The Tuncian flew to his feet. His raiders surged around him, but the Mecht had a crew to match—swords sang out of scabbards, pistols cocked and aimed.
Lu dropped her rag and shot out the back door as insults flew—“Like hell will we let Mecht barbarians take over!” “Tuncian whore, where are your four gods now?”
The noxious tavern birthed Lu into the midnight streets of New Deza. Every building around her glistened in the humidity, the dozens of rivers that crisscrossed the island polluting the warm air with the staleness of water. But that wasn’t what made it hard to breathe—it was terror that choked Lu as she scurried across the cobblestones.
Her father stepped out of the shadows between faint streetlamps. Tom’s tricorne hat shielded his eyes, but his smile was sad as his head pivoted from her to the shouting in the tavern.
Lu needed to recount what she’d heard. But all she could say, as a pistol fired within the tavern, was “Why won’t they help us stop Argrid, Papa? Don’t they want peace?”
With the raider syndicates’ numbers, the revolutionaries could finally push Argrid out of Grace Loray. The war would end, and Lu wouldn’t have to go on missions, and the children of the other rebels wouldn’t have to cower in fear of Argrid deciding they should be cleansed—
Her father chucked her under the chin. “Getting the raiders’ support was a weak hope, sweetheart. There are other things we must do to end the war.”
Lu’s heart sank. “You have another mission for me, don’t you?”
Tom’s face flashed with remorse. But when he smiled at her, it was proud.
Lu clung to that pride like she clung to hope. Even as her throat closed. Even as she could already smell the iron tang of blood.
The raiders weren’t willing to do what needed to be done to end the war. But she was.
Lu’s hands fisted, her fingers gone cold despite the island’s heat.
“There’s my Lulu-bean.” Tom kissed her forehead. “I can always count on you.”
Devereux Bell was thirteen, and that was the only thing about him they didn’t say was evil.
They’d had to tie him to a chair to stop him from trying to escape. He could see the scratched hinges on the door from his latest attempt—courtesy of a nail he’d pried from his cot.
Vex hadn’t expected it to work. It’d just felt good to let them know he was still trying.
The bell that hung over this mission—prison—announced the hour in six sharp tolls. A choir started singing on one of the floors above, voices carrying into the lonely cells. Hymns about honesty and chastity, purity and penance, and other things Vex willed himself to ignore.
The scratched hinges groaned as the door opened. The hall’s flickering torchlight filled Vex’s cell and he dropped his head, hands balling so the rope over his wrists squealed.
When a jailer stopped in front of him, Vex whipped his head up and spat in the man’s face.
The jailer wiped the spittle from his cheek with the sleeve of his black robe. “Another night has done nothing to sway your heart, herexe.”
Herexe. Heretic, in proper Argridian. It reminded Vex of where he was, in a hell created by Argrid on Grace Lorayan soil.
Vex bowed his head, greasy hair swinging as he gulped down sour air so humid it was more like drinking than breathing. He knew what would come next. More jailers would gather and pray over him or recite scripture. It’d been that way, every day, for . . .
He couldn’t remember. And that was downright funny. Vex chuckled.
“This is humorous to you, herexe?” the jailer pressed.
“I’m young,” Vex said, stretching back in the chair. “But you’re not. And I’ll make it my life’s goal to watch this job kill you.”
Other cells up and down the hall stirred with rebels and anyone else Argrid had caught with Grace Loray’s magic. “You are weak,” the jailers’ voices carried as they chanted in other cells. “You are evil. You have proven susceptible to the Devil’s temptations. May the Pious God cleanse you. May the Pious God save what is left of your soul. You are weak. You are evil. . . .”
Vex’s jailer let out a soft sigh of disappointment and started pacing. Vex shook the hair away from his uninjured eye. His wound hadn’t bothered him since his imprisonment—what need did he have for two working eyes when the prison’s routine was so predictable? But now he felt at a disadvantage, able to follow the jailer only from the left.
The jailer stopped, considering. “The Pious God has a plan for souls that do not yield.”
Panic swept from Vex’s head to his toes. The look on his face must’ve said enough.
“Not a pyre.” The jailer smiled. From the folds of his robe, he withdrew a leaf in a vial.
A Church jailer, responsible for punishing people caught with the Devil’s magic, had magic?
But the jailer didn’t explain. He opened the vial and tugged Vex’s head against the chair. Vex cried out, but his open mouth was a mistake—the jailer shoved the leaf in.
Vex swallowed. He couldn’t help it. The bitter leaf broke apart as it slid down his throat.
Every muscle in his body begged for release. Vex screamed, his blood gone to rapids in his veins, tendons in each limb threatening to come apart under his restraints.
“You are weak,” the jailer prayed. “You are evil. May the Pious God cleanse you.” Words, empty words, and pain. “May the Pious God save what is left of your soul.”
1
Six Years Later
AS NEW DEZA’S mission bell sliced ten consecutive chimes into the steamy morning air, Lu bounced on the toes of her worn buckle shoes. The treaty negotiations between the Democratic Council of Grace Loray and the Argridian delegation would be starting again at the castle, yet here she was, stuck in the market that hugged the western edge of the lake. But one more purchase, and she would have all she needed to stop at the infirmary before heading to the castle to resume listening to the draining debates that had filled the past month.
That thought quelled her anxiety. Perhaps she shouldn’t be in such a hurry.
“It is not worth more than six galles,” Lu told the vendor with a table of wares on the deck of his steamboat. The boat on his right offered coconuts, green bananas, and large, spiky jackfruits from farms throughout the island; the boat on his left sold handmade leather goods from tanneries in the north. But this vendor sold botanical magic.
The man dropped a crate on the deck, making the vials of plants clink as the boat listed. “There’s been a rush on Drooping Fern. Twenty galles.”
“A rush,” Lu echoed dully. The back of her throat tickled—oh, the irony of haggling over a plant that caused unconsciousness when she could easily fall asleep right here. She’d spent too many nights in a row sitting with Annalisa in the infirmary.
The vendor squinted at her. “You know what Drooping Fern is, don’tcha? One whiff of its smoke could lay a grown man out for hours. If yer looking for help wif sleeping, apothecaries in the nicer parts of town grind up tonics for fancy things like you.”
That was precisely why Lu had come to what she suspected was a raider stall. The law-abiding sellers of magic offered either individual plants with mild uses like skin protectants and appetite suppressants, or more dangerous plants diluted and blended into tonics like relaxing potions or strength-enhancing brews. Combining plants into elixirs was delicate, often time-consuming work that only a select few undertook, and it would have been too much hassle for Lu to convince a respectable seller that she knew what she was doing with a raw ingredient as potent as Drooping Fern.