She swallowed hard. The real Mia Rose was a Gwyrach. Which meant she had never really known herself at all.
“I hope whatever you’re looking at in that book,” Quin said, “is a blueprint for a river craft. Because unless you can summon a boat once we reach the Natha, this little expedition of ours will soon come to a brief and bloody end.”
“Ye of trifling faith.”
“Faith gets people killed. I’d rather worship at the altar of logic. A cold altar, but a rational one.”
Funny, Mia thought. She’d always felt the same.
But now her logic was contorting into a wild hypothesis about the mysterious squiggle on her mother’s map. It was nothing more than a scrap of a hangnail at the fork of the river, a half-moon bobbing on the Natha’s inky surface, and yet she felt certain she knew what it was.
A boat.
Before Domeniq du Zol’s father was killed by Gwyrach, he had captained a coracle: a small, oval-shaped boat. He collected silver coins at the fork of the Natha River and ferried passengers along its watery ventricles. The du Zols called the boat the Sunbeam, a tribute to their Fojuen heritage: du Zol meant “of the sun.”
Maybe the boat was still there.
Never mind Dom’s father had died three years ago. Or that the du Zols—with the exception of Dom, who had stayed in the river kingdom to train with the Hunters—had fled Glas Ddir and returned to Fojo Kara??o shortly after his death. Or that boats tended not to stay in the same place for years on end. Boats moved. That was the point.
“We’re close,” she said, with more confidence than she felt.
“Close to what?”
She was almost certainly chasing the ghost of a boat. And still she moved doggedly toward the river as the earth grew soft and spongy underfoot. She could smell the wet scent of the Natha, the blackthorn brambles on the banks wicking sweet moisture from the mud. Centuries of erosion had pulverized the rocks, sugared them into glittering black sand.
Mia and Quin stepped into a small clearing. The Natha surged oily black past their feet. In the moonlight it looked like a forked tongue, one prong flowing west, the other east. She shuddered. The black tongue of a demon.
She heard dogs barking, followed by the harsh shouts of men.
Panic rose in her chest. But the map had not misled her: a small, dilapidated dock jutted out into the water. She recognized the smell of rotting wood. This was indeed where Dom’s father had picked up his passengers in the Sunbeam.
Quin blinked. “Is there supposed to be a boat?”
“Shh.” The hairs bristled on Mia’s neck. “Someone’s coming.”
Chapter 15
Silver Blade
MIA HADN’T HEARD THEM; she’d felt them. Her ears were not as fine-tuned as her father’s, but she’d felt an ominous prickling heat as blood pooled in her toes and fingers. Did her magic allow her to sense when someone was near?
“Tree,” she said, shoving Quin toward the closest one. “Can you climb?”
“I’m not a kitten. I know how to climb a tree.”
“So do kittens.”
She scaled the tree, scrabbling up the trunk and wedging her hips between boughs. Quin swung himself up far more gracefully on his long limbs. He’d grown up in a castle, she in a forest, but he was right: he wasn’t shabby at climbing trees.
I don’t hear anyone, he mouthed.
She daggered a finger to his lips. Stop talking.
I’m not talking!
She clapped a hand over his mouth. His breath was warm against her fingers.
Twenty feet below them, Tuk and Lyman, two of her father’s best Hunters, skulked into the glade.
The most seasoned Hunters knew how to tread lightly, their footsteps dew upon the earth. Despite the fact that Tuk was the size of an ox and Lyman never stopped running his mouth, they’d both mastered the art of the silent approach. If Mia hadn’t felt them, she never would have heard them coming.
She didn’t like Tuk or Lyman, not since overhearing them make jokes one day after a training session. “What did she expect?” Lyman had said. “The wife of an assassin will always have a target on her back. Should have thought of that before she married him!” Mia never forgave them for speaking so callously about her mother.
Now she clutched the tree limb, her skin tingling, peppered with a fine frost. Perhaps the boy from the village had sold them out. Or perhaps, said a dark little voice inside her, Tuk and Lyman had picked up her scent. Some Hunters claimed to be able to smell magic, to sniff out a Gwyrach in their midst. “The magical stench,” Lyman called it. “Not very becoming on a lady. But then, we aren’t dealing with ladies, are we?”
Tuk stooped beside the river and splashed water on his broad, russet-brown face. Then he sat and hefted his full weight against the trunk of an oak tree. Tuk pulled a flask of demon’s dwayle from his rucksack and quaffed a long swig, smacking his lips in pleasure. Lyman paced nervously up and down the riverbank, his pinkish cheeks alive with movement, fingertips dancing on his palms.
“Be that as it may,” Tuk was saying, “it doesn’t mean she deserves to die.” He swilled a mouthful of dwayle and belched, as if to prove his point.
“We don’t decide who lives or dies.”
“She saved the prince’s life.”
“And she’ll kill him soon enough. You know as well as I do: that’s what they do.”
The air locked in Mia’s throat. She felt a subtle change in Quin’s breathing, too: a quick inhalation, followed by a tightening of his chest. Would he scream out? If he believed what Lyman was saying . . . if he thought she would try to kill him . . .
But he was silent. He let out his breath, the air fogging her fingers, hot and humid. She loosened her grip.
“She can’t have gone far,” Lyman said. “The girl is book smart, but she won’t last a single night in the woods. She’ll get scared. Come crawling back to Papa.”
Mia knew the woods like the back of her hand—at least she would, once they reached Ilwysion. She was strong there. Competent. Lyman could choke on a plum pit.
“Have a swig and calm down, would you?” Tuk wagged the flask. “You’re making me tense.”
Lyman stopped moving. “Someone’s here.”
“You mean the king’s herd of fools stampeding through the forest?”
Then Tuk went still, too.
Mia’s stomach was a slab of ice sweating through her belly. The Hunters had sensed her. They knew.
Lyman lifted his head, his eyes grating over her like steel wool.
“There you are,” he said, and then said nothing more, as a silver blade caught him in the throat.
Chapter 16
A Raven on the River
MIA COULD PINPOINT THE exact moment Lyman died. She felt it in her own body, the agony whipping through her chest like a scourge: the fractured trachea, silencing his screams; the severed carotid artery, starving his brain of oxygen; the gasps and gurgles from his broken throat. He was drowning in his own blood. His heart writhed as red liquid spurted from his neck, drizzling the sliced knot of flesh and staining his tunic dark.
She didn’t understand how she felt these things, but there was no doubt the collapse in Lyman’s body resonated in her own flesh, her own bones, her own blood. Was this part of having magic, too? Feeling the sensations of a body that was not your own? She’d never read about it in any of her books. But it was very real, and very terrible. Hot bile seethed in her belly; she struggled to keep it down.
Tuk was already reaching for his sword. For such a large man, he was surprisingly light on his feet. With his free hand, he pulled a bone talisman from his pocket, kissed it, and tucked it under his belt.
“Show yourself!” he barked, but no assailant emerged from the forest.
Air burbled in Mia’s throat. This time it was Quin who clapped a hand over her mouth so she wouldn’t cry out. His fingers were glacial.
Who had thrown the dagger? Her mind was swimming in blood, but the blade looked familiar. That pale-green stone.
“Only a coward kills in darkness,” Tuk growled. “Show yourself.”
Domeniq du Zol stepped out of the trees.