“But when the Empire forces came to Orline, the capital of Ventera, they were struck blind by a brilliant light. It was the Sun Queen, glittering and vengeful. She led the charge with King Maximilian at her side, and everyone she touched felt their long-forgotten magic awaken. They were sunspinners once more, firebrands and earthshakers. And the river that morning ran red with Empire blood.”
—The Sun Queen’s Triumph (Being an Alternative History of the Kingdom of Ventera)
As written in the journal of Remy Ferracora
June 14, Year 1018 of the Third Age
After the executions, Eliana saw Harkan home to his tiny apartment on the top floor of the building next to her own.
As she turned to go, he said softly, “El?”
She hesitated. If she stayed, they would share his bed, as they often did. His touch would be absolution—his strong, brown arms, the tender way he held her after and stroked her hair. For a little while, she would forget who she was and what she had done.
But then, Harkan would want to talk. He would look into her eyes and search for the girl she had once been.
The thought exhausted her.
“Please, El,” Harkan said, his voice strained. “I need you.”
He could hardly look at her. Was he embarrassed that he didn’t want to be alone? Or ashamed to crave the touch of a monster?
Unbidden, a memory surfaced: the boy’s defiant, tear-streaked face, just before the executioner’s sword fell.
Eliana’s stomach clenched. She squeezed Harkan’s hand. “All right, but I just want to sleep.”
His voice came gently: “Me too.”
They climbed through the terrace window and into his room—plain and small, strewn with rumpled clothes. The rest of his family’s apartment remained silent and shuttered. Since his mother and older brothers had died at the wall the day the Empire invaded ten years earlier, Harkan had not touched any of their things or sat in furniture they had sat in or used his mother’s pots and pans. The apartment was a tomb, and Eliana dared not enter it for fear of breathing ghosts into her body.
But Harkan’s bedroom was a familiar, untidy place. Over the years, Eliana had spent as many nights there as she had in her own.
She climbed into his bed, waiting. He pulled the drapes nearly shut, leaving the window open behind them. He lit the four squat candles he kept on a side table—one for each member of his lost family. When he had pulled off his shirt and boots, he climbed in beside her and drew her down into the warm nest of his arms.
“Thank you,” he murmured against her cheek.
She smiled, wriggling closer. “I always sleep better when I’m with you.”
He laughed softly. Then the room filled with silence. He worried the ends of her braid between his fingers. “Someday, we’ll have enough money to leave this place.”
Eliana closed her eyes. It was the beginning of Harkan’s favorite story, one he had told her countless times. She didn’t have the heart to tell him she couldn’t stand listening to it, not today. That this story had been a comfort when they were young and didn’t know any better but was simply cruel and pointless now.
So she waited until she could speak instead of yelling at him, and asked, as she always did, “Where will we go?”
“North across the Narrow Sea, to Astavar.”
Astavar. Eliana used to dream about what it would look like—white-capped mountains, lush green valleys, a world of ice and snow and night skies filled with twisting strands of colored light.
Now it was simply a place on a map. Ventera’s northern neighbor and the last free country left in the world.
“No one gets in or out of Astavar,” Eliana countered, falling into the rhythm of their practiced back-and-forth.
“We’ll find a smuggler,” Harkan continued. “A good one. We’ll pay whatever we need to pay.”
“Astavar will fall one of these days. Everyone falls to the Empire. Look what happened to us.”
“Perhaps. But in the meantime, we could have a few years of peace. You, me, your mother, Remy.” He squeezed her hand. “A proper family.”
Just like the one Eliana had destroyed mere hours ago. Suddenly she found it difficult to swallow. Suddenly her eyes felt hot and full.
Damn it. This was what came of trying to be a good friend.
“I don’t know that I could ever be proper,” she teased. It sounded unconvincing even to her.
