Sword Catcher (Sword Catcher, #1)

The carriage cut its way through the crowded square, a shark gliding through a crowded shoal of fish. Lin’s companion had fallen silent. She was gazing out the window, her face blank of expression.

By the time they turned onto the Ruta Magna, Lin could stand the silence no longer. “Will you tell me your name?” she said. “You know mine. I feel at a disadvantage.”

“Ji-An,” said the girl. Though Lin waited, she added no family name.

“Are you in the Arrow Squadron?” Lin asked.

“I am not a soldier. I serve the king directly.” Ji-An touched a hand to the pendant at her throat. It was shaped like a gold key. “Years ago, the king saved my life. My loyalty to him is absolute.”

Years ago? Lin’s companion could not be that old—perhaps twenty-five? And King Markus had been in seclusion for ten years at least. Had he saved her life before she was twelve?

“King Markus saved your life?”

“I didn’t say that,” said Ji-An calmly.

Lin’s heart began to beat faster. The carriage had jounced off the Great Road and onto a smaller street. They were heading into the Warren, the largest neighborhood in Castellane, where tradespeople, merchants, and guildmasters mixed with barbers, clerks, and publicans. It was an old quarter; every once in a while a grand white building would rise from among its wood-and-brick neighbors, a memento of the days of the Empire. An elegantly tiled calidarium sat between a noodle shop and a knife sharpener’s, while a porticoed temple to Turan, God of love, cozied up to a squat inn called The Queen’s Bed.

“This is not the way to the Palace,” noted Lin.

“Oh,” Ji-An said, her tone pleasant, “did you think I meant the King on the Hill? He is not the king I serve. I meant the King in the City. The Ragpicker King.”

The Ragpicker King? Lin’s mouth fell open. “You lied to me.” She put a hand to the door of the carriage. “Let me out.”

“I will,” Ji-An said, “if you want me to. But what I told you was true. The Ragpicker King does wish to speak to you of Kel Saren. He heard that you healed him and was astonished to learn of your skill.”

“Perhaps it wasn’t that bad an injury.”

“It was,” said Ji-An. “I saw his wounds myself. I did not think he would survive them.”

“You saw his wounds?”

“Yes. I am the one who brought him to the Palace gates. I knew someone who was injured like that, once. She—the person suffered for many days before they died. But Kel Saren will live.”

Lin was still, her hand on the carriage door. She recalled Kel saying, I know who left me outside Marivent. It wasn’t the person who stabbed me.

She drew her hand back from the door. “But why?” she said. Why would a Sword Catcher to the Prince know a common criminal, someone who works for the Ragpicker King? “Why did you save him?”

“Oh, look,” announced Ji-An. “We’ve arrived.”

And so they had. They had reached Scarlet Square, the center of the Warren, and the Black Mansion was before them, its dark dome, all strange unreflective marble, rising like a shadow above the rooflines of the city.


How strange to dream about a phoenix screaming, when no phoenix still existed in Dannemore. Kel knew they had lived once, and been the companions of Sorcerer-Kings, as had dragons and basilisks, mermaids and manticores. They had been creatures of real magic, created from the now-vanished Word, and had vanished when the Sundering stripped magic from the world.

Still, in his dreams, they cried out, and their cries sounded like children screaming.

Later, in the dream, he was playing a game of Castles with Anjelica Iruvai, Princess of Kutani. She was dressed as she had been in the portrait Kel had seen, which was perhaps not surprising. The coils of her dark hair were caught in a net of silver, spangled with crystal stars. Her lips were red, her eyes soft, the color of honey wine. She said, “It is not unusual to dream of fire when you yourself have a fever.”

He saw Merren in his dreams, surrounded by his poisoner’s alembics, cross-legged in a circle of hemlock and deadly nightshade. With his threadbare jacket and unkempt blond curls, he looked like a forest spirit, something not quite tamed. He said, “Everyone has secrets, no matter how innocent they may seem.”

Kel saw the Ragpicker King, all in black like Gentleman Death, and he said, “Your choices are not your own, or your dreams, either.”

Lastly, Kel saw the steps of the Convocat, and he stepped out onto them, clothed in Conor’s raiment, wearing the crown of Castellane with its sharp wings on either side. He looked across the cheering crowd that filled the square and saw the arrow flying toward him, too quickly for him to move away; it pierced Kel’s heart and he fell. As his blood spilled red down the white steps, Conor nodded to him from the shadows, as if to say that he approved.


Kel bolted up in bed, his heart racing, his hand pressed to his chest. He had felt the pain in his sleep, and felt it still—a deep sharp ache to the left of his sternum. He knew it had been a dream, the arrows a mist of morphea and half sleep, but the pain was real and present.

He remembered, in a confusion of images, lying here among wet and bloody sheets. Drifting in and out of waking and sleeping; seeing Conor there, but being unable to speak to him. The look on Conor’s face. I ought to have died in the alley, Kel had thought, not here, where he can see me.

He slid a hand into the collar of his nightshirt, discovering the texture of bandages—wrapping his chest, and bound over his right shoulder, like a sling. There was a thicker patch of them just under his heart. He prodded at the spot and jumped as a stab of pain shot through him.

With the pain came a memory. A narrow black alley, Crawlers on the walls above him. The flash of a silver mask. A hot needle in his side. A glimpse of violet . . .

“Sieur Kel! Stop that!” Kel glanced over to see Domna Delfina, shaking her head until her gray curls flew, rising from her seat near his bed. The senior housemaid was holding a pair of knitting needles, the half-finished project she’d been at work on abandoned in her haste. “You mustn’t touch the bandages. Sieur Gasquet says—”

Kel, peevish with fading morphea, poked himself hard in the lumpiest part of the bandage with a forefinger. It hurt. Genius, he thought. Of course it hurts.

“Gasquet didn’t do this. He’s terrible at bandaging.” Kel’s voice scraped out of his throat, dry from disuse. How long had he been asleep?

Delfina rolled her eyes. “If you won’t behave, I’ll get him myself.”

Kel had no desire to see Gasquet quite yet. “Delfina—”