Steel's Edge

EIGHT

CHARLOTTE closed her eyes and listened to the waves splash against the hull. Two hours ago, they had been loaded inside the hold of the ship, slaves first, then the slavers. John Drayton was a careful man who locked up his passengers, willing and unwilling. Richard and Jason were the only two men who had remained above on deck.

George and Jack sat on the floor near the bulkhead. Jack’s shoulders, rigid with tension, slumped forward. He hasn’t said a word since they boarded, but she had seen his eyes. A violent, furious thing stared at her through his irises. Something savage lived inside Jack, and he was using all of his power to hold it at bay. She wanted to tell him she knew exactly how he felt, but her instincts warned her that any stray word could tip the balance in that thing’s favor. She had treated changelings before, or rather she’d treated the changeling soldiers, the hardened, barely human killers who had come out of the crucible of the Adrianglian changeling academy. If Jack lost control now, in the hold, none of them would survive it.

George knew it, too. He sat next to his brother, hovering protectively over him. His eyes were clear with determination, his face sharpened with grief and anger. He felt betrayed, and he wanted revenge, and she didn’t blame him one bit.

Anger filled her too, and she held on to it, letting herself steep in it, solidifying her resolve. John Drayton, Éléonore’s long-lost son. Not so lost anymore. She pictured his smug smile. “Good-looking kids.” They are your children, you heartless bastard. It wasn’t enough their grandmother is dead, now you’re indirectly responsible for her murder. She wished she could strangle the swine, but he was upstairs. This one life she would’ve taken with pleasure. She glanced at the boys again. Yes, with pleasure.

Charlotte glanced out the narrow porthole, little more than an air vent. The ship had activated a cloaking device the moment they raised anchor. A dense cloud of magic-infused fog slid over the vessel, wrapping it like a blanket. The myriad tiny droplets of water that created the mist acted as countless minuscule mirrors, busily reflecting the ship’s surroundings. An outside observer wouldn’t see the ship. He might perhaps notice a smudge against the perfect line of water and sky. In bright daylight, this distortion would be quite obvious, but at night, with the mist rising from the water, the Intrepid Drayton was practically invisible. Unfortunately, from the inside, the reflective fog was opaque and all she saw now was a dense curtain of mist.

They must’ve been sailing for at least an hour or two. Time stretched here, inside the hold.

“I want out of this damn ship. How are we gonna get out of here?” a blond woman next to her murmured to Miko. “We can’t kill the sailors until we get to port, and if we kill them when we get there, there will be a commotion.”

The slender girl nodded at Charlotte. “She’s our key.”

The blond woman stared at her. “You don’t look like much.”

“Looks can be deceiving,” Charlotte told her.

“They better be.” The blond woman bared her teeth. “Because if they lead me out of this bucket in chains and into the slave pens, you’ll be the first I come after. You’ve got a skinny throat. Easy to cut.”

Charlotte’s magic stirred in response to the menace in the woman’s voice, bubbling to the surface. She kept it in check and stared back at the blond woman with disdain.

The woman yanked a knife from inside her rags.

Miko stepped in her way and hissed. “Don’t be stupid.”

“Did you see the way she looked at me? Like I’m gutter trash, and she’s the Marchesa of Louisiana. I’ll cut her throat!”

Miko moved and suddenly there were two slender blades in her hands. “You are gutter trash, Lynda. Jason has a plan. You fuck with his plan, you fuck with me.”

“You got a big mouth for such a dumb bitch. About time someone shut it for you.”

Lynda lunged forward. Miko spun, thrusting, and the woman crumpled to the boards, gurgling on her blood.

Miko turned, one arm held high, the other low, blood dripping from her knives, and surveyed the hold. “Anybody else want to fuck with the plan?”

Nobody volunteered.

Lynda writhed on the floor, hot, dark blood spreading around her on the wood. Charlotte let her magic lick at her. External jugular vein cut, internal jugular vein partially nicked, rapid blood loss, estimated time of death: two to three minutes. A familiar sense of obligation tugged at Charlotte, but this time it wasn’t backed by kindness, only habit.

“Do you want me to heal her?” Charlotte asked.

“No. One less psycho.”

“Then finish it. She’s suffering.”

Miko dropped down on one knee. The knife rose, plunged down, and Lynda stopped struggling.

The door swung open, revealing Richard. About time.

He motioned to her. Charlotte approached.

“We’re about to make landfall,” he whispered. “There are nineteen sailors on this boat.”

“What about the captain?” she asked, glancing at the boys.

Two pairs of eyes stared back at her, one of them glowing amber.

“He’s ours,” Jack said, his voice a ragged, inhuman growl. People backed away from him.

“Wait until I call you,” Richard said, and looked to her. “Sailors only.”

She raised her chin. “Very well. Let’s get this over with.”

Richard turned and climbed the ladder up to the deck. She followed. The ship sliced through the blue-green waters and the salty breeze, barely skimming the surface of the ocean, its grandiose sails spread wide. The dense barrier of magic fog surrounded it on all sides except for the prow, where the curtain parted. Orange and blue lights winked through the gap—their destination.

Sailors moved along the deck. Some sat, some talked quietly. Richard pulled her against the cabin and braced her with his big body, hiding her from the rest of the crew. She rested her hands on his leather-encased body, feeling the comforting strength of his muscular shoulders. It felt so intimate standing like this. It was almost an embrace. She knew she was reading too much into it, but she needed an embrace so badly.

Something brushed against her. She glanced down. The wolfripper hound leaned against her legs.

“How fast do you need them to die?” she whispered. She was so angry, and they were scum who ferried slaves and fed children to sharks. She would extinguish their lives.

“At the speed we’re going, we’ll dock in fifteen minutes. They’re about to light the colors,” he said. “The port is likely armed with cannons. They will send a challenge signal. We must send the proper reply, or they’ll consider us hostile. Once the reply is accepted, they’re yours. Kill them as quickly and quietly as you can.”

“Challenge!” someone called out.

Richard leaned over to glance at the bow of the ship. She did, too.

A pale green flare shot upward from the port. Charlotte held her breath, waiting.

“If it’s green again, they grant us safe passage,” Richard whispered in her ear, his breath a hot cloud.

“Light the colors,” a deep voice bellowed from the deck above them. “One two, two two, one three!”

Magic dashed up the masts. Arcane symbols ignited on the surface of the sails, one each in those on the middle mast and the third in the sails of the center mast on the left side.

A second green flare blossomed in the night sky.

The deep voice barked a string of nautical nonsense. The crew sped about the ship, spinning wheels, adjusting metal levers in the control consoles by the masts. The sails shrunk. The segmented masts began to straighten slowly.

“Now,” Richard said.

The monstrous magic in her chest stirred, waking. She listened to it, sorting through the plagues she carried within, until she found one that felt right.

A sailor brushed by them. “Hey, Crow, who have you got there?”

Charlotte reached out above Richard’s shoulder and gently caressed the man’s weathered face. Her magic rose from her in narrow dark streams, like the tentacles of an octopus, and bit into him. He barely noticed. His skin fractured under her fingertips, sloughing off in tiny white scales of epithelium glistening with magic, and the breeze carried them on, down to the rest of the crew. The man stared at her, seemingly mesmerized but really just dying very quickly. The skin of his face turned to powder, as if he’d dipped his head into a bucket of silvery flour.

