CHAPTER 15
Chief of the Bloodletters
Later, Sefia found out that most of the Gormani clans had refused to join the Alliance with the rest of Deliene. Since Arcadimon Detano had sent the bulk of the kingdom’s navy to invade Oxscini, Oshka Kemura and her allies had been causing all sorts of trouble up north, preying on Alliance patrols like the one the Current and the Crux had seen at the Trove of the King.
“Kaito would have loved that,” Sefia said.
Thumbing the worry stone, Archer nodded. After his confrontation with Chief Kemura, she and the other Gormani captains had departed for the north, taking the Oxscinian merchants with them, and the Brother had begun sailing south for Haven with the Current, the Crux, and the other two outlaw ships from Epigloss.
Sefia, Archer, Frey, and Aljan moved their belongings from the Current to the Brother, where Keon excitedly ushered them to the great cabin. It was in even greater disarray than Sefia remembered it: great swaths of leather slung over the chairs, jars of glue sticking to the tabletop, knots of thread mixed up with scraps of paper, and dozens of books stacked on chairs, in corners, and crammed between sofa cushions.
“I kinda got carried away,” the skinny boy said sheepishly, jamming his hands in his pockets. Even though they hadn’t needed the decoy Book, he’d found he enjoyed the work, and with nothing better to do when he wasn’t on watch, he’d begun making other books: palm-size books, large books, books that could fit easily in a satchel or on a shelf . . .
“And they’re all blank?” Aljan asked, reverently leafing through one of the bigger codices.
“Grieg took one for his recipes,” Keon said with a shrug. “But all the rest are, yeah.”
“Got a story to write?” Frey asked, looping her arm through Aljan’s.
He nodded.
He took over writing lessons aboard the Brother, teaching Frey, Keon, Griegi, and a couple others, while Sefia continued her study of Alteration.
Objects that had been excised didn’t just disappear, she learned. Once you’d eliminated every trace of them, it was as if they’d never existed at all. Once, the Scribes had used this power to erase entire armies—all those people, all those stories—gone, as if they’d never been.
Sefia returned to studying grains of rice. In the Illuminated world, she would examine every particle of light. Then, as if her fingers were tipped with blades, she’d slice through each golden flake, and one by one, they would melt into darkness.
In her hand, the grain of rice would disappear.
Excision.
But the Illuminated world was a painstakingly connected web. Some streams of light were dim, like the faintest constellations in the sky, and others were so bright they seemed to pulse with the strength of their connections, forming a complex system of rivers and brooks and many-armed deltas.
And she soon learned it was these she had to treat with care.
Once, she was going too quickly—she was getting overconfident—and as she was eliminating particles, her hand slipped. Entire strands of gold started disappearing, faster and faster, farther and farther away from her, burning out like candles in the wind.
Around her, the tides of the Illuminated world shifted. Somewhere across the years, she saw a stalk of rice wink out of existence. She saw a sickle. A flash of red. A scar.
She reeled, blinking. Her palm was empty. She’d excised the grain of rice successfully, but she’d also taken the entire plant—somewhere, in burlap sacks and earthen pots, every piece of rice that plant had produced had also disappeared—and that one change had caused permanent injury to a person she’d never met.
She was more careful, from then on, but she was not deterred.
She didn’t yet know how this power could alter the course of Archer’s future, but she would make sure he would no longer be the boy from the legends. She would make sure he lived.
Archer had expected to be relieved, being back with the bloodletters, but his run-in with Chief Kemura had unsettled him, and he could not help wondering if he’d made a mistake, not leaving with Sefia after the Trove.
But he loved the bloodletters. They were his family—sometimes they felt more like family than his own flesh and blood back in Jocoxa, on the northwest tip of Oxscini. No one else knew what he’d been through with the impressors. No one else could really understand.
One day, as he sat with Scarza in the great cabin, he asked, “We’ve done some good together, haven’t we? The bloodletters?”
They’d stopped the impressors in Deliene. They’d freed dozens of boys.
Looking up from the rifle he’d been cleaning, Scarza watched him with his gray sharpshooter’s eyes. “Is this about what Chief Kemura said?”
You’ve done more harm than good.
Archer nodded. “Even after Versil, and Kaito, and the others we’ve lost, I still think the good we’ve done outweighs the bad . . . but the longer I’m your chief, the more battles I lead you into, the more I’m afraid I’m tipping the scales the other way. It’s not the fighting . . . or not just the fighting. It’s the leading. When I’m leading you, I can feel myself becoming a different person.”
