The uprising suddenly failed overnight on December 13, 433 AU, in what has been called the Midnight Massacre. The foreign troops disappeared, and the rebels were killed in their beds by Poromish forces. It is not their disappearance that strikes this scholar as particularly vicious but their obvious betrayal. There is a saying in Deverelli: The word is the blood. When they make a trade, broker a deal, it is considered law. I cannot help but wonder what part of the deal the Krovlan rebels did not uphold.
—Subjugated: The Second Uprising of the Krovlan People by Lieutenant Colonel Asher Sorrengail
“This is a ridiculous way to travel,” Ridoc says for the dozenth time, hauling himself upright in the saddle after slipping yet again as our horses navigate the uneven stone streets of Matyas, Deverelli’s capital city.
I smother a laugh, but Cat doesn’t offer Ridoc the same kindness from two rows back with Mira as we ride the tree-covered fairways. We’re arranged mostly in pairs with the exception of Drake, who is solo ahead of Xaden and me.
The city is even more stunning than I imagined from the air. Built under the canopy of enormous trees, only its tallest structures are visible when flying. The rest feels like a hidden treasure, and we haven’t even journeyed up the hill where the palace—and Halden—is. The roads have been primarily residential until now, with structures far and evenly spaced, growing closer together the nearer we come to the ports and city center, and in the last mile, every single one of them has been built out of stone.
“I’m sorry, but I find it hard to believe that a dragon rider draws the line at a horse,” Cat says with another laugh as we pass what appears to be a tea shop, judging by the painted sign outside the door.
“Hey, horses bite,” Ridoc says over his shoulder, and a woman jumps away at the sight of us, placing a palm over the neckline of her embroidered white tunic.
“And dragons do what, exactly?” Drake calls back.
“You’ll never know, since you’ll never be allowed to ride one,” Mira snaps in a bored tone before returning to her usual side-to-side perimeter sweep. She’s been on alert since we left the manor, even though I’ve assured her Tairn’s within range and he can set this whole place on fire within minutes if I call for him.
What we really need is a freaking communication rune for the others—if such a thing exists.
Drake’s eyes narrow on Mira, then Xaden, whose mouth has curved into a smirk. “I’m surprised you didn’t fight me for the lead position, Riorson.”
Xaden scoffs, and the smirk transforms into a smile as we pass under a patch of dappled sunlight. I stare at him like it’s first year all over again. He’s in a short-sleeved uniform top like the rest of us, baring those gorgeously toned arms, but it’s really the relaxed posture, the ease of his smile that have me utterly transfixed and, I can admit…a little confuddled. Xaden Riorson is a lot of things, but happy isn’t usually one of them. “It’s perfectly fine if you die first, Cordella. I’m exactly where I want to be.” Then the man fucking winks at me, and I almost fall off my damned horse.
I tighten my thighs on instinct to keep from sliding out of the saddle, and the sable mare prances beneath me before I remember to relax. The dizziness has always been worse in the heat, and it’s definitely not doing me any favors today.
“See? Violet prefers dragons, too,” Ridoc says.
“I’m fine.” I roll my shoulders to keep my pack—and its very precious cargo—in place.
“She’s always been a good rider,” Dain argues on my behalf.
“Did you two ride a lot when you were younger?” Xaden asks as we pass by a tavern, and more than one mug of ale spills onto white tunics at the outdoor tables at the sight of us.
My jaw drops and my head whips in his direction.
Leather creaks, and when I glance back, sure enough, Mira is leaning forward in her saddle.
“What?” Xaden looks at me, then lifts his brows and glances back at the others. Cat stares at him like he’s grown another head. Dain’s wearing two lines between his brows like he can’t quite figure out if this is a trick question, and Ridoc grins like he’s got front-row tickets to a play. Xaden’s gaze jumps to mine for a second before returning to the road as we take the fork to the right, leading to the market and port according to the rather remarkable signage jammed between the cobblestone and a large tree. “Am I not allowed to ask about your childhood?”
“No,” I blurt. “Of course you are.”
“It’s just that you usually act like I didn’t grow up with her,” Dain answers casually. “Like we weren’t best friends.”
“I’m so fucking glad I got on this horse,” Ridoc says, gripping his reins tighter.
I send a look his way that I hope tells him I’m reevaluating my decision to put him in this squad in the first place.
“But to answer your question,” Dain continues, just as at ease on his horse as Xaden is, “yes, we rode whenever our parents’ duty stations allowed for it. Not the years they were up in Luceras, of course.”