Her magic wrapped around him, draining his reserves, and withdrew. The wind stirred the powder that used to be the top layers of his skin, blowing it off. The tiny particles caught on his eyelashes. He sighed and crumpled down softly.

Richard turned, still shielding her, to look over his shoulder. The sailors began to fall one by one, silent, soft, each releasing a cloud of scaly powder as they sank unmoving to the deck.

They were bad people who deserved their deaths, yet she felt a crushing sadness at their passing all the same. She buried it away, deep inside, wrapping it in the layers of her anger and resolve. There would be time for self-pity later.

Richard had the strangest expression on his face. Not quite shock, not quite panic, but an odd mix of awe and astonishment, as if he couldn’t believe what he saw.

At the far end of the ship, Jason Parris turned, his eyes wide, as the sailors around him folded like deflated balloons. The dog raised his muzzle to the moon and howled, his lonely cry floating above the waves like a mourning wail.

Above them something thumped quietly. A man tumbled from the upper deck, his face ashen with powder. Richard lunged at him, trying to catch the body to keep it from making a loud thud. But a gust of wind beat him to it—four feet from the deck the body broke into a cloud of particles. They slid harmlessly from Richard’s skin and melted into the breeze.

He turned to her. “What is it?”

“White leprosy,” she said. It was a terrible disease. She had fought it before, she knew all its little habits and quirks, and she had twisted them with her magic just enough to turn it into her silent assassin. He would think twice about letting her touch him now. Something inside her contracted at that thought.

“Jack,” Richard said, his voice low. “Tell them the ship is ours.”

“He can’t hear you,” she told him.

“Jack has good ears,” Richard reminded her.

Sure enough, Jason’s crew poured out of the cargo hold and spread across the deck, people taking up positions where the sailors once stood. People kicked the fallen bodies overboard. The corpses broke in the wind.

Someone gasped. She saw panic in some faces.

“Tell Silver Death thank you for the pretty ship,” Jason said to them. “And stop gaping. We still need to bring this baby to port.”

There was no escape. Death was now a part of her name.

George and Jack emerged from the crowd.

“I need you to guard your father,” Richard said. “There are things he knows that we need. If you can’t help yourself, tell me now.”

“I’ll do it,” George said. “Jack will need a few moments to vent.”

“I’m counting on you, George. This is your only second chance. If I come back and he’s dead, you and I are done. Do not harm your father.”

The boy reached behind his neck and pulled a long, slender blade from inside his clothes. “Understood. I’ll keep him in perfect health.”

Richard rapped his hands on the door of the cabin.

“What is it?” Drayton called.

“There’s a problem,” Richard replied in his normal voice.

The door swung open, revealing Drayton with a rifle in his hands. He saw Jason’s people and jerked the gun up.

Magic pulsed from George, dark and potent. A woman charged out of the crowd and grabbed the gun. Charlotte saw her face and nearly gagged. Lynda, her slit throat a red ribbon across her neck, her face still splattered with the spray of her own blood.

Drayton yanked the gun, but she hung on, blocking the barrels with her stomach. The slaver captain pulled the trigger. The muffled shot popped, like a dry firecracker, blowing small chunks of flesh from Lynda’s back. The undead woman jerked the rifle out of Drayton’s hand and broke it in half like a toothpick.

Drayton stumbled back.

Lynda dropped the broken rifle at George’s feet. “Maaaster,” she whispered, her voice a sibilant mess. Her neck leaked tiny droplets of blood. She stared at George in complete adoration, like a loyal hound gazed at her owner. “I love you, master.”

Behind her, Jack snarled like some nightmarish monster.

George’s face showed no mercy. “Hello, Father.” He took a step forward, pushing the bigger man into the cabin. “Let’s visit.”

Lynda ducked in after him. The door swung shut.

Oh, George . . .

“To the bow,” Richard said, resting his fingers lightly on her arm.

She followed him to the front of the ship and came to stand by one of the control consoles, all bronze and copper gears encased in glass and enveloped by magic.

Her magic sang within her, the monster satiated but not fully satisfied. The more she fed it, the more sustenance it wanted. It wound and curled around her in dark currents, almost as if it were an entity of its own, and it loved her, like a loyal pet, existing to serve her and bring her comfort. All those endless hours of cautionary lectures she’d heard within the walls of the College were right. Destruction was seductive and self-rewarding, while healing was an arduous chore.

She had taken a chance this time. Instead of siphoning off their lives to fuel her magic, she simply killed them, feeding the disease with her own power. Stealing other lives to feed her magic had felt too good. If she tasted it again, there was a chance she wouldn’t stop, and she didn’t want to risk it. Strangely, even though she had relied only on her own reserves, she didn’t feel that drained. Killing was easier than the last time—and the next time it would be easier still. She was on a slippery slope. She had to fight to keep from sliding down.

One of Jason’s men came to stand by them, saw Charlotte still wrapped in magic, and halted in midstep, maintaining his distance. He looked at her, looked at the console, shifted from foot to foot uncomfortably . . .

“Would you like me to move?” she asked.

“Yes,” he exhaled.

Charlotte took two steps to the right, away from the console and toward two other men near Jason, both looking like they crushed skulls for their living. The cutthroats shied from her, backing up. Jason held his ground, but his face locked into a hard, impersonal mask. He was deeply afraid and determined not to show it.

She felt utterly alone. So that’s what it was like to be a pariah.

“My lady.” Richard’s fingers touched her arm.

She almost jumped.

He offered her his arm. “May I?”

Charlotte rested her fingers on his forearm and stood next to him, painfully aware that their legs were almost touching and the streams of her magic wound about him. She dared to glance at him. His face was relaxed. He looked back at her and smiled, as if they had stopped during a stroll in a park to admire some flowers. It made her feel human.

Why, why didn’t she take Éléonore up on the invitation to visit her family? Had she met Richard a year ago, things might have been so different. He was the kind of man she had always wanted to meet. Strong, honorable, and kind. He is also a killer, an annoying voice whispered in her mind. Well, so was she.

Too late now. They were on a ship sailing to deliver death. Romantic fantasies would get her nowhere. She’d given up that luxury.

Charlotte looked straight ahead. A large island loomed in the distance. Two ports hugged its coast. On the right, handsome piers of cut stone thrust into the ocean, flanked by graceful yachts and private boats. Picturesque palms spread their fanned leaves and wide roads, lit with blue and yellow lanterns, ran deeper inland, toward pastel-colored houses in shades of turquoise, white, yellow, and pink. To the left, rougher piers offered refuge to tugboats and barges, leading to a seedy boardwalk and hostile, dark streets. Farther to the left, a naval fort of gray stone stabbed the ocean, overseeing both ports.

“Where the hell are we?” someone asked.

Richard swore, a quiet, savage sound under his breath, and caught himself. “My apologies.”

“What is this place?” Charlotte asked.