The commander. The conqueror. The boy from the legends.
“A worse person,” he added. “If I keep leading you into battle, it’s only a matter of time before I am him, and I won’t be able to come back from that.”
“But we’re not going into battle anymore,” Scarza said, deftly snapping pieces of his rifle back into place with his one hand.
No, they were going to Haven. And if Sefia was right, they were going exactly where the Book wanted them to. A stay at Haven, however, would at least buy them a little time to figure out exactly how to use the power of the Scribes to rewrite the future.
Scarza gripped his shoulder kindly. “I’ll lead us if I have to. But I don’t think I’ll have to.”
And for two and a half weeks, things were fine. Archer remained chief of the bloodletters, but they didn’t fight or train as they used to. They had no one to fight.
Instead, they sailed. They took turns on watch. They ate and gambled and told stories. Aljan taught them to write. He was a patient, gentle teacher, certainly more patient than Sefia had been with him, weaving between the bloodletters and Meeks, Theo, and Marmalade, who came over from the Current, offering a word of advice here or a kind adjustment there. During her lessons, Frey began drawing trees in one of Keon’s books—a gift for her lumberjack brothers back in Deliene—filling it with enormous Oxscinian hardwoods, banyans dripping aerial roots, other Forest Kingdom trees she must have seen in her short time in Epigloss, each neatly labeled with Aljan’s help.
Theo, in particular, was impressed with Frey’s catalogue. The Current’s starboard chanty leader and an aspiring biologist, he kept pushing up his spectacles and gesticulating wildly over her detailed drawings of leaves and seed pods, making the red lory on his shoulder spread her wings and chirp in alarm.
At the back of the class, Sefia continued studying the Book in her pursuit of excision.
It was all the good parts of being back with the bloodletters, and none of the fear, the violence, the bloodlust. It was exactly what Archer wanted.
But it was too good to last.
Because when they finally arrived at Haven, they found it on fire.
All around the island were the sinking wrecks of ships, the cries of the wounded in the water. Nearby, half a dozen ships bearing the blue, gold, and white flags of the Alliance were battling what remained of the outlaws.
Reed had said Haven boasted seventy-seven ships.
Only thirteen were left.
The thunder of cannon fire echoed off the rock pillars that guarded the island, peppered with the sharp reports of rifles and revolvers.
Archer’s hands gripped the rail, his fingers hot with the urge to fight. To rip. To kill. “I thought Haven was unfindable,” he said.
Except, somehow, the Alliance had found Haven. Somehow, the Red War had found him. He couldn’t escape it.
Scarza slung his rifle over his shoulder. “Do you think one of the outlaws betrayed them?”
Archer watched the Current run up their battle flag, followed by the Crux and the two outlaw ships that had come from Epigloss. “I don’t know,” he said, “but they’ll have to answer to Captain Reed.”
“Archer,” Scarza said, “what do you want to do?”
Archer’s pulse roared in his veins. He wanted to fight. He wanted to lead. He wanted to hit the Guard so hard they’d think twice about coming at him again.
And that was exactly why he shouldn’t.
He took the boy by the shoulders. “I can’t stay,” he said. “Will you lead them? Will you be their chief?”
Scarza’s gray eyes were solemn when he nodded. They embraced. “I’ll take care of them for you.”
“Better than I ever did,” Archer murmured into his shoulder.
“What will you do?”
“I may not be able to lead, but I can still fight. I’m going to get Sefia to take me somewhere I’ll do some good.”
On Scarza’s orders, the bloodletters began preparing the Brother for confrontation. Aljan raised a battle flag of their own—a boy with bowed head and crossed forearms.
The bloodletters cheered.
A part of Archer ached to fight with them. But he couldn’t.
“Once they get us close enough to an Alliance ship, I can teleport us,” Sefia said, checking her cuff of sleeping darts.
“Okay,” Archer whispered.
They turned the Brother into the fray, letting off broadsides. Cannonballs went smashing into the hulls of their enemy.
The Alliance returned in kind.
While Archer waited miserably by the foremast, Sefia joined the riflemen at the prow, deflecting bullets and spheres of iron into the waves. Curls of smoke blew past them as they sped through the water.
The Current of Faith surged ahead of them, firing their chase guns.
One of the outlaw ships, with a scrappy little dog for a figurehead, had been boarded by the Alliance. Archer could see blue uniforms swarming the decks.
