The Spirit War

CHAPTER 4

Eli sat on the prow of the schooner, sulking at the blue ocean that spread out in all directions. Ahead of him, the shadowy peaks of the islands of Osera dominated the horizon. Eli sulked at them too. They’d made record time to the coast, thanks to him. Not an hour after Josef had announced they were suddenly and inexplicably going to Osera, Eli had found an express carriage. After a little excessive bribery, the driver somehow found time in his schedule to take them from just south of Zarin to the port at Sanche in a little over a day and a half. At the port, Eli had found a private fishing schooner willing to take them to Osera the very next morning, well before the commercial ferries. It was nothing short of a miracle that they were on the ocean at all right now, but Eli might as well have saved his miracle making for all the thanks he got.

Josef had been in high dudgeon since they’d left the bounty office. He hadn’t said more than a syllable at a time the whole trip. This wasn’t remarkable in and of itself, but considering that Eli was bending over backward to get them to Osera for as yet unknown reasons, the swordsman’s silence irked him more than usual.

Eli sighed and fought the urge to scratch under his wig. They were deep in civilized lands now, where people actually read bounty posters, and he didn’t have the luxury of running around like he usually did. The golden wig wasn’t enough to fool anyone who was actually looking for him, but it was fine at throwing off the casual glances. It was also unbearably hot. Even sitting on the prow with the sea wind in his face and the slightly fishy shade provided by the lofted nets, Eli could feel the sweat crawling down his scalp. But no matter how bad it got, he kept his hands on the railing. The ship wasn’t big, and the sailors had enough to talk about with Josef’s swords. The last thing they needed was for bored, curious fishermen to start wondering why the blade-covered man’s business partner was wearing a wig.

He was just starting to work himself into a really foul mood when something soft touched his arm. Eli jumped and nearly fell off the boat. He grabbed the railing and turned to see Nico standing beside him.

“Don’t do that!”

“I said hello,” Nico said, sounding a little hurt.

Eli took a deep breath. “Sorry. What can I do for you?”

Nico shrugged and sat down beside him. Eli shifted uncomfortably. They’d never really talked about what had happened in the valley, but he liked to think that he and Nico were square these days. Still, it was hard to tell where you stood when the other party in the relationship never said more than five words together under the best of circumstances. After several awkward moments, he tried again. “I don’t suppose Josef has told you why we’re rushing to Osera?”

“No,” Nico said, looking down at the water. “He hasn’t said anything.”

Eli was immediately sorry he’d asked. The girl looked heartbroken. He glanced over his shoulder toward the back of the boat where Josef was standing with the Heart in his hands, practicing his stances. He looked so calm as he brought the enormous sword around (narrowly missing a tied-off line, much to the crew’s displeasure) that Eli wanted to strangle him.

“Who does he think he is?” Eli growled, turning back around. “We’re supposed to have a plan when we enter a new country. We would have had a plan three days ago if I’d had my way, but no. I don’t know what he expects us to do when we land in Osera. Powers forbid he actually tell us anything.”

Nico shifted uncomfortably. “I’m sure he has his reasons.”

“Oh, I’m sure he does,” Eli said. “I just wish he’d share them. We’re supposed to be a team.”

For the first time in days, Nico smiled a little. “Well, we were the ones who decided to come along. I suppose we can’t complain if he doesn’t share plans that he didn’t want us along for in the first place.”

“I can complain about anything,” Eli said, straightening up. “And if you ever quote that back at me, I’m never speaking to you again.”

Grinning at her arched eyebrows, Eli spun on his heel and walked off to find the captain to ask, yet again, how much longer this unbearably long boat ride was going to take.

Nico listened to Eli’s light footsteps until they were lost in the crashing waves. Fifteen steps, she noted to herself. Fifteen steps from a famously light-footed thief on a rocking ship in the middle of the sea. She gripped the railing until her already-white fingers were the color of bleached bone. It wasn’t her imagination. Her hearing was getting better.