“The Isle of Divine Na,” he said. “It’s an independent barony—the Baron of Na purchased it from Adrianglia when the continent was being colonized. The entire place is one big luxury resort, full of tourists in the late summer and fall. See, the luxury port is in the north, and the commercial port, where we’re heading, is to the south. We’re barely three hours from Kelena. I’ve looked at this island as a possibility for the Market but dismissed it because I thought it would be too risky to run a slave operation on an island full of vacationers. It was here all this time under my nose, and I missed it.”

“Don’t beat yourself up, old man.” Jason grinned, patting Richard’s shoulder. “Happens to everyone.”

Richard glared back at him, his composure slipping, and for a second she thought he’d rip Jason’s arm off and beat him with it.

She leaned closer to Richard, and murmured, “If you decide to throw him to the ground, I promise to kick him. Vigorously.”

“Thank you,” Richard said. “I may take you up on it.” He sounded sincere.

A green flare went up at the dock to the left.

“They want us to dock,” one of the older men said to Jason.

“Then dock us. Gently. We’ll need this ship in one piece to get the hell out of here.”

The man barked some orders. The ship slowed, approaching the dock in a graceful arc.

“One fort,” Jason murmured, his face thoughtful.

“It has five long-range, flash-load cannons,” Richard said.

The slaves formed up in two lines on the deck. Jack moved to the front.

“Who the fuck put the kid on point?” Jason took a step toward the lines.

“Leave him where he is,” Richard said. “He sat in the hold for two hours, holding himself in check. He needs to vent, and none of us needs to be in front of him.”

The crime lord looked at Richard. “He’s a kid.”

“He’s a changeling,” Richard answered. “You’ve never seen one fight. Give him the benefit of the doubt.”

The faint hum of the cloaking device stopped abruptly. The fog dispersed. Charlotte hugged her shoulders, feeling suddenly exposed.

A metal chain clanged—they’d dropped the anchor. The ship slowed further, approaching the dock carefully, almost gently.

“Once we disembark and take the fort, take her out a few hundred yards,” Jason said to one of his men. “I don’t want to strip this island and come back to a sunken ship.”

Three dockhands waited on the wooden pier. Behind them, a crew of slavers waited, no doubt ready to receive the merchandise. Some of the slavers were female. Women were no less capable of cruelty than men.

Lines flew from the ship to the pier. The dockhands secured them.

“Lower the gangplank,” Jason said.

Two men cranked a large wheel. A metal ramp slid from the ship’s side toward the dock.

The moment it touched the stone, Jack started down the gangplank. The women followed him in two lines, still keeping their hands bound.

“You’re eager for the slave pens, sweetheart?” one of the slaver women asked.

Jack swayed. A psychotic grin stretched his lips. His face jerked, his expression feral.

A tall slaver stepped forward. “Come her—”

Jack spun, leaping so fast, Charlotte barely saw the knife in his hand slice through the slaver’s neck. Jack landed, catching the man’s severed head by the hair, and hurled it at the slavers.

“Holy shit,” Jason said.

Her mind reeled at the amount of force it must’ve taken to slice through the muscle and bone of a thick human neck with a knife.

The slavers froze, shocked, and Jack ripped into them like a pike into a school of minnows. Blood sprayed, people screamed in pain. The slaves abandoned their fake shackles and charged down to join the slaughter. The dog shot down the gangplank and into the thick of the fighting. She tried to keep up with Jack, but he darted in and out of the bloodbath. She caught a flash of his face—he was smiling.

In two minutes, it was all over. Eight bodies lay on the ground. Jack shook himself and dashed down the dark street, melting into the gloom. The dog chased him. The women started moving after the two of them.

“Stop!” Jason roared.

The pretend slaves halted.

“Fall in! Find your squad captain. Now.”

The criminals separated with almost military discipline, forming four groups.

“Squad one, slave pens,” Jason barked. “Let everyone out, set it on fire, kill whoever comes to put it out. The slaves will run wild, let them. Don’t follow them. Squad two, hit the barracks and burn that shit to the ground. Kill as many as you can. Squad three, with me. I want these cannons, and I want them yesterday. Once we have the fort, a double green flare will go up. Squad four, hold the line here. Cut this port off from the city. Everyone, you see a red flare, we abort, and you get the hell out. Blue flare, haul ass to where it came from. Don’t loot until I give the all clear. You stop to stuff your pockets before I tell you to, and I’ll kill you myself. You get me?”

The criminals howled in agreement.

“Go!” Jason yanked a large sword from under his cloak. “Good luck, old man. Try not to get in my way.”

He strode down the gangplank, his monk’s habit flaring.

The criminals dispersed.

Richard held out a ragged gray cloak to her. “I’m wearing a disguise, but you aren’t. Someone might recognize you.”

It was unlikely, but there was no need to tempt fate. She put on the cloak, hiding her face in its deep hood, and adjusted her bag of first-aid supplies under the folds.

Richard unsheathed his sword. The slight curve of the long, slender blade caught the light from the lanterns.

“Our turn,” Richard said. “We must find the bookkeeper. Stay close to me.”

RICHARD marched down the gangplank, keenly aware of Charlotte following him. The Broken was forever closed to him, but its books were not, and he’d read extensively about the Broken’s military traditions. As a Marine, Jason was trained in the art of small wars. His particular branch of the military evolved to respond to an enemy employing asymmetric warfare, the tactic that involved striking against the vulnerabilities of the opponent rather than seeking to eliminate the bulk of its force. Jason would take a page out of that playbook: he would deliver brutal precision strikes against the vital points of the island, he would drown the island city in chaos and confusion, demoralizing the enemy and severing communication, then he would eliminate the fractured opposition. He would be ruthless and impossible to rein in, but he couldn’t blockade the entire island.

They had to hurry, before the bookkeeper caught on and attempted his escape. They needed his information.

He veered left, following the cobbled streets at a rapid walk. He would’ve liked to run, but Charlotte’s face had turned chalk pale after she’d eliminated the crew, and the color still hadn’t returned. He didn’t want to push her.

What she had done to the crew of the Intrepid Drayton shocked him to the core of his being. There was a kind of terrible beauty to her magic, and when he stood in the epicenter of her silent storm, a feeling of otherworldly awe claimed him, as if he became part of a mystical event that couldn’t be explained, only experienced. It was a peculiar, mesmerizing serenity with a touch of fear, the kind he sometimes felt when walking alone through the towering woods of Adrianglia or staring at the rough ocean and its sky, pregnant with a storm. He had encountered something greater than the limits of his ordinary life, and he was both alarmed and drawn to it.

Jason was right when he called Charlotte Silver Death. The name fit. Horror and beauty mixed into one. But underneath it she was a living, breathing woman, and when he’d looked at her, standing alone at the bow of the ship, vulnerable despite the potent magic swirling around her, while the rest of the people hugged the sides, afraid to step even an inch closer, he felt her isolation. He wanted to shield her, and he had.

He still wanted to protect her now. Despite everything he had gone through, despite his goal being in sight, if someone had offered him a chance to instantly transport her somewhere safe in exchange for having to relive the last six months over again, he would’ve taken it in a heartbeat. And she would deeply hate him for it.

Three people shot out of a side street, two men and a woman. Good weapons, good clothes of a similar cut—town militia or the Market’s slavers. They charged him.