“Fuck that was cold,” Mira says.
“It was,” I agree, cringing at the memory. “Riding was hard on me when I was out of practice, and falling always sucked, but it gave me a sense of awareness of my body, too. What about you?” I ask Xaden as we curve onto a bustling street.
“I think I rode before I walked.” He flashes me a quick smile. “It’s probably one of the things I missed most once I crossed the parapet, actually. Horses go where you ask them to for the most part. Sgaeyl…” He glances up at the trees as if he can see her in the sky above us, a look of longing on his face. “She doesn’t really give a shit where I want to go. I’m just along for the ride.”
“Man, do I feel that,” Dain mutters, and I laugh.
“Look alive,” Drake calls back, and the mood of the squad instantly shifts as the street grows crowded with horses, wagons, and pedestrians carrying baskets in their arms and strapped to their backs. The only blades I see are the ones we carry.
Stone shops line both sides of the congested double-wide street. Their doors are open to the breeze, their wares and produce displayed on carts in front under vibrant cloth awnings for what looks to be a mile straight ahead, and from what I read, I know this area branches off to the south, into a gold and spice market, and farther up the hill where the financial sector perches like an overlord.
We’re a half mile off the beach, but the scents of salt and fish are thick in the air, and I understand why business is done under the canopy of the trees. I can’t begin to imagine the smell or how quickly things would spoil in the sun in this climate.
Everywhere I look, there’s a purchase being haggled over, a fruit I’ve never tasted, a flower I’ve never smelled, a bird I’ve never heard. It’s a sensory feast, and I consume it like a starved woman.
“Anyone feel like our home is a completely dreary shithole?” Ridoc asks as traffic pauses us outside a cloth merchant, and I find myself staring at a bolt of shimmering black silk so diaphanous it’s almost silver.
It wouldn’t last a day against the dragon-scale armor currently covering my torso.
“Speak for yourself,” Xaden says, swinging his leg over and dismounting next to me. “Aretia is the second most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.” He hands me his reins, turning those gorgeous, gold-flecked onyx eyes into weapons capable of melting the underwear straight off my body as he looks up at me. “And my home is the first.”
Unh. Yeah, I flat-out liquefy.
“You’re laying it on thick, Riorson.” But I still smile when I take the reins.
“I’m going to ask about our merchant. Don’t leave without me.” He glances back at Dain. “Let’s go, Krovlish.” Offering me another precious grin, he disappears into the store, followed quickly by Dain.
“Is that the same guy?” Drake asks Cat, turning around in the saddle. “That cannot possibly be the same fucking guy.”
I try not to look, but fail, and when I glance over my shoulder, I catch a glimpse of her shrugging and quickly looking away.
“Maybe this is who he could have been if his dad hadn’t led a whole rebellion and fucked him over by getting executed and having him thrown into the quadrant and making him responsible for all the marked ones at the age of what? Seventeen?” Ridoc muses.
“Yeah,” I agree, my eyes on the door. “That.” And yet…if all of it hadn’t happened, would we still be us? Or is the miracle of our relationship the result of a precise combination of tragedies that broke us both so completely that when we collided, we became something entirely new?
“Or it could just be that he loves Violet, so he’s not a dick to her,” Mira says, eyeing a puckered-browed Deverelli man who scurries back into a dressmaker’s shop at the first sight of us, dragging a woman along with him. “Guess we’re more visible than we thought.”
“We’re the only ones in black,” I mutter.
“Fire-bringers!” the man accuses in the common tongue, then slams the door shut, rattling the glass.
“Rude.” Ridoc adjusts in his saddle.
“And wrong,” Cat mutters. “Some of us just want to fuck with your feelings, not burn your house to the ground.”
I huff a laugh, but Ridoc full-on snorts.
Xaden strides through the cloth merchant’s door with Dain, tucking a black velvet pouch into the front left pocket of his uniform as he comes down the three stone steps. “She’s a dealer of rare books, two streets up the hill.”
Stunned, I hand him back his reins, and he mounts quickly. “It can’t be that easy.”
“It can,” he says, tapping his pocket. “We don’t share a currency, but gemstones seem to speak in every language.” He looks over his shoulder. “Good job, Aetos.”
“Was that a compliment? What the fuck is going on?” Dain asks, his gaze flying to mine. “Did you give him something?”
I shake my head, and Drake starts us forward.