And it wasn’t just her hearing. Ever since she’d taken back her body from the demon, her strength had grown as well. Her night vision was now better than her normal sight, and she could smell the tiniest traces of scents lingering days after whatever had made them was gone. She could hear the turning of the sleeping spirits and the laughter of the winds as they rushed overhead. But all this she could accept. It was reasonable that her senses would get better now that she was her own master. What didn’t make sense, what she couldn’t accept, was that she wasn’t just seeing the world more clearly. She was seeing things she’d never seen before, things that were not there.

Nico tilted her head back, squinting up at the clear sky overhead. At first, she saw nothing but the sky, deep blue and cloudless. Then her eyes adjusted, and she saw them. High overhead, great things—she had no other name for them—streaked through the air. They were as faint as shadows, but they were always there, swimming through the sky in great colorless coils, turning and flashing so quickly it made her nauseous.

The snakes in the sky weren’t all she saw, the strange things were everywhere: in the boat, in the sails, in the nets. Unlike the things in the sky, these were stationary, twitching only slightly, mostly when Eli walked by. The sea, however, was roiling with half-seen shapes. They flowed with the waves, thousands of millions of little sparks swimming in and out of each other.

The first time she’d seen the shapes was the day after she’d beaten the demon. They were so dim then, barely more than shadows, that she’d dismissed them as a trick of the light. But the trick never went away. Day and night she saw them like a second world over the real one. As the days passed and it was clear the things weren’t going away, she’d finally decided to talk to Eli. Other than Slorn, he was the only person who might know what they were. But just when she’d finally worked up the courage to ask him, Josef had declared they were going to Osera. Nico decided to keep her mouth shut after that. Whatever Josef needed to do in Osera, he had enough to worry about without her adding more.

Nico closed her eyes. When she woke up on the valley floor, it hadn’t occurred to her that she might be different. How stupid. You couldn’t be torn apart and rebuilt and expect to still be what you were. What had happened in Izo’s valley had changed her. Was still changing her. But whatever was different, whatever changed, she was still the master of herself. The demon was still buried. She could feel the rock in her mind keeping him down as clearly as she felt her own arms. The shadows weren’t his doing, but that almost made things worse. The demon she could deal with, but these new visions were alien and frightening. Every time she saw them, which was all the time now, she couldn’t help thinking that maybe she hadn’t been truly rebuilt that day. Maybe something was still missing, something important.

Maybe she really had gone mad.

Against her better judgment, Nico opened her eyes and looked up again, past the coiling snake creatures that streaked through the air and up to the sky itself. It was hard to make out under all the movement, but if she stood very still and focused on one spot, there was no mistaking it. There, at the very top of the world, something was moving. Something enormous, something sharp, dragging across the other side of the sky’s dome.

Fear closed over her like ice, and she slammed her eyes shut. It made little difference. From the moment she’d first seen the things clawing the sky, she could not unsee them. The dread followed her waking and sleeping, eyes open or closed, and through it all a thought went round and round and round her head, like a marble rolling around the inside of a bowl.

Only mad people saw shapes against the sky.

She stayed like that for several minutes, eyes shut, forcing her breath to remain calm. Finally, when she’d worked up the courage to open her eyes again, Nico looked over her shoulder at Josef. He was standing at the back of the boat with the Heart in his hands, moving through his stances. His face was blank, eyes half closed. To an outsider, he probably looked bored, a man going through a routine, but Nico had been watching him all her life that she cared to remember. She could tell he was upset as well as if he’d screamed it. It was written all over him: in the tenseness of his footing, the way his hands folded white-knuckled around the Heart’s hilt, the clench of his jaw. Something about this trip to Osera bothered him deeply, and until she found out what, and why, she could not add her fears to that burden, no matter how desperate she got. Whatever had changed in her that day in the valley, nothing could change the fact that Josef was the center of her life. He was her partner, her savior, the one person who had never done her wrong, who had always believed in her even when there was nothing to believe in. Whatever he needed out here in the middle of the sea, she would help him reach it, and no madness, no bizarre other world that crept across the real one would keep her from being whatever he needed her to be.