He lent a part of himself to his blade, feeling the magic slide along the edge of his sword. In the Edge, becoming one with the blade took time and effort, but here in the Weird, where the magic was at its strongest, it required a mere fraction of a second. His flash surged along the blade, pure white, fed by the adrenaline coursing through him.

The first man stabbed at him with a short, utilitarian sword. Richard swayed out of the way and thrust into the man’s armpit. The sword slid into his flesh, cutting bone and gristle like it was warm butter. He felt the faintest resistance when the heart ruptured and freed his blade with a sharp tug in time to slam the pommel into the second man’s face. The second attacker stumbled back. The woman jumped into his place, swinging the heavy mace in a devastating sideways blow aimed at Richard’s shoulder to incapacitate his sword arm.

Richard leaned back, letting the mace whistle past him and sliced his sword across her throat. A shallow cut, all that was needed. She gulped her own blood and fell.

He grabbed the remaining man and hurled him against the wall, holding the blade an inch from the thug’s throat. The man’s eyes told Richard he was drowning in sheer animal terror.

“The bookkeeper?”

“House on the hill,” the thug said, his voice shaking. “Columns. White columns.”

Richard released him, and the man took off down the street at a dead run.

Charlotte stood unharmed, taking short, shallow breaths. An expression of deep frustration touched her face.

“Come, we have to hurry,” he told her.

She caught up to him, and together they started up the street, toward the low hill.

“Why do I always do that? Why do I freeze instead of helping you?”

“No killer instinct, remember?” he said. “It’s a natural reaction. When in danger, we fight, flee, or freeze.”

“You don’t freeze.”

“I’m too busy trying to impress you,” he said. “Is it working?”

She gave him an unreadable look. Perhaps now wasn’t the best time for levity.

The street ran into an eight-foot-tall stone wall. Small rocks, each paler than the gray stone making up the bulk of the wall, guarded its top, embedded about twenty feet from each other.

“Ward stones,” Charlotte said.

Climbing the wall was out of the question. The ward wouldn’t let them pass.

“New plan.” Richard turned, and they trailed the wall, heading down. Somewhere there had to be a gate or an opening.

Ahead and to the right, screams cut the silence. An orange-and-red glow lit the night, punctuated by a column of smoke. Jason’s crew had set something on fire.

The side street curved, and they followed it around the houses, closer to the fire and to another wall. An iron gate lay wrenched to the side. Richard ducked through the opening. A wide courtyard spread before him. To the right, near a blocky building, a fight raged between the slavers and a ragged mob armed with shackles and rocks. The slaves struck out, their haggard faces contorted with bestial fury, their bodies, gaping through the holes in their rags, bearing whip marks. They had no weapons. They ripped into the slavers with their nails and teeth like wild animals.

These weren’t the freshly acquired, to be sold as slaves. No, they were the rejects, probably used for manual labor on the island, little more than beasts of burden. No human being should have been treated this way, but they had been, and now they were finally venting their rage. They would kill anyone in their path.

Straight ahead, a raised platform with seven sets of metal posts stood, each post widening at the top. The slaves’ shackles would be fixed to the post, under that wide top, so they could be evaluated. To the right, another gate gaped open, and another group squared off for its control. Nine armed slavers in leather on one side and four of Jason’s people on the other. Neither was willing to make the first move. Jason’s people were good and looked desperate, but the slavers outnumbered them two to one.

He had to get through that gate.

Richard grabbed Charlotte’s hand and squeezed it. “We’ll have to cut our way through. Stay behind me.”

He strode toward the fight. A slave spun into his way. Richard knocked him aside and thrust himself between the two lines, holding his sword lightly at an angle.

The slavers surveyed him, spreading out. He heard Jason’s people move back.

Here, poised on the threshold between violence and peace, was his true place. Generations of warriors, stretching back through time to the fierce native clans that had first fled into the Mire to escape a magic catastrophe, had stood just like him, balanced on that sword’s blade between life and death. Here he was in control, serene and at peace.

In that brief moment, when their lives and his came together, he truly lived. But for him to experience life, his opponents had to die.

The first slaver moved to his right. Richard struck, piercing and cutting with a surgeon’s precision and speed honed by countless hours of practice. He spun in a fluid movement and stopped, his sword held at a downward angle.

The slavers looked at him.

The second, fourth, fifth, and seventh of them fell. They made no noise; they simply crumpled to the ground.

The remaining slavers froze for an agonizing second and rushed him. He melted into the moment, striking without thought, completely on instinct. Gash across the chest, reverse, throat cut, abdomen cut, stab under the rib cage to the right, free the blade cutting across a chest in the same move, reverse, cut across the throat, thrust forward . . . and it’s over.

Too soon. It was always over too soon.

The last slaver stopped short of his sword. The thrust never connected. The man lingered upright for the space of a breath and sank to his knees, struggling for air. Behind him, Charlotte’s magic coiled back into her body.

She stood very still, her eyes opened wide, looking at him as if they had met for the first time. This is it, he wanted to tell her. This is who I am.

He couldn’t tell if she was surprised or horrified or perhaps both or neither. Regret stabbed at him, but then it was better that she knew his true nature. They had to move. He took her hand, and they ran to the gate.

“Thank you,” he told her. “That was brave of you, but also unnecessary. Please don’t do that again. I don’t want to accidentally injure you.”

She pulled her hand out of his fingers. “I’m not helpless, Richard.”

Did she find his touch repulsive? He sliced through the lock securing the gate. “I know you’re anything but. But you’ve done your part, and it’s my turn. Save your reserves. We may need them.”

They went through the gate, and Charlotte gasped. Above them a corpse hung from a pole. A boy, Jack’s age. His eyes had been gouged out. His mouth was sewn shut. His nose was a broken mess of flesh and cartilage on a face scoured with burn marks. A sign hanging around his neck read, “We’re always watching.”

He had seen this before—the slavers’ favorite visual aid to discourage escape. He had pried Jason out of a hole in the ground just before he was about to end up on such a pole. Anger, hot and furious, burned in him, then died down to a simmer.

“He was alive,” Charlotte whispered.

“What?”

“He was alive when they mutilated him. Those are predeath wounds.”

Darkness whipped out of her. The hair on the back of his neck rose.

Charlotte clenched her fists. “I’m going to kill every slaver we find.”

He noticed the set of her jaw and the thin line of her lips. Her eyes burned. He recognized this fury. It and he were old friends, and he knew it was useless to get in its way. “As you wish,” he told her. “All I ask is that we move up the hill toward the bookkeeper.”

Ahead, the streets unrolled before them, climbing up a low hill. They marched upward together.

THE house sat recessed from the street, a stately, respectable, two-story mansion, flanked by carved columns and palm trees. A brown horse was tied to the side, flicking its ears and casting nervous glances at the street.

Richard glanced back behind them. No movement. They had left a trail of dead bodies, and half of them belonged to Charlotte. She killed again and again, driven by an overwhelming need to stop the slaver savagery from happening. He was like that too, at the start of this mess. Back then, every new mutilation and atrocity infuriated him. He had seen things so wrong and shocking, that the only reaction he could manage was to destroy those who committed them. It had become his moral imperative and the only possible human response.

