“Eliana says that on the day the Empire took our city, you couldn’t breathe without choking on the taste of blood. She said I should be glad I was only a baby, but I wish I could remember it. Maybe then I would be stronger. I would be a warrior. Like her.”
—Journal of Remy Ferracora, citizen of Orline
February 3, Year 1018 of the Third Age
1,020 YEARS LATER
Eliana was on the hunt when she heard the first scream.
Screams weren’t so unusual in the city of Orline, especially in the Barrens, where slums sprawled across the river docks in a dark plain of misery.
This one, though, was high, piercing—a young girl’s scream—and fell silent so abruptly Eliana thought she might have been imagining things.
“Did you hear that?” she whispered to Harkan, who stood beside her with his back against the wall.
Harkan tensed. “Hear what?”
“That scream. A girl.”
“I heard no scream.”
Eliana glanced at the nearby darkened window, adjusted her new velvet mask, admired the lean lines of her body. “Well, we all know your hearing’s shit.”
“My hearing is not shit,” Harkan muttered.
“It’s not as good as mine.”
“We can’t all be as marvelous as the Dread of Orline.”
Eliana sighed. “Sad, but true.”
“I think even I, with my shit ears, would hear a scream. Maybe you imagined it.”
But Eliana didn’t think so.
In the city of Orline, girls and women had been disappearing of late—not shipped off to an Empire work camp nor taken to the Lord of Orline’s palace to be trained in the maidensfold. Those things left behind gossip, trails of evidence.
These recent girls were simply being taken. One moment they were there; the next they were gone.
At first, Eliana hadn’t let herself care. No one in her neighborhood had been taken, and she didn’t think the Empire would start abducting its own favored citizens. Her family was safe. It therefore wasn’t her problem.
But the more girls disappeared, the more stories she heard of vanished women, the harder it became for her to ignore the situation. So many sisters gone, and so many mothers—snatched from their loved ones, taken as they slept. Not criminals, not Red Crown rebels.
And then there were the rumors that persisted in some circles, despite their absurdity, of a hole in the sky on the other side of the world. Possibly in Celdaria. Possibly in the Sunderlands. Every rumor told a different tale. Some thought everything was connected—the hole in the sky, the vanished girls.
Eliana was not one of them. Hole in the sky? More like fear run amok. People were becoming hysterical enough to look to archaic legends for comfort and truth.
Eliana refused to join them.
Then she heard it again: a second scream. Closer.
A sour feeling drifted through her body, raking violent chills across her skin. The world tilted, froze, then righted itself. The sweet odor of the white gemma tree flowers overhead turned rancid.
Beside her, Harkan shifted. “Are you all right?”
“Don’t you feel that?”
“Feel what? What’s going on with you tonight?”
“I feel…” The edges of her vision shimmered like a heat mirage. “I don’t know what I feel. Like an adatrox is nearby, but worse.”
At the mention of the Empire soldiers, Harkan tensed. “I don’t see any adatrox. Are you sure?”
A third scream—more desperate this time and quickly stifled.
“Whoever it is,” Eliana muttered, her voice tight and angry, “they’re close.”
“What? Who?”
“Arabeth’s next meal.” Eliana flashed Harkan a grin, then unsheathed Arabeth—the long, jagged-bladed dagger she kept at her hip. “Time to play.”
With one last peek at her reflection, she darted out from the shadows and into the cramped, grime-slicked alleyways of lower Orline. Harkan called after her; she ignored him. If he wanted to stop her, he could try, but she’d have him flat on his back in two seconds.
She smirked. The last time she’d pinned him like that, it had been to his bed.
She honestly couldn’t decide which context she preferred.
All the same, she didn’t want to start a fight just yet. Not when she had a girl-snatcher to hunt.
She entered the Barrens, slipping between patched tents and sagging wooden shacks dotted with dying fires. Beyond the Barrens crawled the wide Bruvian river, its banks clogged with piles of festering white moss.
Her first time in these slums, aged ten, she had nearly gagged from the smell. That had earned her a hard glare from her mother.
Now, eight years later, the stench hardly registered.
She scanned the night: A beggar picking the pockets of an unconscious drunkard. A gaunt young man, coifed and powdered, coaxing a woman through a painted door.