That thought alone drove the fear back, and Nico gripped it like a lifeline as she turned again to face the islands rising like swords from the sea.

Seen on a map, the kingdom of Osera looked like a wall separating the Council’s eastern seaboard from the wild waters of the Unseen Sea. Though even those who lived there called their land “the island,” the kingdom of Osera was not one island, but dozens, a long line of mountaintops rising vertically from the ocean along the Council coast. Most of these islands were uninhabitable, their sloping sides too steep for anything other than sea birds, but at the center of the chain the islands grew wider, and there was room for people, especially on the island of Osera itself.

Even on its largest island, Osera was like a wall. Over fifty miles long, the main island Osera measured barely twenty miles at its widest point. Dominated by the peak at its center, the island was constantly sloping. This slope was long and gentle on the Council side, but steep and short on the side facing the Unseen Sea. Because of this quirk in geography, and the fact that the face the island turned to the open ocean had borne the brunt of the Empress’s attack, the eastern side of the island had been left to ruin. After the war, Osera had turned its back on the sea and the Empress, embracing the Council’s new prosperity by covering its gentle western slope in city.

“Covering” was the right word. Buildings on the island’s western slope crowded every inch of land that was flat enough to lay a foundation. Tiny streets ran seemingly at random, following the flattest paths upward or sideways along the mountain and sometimes changing into stairs without notice when the island’s geography took a sudden turn for the vertical. The farther up the mountain the buildings climbed, the shorter and narrower they became, clinging to the mountain’s rising cliff like barnacles. But down by the water, the buildings were tall and broad, a busy tangle of workshops, warehouses, and shipyards spilling out onto Osera’s pride and greatest source of wealth: the marina.

The marina ran nearly unbroken for thirty miles along the island’s western edge. Docks jutted far into the calm water of the protected channel that ran between Osera and the Council coast. Endless lines of moored ships waited their turn to be unloaded and reloaded by the armies of barefoot dockworkers while captains did business on the large, permanently moored barges that served as mobile offices for the hundreds of trading companies that called Osera home.

Eli’s ship tied in at one of the long sloops jutting from the floating tangle of deepwater docks at the center of the marina. Josef hopped off the moment they stopped moving, and by the time Eli had worked out a payment for the schooner captain that was large enough to make sure the old man didn’t remember them should anyone ask, but not enough to send him bragging in the taverns and drawing unwanted attention, the swordsman was halfway to the island. Nico trailed behind him, a black blot in the bright sun.

With a final, frustrated sigh, Eli pressed the gold coins into the captain’s hand and jogged down the planks after his companions.

“Well,” he said, raising his voice over the squawk of the sea birds. “Here we are. Do you have further directions to find your queen, Mr. Cryptic, or shall we just turn ourselves in at the local bounty office?”

Josef didn’t even honor that comment with a sneer. “We’re going to the palace,” he said, boots clattering on the wooden boards.

“The palace?” Eli fell in step beside him. “Of course. Brilliant. Where else do you find queens? Out of idle curiosity, what’s your plan for getting into said palace?”

“We’re going to walk up to the front gate and ask the guard.”

Eli nearly tripped. “Are you out of your bleeding mind?”

He would have said more, but Nico elbowed him hard in the back. He grunted and gave her a hurt look over his shoulder. She didn’t even have the good grace to look apologetic, just pressed her finger to her lips and glanced pointedly at the sailors crowded on the dock beside theirs, most of whom were now unloading their cargo suspiciously slowly with their ears turned toward Eli.

Eli shoved his hands in his pockets. “The question still stands,” he said, albeit more quietly. “All you had to do was say, ‘Eli, I need to get into a castle’ and I could have done it in a heartbeat, but no. You’ve apparently taken too many hits to the head to remember that you’re traveling with a master thief. And since you never thought to share any of your magnificent plans, I don’t have anything ready. No false papers, no aliases, no nothing. That kind of throws a kink in the whole front door plan.”

“Really,” Josef grumbled.

“Really,” Eli grumbled back. “I never saw a palace that just let random people in off the street, especially not when one of them was carrying enough blades to open his own armory, but maybe I’m just being negative.”