He saw it now in Charlotte. She was trying to cleanse the city. He wasn’t a mind reader, but he knew exactly what went through her head. If only she could manage to kill every slaver in their way, the pain would stop. If she didn’t kill, she would have to process the full horror of what she had seen in the past five days, and it would rip her to pieces.

It had taken him several months before he realized that killing slavers accomplished nothing. They were the immediate tormentors, but no matter how many he cut down, as long as somewhere, someone wealthy was getting wealthier from that torment, new slavers would always take the place of the old. Charlotte would come to realize this too, but for now she needed to act, and act she did. He had known that many plagues existed, but seeing them in all their terrifying glory was an educational experience.

She was walking oddly now, as if her feet hurt when she rested her weight on them. Her lips were pressed together into a thin, hard line. Her skin was pale, her eyes very bright. She looked feverish. She must be expending too much magic. There were only two ways from here: she would stop exerting herself and recover, or she would drain herself and die.

“We’re almost done,” he told her. “No more, Charlotte. Save yourself.”

Charlotte nodded.

He cut into the door, carving the lock out of it with precise strikes, and pushed the heavy wooden halves open, revealing a large hall with a staircase curving to the second floor.

His mind barely registered the three crossbowmen crouched behind an overturned chest of drawers. He saw the crossbow bolts coming at him and automatically flashed, throwing his magic in a pale shield in front of him. The bolts bounced off. He dashed forward.

“Die,” Charlotte ordered, her voice exhausted.

The three crossbowmen choked. He jumped over the chest and cut them down with three strikes.

Behind him, Charlotte slumped over and leaned against the column. Damn it all.

SHE was spent. The last spark of magic burned dimly within her. If Charlotte let it go, her hold on life would slip. She was almost tempted to do it.

How had it snuck up on her so quickly? She had expended a lot of magic, but she never felt tired. She felt light and all-powerful, as if her body had become a burden, and she was disconnected from it. And then, in the last five minutes, as she climbed the steep street to the house, reality crashed back into her. Her body felt so heavy, so constraining, as if every pound of her flesh and bone had become three. Her feet ached. She wanted to vomit just to lighten the load.

The moment her magic flowed out to strike at the bowmen, her legs failed. Too much of herself had gone out with the magic. She had to lean against the column, or she would fall.

Richard loomed over her. She glimpsed anger in his eyes.

“No more.” His clipped voice held an unmistakable command.

She felt the magic of his body, a vibrant life force shivering just inches from her. All she had to do was reach for it. Her magic whimpered, eager for sustenance. That’s how plaguebringers were born—the exertion drove the healer to seek an alternate source of fuel and siphon off the nearest life to keep on killing.

He dipped his head to meet her eyes. “Charlotte!”

She wasn’t ready to give up on life yet. “Do not raise your voice at me, my lord. I know where my limits are, and I have no intention of fainting or dying. I won’t use my magic anymore. You’re on your own.”

A lean, dark-haired man walked out from behind the staircase. He carried a sword.

THE man held a Sud sword, a long, slender length of steel. Young, fit, walking with perfect balance, and carrying his sword with complete confidence. An adept, probably a professional fighter.

Richard flicked the blood off his blade.

They looked at each other.

The sword master attacked. Richard parried and lunged. The blade met a wall of blue flash and slid off. Magic burned his arm. The Sud used the flash to reinforce his blade. Fantastic. And here he thought this would be easy.

Richard ignored the pain and spun, delivering a short barrage of strikes. The Sud parried, dancing and spinning. They moved across the floor. Richard attacked. Strike, strike, strike. His blade bounced from the Sud’s sword. Normally, his flash-sharpened blade would’ve severed his opponent’s weapon.

The man was good, Richard gave him that.

Richard backed away. He walked the path of the lightning blade, relying on that first, faster-than-sight strike to instantly incapacitate his opponent. Failing that, he fought with precision, banking on his power and control. The rapid melee of parrying and trading blows while covering a lot of ground was his weakness, while the Sudanese swordsmen reveled in it.

The Sud attacked in a flurry of blows. Richard parried, lunging, thrusting, looking for an opening and finding none. The Sud coated his entire sword in a protective magic sheath, making it nearly impossible to break and using it as a shield. It was down to skill and speed, and the Sud had plenty of both.

The man feinted to the right. Richard pulled away, avoiding the trap. As he dodged, the man hopped forward, turning the feint into a spin, and kicked. Richard saw it, but he had no way to avoid it. He spun into it, flexing, taking the hit on his left shoulder. The kick hammered into the muscle, and Richard staggered back. Like being hit with a club.

The Sudanese swordsman landed and spun on one foot, showing off. “My technique is superior.”

Vanity. The Sud was young, hungry, and eager to prove that he was better. Thank you for showing me the chip in your armor.

“Keep hopping around,” Richard said. “Your dance teacher isn’t here to clap for you, but I’m enjoying the show.”

Most men would’ve begun to tire by now. He doubted this one would. The Sud seemed to take putting spring into one’s step literally. His sword was unbreakable, his technique flawless. But the man himself was flawed.

A hint of movement tugged at Richard. He turned his head slightly. Charlotte pushed away from the column. He had to keep her from doing anything rash. Charlotte was a proud woman. If she had any strength at all, she would’ve remained upright, so she must’ve been at the end of her rope. If she thought he was desperate, she’d try to save him. Letting her die for his sake wasn’t in the plan.

He shrugged, nonchalant. “My lady, I’ll be with you in a moment. I just need to pull the wings off that pretty butterfly.”

The Sud clenched his teeth, making his jaw muscles bulge. It wouldn’t take too much more to nudge him in the right direction.

“Don’t mind me,” Charlotte said.

“First I’ll kill him, then you,” the Sud promised.

“I don’t think so.” Charlotte sat on the overturned chest. “He’s better.”

“I’m better and faster,” the Sud said.

She shook her head, her voice matter-of-fact. “Not only is he better, but you fight for money. He has more at stake.”

No panic, no tremor in her voice. Just a calm statement. She hit the Sud right where it hurt, and she did it as if the outcome of the fight were already a foregone conclusion. Damn, but that was impressive.

Charlotte had no doubt he would win. Richard shifted the grip on his sword. He couldn’t disappoint.

He motioned to the Sud with the fingers of his left hand. “Come on, let’s have the finale. I can’t waste any more time on your prancing. The lady is waiting, and I don’t want to be rude.”

The Sud leaped, unleashing a flurry of strokes, too fast to keep up. Richard parried the first, the second, the third, and counterattacked, holding his sword with both hands, sinking all of his strength into the overhead blow.

The Sud flashed, shielding his blade, but the sheer power of the impact staggered him.

Richard struck again, bringing a barrage of blows onto the Sud’s sword, forcing him back with every strike. Sweat broke out on Richard’s forehead. This attack was draining all of his reserves, but he was betting on the Sud’s ego. If he was lucky, the younger man would rise to the challenge. A wiser swordsman would simply wait Richard out and, once he tired, kill him at his leisure, but youth and wisdom didn’t always travel together.

