Knox couldn’t sleep, the heat of the room dripping down his neck and chest despite the wind coming through the open window. Anwei had a brother who’d been murdered by a Basist. A shapeshifter.
Thoughts of Willow swished around in his head. How she’d pushed him into a pond only days before the Devoted came. How she hadn’t wanted to go with them and had cried into her pillow with Mother stroking her hair and whispering that she didn’t want Willow to go either. Knox had only thought of swords and shields, of auroshes and armor, of his father telling him stories about Therasian the Stolid, Gelana the Brave, and the first Warlord giving up her name and life to organize an army that could take on Bevanti, a shapeshifter monster with spider legs and fangs.
Swords and stabbing things sounded much better in stories than it ever was in real life.
Is this the answer you’ve been promising me, Calsta? He buried his face into the pillow as he thought it, almost a prayer, though Knox had never been sure if Calsta listened except when she felt like it. Gods seemed to prefer speaking to listening, bestowing without caring very much about whether or not the recipient wanted what was given. Was meeting Anwei your doing? What else could he believe? It was too much to be a coincidence.
If this shapeshifter could tell Knox what had been done to his sister, then could Anwei use her power to help him undo it?
He looked over at Anwei, curled into a ball around her pillow in the very corner of the bed, as if she thought he’d take all the rest of the space. One of her hands held the blanket up to her chin like the prim thing she was, the ends of her braids curling all around her. One for each place she’d lived. One for each of the hundred isles. One for each boy she’d kissed.
Anwei came up with a new answer every time he asked why a hundred was the right number of braids for a Beildan healer, each one a different size, as if earning them had required different amounts of effort. One very small braid was curled across her cheek, and Knox moved to brush it back.
His mind caught up with his hand just before he touched her. Pulling his hand back, Knox turned over to stare at the wall. He knew what it meant to keep oaths—his whole life had been one of looking away, of holding himself aloof, something that hadn’t been too difficult with a sword on his back and the Warlord’s auroshes on his chest.
Now, though, it didn’t seem quite so simple. Giving people up was much harder than never letting them in in the first place. Anwei was already there inside him. Her touch was inside his head. And if he was honest, it hadn’t started when he called for her on the wall.
Knox closed his eyes, forcing his mind from what had happened earlier in the day. The way Anwei had come running for him when he’d called, how she’d stood between him and the sword while Willow danced in violent circles in his head, prodding him toward her. How Anwei had tried so hard to tell him to leave because she was worried about what the shapeshifter could do.
The way her breaths rose and then fell in her chest as she slept now.
Eyes shut, Knox concentrated on the aura glows that plagued him despite the wall between him and Calsta’s well of energy inside him. The innkeeper downstairs. Four men around a table, probably still playing cards. A few auras walked in and out of his range outside, their globes magnified and distorted with malt and an evening of dancing in the square. But Anwei was there too, her aura a quiet lavender in sleep.
If Calsta minded his partnership with Anwei, the goddess would have taken everything, down to Knox’s aurasight. But it was all still there. It wasn’t as if friends were not allowed. Knox had been close to Lia for years, the two of them like two halves of a sword, taking turns who was the hilt and who was the blade. But it had never been like this.
What had the masters meant, exactly, when they’d burned the third oath into Knox’s scalp? Love only Calsta. Knox turned over again, restless. Because he did know what it meant. Sweat dripped into his eyes, and Knox swore at himself under his breath, staring up at the wood-paneled ceiling. After so many years of closing his mind, his heart, everything about him, Knox hadn’t even looked at a girl in ages—so long that he hadn’t realized he’d been looking at Anwei.
He breathed in deep, not thinking of Anwei or her hundred braids, or the way she looked so much smaller and softer curled up beside him.
When sleep came, dreams came with it. First of Willow, crying herself to sleep, but when she sat up, she was Lia, the sister who had replaced his murdered family. “You left me just the way you left Willow,” she cried, her voice as loud as the sword’s. Blood ran down from her chest, out her eyes and nose, covering her like her veil. “You left me when I needed your help the most.”
“I’m sorry.” He tried to wipe away the blood, but it only came faster, Lia dissolving right before his eyes like a spoonful of sugar under a stream of water. “Lia! No! Lia, I didn’t want to leave! I want to help now!” But she melted away.
“What are you doing, Knox?” It was Anwei behind him. Knox looked back toward where Lia had been, but she wasn’t there, Willow wasn’t there, there was nothing there but warm air and the crackle of Calsta in his chest. Anwei stepped in front of him, a flower behind her ear, and her olive cheeks flushed as she looked up at him. “I want you to go,” she said, but then she took his hand.
She took it and pressed it to her cheek, kissed his palm with soft lips.
And then he was against her and it was his hands pulling her close. His nose in her hair. His lips against her cheek, his body curving around her as she smoothed her hand up his back…
Knox’s eyes jolted open, his body filled with a swarm of bees. The room was wrong, Jaxom, the lower moon, peering with his black-and-red-mottled face through the window with a smirk. Anwei had moved, curled up next to Knox, her eyelashes like petals against her cheek. The high collar of her tunic had come undone, the line of her throat and collarbone bared. The end of a scar marked her neck and what he could see of her shoulder, the thin white line disappearing beneath the cloth.
Breathe. Knox sat up and turned toward the wall, his bare feet cold on the smooth floor.