Josef stopped and turned to face the thief. “Are you done?”

Eli opened his mouth and then snapped it shut and threw out his arms for Josef to lead the way. Shaking his head, Josef resumed his march down the wooden dock and into the packed, tangled streets of the city itself.

Put out as he was, Eli enjoyed the walk. For a country burned to the ground by the Immortal Empress, Osera looked remarkably well. Narrow streets merged into large courtyards strung with vines that shaded merchant stalls of every sort. The buildings were brightly painted and cheery, and though their upper stories loomed over the streets, the vertical nature of the island made it impossible to feel claustrophobic. Every corner came with a grand view of the port below, and, narrow as they were, the streets were impeccably clean, probably because of the constant wind tunneling down them from the mountain above.

Nothing in the city looked old or dilapidated. Everywhere Eli looked he saw new construction, most bearing the clean architecture and ornate accents that had come into style with the Council’s rise. Every building had glass windows, tiled roofs, and iron window grates that grew only more ornate as they climbed away from the docks. Storefronts showcased impressive displays behind large picture windows. In the space of two blocks, Eli saw clothes, fabrics, cheeses, pastries, and metal goods as fine as any in Zarin. Tastefully painted signs advertised restaurants that, this close to noon, were full of well-dressed men and a few women. Eli could almost smell the money in the air, and he was beginning to wonder why he’d never come to Osera before.

Josef led the way, forging a path upward through the busy streets and toward the top of the island. He kept his eyes ahead and said nothing, and Eli, thoughtful friend that he was, took the opportunity to do a little digging.

“So,” he said, pushing through the crowd until he was walking beside Josef. “You’re from here, right?”

“Yes,” Josef said without looking at him.

“Not what I expected,” Eli said, smiling as they passed through another of the vine-shadowed merchant squares, this one with a large, ornate, bronze fountain done in a fanciful representation of a whale gushing water from its enormous mouth. “I’d always heard Osera was an island of barely reformed pirates, terrible weather, and fish smokehouses. This place rivals Zarin.”

Josef stopped to let a cart go past. “Being burned to the ground leaves a lot of room for improvement.”

“But all this?” Eli said. “In twenty-six years?”

Josef shrugged, picking up the pace again. “Osera bore the brunt of the war so the inner kingdoms didn’t have to. In return, the Council waived most of our sea-trade tariffs. That’s the kind of thing that can make a small country rich enough to build just about anything.”

Eli grinned. “So I see. My only question now is what to steal first.”

“Nothing,” Josef said.

Eli’s smile faded. “Why not?”

“Because we’re not going to be here long enough for you to steal anything,” Josef snapped. “We’re going to the palace, hearing what the queen has to say, and then we’re leaving.”

“What?” Eli cried. “Wait, wait, wait. That’s it? That’s why you dragged us all the way out here? Powers, Josef, if we’re just going to tell this queen to shove off, why did we even come?”

“Because even I feel guilty sometimes,” he said. “Now come on. And shut up. The last thing we need is more attention.”

Eli stopped, affronted. The street was packed with people on their own business. No one so much as glanced their way. Still, when Josef was this prickly it never did any good to push him further. So with great difficulty, Eli kept further opinions to himself as he stomped up the hill after Josef and Nico.

The sun was high and hot overhead when Josef finally stopped them. Eli fell against a building, panting. “Please tell me we’re there,” he said, fanning himself. “We’ve been walking for years.”

Josef rested his hands on the swords at his sides, infuriatingly untouched by the heat or the long climb. “Almost,” he said, nodding across the street. “There’s the palace.”

Eli looked up. The road ahead opened into a large square. It was the most open space he’d seen since arriving in Osera, and the flattest. They were on the mountain’s shoulder, a long stretch of relatively flat land before the final assent to the peak. The buildings surrounding the square were as rich as any Eli had seen in any country, but the square itself looked old and almost shabby. There were no shady vines, fountains, or merchant carts, just open stone baking in the noon sun. The crowds were thinner here as well, mostly men in formal dress carrying leather cases and looking very important.