“Think of it, El.” Harkan’s thumb smoothed circles against the crook of her arm. “The sea isn’t large. We could be in Astavar in an hour, maybe two. We could find a small place, maybe by a lake. I could farm. Remy could bake. Your mother could continue with her mending. And you—”
“And me?” Eliana sat up. She couldn’t play this game any longer. “If we could get past the Empire troops at our border, and if we could find a smuggler who wouldn’t betray us to the Empire, and if we could convince the Astavaris to let us cross their border…if we managed to do all that, with money we don’t have, what would I do, then, in this fantasy of yours?”
Harkan ignored the harsh edge to her voice. He kissed her wrist. “Anything. You can hunt game. I’ll teach you how to grow tomatoes. You can wear a straw hat.” He pressed his lips to her shoulder. “I suppose you don’t have to wear a hat. Although I’m not ashamed to say I’ve been daydreaming about it for so long that my heart might break if you didn’t.”
“It won’t work,” she said at last.
“The hat?” Harkan’s gaze was soft. “On the contrary, I think it would flatter you nicely.”
In that moment, she hated him almost as much as she hated herself.
She moved out of his arms, drew her tunic over her head, and gently pinned his wrists to his pillow.
“There’s no place for a girl like me in your dream world, love,” she explained with a coy smile. “All I know how to do is kill, remember?”
“And this,” Harkan said, his eyes dark and his voice low.
“And this,” she agreed and then kissed him deeply enough that he had nothing else to say.
• • •
That evening, she returned home at dusk to prepare dinner.
“Darling Mother!” She dropped a kiss on her mother’s cheek.
“What happened today?” asked Rozen Ferracora. She sat at the table, parts from her latest tinkering job scattered across the worn wood. Nuts and bolts. Nails and knives. “I heard about the boy—and Quill.”
“Oh, did you?” Eliana shrugged, started chopping carrots. She felt her mother’s eyes upon her and chopped faster. “Well. What do you expect? Another banner day in the glorious kingdom of Ventera.”
Later, Remy came in and sat at the table, watching Eliana lay out their dinner—a loaf of fresh bread, vegetable stew, a block of hard cheese—all of it high quality, freshly bought in the Garden Quarter.
Eliana had never been more aware of their lovely little home, their stock of food, the relative safety of their neighborhood.
All of it bought with the blood on her hands.
She filled her mother’s bowl and set it before her with a flourish.
Remy broke the silence, his voice shaking. His blue eyes were brilliant with unshed tears. “You’re a coward.”
Eliana had expected that. Still, the vitriol in his voice was a gut punch. She almost dropped her plate.
Rozen hissed at him, “Stop it, Remy.”
“I heard a child was executed today, and that rebel, Quill. The one who smuggles people out of the city.”
Eliana’s throat tightened painfully. She had never seen such an expression on Remy’s face. Like he didn’t recognize her—and didn’t want to.
With relish, she bit off a chunk of bread. “All true!”
“You did that,” he whispered.
“Did what?”
“You killed them.”
She swallowed, knocked back a gulp of water, wiped her mouth. “As I’ve said before, my cowardice keeps us warm and fed and alive. So, dearest brother, unless you’d prefer to starve…”
Remy shoved his plate away. “I hate you.”
Rozen sat rigid in her chair. “You don’t. Don’t say that.”
“Let him hate me.” Eliana glanced at Remy and then quickly away. He was looking right at the soft hole in her middle, the hollow place she let no one but him see. It ached from the bruise of his words. “If it helps him sleep at night, he can hate me until the end of his days.”
Remy’s eyes flicked to her neck, where the chain of her necklace was visible. His expression darkened.
“You wear King Audric the Lightbringer around your neck, but you don’t deserve to.” His gaze traveled back to her face. “He’d be ashamed of you if the Blood Queen hadn’t killed him. He’d be ashamed of anyone who helps the Empire.”
“If the Blood Queen hadn’t killed him,” Eliana said evenly, “then it wouldn’t matter, would it? Maybe the Empire would never have risen. Maybe we’d all be living in a world full of magic and flying horses and beautiful castles built by the saints themselves.”
