Guards trailing to make sure any spies are dispatched. By noon, we are deep within the mountains east of Navium.
“Shrike,” Harper says when we are clear of the city. “You should know that the Commandant had a late-night visitor.”
“The Nightbringer?”
Avitas shakes his head. “Three break-ins of her quarters at the Island over the course of the last two weeks. During the first, my spy reported that a window was left open. During the second, an item was left on Keris’s bed. A sculpture.”
“A sculpture?”
“A mother holding a child. The Commandant destroyed it and killed the slave who discovered it. During the third visit, another sculpture was left. My contact pulled this one from the ashes of the fire.”
He reaches into a saddlebag and offers me a rough sculpture of yellow clay, blackened on one side. It is of a crudely made woman, her head bowed. Her hand reaches down with strange plaintiveness to a child who reaches back. They do not touch, though they sit on the same base.
The figures have thumb indents for eyes and lumps for noses. But their mouths are open. It looks as if they are screaming. I shove the sculpture back at Avitas, disturbed.
“No one’s seen the intruder.” Avitas tucks the object away. “Other than what my spy saw, the Commandant has hidden the break-ins well.”
There are plenty of people who could get into the Commandant’s quarters unseen. But for her to then not catch them after they’d been there once—that indicates a level of skill I’ve known only one person to have. A woman I haven’t seen in months. The Cook.
I mull it over as we travel higher into the mountains, but it doesn’t make sense. If Cook can sneak into the Commandant’s quarters, why not just kill her? Why leave her peculiar statues?
Hours later, after winding through switchbacking mountain trails, we arrive at the foot of a sweeping, old-growth forest. Navium glitters to the west, a cluster of lights and still-smoldering fires with the black snake of the Rei winding through it.
We abandon the horses beside a creek, and I draw a dagger as we make for the tree line. If Quin is out there, he won’t take kindly to Emperor Marcus’s Blood Shrike showing up unannounced.
Harper unhooks his bow, and we slip cautiously into the woods. Crickets chirp, frogs sing—the wild sounds of a summer countryside. And though it is dark, there’s moon enough for me to see that no one has trod these woods for months, maybe years.
With every step, my hopes diminish further. I’m to send a report to Marcus tomorrow. What the bleeding hells am I going to say if Quin isn’t out here?
Harper curses, the sound sharp and unexpected, and I hear a hissing snick. It’s followed by a muffled grunt. A phalanx of axes swings down from the trees.
Harper only just dives out of the way, and I have never been happier to see an ally nearly have his head sliced off.
We spend the next two hours avoiding carefully laid booby traps, each one more intricate and well-hidden than the next.
“What a bleeding lunatic.” Harper cuts a trip wire that drops a net laced with razor-sharp shards of glass. “He’s not even trying to catch anyone. He just wants them dead.”
“He’s not a lunatic.” I drop my voice. The moon is high. It’s past midnight. “He’s thorough.” Glass gleams through the trees—a distant window.
Something in the air shifts, and the night creatures go quiet. I know, as sure as I know my own name, that Harper and I are no longer alone in this forest.
“Let’s get this over with.” I sheathe my blade, hoping to the skies that I’m not talking to a pack of highway bandits or some crazed hermit.
Silence. A moment during which I’m certain I’m wrong.
Then the whisper of footsteps behind us, all around us. Far ahead, a powerful silver-faced figure emerges from behind a tree, his thick white hair half-hidden by a hood. He doesn’t look any different than he did months ago, when I first snuck him out of Serra.
Two dozen men surround us, their uniforms impeccable, Gens Veturia colors worn proudly. When I step forward, their backs snap straight and, as one, they salute.
“Blood Shrike.” Quin Veturius salutes last. “About damned time.”
* * *
Quin orders Harper to stay with his men, then leads me through the crumbling house built into the mountain and into a series of caverns. It’s no wonder Keris hasn’t found the old man. These tunnels are so extensive it would take months to explore all of them.
“I expected you weeks ago,” Quin says as we walk. “Why haven’t you assassinated Keris yet?”
“She’s not an easy woman to kill, General,” I say. “Especially when Marcus can’t afford for it to look like an assassination.” We trek upward until we emerge onto a small, flat plateau, walled in on four sides but open to the sky. It is home to a hidden garden, wild with the beauty of a place once lovingly cared for but left alone for too long.
“I have something for you.” I pull Elias’s mask from my pocket. “Elias gave it to me before he left Blackcliff. I thought you’d want it.”
Quin’s hand hovers over the mask before he takes it. “It was a nightmare to get that boy to keep it on,” he says. “I thought he would lose the damned thing one day.”
The old man turns the mask over in his hand, and the metal ripples like water. “They become part of us, you know. It is only when they join with us that we become our truest selves. My father used to say that after the joining, a mask held a soldier’s identity—and that without it, a bit of his soul was stripped away, never to be recovered.”
“And what do you say, General?”
“We are what we put into the mask. Elias put little into it, and so it offered little in return.” I expect him to ask me about his grandson, but he simply pockets the mask. “Tell me of your foe, Blood Shrike.”
As I relate the attack on Navium, the loss of the fleet, even the presence of the statue, Quin is silent. We walk to a pond in the garden, bordered by paint-chipped stones.
“She’s up to something, General,” I say. “I need your help to figure out what it could be. To figure her out.”
“Keris learned to walk here, before I moved her and her mother to Serra.” He nods to a barely visible path that leads to a pergola dripping with ivy. “She was nine months old. Tiny little thing. Skies, Karinna was so proud. She loved that girl to bits.”
He raises his eyebrows at the look on my face. “You thought my dear late wife was the monster from whom Keris learned? Quite the opposite. Karinna wouldn’t let anyone touch a hair on that girl’s head. We had dozens of slaves, but Karinna insisted on doing everything herself: feeding her, changing her, playing with her. They adored each other.”
The idea of a sunny-haired baby Keris is so far from what she is now that I can’t conjure the image. I force myself to hold back the dozens of questions in my head. Quin’s voice is slow—almost halting—and I wonder if he’s spoken to anyone about this.
“I wasn’t there for them early on,” he says. “I was already a lieutenant general when Karinna and I married. The Karkauns were pushing hard in the west, and the Emperor couldn’t spare me.”
He sounds . . . not sad, but almost wistful. “And then Karinna died. The Emperor didn’t give me leave, so it was a year before I returned home. By then Keris had stopped speaking. I spent a month with her, and then it was back to the battlefield. When she was chosen for Blackcliff, I was certain she’d die in the first week. She was so soft. So much like her mother.”