The Brother pulled up on the ship’s other side, and the bloodletters leapt across the rails, swords flashing as they cut down Alliance soldiers, six-guns cracking like fireworks.
Sefia ran to Archer’s side. “Ready?”
No.
On the outlaw ship, Griegi cursed as a bullet skimmed the side of his head.
Archer nodded. His arms went around Sefia’s waist.
The last thing he saw before he felt the deck go out from under him was Scarza and the bloodletters pressing the Alliance soldiers back onto their own ship.
When they touched down again, they were hundreds of yards from the Brother. Sefia had taken them to the farthest ship out.
It was just the two of them against a vessel full of Alliance soldiers.
Archer grinned at her. His weapons were heavy as death in his hands.
“You’re welcome,” she said, flinging out her hand as the soldiers attacked. Bullets were thrown back. There were spurts of blood and startled cries among the enemy.
He and Sefia ducked behind the mainmast as the soldiers charged. Beside him, Sefia was a blur of movement, shoving enemies aside, redirecting shots into the Alliance ranks. Archer’s rounds found their own targets, one after another, bullets striking bone.
“In there!” Sefia cried, pushing him toward the door of the great cabin.
They tumbled inside just as the soldiers rushed them, and Archer glanced back to get his first good look at his enemy.
Boys.
Some younger than him. Some a little older. But all of them boys. All of them with the blistered ring of scar tissue around their necks.
Candidates.
His stomach turned as he pressed himself against the door, trying to close it.
From behind him, a gust of air slammed the door shut. The lock clicked. “Get back!” Sefia cried.
He stumbled away as bullets punctured the wood around him, and Sefia slid a wardrobe in front of the door. Hands trembling, he fed bullets into the cylinder of his revolver. One dropped, striking the floor with a ping!
“What’s wrong?” Sefia asked.
He scooped up the bullet and managed to get it into the last empty chamber. “They’re candidates,” he whispered. “All of them. The Guard must have brought them out here to annihilate the outlaws at Haven—”
“I’ll teleport us out of here,” she said immediately, sweeping her arms wide.
He caught her hand. “No.”
“Why not?”
He touched the scar at his throat. Because they were like him. They were his brothers, in a twisted way—they were all victims of the impressors, of the Guard—even if they were brothers on opposite sides of the war.
He flicked the cylinder closed. “I can’t save them,” he said, “but right now, I can stop them. Some of them, anyway.”
Grimly, Sefia nodded. She flexed her fingers. “Ready?”
He shoved a table onto its side and crouched behind it. Lifting his fingers to his neck, he gave the worry stone a swipe with his thumb.
Behind her own barricade by the windows, Sefia lifted her hands. He could almost feel the air shift beneath her fingers.
The wardrobe slid away from the door.
In rushed the candidates. Archer popped out from under cover and let off a round. The bullet struck one of them square between the eyes.
Except they weren’t a stranger’s eyes.
They were Kaito’s eyes.
Archer ducked as gunfire drove him under cover again. He stared at the carpet beneath his boots.
Carpet. Not loose stone.
He wasn’t back there anymore. He wasn’t chief of the bloodletters. He wasn’t killing his best friend.
He forced himself up again, firing quick shots that found eye sockets and scarred necks. The boys collapsed on the threshold as their brothers ducked behind the door frame.
Brothers.
He shut his eyes. No, no, no. He could do this. He had to do this. They were his responsibility.
He heard Sefia calling as if from a distance. “Archer! Get under cover!” He felt the force of her magic on his back, thrusting him down again.
His cheek struck wet rock. Kaito was leaning over him, grinning, with blood between his teeth and the black sky beyond.
Then—the crack of thunder—no, gunfire. Archer was back in the great cabin. He was fighting candidates. He leapt up, found his next target, a dark boy with striking blue eyes.
He pulled the trigger.
But it was Kaito now—black hair plastered to his forehead, face lined with regret.
The bullet went wide, puncturing the wall behind the candidate.
They tossed a grenade into the cabin. Archer watched the smoking fuse, the glowing ember, but it was as if he wasn’t seeing it at all.
He was seeing the rain on the rocks. He was seeing lightning flash in the puddled water. He was seeing Kaito.
Archer felt for the worry stone as a gust of air shot past him and Sefia flung the grenade out the door, where it exploded.
Thunder.
Lightning.
Kaito.