Another scream. Fainter. They were heading for the river.
The feeling crawling up her spine magnified. It felt—she knew no other way to describe it—as though it had a will.
She placed her hands on her knees, squeezed her eyes shut. Spots of color danced behind her eyelids. On the battered wooden support beam beside her, someone had scrawled a childish drawing of a masked woman in black, leaping through the air with a knife in each hand.
Despite the ill feeling blotting her vision, Eliana couldn’t help but grin.
“El, for the love of the saints, what are you doing?” Harkan came up beside her, put a hand on her shoulder. “What’s wrong? Are you hurt?”
“Me? Hurt?” She swallowed hard against the sick feeling tightening her throat. “Dearest Harkan.” She gestured grandly at the drawing of herself. “How could you think such a thing of the Dread of Orline?”
She sprinted away and jumped off the top level of the docks onto another level about one hundred feet below. The impact jolted her with only a slight pain. She was up and running again in an instant. Such a fall would break Harkan’s legs; he’d have to take the long way down.
If Remy were there, he would tell her not to be so obvious.
“People have started to notice,” he had told her just the other day. “I hear talk at the bakery.”
Eliana, stretching on the floor of her bedroom, had asked innocently, “What kind of talk?”
“When a girl falls three stories and then jumps right back to her feet in the middle of the Garden Square, people tend to notice. Especially when she’s wearing a cape.”
Eliana had smiled at the thought of their gaping, awestruck faces. “And what if I want them to notice?”
Remy had been quiet for a long moment. Then: “Do you want Invictus to come and take you away from me?”
That had silenced her. She’d looked up at her little brother’s pale, pinched face and felt her stomach turn over.
“I’m sorry,” she’d told him quietly. “I’m such an ass.”
“I don’t care if you’re an ass,” he’d replied. “Just don’t be a show-off.”
He was right, she knew. The problem was, she liked showing off. If she was going to be a freak with a miraculous body that no fall could kill, then she might as well have fun with it.
If she was busy having fun, then she didn’t have time to wonder why her body could do what it did.
And what that meant.
Running through the docks, she followed the trail of wrongness in the air like tracking the scent of prey. The docks’ lowest level was quiet, the summer air still and damp. She ran around one corner and then another—and stopped. The scent, the feeling, roiled at the edge of this rickety pier. She forced her way forward, even though her churning stomach and every roaring ounce of her blood screamed at her to stay away.
Two figures—masked and wearing dark traveling clothes—waited in a long, sleek boat at the pier’s edge. Their tall, blunt builds suggested they were men. A third figure carried a small girl with golden-brown skin like Harkan’s. The girl struggled, a gag stuffed in her mouth, her wrists and ankles bound.
Red Crown? Unlikely. What would the rebels want with stolen children? And if Red Crown were involved in the abductions, Eliana would have heard whispers from the underground by now.
They could be bounty hunters like herself, but why would the Undying Empire pay for what it could simply take? And working in a group? Very unlikely.
One of the figures in the boat held out its arms for the girl. Lumps crowded the boat’s floor—other women, other girls, bound and unconscious.
Eliana’s anger ignited.
She pulled long, thin Whistler from her left boot.
“Going somewhere, gentlemen?” she called and ran at them.
The figure on the dock turned just as Eliana reached him. She whirled, caught him with her boot under his chin. He fell, choking.
One of the figures from the boat jumped onto the dock. She swiped him across the throat with Arabeth, pushed him into the water after his comrade.
She spun around, triumphant, beckoned at the abductor still waiting in the boat.
“Come on, love,” she crooned. “You’re not afraid of me, are you?”
Once, she had flinched at killing. Her first had been six years ago, at the age of twelve. Rozen Ferracora, Eliana’s mother, had brought her along on a job—the last Rozen had taken before her injury—and someone had ratted them out. The rebels had known they were coming. It had been an ambush.
Rozen had felled two of them, and Eliana had hidden in the shadows. That had always been her mother’s instruction: I’ll keep you from killing as long as I can, sweet girl. For now, watch. Learn. Practice. What my father taught me, I will teach you.
Then one of the rebels had pinned Rozen to the ground, and Eliana had known nothing but rage.
