They would be a family.
Zekia just had to try a little harder.
“Will you join us if I let him go?” Zekia asked Wesley. “Will you join us now that Creije is on the line?”
In an ideal world, Wesley would have said yes.
He would have taken her hand and said he’d be her big brother.
He would have told Zekia that he liked the view from his high horse very much, but that he liked the view from a throne a lot more.
Instead, Wesley lifted his hand from hers and said, “I wouldn’t join you if my life was on the line.”
“Don’t you think it is already?”
Wesley laughed and Zekia didn’t mind, even if it was the bitter, horrible kind of laugh that was meant to make her feel like killing him, just so she wouldn’t be able to use him.
She liked it when Wesley laughed. She liked seeing him happy. She thought it was good that she made him smile every now and again, because the rest of the time all she did was make him scream.
“I’m not afraid of you, kid,” Wesley said. “If you were going to kill me, then you would have done it already. And Creije isn’t on the line. One district won’t break my city. I built it to be strong and when this is all over, it’ll still be standing.”
Zekia could see why people found Wesley frightening. Even now, when he was hungry and cold and looking like he was about ready to fall over, he still looked formidable. He still looked like an underboss.
“The city may be standing, but the people will be on their knees.”
It was Dante Ashwood who spoke then, and Zekia couldn’t help but think how his voice sounded like a whisper in the wind and a storm in the dead of night all the same.
Dante Ashwood, Kingpin of Uskhanya and future Doyen of the realm, had shadows swarming him like fireflies to offer a shield of protection. Zekia thought they smelled like dark, burnt magic, as if Ashwood had seared their power to him, and sometimes she held her breath when they neared, just in case they tried to burn her from the inside out, stealing the parts of her mind that had not yet gone.
Zekia took one of Wesley’s cuffed hands in her own.
His fingers were cold and limp, and he stared blankly ahead as if she hadn’t touched him at all. When Zekia squeezed his hand, his jaw ticked.
Wesley looked like he was trying very hard not to kill her.
The moon acted as a torch as they eyed the barricade.
The fort was erected by the amityguards, with guns and charms holding their positions steady. There were hundreds and hundreds of them, but Zekia wasn’t worried. Her army had what these soldiers never could: vision. The hope of a new realm, ruled by magic, with Crafters ready for a glorious future, filled with peace and light and no more pain.
They just had to kill a few people first.
But it was worth it. Ashwood had told her so.
Sometimes you have to hurt people to save them.
Ashwood approached the man on the ground and placed his large hands around the prisoner’s head.
“Surrender,” Ashwood said.
From behind the barricade, a voice cracked through a speaker. “We don’t take orders from crooks.”
Wesley snorted. Zekia squeezed his hand tighter.
Just surrender, she thought. If you surrender, then I won’t have to do anything bad.
“Nobody needs to die today,” Ashwood said.
“You sure as fire-gates do,” the voice shot back.
Ashwood sighed, and in a last attempt to stay the bloodshed, he said, “Lay down your weapons and join me. Or keep them and die.”
There was a pause.
Utter and complete silence.
The capital city of Uskhanya was alive every second, from dawn to dusk before the cycle started over, and usually a scream could barely be heard above the bastardized magic and laughter of criminals. But now Zekia could hear the birds crying out in warning and, if someone had a pin, she’d probably hear that drop too.
The speaker crackled again.
The man on the other end took a breath.
“Djefil,” he said. “Go fuck yourself.”
Ashwood sighed. He turned to Zekia. She caught a glimpse of that ghost smile somewhere in his face, and swallowed.
“We can save you.”
Zekia said it quietly, almost a whisper, but then Ashwood twisted his hand around their prisoner’s neck and Zekia felt the snap shoot through her.
There was a wave of anger from the amityguards and in mere seconds bullets spat out from behind the barricade. They stopped inches from Zekia’s face, hitting the shield her Crafters conjured. Crashing against the force field, they sounded like raindrops on a tin roof.
Zekia turned to Wesley, whose hand was still limp in hers. He stared ahead, barely blinking his black eyes as the shots continued.
When he swallowed, Zekia heard it over the gunfire.
Wesley knew what was coming.
He knew the future without needing mind magic.
He knew what Dante Ashwood was going to say, because he knew the man just as well as Zekia did, and he knew what it took to achieve greatness. The sacrifices that needed to be made for a better future.
“Kill them all,” Ashwood said.
And so they did.
One district down. Six more to go.
3
Saxony
SAXONY WAS NOT IN charge and it was really starting to get on her nerves.
“My answer is final,” Amja said. “We’re not talking about this any longer and I’m finished going around in circles with you.”
Saxony’s amja, her long steel hair grazing her clasped hands, sat on the wooden chair next to Saxony’s father, Bastian. Amja had a look in her eyes that told Saxony to stand down, designed to make her feel regret at challenging her authority, or shame at not trusting in her wisdom. Only, it didn’t work so well anymore. Now all it did was make Saxony want to yell about how wrong her family was.
Saxony had seen war. She had seen what Ashwood was capable of firsthand, especially with her little sister at his side. She knew this was not the time to back down or run scared.
“You’re right,” Saxony said. “No more talking. What we need is action. We have to summon the other Crafter Lieges from across the realms. Ashwood has an army of Crafters and that’s exactly what we need.”
Amja did not even look at Saxony when she spoke next.
“I am the Liege of this Kin now,” she said. “And I will not endanger any more of our people.”
She said it as though that was final and Saxony was a child who needed to know her place. Saxony had never thought that she’d want help from Wesley Thornton bloody Walcott, but at times like this, with her amja refusing to see sense, Saxony almost missed the underboss’s penchant for convincing people to do things they didn’t want to. Not to mention that Wesley had named Saxony temporary leader of the Crafters, and without him here to back her up—with Amja acting as Liege to her Kin in Zekia’s place, and Asees and Arjun sectioning their people off to the other side of camp—Saxony was starting to feel like she’d been demoted in some way.
Like nothing she said mattered anymore.
And boy did it suck.
“I do not want more strange Crafters in our camp,” Amja said. “Or more buskers from the other cities. You’ve already brought in an army of misfits to roam around our village. Now you want to fill it with more people we don’t know or trust? You want to start another War of Ages?”