The Sud lunged forward, grinding his blade against Richard’s, flash against flash. They struggled, locked. The Sud twisted, trying to catch Richard’s leading leg with his foot, aiming to trip him. Richard shoved him back. The younger man stumbled, off-balance. Richard hammered a front kick to his chest.

The Sud fell back and rolled to his feet like a cat. His face was a furious mask. He screamed and charged. Richard sidestepped his barrage of strikes, dodging, parrying, knocking the blade aside when he could. He knew the wall was behind him, but there was no place to go.

His foot touched the stone of the wall. The Sud whirled like his joints were liquid and thrust, aiming at the heart, so fast he blurred. Richard parried on pure instinct, sliding his blade under the strike. Their magic ground against each other, blue against white. The man’s entire weight pressed onto Richard’s blade, tearing a ragged snarl from him.

The swordsman’s blade slid up, gaining an inch.

Richard pushed back, his arms shaking from the strain. Holding the younger man’s deadweight was squeezing the last drops of strength from his tired body.

Another inch. The Sud’s narrow blade slid along Richard’s sword. He saw it move but was powerless to stop it.

The sword cut his left biceps, slicing through the muscle in an agonizing slow burn.

Sonovabitch. There was no way out of this position that didn’t end with his being hurt. Even if he could summon enough strength to shove the younger man back, the effort would leave him exposed for a counterstrike, and with his back to the wall, he had no way to maneuver.

The Sud grinned.

If he lost, Charlotte would die. He would fail, and Sophie would be left alone with her demons. He had to kill the other man.

He would endure pain if it meant he would win.

Richard dropped his blade. The Sud’s sword, abruptly free from resistance, slid forward and cut deeper across his arm, biting into the bone in a flash of pain. Thrown off-balance, the Sud pitched forward, and Richard hammered his fist into the man’s throat. The swordsman rocked back from the blow. Richard tore the sword from his opponent’s hand, flashed, coating it in his magic, and thrust it upward, under the rib cage. The blade carved through the lungs and heart like a knife through a soft pear. The bloody end emerged from the Sud’s breast and sliced into the underside of his chin.

The man opened his mouth, surprise making his face look young . . . Blood poured out from between his teeth, drenching them in red. Richard pushed him back, and the Sud fell, his unseeing eyes staring at the ceiling.

Richard slumped forward, trying to catch his breath. His left arm hung useless, the gash in his muscle burning as if someone had poured molten lead into wound. He stared at the man by his feet. What was he, twenty-five? Twenty-eight? His whole life ahead of him, good looks, talent, and now he was dead. Such a waste.

Richard gritted his teeth and looked at the cut. Blood drenched his skin and dripped on the floor. He didn’t have much of it to spare as it was.

Gods, it hurt like hell. He breathed in deeply through his nose, trying to separate himself from the pain, forced his face into a calm mask, and turned to Charlotte.

She sagged on the overturned chest, her shoulders slumped, her spine bent. “Let me see it.”

“No.” If she saw it, she would try to heal him, and he couldn’t let her do that.

“My lord—”

“I said no.”

“—don’t be a baby.”

A baby? He ripped a sleeve off the Sud’s shirt and wrapped it around his arm. “There. It’s fixed.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

He picked up his sword. His left arm felt like it was on fire, and it hurt to move.

“Richard, don’t ignore me. You just wrapped a filthy rag over an open wound, which is surely infected now.”

He walked over to her. “I’m fine. You’re spent.”

“At least let me look at it!”

“Are you well enough to go upstairs?”

She pushed herself up from the chest, that familiar ice flashing in her eyes. “Without my magic and with my eyes closed, I’m a better field medic than you are. You will let me look at your wound and dress it properly instead of wrapping some soiled sleeve around it. It will take two minutes, then we can go upstairs and hunt down the bookkeeper. Or we can do it your way, and you can faint from blood loss, in which case we’re both dead because I can’t carry you or protect you. Your arm, my lord. Now.”

He turned, presenting her with his left arm. It was easier than arguing. She pulled a bag from under her cloak, opened it, and a took out a plastic first-aid kit, complete with the Broken’s familiar red cross on it. Charlotte opened the kit, took out a small vial, and handed it to him. “Drink this.”

He pulled the cork out with his teeth and gulped the bitter liquid. Cold rushed through him, down the injured muscle, right to the source of pain. A welcome numbness came. It felt heavenly.

Charlotte splashed something on the cut and began wrapping his arm. “He cut the bone.”

“Mhm.”

“This stone-faced routine isn’t necessary. I know the pain is excruciating.”

“If my rolling around on the ground and crying would make things easier for you, by all means I will oblige.” It finally sank in. He had won and lived, and so did she.

Charlotte rolled her eyes. “We’re lucky his sword was so sharp. The cut is very clean. If you give me an hour or two to recover, I will heal this. Was it necessary to let him slash you?”

Argh. “Yes, it was. He was very good, and I didn’t have a choice about it. Since when are you a connoisseur of martial arts?” He was actually arguing that he was a lesser swordsman. How did it even make sense?

“Since my life started depending on them.”

“The next time I’m in a fight for my life, I’ll be sure to ask your advice, my lady.”

“If you do, I’ll advise you to not throw away your sword.”

He almost growled, but it would’ve frightened her, and he held himself in check. An infuriating, impossible woman.

She tied the final knot and wrapped white tape around the bandage. “What’s next?”

“We go upstairs.”

“Very well.” She leaned toward him to tie a sling around his shoulder. Her hair brushed against his cheek. Desire stabbed him, sudden and overwhelming. His irritation only made him want her more.

Charlotte slid his arm into the sling and put the kit back into the bag. “If you promise not to get yourself cut or skewered with anyone else’s sword, I promise not to faint.”

Delightful. “I’d be a fool not to take that generous offer.”

They started up the stairs, agonizingly slow.

“Did you really think I would win?” he asked.

She turned to look at him, gray eyes so beautiful on her lovely face. “Of course.”

Richard imagined stepping forward, pulling her to him with his uninjured hand, and kissing her right there on the stairs. In his mind, her lips were warm and inviting. In his mind, she loved it and kissed him back.

His mind was a place of many dreams, most of them dead and abandoned. She’s walking next to you, he told himself. She saw the true you, and she’s still willing to care for you. Enjoy what little you have while you have it.

They made it into the hallway. A faint light painted the floor under the door on their right. Richard pointed at the wall by the door. Charlotte pressed her back against it.

He kicked in the door, spinning to the side. Bullets peppered the opposite wall, biting chunks out of the plaster. He’d seen the inside of the room for a fraction of a second, but it was enough: a red-haired woman sat behind a desk and a tall man stood next to her, armed with one of the Broken’s guns. Richard yanked a throwing knife out of the sheath on his belt, thrust himself into the doorway, and hurled the blade. The knife bit into the gunman’s throat. The man stumbled back and fell.

The woman stared at him with cold, clear eyes. She had a heart-shaped face, with the high, contoured cheekbones bluebloods often found desirable. Her flame red hair coiled around her head in a complex braid. Her tunic was silk, cut in what was assuredly the latest style. An oval pendant hung from her neck on a thin gold chain: a pale, aquamarine stone the size of his thumbnail. She looked to be near Charlotte’s age.