They were very high now. To the west, Eli could see the whole of the city stretching down the mountain like a mushroom forest made of red-and-yellow-tiled roofs, but looking east, the view was entirely different. At the edge of the square, the mountain’s sharp peak rose dramatically, and wrapped around it was a building unlike any Eli had seen in Osera. The palace of Osera was a hulking mass of rough-cut, weatherworn stone wrapped around the mountain like an ugly scarf. What windows it had were narrow as arrow slits, and its roof was tiled with stone shingles worn white by time and rain. There was no proper gate or guardhouse. Instead, the palace’s face fronted directly onto the square, its tiny windows glaring down on the lovely modern buildings below like the squinty eyes of a disapproving old man.

Staring up at the old, ugly, ungainly mess, Eli felt crushingly disappointed. If the brightly colored city below had been modern and inviting, the building in front of them was gloomy and aggressive, more like a lonely fortress on an embattled front than the royal palace of a prosperous, modern nation. Just the sight of it was enough to kill any joy left lingering from the beautiful climb up, not to mention Eli’s fledgling dreams of a glorious heist.

“Lovely,” he said at last, fiddling with his wig.

Nico shot him a nasty look, but Josef didn’t even seem to hear. The swordsman wiped a spare bandage across his face to clean off some of the day’s grime, and then, tying the bandage tight around his wrist, started across the square like a man beginning his death march. Eli and Nico exchanged a final, worried glance before falling in behind him.

The front entrance to the palace was protected from the main square by a guard box, a wooden structure slightly larger than a shed, attached to the castle wall beside the narrow main gate. There were two guards on duty that Eli could see, and they came out to stand at attention only when Josef had cleared the center of the square and was obviously headed their way. The guards wore minimal equipment, just a simple chain jerkin under their uniform jackets and a short sword like the ones at Josef’s hips, but they carried their swords like they knew how to use them, which was more than Eli usually expected of gate guards. The men kept their faces blank as Josef approached, but their hands were on their sword hilts when he stopped in front of them.

The older guard gave them a long, disdainful glance. “Business?”

Josef pulled himself straight. “I am Josef Liechten Thereson Eisenlowe, here to answer the queen’s bounty.”

Eli gritted his teeth. Trust Josef to find the baldest way to say anything. He eased his feet carefully, ready to jump if the soldiers made a move to arrest his idiot swordsman. But, to his surprise, the guards didn’t budge.

“Josef, you say?” The older guard looked at his companion, who seemed to be smothering a laugh. “And do you have proof?”

“What proof do I need?” Josef was starting to sound annoyed. “Show me to the queen and that should be proof enough.”

This time the younger guard did laugh. “If I had a silver for every time I’d heard that one…”

“We wouldn’t be working here,” the older guard finished. He grinned and turned back to Josef. “Listen, idiot, the queen doesn’t have time to go over every two-bit con who says he’s Josef Liechten. If you’re going to try and impersonate a long-lost prince—”

“Prince?” Eli said before he could stop himself.

The guard gave him a funny look. “Aye, prince. As I was saying, if you’re going to try and impersonate a prince, at least have the decency to clean up a bit. Look at you—knives head to foot, scars, worn boots, you look like a highway bandit.” The guard snorted. “At least the last fool who claimed to be Josef Liechten had a crown. That was a nice touch. ’Course, it got all bent when we sent him packing, but you can’t complain when you’re scamming, can you?”

“But I am Josef Liechten,” Josef said, his voice tight with anger. He pointed inside the guard box, where his wanted poster was prominently displayed. “Look at the picture.”

The guard didn’t turn around. “I seen the picture,” he said, crossing his arms. “Drawn by some Council hack off the account of some witness who probably didn’t witness anything. I’ve been working at the palace for close to twenty years. I saw the prince plenty of times when he was a boy. He was a handsome lad. I find it frankly insulting, you coming up here saying Queen Theresa’s son’d grow into something like you.”

Josef took a deep breath. “You won’t take me to the queen?”