She flew at the rebel woman, thrust her little blade deep into the woman’s back. Then she stood, staring, as the woman gasped away her life in a pool of blood.
Rozen had taken Eliana’s hand, hurried her away. Back home in their kitchen, her brother, Remy—then only five—had stared wide-eyed as Eliana’s shock gave way to panic. Hands red with blood, she had sobbed herself hoarse in her mother’s arms.
Luckily, the killing had grown much easier.
Two masked figures darted forward out of the shadows, small bundles in their arms. More girls? They tossed the bundles to their last remaining comrade in the boat, then spun to meet her. She ducked one blow, then another, then took a hard one to the stomach and a sharp hook to the jaw.
She stumbled, shook it off. The pain vanished as quickly as it had come. She whirled and stabbed another of the brutes. He toppled into the filthy water.
Then a wave of nausea slammed into her, mean as a boot to the gut. She dropped to her knees, gasping for air. A weight settled on her shoulders, fogged her vision, pressed her down hard against the river-slicked dock.
Five seconds. Ten. Then the pressure vanished. The air no longer felt misaligned around her body; her skin no longer crawled. She raised her head, forced open her eyes. The boat was gliding away.
Wild with anger, head still spinning, Eliana staggered to her feet. A strong arm came around her middle, pulling her backward just as she prepared to dive.
“Get off me,” she said tightly, “or I’ll get nasty.” She elbowed Harkan in his ribs.
He swore, but didn’t let go. “El, have you lost your mind? This isn’t the job.”
“They took her.” She stomped on his instep, twisted out of his grip, ran back to the dock’s edge.
He followed and caught her arm, spun her around to face him. “It doesn’t matter. This isn’t the job.”
Her grin emerged hard as glass. “When has restraining me ever worked out in your favor? Oh, wait.” She sidled closer, softened her smile. “I can think of a time or two—”
“Stop it, El. What have you always told me?” His dark eyes found hers, locked on. “If it isn’t the job, it isn’t our problem.”
Her smile faded. She yanked her arm away from him. “They keep taking us. Why? And who are they? Why only the girls? And what was that…that feeling? I’ve never felt anything like that before.”
He looked dubious. “Maybe you need to sleep.”
She hesitated, despair creeping slowly in. “You felt nothing at all?”
“Sorry, no.”
She glared at him, ignoring the unsettled feeling in her gut. “Well, even so, that girl was no rebel. She was a child. Why would they bother taking her?”
“Whatever the reason, it’s not our problem,” Harkan repeated. He took a long, slow breath, perhaps convincing himself. “Not tonight. We have work to do.”
Eliana stared out at the river for a long time. She imagined carving a face into a slab of flawless stone—no sweat, no scars. Only a hard smile that would come when called, and eyes like knives at night. By the time she had finished, her anger had faded and the unfeeling face was her own.
She turned to Harkan, brought out the cheeky little grin he despised. “Shall we, then? Those bastards worked up my appetite.”
• • •
The Red Crown rebel smuggler known as Quill snuck both people and information out of Orline. He was good at it too—one of the best.
It had taken weeks for Eliana and Harkan to track him down.
Now, they crouched on a roof overlooking a tiny courtyard in the Old Quarter, where Quill was supposed to meet a group of rebel sympathizers trying to flee the city. The courtyard reeked sweetly from the roses lining the walls.
Beside her, Harkan shifted, alert.
Eliana watched dark shapes enter the courtyard and crowd together in the corner below a climbing rosebush. Waiting.
Not long after, a hooded figure entered from the opposite corner and approached them. Eliana curled her fingers around her dagger, her blood racing.
The clouds shifted; moonlight washed the yard clean.
Eliana’s heart stuttered and sank.
Quill. It had to be him. There was the faint limp in his gait, from a wound sustained during the invasion.
And there, waiting for him, were a woman and three small children.
Harkan swore under his breath. He pointed at the children, signed with his hand. He and Eliana had engineered a silent code years ago, when she first started hunting alone after Rozen’s injury. He had insisted she not go by herself, and so he had learned to hunt and track, to kill, to turn on their own people and serve the Empire instead—all for her.
No, came his message. Abort.