“Fire-bringer” is hurled as an insult in our direction more than a few times as we make our way down the rows of shops and up the two streets where Xaden and Dain were directed. The flurry of activity dwindles from the urgency of a daily produce-and-goods mercantile district to more varied and niche shops by the time we reach the second street. When we stop in front of Tomes and Tales, there’s ample room next to the trunk of an enormous tree for the horses to wait.
The shop itself is two stories, built in various shades of gray stone, and unlike the streets below, none of its sides touch the buildings around it. From the outside, it looks to be the same size as the bookstore I visited in Calldyr with Dad, a little larger than the library in the Riders Quadrant, but nowhere even an eighth of the Archives.
“You’re on,” Xaden says from the ground, reaching up for me.
I swing my leg over the sable mare and dismount into his arms, noting how he takes his delicious time sliding me down the length of his body.
He keeps our eyes locked, and the heat I find there, the need that flares as my hands drift down his chest make my breath catch. I reach for our bond out of reflex to tell him how much I want him back in my bed, and my hands fist the fabric of his uniform when I remember it’s blocked here.
“I miss the bond,” I whisper before I can think better of it.
“Me too. But you don’t have to say what you’re thinking for me to know,” he whispers, his hands slipping from my waist to my hips. “I can read it in every line of your body. Your eyes are a dead giveaway, too.” Under my fists, his heartbeat accelerates. “Always have been. You have no idea how many times I almost fucked up on the sparring mat when I caught you watching me.”
He says this now? When I can’t just drag him into the nearest room and lock the door? Suddenly, the last six weeks feel like an eternity.
“I swear to Amari, you two get one inch closer and I’m going to throw a bucket of water on you,” Mira warns, breaking the spell.
I fall forward, leaning my forehead on Xaden’s chest right between my fists, and feel his laughter rumble as he closes his arms around me.
“Do riders get nicknames once they earn their wings?” Drake questions Mira. “Because I’m pretty sure yours would be Killjoy.”
“Are we doing this or not?” Mira asks, clearly ignoring him.
I nod and sigh with resignation as I step out of Xaden’s arms. “Ridoc, Drake, Cat, please stay with the horses and be ready to run if this goes badly. Mira, Dain, and Xaden, you’re with me. Hopefully we’ll be out quickly.”
Ridoc dusts off his summer-weight uniform and gathers the reins. “I’ll be nearby.”
“I know,” I reply. The reassuring way he said it makes my brow furrow.
“What?” Mira asks, spotting my face.
“Just wondering if we did the right thing letting Halden go by himself to see the king.” My stomach sinks as I consider every way it could go wrong.
“Didn’t exactly give us a choice,” Ridoc says. “Courtlyn only allows aristocrats to enter.”
“Even if he did, we can’t be in two places at once.” Mira nods toward the bookshop.
Right.
None of us draws a blade, but our hands remain loose and ready as we walk the short cobblestone path to the staired entrance midway down the south side of the shop. Mira enters first, mainly because no one seems to want to argue with her, and Xaden follows me in last, mainly because I don’t think he’ll ever trust anyone without a rebellion relic to ever truly cover his back.
The scents of dust and parchment fill the thick air as soon as our boots hit the hardwood floor, and I immediately understand why there isn’t another shop on the side. Windows stretch from floor to ceiling, allowing natural light to pour in over the rows of bookshelves taller than I can possibly reach that jut out lengthwise from the wall on my right, matching their three-foot-long counterparts on our left, leaving a lengthy, clear aisle to a single counter. The titles are stacked haphazardly, but none touch the backs of the shelves, allowing for air to circulate. It’s beautiful…but hot as hell.
If I’d thought the heat outside the shop was stifling, then the temperature inside—without the breeze—is truly oppressive. Sweat immediately beads beneath my armor and along the side of my neck.
There are a few customers browsing toward the narrow staircase in the back and a woman who appears to be in her sixties with a pert nose and a slicked-back salt-and-pepper bun behind the counter, licking her umber fingers every few seconds as she flips through the pages of a ledger, but I don’t see anyone in the stacks to the right, so I nod toward the counter when Mira looks back at me.
We make our way down the aisle that opens into a small seating arrangement, and Dain keeps his eye on the customers in the back—a pair of men who have definitely taken notice of us. I glance over my shoulder as we approach the counter, finding Xaden has slipped behind the last shelf on the left and is currently leaned against the wall, wearing his usual expression of apathetic boredom.
Go figure, he’s found what seems to be one of the only patches of shadow in the place to wait while I sort out whatever my father sent me here to find.
Dain moves to the edge of the counter, earning the shopkeeper’s attention and placing himself between Mira and the customers, while Mira backs herself to the far edge of the seating group, setting a perimeter.