“No,” the guard said. “Now shove off before I do it for you.” And with that the guard spat on the ground by Josef’s foot.

Josef didn’t move. He just stood there with his hands clenched so tight on his swords that his arms were beginning to shake. Beside him, Nico was easing into a fighting stance, preparing to back Josef the second the swordsman moved. It was clear things were about to get bloody, and bloody was not how Eli liked to start his jobs, planned or not. Clearly, it was time to step in.

“Well,” he said cheerfully. “I guess that’s that.”

Nico, Josef, and the two guards all turned to look at him.

Eli gave them a large smile. “Can’t fault a fellow for trying, can you, gentlemen?” he said, his voice bright as the noon sun. “I don’t suppose you’d believe I was Eli Monpress, would you?”

The guards stared at him for a moment more, and then they burst into laughter.

“Powers,” the older one said, wiping his eyes. “No offense, friend, but you three look like beggars. Monpress is stinking rich. Wasn’t even six months ago he robbed Gaol blind, so I hear. You do look like him, though. I’ll give you that. ’Cept for the hair, of course.” He eyed Eli’s blond wig. “Tell you what.” The guard reached into his pocket, pulling out a silver coin and tossing it at Eli. “Take this and get out of here. Go get a haircut and some better clothes, and then you come back and try that line again next shift. I’d love to see Wallace handle Eli Monpress at his door, the old stuffed shirt.”

“Next shift,” Eli said, catching the coin neatly. “I may just do that. What time?”

“Eight o’clock even,” the guard said.

“Much obliged,” Eli said. With a final, farewell grin, he grabbed Josef’s arm and began to steer the swordsman back across the square. “Thank you, gentlemen. You’ve been exceedingly kind.”

The guard waved. “Shove off. And if Wallace guts you later, you got none to blame but yourself.”

“I’ll bear that in mind,” Eli called. “Good afternoon.”

The guards started laughing again and walked back into the guard box. Eli kept grinning the whole way across the square. When they were safely out of sight around a building, he dropped the smile and slammed Josef against the wall.

“Prince?” he shouted. “You’re a prince and you never told me?”

Though he could have broken Eli’s hold easily, Josef let it stay, leaning in to the wall at his back. “Not anymore.”

“Well, your mother’s a queen,” Eli said. “That sounds like a prince to me.”

“Eli.” Nico’s hand closed on his shoulder. “Stop it. Now. I’m sure Josef had his reasons.” She looked at Josef. “Didn’t you?”

Josef glowered at them. “Do I need reasons?”

“Oh come on!” Eli cried. “What kind of a question is that? I thought we were partners. I thought we were friends. How do you just go hiding something like that? Never mind all the times before, how do you justify hiding it when you’re bringing us back to your own country to turn yourself in?”

“Because I’m not a prince anymore,” Josef growled. “I told you before. And I am your friend. That’s why I let you come along.”

Eli let his look say exactly what he thought of that logic, and Josef lay back with a deep sigh. “You know what? Never mind. This is all wrong.”

Despite his anger, despite how hurt he was, Eli couldn’t help laughing at that.

“Of course it’s all wrong, idiot,” he said, letting Josef go. “You didn’t have a plan. You just expected to walk right in and then walk right out. This is what you get for not clueing us in, you know. If you’d just told me what you wanted to do, I could have made a plan that would have had us in your mother’s throne room enjoying your embarrassing childhood stories at this very moment.”

Josef shook his head. “All right then, Mr. Greatest-Thief-in-the-World, I give up. How would you do it?”

Eli straightened up and casually tossed the silver coin the guard had given him in the air, catching it in his palm. “I thought you’d never ask.”

He gave Josef a final I-told-you-so sniff and started down the alley, tossing the coin as he went. Josef pushed himself off the wall with an enormous sigh. “Now I’ve done it.”

“You should have done it days ago,” Nico said, crossing her arms.

“Right as usual,” Josef said. “Shall we?” He nodded down the alley.

Nico gave him an exasperated look and they started after Eli, walking side by side down the clean-swept alley.