Grell threw himself at me. I rammed my heels into his chest.
His ribs snapped.
Grell smacked backward into the wall, blood oozing from under the hand clutched to his neck. I slid off the desk, floor rolling beneath me and pain aching at the back of my head. I gripped the desk and swallowed the bile in my throat. My ears rang.
“I meant to be quick.” I slurred, my mind a step behind. “Sorry.”
Grell’s red-rimmed eyes fluttered open. Spurts of blood painted the wall, and he blinked at me. His breathing was quick and frantic, chest too tight, and I knelt before him. He tightened the hand around his neck.
“Nothing personal.” I stepped on his free arm, pinning it to the floor, and flipped my knife around. “But I need a hand.”
Grell tried to tug at my bootlaces, fingers weak, and I pressed my palm to his chest. His heart thrummed beneath my hand as it struggled to keep up with the hole in his neck. I slipped my knife between his ribs, slick and easy. Grell gasped.
His heart stopped.
His hand fell.
I eased away, bitterness stuck in the back of my throat. My knife clattered to the ground. Scattered gold and finger bones rolled around my feet as I pried Grell’s old sword from the wall behind his desk. My heart tried to beat its way out of my chest.
I’d the appropriate skill.
I took another breath, fingers catching up with my thoughts as I grasped the sword with both hands. I sliced the blade through Grell’s wrist. His bones snapped as easily as Rath’s, and the scrape of metal against him shuddered down my spine. The sword slipped from my trembling hands.
He was only Grell.
He wasn’t good, not even a little bit. He’d taken nine-year-old Rath’s finger with a laugh and a sharpened knife.
Opal wouldn’t be bothered. Grell had to die, and I had to do it, like Opal with one of Our Queen’s marks. Wasn’t anything wrong with this.
This burning weight writhing in my chest and bubbling up my throat had no place in Opal’s life.
I coughed, heaved, and lost my breakfast in the corner. Up and out, no more of that. Nothing left to make me sick over killing Grell. He’d made his choices, and I’d made mine. I would be Opal.
With Grell da Sousa’s hand heavy in mine, I fled.
Four
I left town soon as I was done scrubbing the blood from my tunic. I fit in well enough with the other dust-covered travelers on the wagon heading to Willowknot, the city next to the new palace, but I ran out of money after three days on the road. All I could do was pick at the dried blood under my nails.
I wasn’t used to all that happened with Grell. I’d not been able to stand the sight of blood for years after the war. It was too wrong, too against everything I’d been taught as a kid. Just had to get familiar with it again.
My home, Nacea, had been small, wedged between Erlend and Alona and ruled from afar by Erlend lords. A territory allowed to keep its queen and god in exchange for tribute.
Then Erlend and Alona went to war and called their mages to the front lines. Nacea didn’t deal in magic. The Lady, our godly Lady of Nacea, was not to be stolen from. She wasn’t human or flesh but magic in every form. Mages used her up, forced her into the old handwritten language of runes, and devoured her power.
She devoured them right back—runes rotted their flesh and minds, leaving nothing but mindless souls.
Shadows of the people they’d once been.
The Erlend mages didn’t know, of course. They’d never pushed so far, tried so hard for innovation than during the war, but the damage was done. The perfect soldiers they’d tried to make couldn’t be called back. The shadows had no bodies and no minds, only broken souls, memories of a face, and an all-consuming need to get back their stolen flesh. They scoured the lands looking for themselves and flayed the skin off any they found.
Erlend’s lords realized their mistake too late but not too late to save themselves and ruin Nacea.
I dreamed of a family I couldn’t recognize in death, of neighbors’ faces stitched into a patchwork of skin. There’d been no help, no aid, and no memorials. We’d been forgotten.
I would make Erlend remember.
“Lady, help me.” I tilted my head to the sunny sky, looking to where The Lady’s stars would be tonight.
There was no room for gods in a world of monsters and monstrous men, but tradition endured.
“She’s helping herself.” My neighbor in the carriage waved a freshly calloused hand toward the horizon. He was new to hunger, clinging to the family crest around his neck that would fetch plenty if he sold it. Runes decorated his arms. An old out-of-work mage. “A shadow on Erlend’s rising sun.”
An Erlend mage who thought I was speaking of Our Queen.
I scowled. The wagon I was taking to Willowknot collected people at each turn, and my seat was more knees and elbows than wood. Grell’s hand, wrapped in three old sacks and perfumed linen, was wedged under my thighs. I’d no space to stretch and no patience for asses.
“Did you see the shadows?” I asked. Our Queen’s palace was built over the ruins of the old mages’ keep on the defunct border between Erlend and Alona. They were one nation now and had no reason for the school with magic gone. She’d been Head Priestess of the Mind before the war. The other two head priests had created the shadows. She’d tried them as war criminals after Rodolfo was done with them, but the gallows were a faster death than they’d deserved.
I liked Rodolfo’s methods more—a taste of their own treatment and no Erlends left who could spread the knowledge of shadow creation. He’d died to save us all from the threat of shadows ever returning.
“Lies.” The old mage spat out of the carriage. “People afraid of their own damned shadows, afraid of going to war, afraid of protecting what we’d built. And look at the trash that rose from our ruin.”
I clucked my tongue. Wooden spires loomed over the roofs and battlements, and sunlight sparkled in the stained glass windows circling the towers. Walls of glass dyed blue and gold glinted with each jerk of the wagon. The new Igna flag fluttered over every peak.
“And look at the trash Our Queen hasn’t claimed,” I said as I lurched to my feet and yanked my bag from the floor, whacking him with Grell’s hand. “When will her Left Hand reach for you?”
He paled. As the carriage came to a halt, I rushed away from him and laughed the rest of my walk to Willowknot.
A collection of guards shuffled through travel papers and checked bags at the city gates. I unwound the linen from Grell’s hand. Might as well be upfront with it.
The line of people scattered. Grell’s hand reeked, flowers and perfume barely clinging to his rotten fingers.
“How do I declare this?” I asked, holding it up.
“Drop it.” A guard, pink cheeks fading to pale green, leveled his spear at my chest. “Tell me your name.”