Behind her were two large windows. Rows of shelves supported an assortment of books on the right wall while a large white limestone fireplace occupied the left. An arithmetika, a magic-powered calculator, sat on her desk, next to stacks of paper. No weapons appeared to be in the vicinity.

“We found the bookkeeper,” Richard said. “Come inside, Charlotte.”

She walked into the room. She saw the dead gunman. Her eyebrows rose briefly, then Charlotte sank into the nearest chair.

“If you had a knife, why didn’t you throw it at the swordsman downstairs?”

“It would’ve been a waste. He would’ve knocked it aside.” Richard nodded at the woman. “Place both hands on the desk.”

She did so. Delicate fingers, adorned with thin gold rings studded with stones. Wealth and taste were sometimes unlikely bedfellows, but in this case, they were clearly bosom buddies. A familiar anger flared in him.

“You’re wealthy, probably well educated,” he said. “Juliana Academy, perhaps.” Juliana’s was considered the best place for blueblood girls with money to receive their education. He’d became very familiar with Adrianglian school selection for Lark’s sake. He shouldn’t have bothered. His niece shot down all of his careful choices.

“Winters College,” Charlotte said. “Her tunic perfectly matches the shade of her eyes. Juliana’s encourages more creativity.”

The woman arched an eyebrow and looked Charlotte over, pausing on her dirty, bloodstained clothes. His urge to injure her shot into overdrive.

“And where did you study, if I may ask?”

“I had personal tutorship from one of the first ten,” Charlotte said, her voice glacially cold and cutting with scorn like a knife. “Don’t try to belittle me; you’re hopelessly outclassed. I see shortcomings in your every single aspect, from your lack of taste to your rotten morality. You’ve involved yourself in the basest of crimes. You facilitated murder, rape, and the torture of children. Your conduct is unbecoming a peer of realm.”

He almost winced.

The woman drew back, her cheeks turning red. “Please, spare me the rhetoric. We’re a higher breed. You know this as well as I do. You simply put on blinders and call it altruism. I call it willful ignorance. Those of us who are blueblood became so because our ancestors rose from the ranks of unwashed mobs. They were the thanes, the chiefs, the leaders of their people. The betters of the rest by virtue of their abilities and will. We’re their descendants. They climbed to power, and we maintain it. It’s that simple. These people you’re accusing me of crimes against live like animals. In many cases, being stripped of their freedom is the best thing that ever happened to them.”

Charlotte stared at her. “The function of a noble title is to serve the people. Seven blocks from here, there’s a body of a boy whose eyes have been gouged out with his mouth sewn shut. He was still alive when they did it. What is wrong with you? Are you human at all?”

“A regrettable but necessary casualty.” The bookkeeper crossed her thin arms on her chest. “But you are right, perhaps we should’ve left him with his lovely family to live in squalor while his parents drank themselves senseless in an effort to forget their own laziness and beat him when his existence reminded them of their baseness. Those who are capable act. They amount to something in life. They don’t live in filth, gorging themselves on cheap food, drowning in addictions, and rutting to produce yet more of their ilk. We rescue children from that. We provide a valuable service.”

Unbelievable.

Charlotte made a choking noise.

“Your condemnation means nothing,” the bookkeeper said. “This enterprise was conceived by a mind far superior to yours or mine. Think about it, when a blueblood buys a pretty young girl, she has a shot at a better life. If she’s smart, she will elevate herself by having his child. Just the other day, we fulfilled a special order for a childless couple. They wanted a pair of twins, a boy and a girl, between the ages of two and four, resembling both of them. Do you have any idea how difficult it was to find suitable children? Yet we’ve managed. Slavery is an opportunity. It’s regrettable you can’t understand that.”

Nothing either Charlotte or Richard could say would ever make this woman see reason.

“Kill her,” Charlotte said. “If you don’t kill her now, I’ll do it myself.”

“We need her testimony and information.” He approached the table. He had no idea how they would make it down the hill and to the port with a captive, but by gods, he would try.

“Killing me won’t be necessary.” The woman raised her chin. “Unlike you, I know my duty to the spear.”

She grasped her pendant.

Richard lunged to stop her.

The stone crunched under the pressure of her fingers. A blinding spike of light shot out into her chin, through her head, and out of her skull.

Charlotte gasped.

The bookkeeper sagged in her chair, dead, her head drooping to the side. The whole thing took less than a second. She had been wearing an Owner’s Gift necklace. He should have seen it, gods damn it.

The world screeched to a halt. He felt like he was falling.

All this time, all this work, and the arrogant scum killed herself. Was there no justice in the world?

Maybe Charlotte . . . He pivoted to her.

“Very dead,” she said, her face disgusted. “Irreversibly dead.”

“Damn it.”

His mind whirred, trying to reassess the situation. Wallowing in defeat never served any purpose. No, he was kidding himself. Even if they had managed to take her alive, neither of them could have gotten her to the ship in their present condition, and if they did, by some miracle, manage it, she would never testify. But it wasn’t over, he reminded himself. Not yet. They might not have the bookkeeper alive, but they still had her office and everything within it.

Duty to the spear. Only one spear came to mind. “Gaesum,” he thought out loud. The symbol of the Adrianglian royal family.

“That would explain her devotion,” Charlotte said. “If she thought she was serving the crown in some capacity, she couldn’t permit herself to acknowledge that they could do something base, or her entire worldview would come crashing down.”

They looked at each other. In Adrianglia, the crown was revered. The power of the royal bloodline had its limitations, but the monarch still held the presiding position over the Council, wielding much of the power within the executive branch. The royal family was looked upon as the epitome of behavior and personal honor. The idea that the crown could be involved in the slave trade was unthinkable.

“There has to be a trail somewhere. She was a bookkeeper; she had to have kept financial records.” Richard strode to the shelves and pulled a stack of books out. He handed them to Charlotte. She leafed through them while he rummaged through the desk. His search of the drawers turned up a wooden box, unlocked. Inside, necklaces lay in a row, each with a simple large gemstone in a variety of colors. Unlike the bookkeeper’s pendant, their chains were short. Once fastened around the neck, they couldn’t be removed by slipping them over the head.

“Is that what she used to kill herself?” Charlotte asked, her voice dry.

He nodded. “They’re called Owner’s Gifts.” He picked one up, dangling the false ruby pendant. “They’re given to young attractive slaves who are used for sexual gratification. They have a one-time lock: once fastened, they’re impossible to take off without cutting through the chain. Each contains a small magic charge designed to kill the wearer. The necklace detonates if the chain is cut or the stone is damaged. A pointed reminder that if you disobey or displease, your life can end in an instant. They work much better than shackles and are a lot less obvious.”

She clenched her teeth, and he read a mix of horror and disgust in her face. “Every time I think I’ve reached the limit, this place shocks me.”

And that was true, Richard realized. He thought she’d grow callous or numb, but every new evidence of cruelty cut a new wound into her. Again, he wished he hadn’t brought her here. There were only so many wounds one could take.

“What do you make of this?” Charlotte showed him a hollowed-out book.

Hope stirred in him. “Was there anything inside?”

“No.”

And the newborn hope plummeted to its death. “We have to keep looking.”