She knew what he meant. The children weren’t part of this job. Quill was one thing, but the idea of handing innocent children over to the Lord of Orline… It wouldn’t sit well with Harkan.
Honestly, it didn’t with Eliana either.
But three rebels waited at the courtyard’s shadowed entrance: Quill’s escort and protectors. There was no time, and it was too big a risk to spare the family. She and Harkan had to move quickly.
She shook her head. Take them, she signed back.
Harkan drew a too-loud breath; she heard the furious sadness in it.
Below, Quill’s head whipped toward them.
Eliana jumped off the roof, landed lightly, rolled to her feet. Thought, briefly, how it was a terrible shame that she couldn’t sit back and watch herself fight. Surely it looked as good as it felt.
Quill drew a dagger; the mother fell to her knees, begging for mercy. Quill pushed his hood back. Middle-aged, ruddy-faced, and intelligent in the eyes, he had a serenity to him that said, I fear not death, but surrender.
Four seconds later, Eliana had kicked his bad leg out from under him, relieved him of his knife, struck the back of his head with the hilt. He did not rise again.
She heard Harkan land behind her, followed by rapid footsteps as the other rebels rushed into the courtyard. Together she and Harkan had them down in moments. She whirled and flung her dagger. It hit the wooden courtyard door, trapping the eldest child in place by his cloak.
The others froze and burst into tears.
Their mother lay glassy-eyed on the ground in a bed of rotting petals. One of the rebel’s daggers protruded from her heart.
Eliana yanked it free—another blade for her arsenal. She wondered why the rebels had killed the woman. To protect themselves?
Or to grant her mercy they knew she would not otherwise receive.
“Fetch the guard,” Eliana ordered, searching the mother for valuables. She found nothing except for a small idol of the Emperor, crafted from mud and sticks, no doubt kept on her person in case an adatrox patrol stopped her for a search. The idol’s beady black eyes glittered in the moonlight. She tossed it aside. The children’s sobs grew louder. “I’ll stay with them.”
Harkan paused, that sad, tired look on his face that made her hackles rise because she knew he hoped it would change her, one of these days. Make her better. Make her good again.
She lifted an eyebrow. Sorry, Harkan. Good girls don’t live long.
The eldest child watched Eliana, arms around his siblings. Some impulse stirring deep inside her urged her to let them go, just this once. It wouldn’t hurt anything. They were children; they were nothing.
But children couldn’t keep their mouths shut. And if anyone ever found out that the Dread of Orline, Lord Arkelion’s pet huntress, had let traitors run free…
“We were afraid the bad men would take her too,” the boy said simply. “That’s why we wanted to leave.”
The bad men. A tiny chill skipped up Eliana’s neck. The masked men from the docks?
But the boy said no more than that. He did not even try to run.
Smart boy, Eliana thought.
He knew he would not get far.
• • •
The next afternoon, Eliana stood on a balcony overlooking the gallows.
Lord Arkelion lounged at the east end of the square, the high back of his throne carved to resemble wings.
Eliana, watching him, folded her arms across her chest. Shifted her weight to one hip. Tried to ignore the figure standing in a red-and-black Invictus uniform beside His Lordship’s throne.
From this height, Eliana couldn’t tell who it was, but it didn’t matter. The mere sight of that familiar silhouette was enough to turn her stomach.
Invictus: a company of assassins that traveled the world and carried out the Emperor’s bidding. The most dangerous jobs, the bloodiest jobs.
It was only a matter of time before they recruited her. She imagined it daily, just to see if the idea would ever stop terrifying her.
So far, it hadn’t.
Probably Rahzavel would be the one to come for her. Eliana had seen him at a handful of His Lordship’s parties over the years. Each time, he had requested a dance with her. Each time, his flat gray gaze had dared her to refuse him.
Oh, how she’d wished she could have.
“An invincible bounty hunter,” he had crooned in her ear during their last dance together the previous summer. “How curious.” He had threaded his cold fingers through hers. “You’ll make a fine addition to our family someday.”
When Rahzavel came for her, he probably wouldn’t even let her say goodbye to her loved ones before escorting her overseas to Celdaria, the heart of the Undying Empire—and to the Emperor himself.
