Facedown on the bed, Tanin could see little beyond the crisp white pillow and the carved headboard, but she could hear the snip, snip of the scissors under the distant rumble of cannon fire, and she could feel every lance of pain as her clothes were cut from the glass shards embedded in her back.
“My Apprentice’s daughter did this to you?” The First’s voice was faint and dry as smoke. Snip.
Tanin couldn’t see him, but she could smell the scent of his bloodsword filling the cabin with its distinctive metallic odor. The smell still reminded her of Mareah, who’d earned her bloodsword after using it to murder her own parents.
To fulfill their grisly duties, Assassins could have no compassion, no mercy, no ties to anyone other than the Guard. They couldn’t even have names. Which was why they were only referred to as the First and the Second.
Snip. “How I would have liked to train her.” The First began peeling Tanin’s clothing from her skin. The Master Assassin had taken on another Apprentice after Mareah betrayed him—the Second, with pockmarked skin and muddy gray eyes, who’d been killed on the Current of Faith. And he had another Apprentice now—Tanin. But after all these years, he still spoke of Mareah as if she were the only one who mattered.
Isn’t she, though? Tanin thought before she could stop herself. She’d loved Mareah and Lon like they were her siblings. She’d almost let herself love their daughter.
But because of her love, she’d lost the Book. She’d lost her position. She’d been stripped of her name. She would never let love do that to her again. Sentiment was for the weak. That was the one thing Stonegold had taught her.
“Unfortunate that you didn’t kill her,” someone said in an indolent voice, “but you did well at Haven, my little dog.” A heavy hand patted the back of Tanin’s head, jarring her whole body. She could feel every fragment of glass in her skin.
Biting her lip, Tanin closed her eyes to hide her revulsion. Stonegold. The King of Everica was the Guard’s Master Politician—and now their Director. He’d forced her out. He’d made her beg. It was all Tanin could do to keep from leaping up and slicing each of his jowls from his face.
Forbearance, she reminded herself. If she murdered him in front of all these witnesses, the other Guardians would turn on her immediately. And that wouldn’t do.
“Really, Director,” she whispered, “it’s my pleasure to serve.”
In the dead of night, she and the candidates had slipped from the Black Beauty to sink every ship in Haven’s protected lagoon and slit the throat of every person they came across. They’d detonated bombs in Adeline and Isabella’s compound and torched the jungle. By the time the outlaws knew what was happening, the Alliance had opened fire on the ships patrolling the currents beyond the islet.
She’d counted thirteen of the original outlaw vessels, plus a stray from Oxscini, the Crux, and the Current.
Only, the outlaws could not make a difference now, not when the Alliance had hundreds of ships ready to go.
Like a wisp of fog, the First’s raspy voice reached her again: “The pain may cause some nausea.”
Tanin set her jaw and said nothing as he began removing bits of glass from her flesh. She’d done this dozens of times for Mareah, plucking shrapnel from her arms and legs, sewing up gashes, smoothing salve on welts the First had inflicted on her. Assassins had to be trained to take wounds as well as inflict them, or they’d be of little use.
“You’ve proven your loyalty, but you failed to do what I asked.” Stonegold’s hot breath skimmed the bare skin of Tanin’s back. “You failed to kill the traitors’ daughter. That’s twice she’s escaped you since I allowed you to live. Once more, and I’m afraid you won’t be able to be our Second Assassin after all.”
“My apologies, Director, but she has an advantage. She has the—”
Stonegold interrupted her with a long, drawn-out sigh.
Tanin paused. “I have no excuse, Director.” The words made her mouth pucker with distaste. To quell her gag reflex, she imagined the look in his dying eyes when he realized she was the one who’d killed him.
Somewhere behind him, she could hear pen nibs racing across parchment. Tolem, the Apprentice Administrator, and June, the Apprentice Librarian who’d replaced Lon, had been summoned to take notes and report back to their Masters at the Main Branch.
Once, the two Apprentices had been frightened of her. Now they were witness to her humiliation.
Tanin turned her face away.
They were in the captain’s quarters of Braca’s prize flagship, the Barbaro. The cabin was roomier than most, with friezes of battles from the Everican Rock-and-River Wars carved into the doors of the built-in wardrobes and walls decorated with the military awards the Master Soldier had racked up during her lifetime—gold bars, multicolored ribbons, shields—under frames of glass. Among these simple, martial adornments, the only item that appeared out of place was a full-length mirror, its frame a lavish carving of the Library—a portal for Guardians like the Apprentices and Stonegold, who hadn’t mastered Teleportation and needed a way to access her ship.
By the cabin windows, the Master Soldier herself, Braca Terezina III, military leader of the Alliance, stood with her hands crossed behind her back, watching distant explosions light up the night sky.
After the attack on Broken Crown, she and her forces had pushed into the Bay of Batteram, the Oxscinians’ next line of defense. Now they were battling the Royal Navy and a complement of Black Navy ships Roku had sent to the Forest Kingdom’s aid.
Braca’s Apprentice, Serakeen—Rajar—was out there somewhere, in the darkness, leading the attack in his flagship, the Amalthea, a former pirate vessel with a winged horse flying at her bowsprit.
The lantern light touched Braca’s blue suede coat, her gold-tipped guns, the edge of her burned face. Her name wasn’t even Braca—at least, it hadn’t been to begin with. When she was an Apprentice, the Guard had required her to take on the identity of a soldier who’d died in a fire, to legitimize her place in Stonegold’s army, so she’d submitted to the facial disfigurement, later appearing out of the ashes as Braca Terezina III, soon to climb the ranks.
They all made sacrifices for the greater good.
“I’m reassigning you, my little dog,” Stonegold said, interrupting Tanin’s thoughts. “You won’t be returning to the Black Beauty and the candidates.”
Tanin gritted her teeth. The Beauty was her ship. The candidates were Lon’s brainchild. Both should be under her command. But her voice was level when she spoke. “What’s to happen to them?”
“They’ll sail south for the invasion of Roku.”
In Lon’s original plan for the Red War, the fifth and final kingdom had been an afterthought. A former territory of the Oxscinian empire, the littlest kingdom was a cluster of rugged volcanic islands near the Everlasting Ice, useful for mining the materials necessary for making weapons, but the high cold winds, the stench of the geysers, and the periodic eruptions of lava, ash, and mudflows made Roku so inhospitable that no one went there unless they were forced to.
Now, however, half of the Black Navy was here, in the Bay of Batteram, leaving Roku ripe for the taking.
An Alliance invasion fleet was already on its way. In three weeks, they would batter the Rokuine defenses; capture Braska, the capital; and compel Sovereign Ianai to bow to the Alliance or be executed.
The Alliance would be four kingdoms strong. And it would not be long after that Oxscini, the last holdout, would fall.
“What of me, Director?” Tanin asked.
It wasn’t Stonegold who answered but the First. “You’re to stay with me, in Kelebrandt,” he whispered. His low rasping voice sent a chill down her injured back. “It’s time to begin your training so when you face my Apprentice’s daughter again, you won’t lose.”