She clasped her hands, regarded him with exaggerated patience. “But Queen Rielle did kill him. And so here we are. And I wear his image around my neck to remind myself that we don’t live in that world. We live in a world where good kings die and those foolish enough to hope for something better are killed where they stand.”
She ignored them both after that and devoured her stew in silence.
• • •
Her mother found her later that night, when Eliana was cleaning her blades in her room.
“Eliana,” said Rozen, panting slightly, “you should rest.” Even with her prosthetic leg, it took her some effort to get upstairs unassisted. She leaned hard on her cane.
“Mother, what are you doing?” Eliana rose, helped her to sit. Her daggers and smoke grenades lay across the floor, a tapestry of death. “You should be the one resting.”
Rozen stared at the floor for a long moment. Then her face crumpled, and she turned into Eliana’s shoulder.
“I hate seeing you like this,” she whispered. “I’m sorry for this. I’m sorry I taught you… I’m sorry for everything.”
Eliana held on to her, stroking her messy knot of dark hair. She listened to Rozen whisper too many apologies to count.
“Sorry about what?” Eliana said at last. “That Grandfather taught you how to kill? That you taught me?”
Rozen cupped Eliana’s cheek in one weathered hand, searched her face with wet eyes that reminded Eliana of Remy’s—inquisitive, tireless. “You’d tell me if you needed a rest? We can ask Lord Arkelion for time—”
“Time for what? To bake cookies and paint the walls a fresh color?” Eliana smiled, squeezed her mother’s hand. “I wouldn’t know what to do with myself.”
Rozen’s mouth thinned. “Eliana, don’t play coy with me. I can see right through that smile of yours. I taught you that smile.”
“Then don’t apologize for teaching me how to keep us alive, all right? I’m fine.”
Eliana rose, stretched, then helped Rozen to her own bed. She made her a cup of tea, kissed her cheek, helped unstrap her leg for the night—a finely crafted, wooden apparatus that had cost Eliana the wages from two jobs.
Two executions. Two slaughtered souls.
When Eliana returned to her room, she found Remy waiting for her, hugging his knees to his chest.
She crawled into bed beside him, struggling to breathe through a sudden tightness in her chest. Grief crashed upon her in waves. Dry-eyed, she let them pull her under.
Remy said quietly, “I don’t hate you,” and allowed her to hold on to him. She closed her eyes and tried to focus on only him—the twin scents of flour on his clothes and ink on his hands. The sound of his voice singing her “A Song for the Golden King.” It had been Eliana’s favorite lullaby as a child—a lament for Audric the Lightbringer.
Remy’s small hands stroked her hair. She could crush him if she wanted to. And yet, given the chance, her bony bird of a brother would face off against the Emperor. Even if it killed him.
And I have a warrior’s strength, she thought, but the heart of a coward.
A cruel joke. The world was full of them.
“I can’t bear it,” she whispered, her voice muffled against Remy’s shirt.
“Can’t bear what?” Remy asked quietly.
“You know what.”
He said nothing. He was going to make her say it.
She sighed. “Killing people. Hunting people. Being good at it.”
“You like being good at it,” he pointed out.
She didn’t argue. “It’s getting worse out there. And I still have no answers.”
“The missing women?”
“Who’s taking them? And where? And why?” Her fingers curled around his wrists. She imagined pulling him down into the safe, dark world under her bed and never letting him leave.
“You’re afraid we might be next,” he said.
“I’m afraid we could be. Anyone could be.”
“You’re right.” Remy lay down beside her, his eyes close and bright. “But all that matters right now is that you’re here, and so am I.”
Eliana held his hands to her heart and let him sing her into a fitful sleep.
• • •
The next job arrived several days later on Eliana’s doorstep.
Packaged in a brown paper parcel, it was marked with the address of the city’s most expensive tailor.