Welcome, Eliana Ferracora, the Emperor said in her most awful dreams, his smile not reaching his black eyes. I’ve heard so much about you.
And that would be the end of life as she now knew it. She would become one of the elite—a soldier of Invictus.
She would become, like Rahzavel, a new breed of monster.
Today, however, was not that day.
So Eliana watched, tapping her fingers against her arm, wishing His Lordship would get it over with. She was hungry and tired, and Harkan was beside himself with shame. And the longer they stood there, the more desperately he would expect something from her that she couldn’t give him:
Regret.
The Empire guard marched Quill and the eldest child up to the gallows. It been constructed in the ruins of the temple of Saint Marzana, the revered firebrand of the Old World—the world before the Blood Queen Rielle had died. Before the rise of the Empire.
Empire soldiers had almost entirely demolished the temple when they seized Orline. Once, the temple had been a grand array of domed halls, classrooms and sanctuaries open to the river breeze, and courtyards draped in blossoming vines. Now, only a few crumbling pillars remained. Saint Marzana’s statue, standing guard at the temple entrance, had been destroyed. A likeness of the Emperor now loomed there instead—his features masked, his body cloaked. Gold, black, and crimson banners flanked his head.
The plaza beneath him was crowded but quiet. The citizens of Orline were used to executions, but Quill was popular in certain circles, and not even His Lordship often slaughtered children.
When Eliana and Harkan had presented the captive children to him, Lord Arkelion had smiled kindly, inspected the younger ones’ teeth, and sent them off with one of his mistresses. The children had reached back for their brother, wailing all the way down the throne room until someone had, blessedly, shut the doors.
But the eldest child had not cried. And he was not crying today, not even as he watched the executioner raise his sword.
“The Empire will burn!” shouted Quill, his hair plastered to his scalp with sweat.
The sword fell; Quill’s head rolled. An uneasy wave of sound swept through the crowd.
Only then, his face splattered with fresh blood, did the boy start to cry.
“El,” Harkan choked out. He took Eliana’s hand in his sweaty one, rubbed his thumb along her palm. His voice came out frayed. He had not slept.
She had slept like the dead. Sleep was important. One could not hunt without a good night’s sleep.
“We don’t have to watch,” she told him as patiently as she could manage. “We can go.”
He released her hand. “You can go if you want. I have to watch.”
There it was again—that same exhausted tone, like a sad-eyed hound resigned to its next beating.
To keep from snapping at him, Eliana fiddled with the battered gold pendant under her cloak. She wore it on a chain around her neck every day and knew the scratched, worn lines of it by heart: The arch of the horse’s neck. The intricate details of its wings. The figure riding astride it, sword raised, face blackened from time: Audric the Lightbringer. One of the dead Old World kings her brother obsessed over for reasons Eliana couldn’t fathom. Her parents told her they had found the trinket on the street when Eliana was still a baby and given it to her to calm her crying one sleepless night. She had worn it for as long as she could remember, though not out of love for the Lightbringer. She cared nothing for dead kings.
No, she wore it because, some days, she felt like the familiar weight of the necklace at her throat was the only thing that kept her from flying apart.
“I’ll stay,” she told Harkan lightly. Too lightly? Probably. “I’ve got the time.”
He didn’t even scold her. The executioner lifted his sword. At the last moment, the child raised his hand in a salute—a fist at his heart and then held up in the air. The sign of allegiance to the rebellion, to Red Crown. His arm shook, but he stared at the sun with unblinking eyes.
He began reciting the Sun Queen’s prayer: “May the Queen’s light guide me—”
The sword fell.
Eliana’s tears surprised her. She blinked them away before they could fall. Harkan covered his mouth with one hand.
“God help us,” he whispered. “El, what are we doing?”
She grasped his hand, made him face her.
“Surviving,” she told him. “And that’s nothing to be ashamed of.” She swallowed—and swallowed again. Her jaw ached. Pretending boredom was hard work, but so was war. And if she fell to pieces, Harkan would crumble even faster.
The Lord of Orline raised one hand.
The citizens packed into the plaza below chanted the words that constantly circled through Eliana’s mind like carrion birds:
“Glory to the Empire. Glory to the Empire. Glory to the Empire.”