Twenty minutes later, they looked at each other across the table. The office was a wreck. They had left nothing untouched. The ledgers, if they existed, eluded them.

Richard braced himself on the table. He felt another bout of dizziness coming on. He’d gotten through the first one a few minutes ago, but now the vertigo was back. Taking wounds came with a price.

“Richard,” Charlotte said.

He turned.

A bloody figure stood in the doorway, his hair and clothes stained with gore and soot. His eyes were tired, and he was carrying a bloody crowbar. A huge black dog panted by his side.

“Jack?” Richard said.

“Hi.” Jack dropped the crowbar. It clanged on the floor.

“How are you?” Charlotte asked.

“Good,” he said, his voice dull. “I’m all funned out. I think we should go to the ship now. The city is burning, the fire’s coming this way, and the smoke is making my throat itch.”

“We can’t leave yet.” Charlotte sighed. “We’ve looked everywhere, but we haven’t found the ledgers. We have to find them, or all this was for nothing.”

“Did you look in the safe?” Jack asked.

“What safe?” The room had no safe, only a table and the shelves, and he had knocked on all the clear walls looking for a hollow spot.

“In the fireplace.”

Richard turned to the fireplace. It was a typical Weird limestone fireplace without a mantel. No fire was laid out and the fire pit was perfectly clean. No soot marks. It definitely hadn’t been used, but this far south it might have been conceived as decorative. Richard moved to it, probing the stones with his hand. “What makes you think there is a safe in it?”

Jack sat by Charlotte on the floor. “There’s no chimney. It smells like the dead woman’s perfume—I can scent it from here. Also, there’s a doorstop.”

“Where?” Charlotte asked, brushing debris from Jack’s hair.

Jack pointed to the ground. A small ornate doorstop designed to be slid under a door sat by the desk. If the front of the fireplace swung open like a door, it was in the perfect position to be grabbed and wedged under it.

There was no reason for the bookkeeper to spend time at the fireplace. She wouldn’t have gone anywhere near it. Richard knocked at the stones. If there was some mechanism to unlock it, he couldn’t see it. He picked up his sword.

“Maybe there is a hidden switch,” Charlotte said.

“It would take too long.” He concentrated, feeding magic into the blade, forcing it toward the tip of the sword. The flash-coated edge glowed brighter and brighter, until it blazed like a tiny star. Richard raised the sword and forced the tip into the limestone, testing it. The blade sank into the fireplace, cutting through the rock with surprising ease. No more than half an inch, he decided. If there was a safe, he didn’t want to damage the contents. He dropped to one knee, slashed horizontally across the fireplace, rose, and slashed again at his eye level.

The front of the fireplace slid half an inch. Richard stepped back. The cut section crashed down and fell with a loud thud, its back exposed—wooden boards with a thin layer of limestone affixed to its front. Inside the gutted fireplace, shelves gaped, containing five small black books and one red one.

He turned to Jack. “Well done.”

“You’re a genius.” Charlotte hugged the boy.

Richard pulled out the books and brought them over to Charlotte. His hands shook.

She opened the first black book, and her eyes widened as she read.

He flipped through the red volume, scanning the pages filled with neat rows of accounting figures. Investments and payments, to and from five names. Here they were, the people directly profiting from the sale of human beings. Lord Casside, a rich blueblood who’d made his money in the import and export trade. He’d seen him once at Declan’s house during a formal dinner. Lady Ermine. He had no idea who she was, but he would find out. Baron Rene, another unfamiliar name. Lord Maedoc, a retired general, a decorated war hero. And . . .

“Viscount Robert Brennan.”

“The king’s cousin?” Charlotte asked.

Richard nodded. So it was true. The bookkeeper truly served the spear. Robert Brennan, the seventh person in line for the throne. Never in his calculations had he ever thought that the chain of command went that high.

“You’re shocked,” Charlotte said.

“I don’t understand.” Richard leaned against the desk. “He was born wearing a silk shirt. He has wealth, status, the privilege afforded to his bloodline, the best education one can buy . . .”

All the things that had been denied to Richard. An education was a double-edged sword: it broadened his horizons, and, at the same time, it made him painfully aware of the opportunities he would never have. There was a time when he felt trapped in the Mire, aware of the world outside the Edge but unable to get to it, chained to the swamp. He had neither the breeding, nor the money, nor the opportunity to make it past the Louisiana troops guarding the border with the Edge, but he had the intellect and the education to understand the full futility of his position. He would’ve killed to open just one door and escape. Brennan had all the advantages. Every door was open to him.

“Why? Why do this? He’s like a millionaire who’s robbing beggars.”

“Who knows,” Charlotte said. “Maybe it’s the thrill of doing something criminal.”

She sounded exhausted. Worry stabbed at him. He had to get her and the boy out of here.

He cut a section of the gauzy curtain, stacked the books on it, and tied it into a makeshift bag. Stealing was criminal. This was an atrocity. More so, because Brennan, born into privilege, had a duty. He had a responsibility to wield his influence for the benefit of the realm, and instead he spat on it. Whatever sickness drove Brennan to rule over the slave trade, Richard would make sure he paid. He would make certain. He had promised it to Sophie, and he would see it through.

Richard sheathed his sword and handed the bag of books to Jack. “This is vitally important. Guard it.”

The boy nodded.

Richard offered Charlotte his right hand. She rose from the chair, swaying a little. They walked downstairs and out of the front door. Below them, the city stretched down the hill to the harbor. Orange flames billowed from two different sides of the town, far to the left and closer to the right, devouring the structures. Here and there, isolated shots rang out, followed by screams. A single ship waited in the middle of the harbor, like a graceful bird on a sea of black glass, and above it all, in the endless night sky, a pale moon rose, spilling its indifferent light onto the scene.

Richard turned to the left, behind the house. The horse still waited. He untied the reins and brought it over to Charlotte.

“I can walk.”

“Charlotte.” He hadn’t meant to put all of his frustration into that one single word, but somehow he did.

She blinked, startled.

“Please, get on the horse.”

She climbed into the saddle. He took the reins and started down the street, Jack at his side. The dog took position ahead of them. Richard’s face itched mercilessly. As soon as they got down to the coast, he would wash all the gunk of his disguise off his skin.

“George has been alone with dad for a long time,” Jack said.

It was a lot to ask, but he had confidence in George, and the boy needed to redeem himself. “He will be fine.”

“Are you going to kill our dad?” the boy asked quietly.

“It’s not for me to decide what to do with your father.” John Drayton deserved to die, and if Drayton weren’t connected to the boys, he would dispose of the man like the piece of garbage he was. But family took precedence, and the children’s claim superseded his.

“If you’re going to let us handle it, don’t let George do it,” Jack said. “I’ll kill him for grandma. I don’t care. I don’t even remember him, but George waited for him all this time. It would be bad for him.”

It was said that changelings didn’t understand human emotion. They understood it just fine, Richard reflected. They simply couldn’t figure out why others chose to mask what they truly felt. Jack wanted to spare his brother. Even in the Mire, where things like betrayal and punishment were kept in the family, no child was expected to kill his parent.

The boy, no, the young man was looking at him.

“Don’t worry,” he told Jack. “That’s one burden neither of you will have to carry.”