Eliana took the package and gave the messenger three silver coins. The pale-skinned man wore the plain brown tunic of an apprentice, and at first glance looked as ordinary as anyone. But Eliana knew at once that this man was no tailor’s apprentice.
She thanked him with a silent nod and returned to her bedroom. From her window, she watched him walk down the street, crowded with Garden Quarter shoppers.
He walked almost perfectly. But Eliana had learned to watch for a certain stiffness in the way adatrox moved—every so often, a tiny, unnatural tic accompanying shifts in direction. A slight dimness in the eyes, delayed movements of the mouth, the brow. The subtler parts of the face that told you what the person inside was thinking.
It was as though the Empire’s soldiers moved not by their own will, but by someone else’s.
She hoped she never found out why the adatrox could seem normal one moment—laughing, talking, yawning—and then, without warning, fall perfectly quiet and still. Statue still. A shadow falling over the face, clouding the eyes. It could last an instant or for hours.
Whatever the Empire did to its legions of soldiers, she hoped it had not been done to her father, wherever he was. If he was still alive.
She placed the parcel on her bed and paused for a moment, readying herself.
She often heard of potential jobs when visiting Remy at the bakery or while attending one of His Lordship’s parties with Harkan. She would allow some favored son or daughter of the Empire to kiss her in a curtained corner, whisper secrets to her. Then, later, she and Harkan would fall together into bed until they no longer felt so unclean.
But sometimes jobs came as messages, especially for Eliana.
These, she did not share with Harkan.
They often arrived folded between powdered fritters wrapped in thin paper, to remind Eliana of Remy—and how close he had been to this note and its messenger with the blank-slate eyes. She would read those orders with shaking hands.
Today, the job came tucked beneath folds of silk—a wine-colored whisper of a dress with long slits up each leg, shimmering as though it had been dipped in diamonds. The back was entirely bare, save for three thin, beaded strands. It was a flattering color for her, and the measurements seemed right. It would drape nicely over her body.
She swallowed past the sick knot in her chest. Lord Arkelion paid too close attention to her—and had for some time now. Eliana unfolded the message and read the encoded instructions three times over:
The Wolf rides on the full moon.
I want him alive.
Glory to the Empire.
Long live His Holy Majesty the Undying Emperor.
She stared at the exquisite penmanship.
Though the message bore Lord Arkelion’s seal, the writing was not his.
It was Rahzavel’s.
This writing, then, was a message within a message: Rahzavel was on his way to Orline. He was after the Wolf, and he wanted Eliana’s help.
She didn’t blame him.
Unlike Quill, the Wolf was not some Red Crown lackey. He was the right hand of the Prophet, lieutenant to the mysterious leader of Red Crown himself. The Wolf had evaded the Empire for years, and now he was here in her city.
Eliana’s eyes found the figure written across the bottom of the note in that same meticulous hand:
20,000 gold
Her heart raced.
A payment of 20,000 in Empire gold?
Money like that was a small fortune—and, coming from Rahzavel, the invitation Eliana had long feared: Deliver the Wolf. Take our money.
Join Invictus.
Serve the Emperor.
She had never told Harkan how she had, over the past two years, accepted even more jobs than he knew and saved as much as she could.
She had never told him just how deeply she had come to long for his fantasy of living in some quiet corner of Astavar with goats and fresh bread and tomato plants.
Instead she had saved and killed and hunted and saved. And now, with 20,000 gold in addition to her savings…
She heard the bell ring downstairs. Remy was home; his laughter lit up their house. How miraculous, that he could still laugh so easily.
Eliana threw the note into the fire and watched Rahzavel’s words burn. Once the note was ashes, she glanced out her window at the darkening sky. It was the first night of the full moon.
If Invictus wanted her, they could have her—but they would never touch her family.
She would deliver the Wolf as ordered.
She would accept her reward and ensure that Remy, Harkan, and her mother could safely leave the country.
And she would begin the hunt that very night.