In a bookstore.
I manage to keep from rolling my eyes.
The shopkeeper’s gaze darts from Dain to Mira to me before she closes the ledger and places it under the counter.
“Dain, could you ask her—” I set one hand on the counter for balance.
“I speak the common tongue,” the woman says. “We are educated here in Deverelli.”
I blink. “Right. Well, I was just wondering if you happen to know anyone by the name of Narelle.”
Her eyes flare, and my stomach jumps into my throat when she glances over my right shoulder.
Mira.
“Fire-bringers!” someone shouts.
I draw two blades in the breath it takes to whip toward my sister.
Two assailants charge from the back shelves—the ones I’d previously, foolishly thought empty—and Mira sighs when one of them, a woman who looks to be my age, lifts a serrated dagger at her.
“If we have to,” Mira says, drawing her own as the older man, someone closer to Brennan’s build and age with spiky black hair and what seems to be a standard-issue white-and-gold tunic, runs down the aisle. Rage fills his eyes as he rushes toward me, two longer, serrated blades pointed in my direction.
I flip one of my daggers to the tip and prepare to throw, angling my body so the shopkeeper remains within sight.
The guy will be here in four seconds.
Three.
Two.
Xaden takes a single step, then kicks a large armchair straight into the man’s path. It hits him square in the stomach, and his breath gushes out, but he regroups quickly, turning a glare in Xaden’s direction with raised blades.
“You don’t want to do that.” Xaden shakes his head.
The guy shouts a battle cry, then draws back his right arm, and I flick my wrist. The dagger lands in his shoulder, and the man howls as crimson streaks down his white tunic and his blade falls to the floor.
“I warned you,” Xaden says as the man hits his knees. “Your error was changing your assessment to targeting me as the threat and letting your eyes off her.” He takes his time walking over to the man as Mira punches her assailant in the face, knocking the woman unconscious. Then Xaden plucks the blades from the man like they’re toys. “I knew some of you carried blades. There’s no society in the world that doesn’t keep some kind of cutting tool, and eventually…well, we all cut, don’t we?”
Dain clicks his tongue, and I turn in his direction to find both his dagger and sword out, the shorter of the blades pointed at the shopkeeper and the longer at the customers. “I would stay back,” he tells the men, who have drawn their own serrated daggers. “In fact, if there’s a back door, I would find it and I would leave.”
They scurry to do so.
The injured man falls forward, catching himself on his good hand before collapsing on his stomach, and Xaden leans over him.
“This is going to hurt,” Xaden warns before retrieving my dagger from his shoulder. To his credit, the man doesn’t scream or complain when Xaden wipes the blade clean on the back of his white tunic. “You really shouldn’t raise a blade if you’re not prepared to receive one.”
Mira sheathes her daggers and steps over the unconscious woman. “Well, that was annoying. Are you protecting something? Or do you just really hate riders?” she asks the shopkeeper, who has backed herself into the corner as far as she possibly can.
“Only fire-bringers in this store looking for Narelle,” the shopkeeper answers.
Protecting something. Got it.
The stairs creak, and the angle of Dain’s sword changes as our heads swing collectively.
The man groans, and out of the corner of my eye, I see him struggle to get off the floor.
“No, no. Staying down is a safer bet for everyone involved,” Xaden warns him. “She only wounded you, but I’ll kill you if you take another step toward her, and it turns out that’s bad for international relations.” I glance his way as someone descends the steps, and he arches his scarred eyebrow. “I’m giving diplomacy a try. Not sure it’s for me, though.”
The man goes utterly limp.
Dain hesitates as a hunched figure rounds the end of the staircase.
The shopkeeper yells something in Krovlish, and I blink. “Did she just call her—”
“Mom,” Dain confirms with a nod. “She said, ‘No, Mom. Save yourself.’”
“We’re not here to kill anyone,” I tell the shopkeeper as her mother walks into the light, leaning heavily on a walking cane. Her hair is silver, and the lines of her face have deepened with time, but she has the same pert nose as her daughter, the same deep-brown eyes and round face. “You’re Narelle,” I guess.
Dain lowers his sword as she approaches, then sheathes it as she completely skirts around him, taking in the scene of what I assume is her shop.
She studies Xaden through thick glasses, then Dain, Mira, and finally me, her gaze lingering on my hair before she finally nods. “And you must be Asher Sorrengail’s daughter, here to collect the books he wrote for you.”
My heart stops.
