“We tried,” said Bex. “Trust me. Calin may be an incompetent shit, but I’m not…”
She went on making excuses, but Berras had stopped listening. He began to roll up his sleeves. The skin on his forearms was tan, and tough, the veins faint shadows beneath. He had survived the Tide and bore no silver scars, because when the dark god poured itself into his blood, he did not fight. Instead, he let it rage. Let it burn through him, unchecked, and as it did, it spoke. It told him what could be. It showed him that change was not a gift, it was a prize, something to be taken.
Across the room, Bex was still talking. Still making excuses. He cut her off. “Why are you here?”
Bex crossed her arms. Shifted her weight. “Well, the way I see it, we did our part.”
Berras stared at her, nonplussed. “You want me to pay you for a job you didn’t do.”
“It was a fair amount of work,” said Calin.
“I didn’t realize I was paying for the effort.” Berras took a step forward. “Your part was to meet the three thieves, dispose of them, and deliver the persalis to me. You failed. And yet, you have the nerve to show your face. To come to me for recompense. Get out before I break your necks.”
Calin stood. Bex straightened. But neither so much as looked toward the door. For a moment, no one spoke. In the end, it was Bex who broke the tension. Bex who rolled her shoulders and spread her hands.
“One way or another,” she said, “we’ll be needing our cut…”
As she spoke, her fingers twitched toward the metal wrapped around her forearm. She clearly expected the steel to answer, perhaps provide some dramatic flourish to the word cut—but the metal didn’t so much as twitch. It hung there, useless as a bangle on her wrist.
The mark he’d touched glowed faintly on the doorway. A sigil. A ward.
Berras watched, savoring the way Bex faltered, the confusion that spread like shadow on her face, her eyes widening, just a little, as she realized her magic wouldn’t answer. Too late she went for her nearest weapon, but Berras was already there. His fist crashed into her cheek, and he heard the satisfying crunch of bone as she staggered back, dropping to a knee. One hand went to her face, trying to stem the blood now pouring from her nose.
Her other hand managed to draw a dagger, but Berras’s boot came down, crushing her fingers under his heel as Calin finally caught on, and flung himself into the fight. Or tried. He threw a punch, and he was a large enough man that the blow would have hurt, if he’d known how to land it. But he didn’t. The gesture was sloppy, and Berras turned out of its path, palmed the side of Calin’s skull, and slammed it into the wall. The man dropped like a brick, but Berras kicked him once in the head, to keep him down.
Bex was up again by then, and came at Berras with the dagger, but she was half-blinded by tears and he caught her wrist, and snapped it cleanly. She gasped, her grip loosening on the blade, which he took, and drove down through the meat of her hand, pinning it to his desk.
Bex let out a feral sound. “You fucking pilse—” she got out, before Berras leaned on the blade, sinking it another inch, and she cut off, stifling a scream.
Calin was still on the floor nearby, clutching his head and groaning.
“My father taught me many things,” said Berras Emery, “but this one most. If a man does not know how to bow, you show him how to kneel.”
With that, he pulled the blade out of the desk, and Bex scrambled back out of his reach, cradling her bleeding hand and broken wrist, her eyes full of hatred. Hatred, and fear. Calin got to his feet, swayed violently, braced himself against the wall, and retched. Bex used her less injured hand to snap her nose back into place.
Berras studied the blood-soaked knife. “You want payment?” His dark eyes flicked up, the color of a storm at dusk. With his bare hands, he broke the blade in two, and flung the pieces at her feet.
“Bring me something worth paying for.”
V
GREY LONDON
Rain dripped from the signs that hung over the darkened shops.
Tes squinted, trying to make out the words, and wishing she had kept up with her lessons. They were not ostra, her family, but her father still insisted all his daughters knew the tongue they spoke at court, in hopes that they would make it there. Make him proud. Now she struggled to make sense of the signs.
Dressmaker. Butcher. Spirits. Baker.
Of course, he’d lost his fervor halfway through her lessons, when it was clear she wouldn’t bring him glory. Her father—Tes tried to push the thought of him from her thoughts, as she always did, but she’d lost too much blood to fight her body and her mind, and soon his voice crept in.
What are you worth?
Four words, and there he was, standing at the counter of his shop, a rare and precious purchase hefted in one palm, his dark eyes sliding from the talisman to her.
Tes stumbled, gasped as she caught her balance, the jolt tugging at the stab wound in her side.
A small, frustrated sob escaped. The rain had stopped, but it was the middle of the night, and everything was closed. The streets were empty, and even with the lampposts, it was impossibly, unnaturally dark, and her head was spinning, and the pain had grown less sharp, which should have been a relief, but she knew enough to know it wasn’t a good thing, when wounds this bad stopped hurting.
She was beginning to lose hope when she saw it.
Not a shop window or a sign.
A thread.
It crept down the street, a single tendril of light, so faint she would have missed if it not for the glaring absence of any other magic. Even still, she blinked, sure it was a phantom, her eyes finally beginning to fail.
But when she looked again, it was still there—a filament, unlike any she’d seen before. It had no color, nothing to define its element, was rendered instead in black-and-white, a core of darkness limned in light. Tes followed it to a break in the road. For a moment, the thread vanished, and she stumbled as she turned, desperate to catch sight of it again, then—there. At the corner, it flickered, returned a little brighter.
She followed it, until the river came into sight.
The Isle—though of course, it was not the Isle, only carved the same path. She thought the thread must stem from there, but when she neared the river, it was an oily black, lightless in the dark. It was eerie, to see the water at the heart of the city without a pulse.
Tes shivered, her shirtfront long soaked through with blood. She closed her eyes, swayed, forced them open again. Found the thread. It ran along a nearby wall, brighter still, until it dove between the bricks of a house and disappeared. The windows of the house were shuttered, but light seeped beneath the door, and Tes used the last of her strength to pound against the wood.
No one answered.
She kept knocking, but the sound seemed far away. She was so tired. Her forehead came to rest against the door. Her fist slipped. She closed her eyes, felt her legs begin to buckle. She heard a voice, a set of footsteps, the scrape of an iron lock. And then the door swung open, and she was falling.
* * *
“She’s been stabbed.”
“I can see that, Beth.”
“Girl shows up half-dead at your door, leaving bloody handprints on the wood and leaking on the floor, and you don’t think to call someone.”
“I called you.”
Tes dragged her eyes open, and saw that what she’d taken for a house was in fact a tavern. Low wooden beams drew tallies overhead, and the scent of ale wafted through the room. Her fingers twitched against the slats of wood beneath her. She was lying on a hard, raised surface. A table.
There were two voices, somewhere beyond her sight, talking loudly, as if she were not there. A man, his voice not deep but even. A woman, her tone drawn taut as she said, “If she dies, you’ll have a bigger mess.”
Tes tried to move, but her limbs felt like sacks of sand. She closed her eyes again and strained to catch the words as they rushed past in High Royal.
“It’s my tavern.”