First I gave you my tongue, Calsta. My food, my nose.
Then my things, my bed, my clothes.
Last of all my heart, my body. They are yours.
Breathe.
Lia. What happened to Lia? The thought felt like blood pooled behind his eyes, but he shook it away. Lia was only a dream. He missed her, worried about her, but Lia had always been able to take care of herself.
The last thought that broke through was somehow worse than all the others: Anwei is your best friend. How she would laugh if she knew what you were thinking right now.
No, what mattered was what Calsta thought. Knox looked toward the window, the heat of the room leaving condensation dripping down the panes. But still it was Anwei’s face, the way she laughed, the way she would have laughed and then sent him to sleep with the rats in the other room if she’d been awake and able to see into his mind at that moment.
A bloom of fire burst inside his head. We don’t really need to talk about this, do we, Knox?
Knox curled forward, hands clutched to his head as the words charred his mind. So different from the ice of Willow’s death gasps. He sucked in a breath, fingers pulling at his hair.
Calsta. Of course she’d chime in now, not when Willow attacked him or when a sky-cursed shapeshifter peered down at them from the excavation wall.
You know I can hear all of what you are thinking, right, Knox? All of it? Believe it or not, I do have other things to do than watch you scuttle around like a little bug.
Knox tried to push space between himself and her words, holding them at arm’s length like a muddy shoe, but her voice didn’t recede, scorching holes through him. He thought back to when he’d first tried to tell the masters about Calsta’s voice, and they’d all looked at one another with worry. Asked him if he saw things that weren’t there, if the voice ever told him to do anything.
Calsta had laughed afterward. You thought they’d believe that I was speaking to you? I can’t guide people whose paths are already set in motion. Yours is a path that might fix a few things if you walk where I want you to. Something you won’t be able to do if you get distracted.
Knox hadn’t been confident enough at the time to ask what sorts of things a goddess would need him for, and when he’d asked later, she’d always told him to wait. He’d trusted her, and she’d nudged him along, taking him to Lia, to the right masters, to a safe place for the sword. Her power had made Willow’s voice quieter.
He trusted Calsta. But he’d always been able to see the shape of what he was supposed to do, until she’d told him to run away. It had been nothing but stumbling in the dark since then, Willow’s voice growing louder every day, as if she could shout the goddess herself down.
And now? It’s been a very long day, Calsta. He looked at the ceiling as if the goddess would come down from the sky and speak to him in person. Seems like running into a shapeshifter would pique your interest.
You must be very, very careful. Both about Anwei and otherwise. This is exactly where I need you, but it is very dangerous for all of us. This is the chance I’ve been waiting for, but I can’t tell you any more.
“Dangerous for you?” Knox whispered. “The goddess of the sun and storm? You can’t…” Knox threw his pillow into the wall, but he could already feel the heat receding, leaving him there alone. “What is that supposed to mean, this is exactly where you need me?”
But Calsta, as usual, only answered back when she felt like it. Had she really come down from whatever it was she did up in the sky to reprimand him over a dream? The words burned like hot coals against his forehead. Anwei shifted, her hand slipping out to rest next to him on the blankets.
He breathed in. Out. Retrieved the pillow and placed it on the floor next to the bed. Didn’t move for a moment, commanding every inch of his mind to concentrate on the way Lia’s face had looked as she stared up at him in the dream. The murderous ghost that was all the shapeshifter had left of Willow. The pockmarked sword he needed to destroy. Calsta and her burning words.
Then he stood. Laid himself down on the floor and closed his eyes. But he did not sleep for a long time.
The morning found Knox before it was fair, a hand on his shoulder giving a firm shake.
“Since when do you sleep in?” Anwei’s voice was so cheery, he wanted to fight her. She gave his shoulder a slap that was definitely harder than warranted. “Are you all right?”
He sat up a little more quickly than necessary. “I’m fine.”
Groaning, Knox stood, his whole body aching from the night on the hard floorboards. He hadn’t even taken a blanket, as if sleeping on the floor would somehow atone for his wandering mind the night before. And it had worked, apparently, because Calsta’s energy was still there waiting for him. He let out a long breath before looking over at Anwei, angry at himself for letting something so trivial as a dream shake him. “So, we go to the governor’s house?”
Anwei’s back was to him, her tunic rumpled from sleeping in it. “First I have to go to the Fig Cay. Some kind of plague outbreak.” He couldn’t help but remember the scar on her collarbone, a thin white line against her amber skin. She turned, arms raised to tie her braids at the nape of her neck. “Then I’ll talk to Noa, and we’ll plan how to get into the governor’s party. Getting in as a servant might not be hard. Getting back out with the governor’s logbooks might be more difficult if they’re watching the doors.” She paused. “Unless you think Devoted will scoop you off the streets before we get there?”
“I don’t know. It feels like…” He scratched the back of his neck, Anwei a warmth at the base of his skull. If that meant he was hidden, then they were safe. But did it? “I don’t know how it works. When it works.”
“If it works.” She waved a hand dismissively and started toward the door. “We’ll have to be careful today. Let’s go.”
He grimaced at the bowl of water, the lip edged in grime, but splashed some onto his face anyway. “I’m playing assistant, then?”
“You’ll make a good one.” She pulled the medicine bag from her shoulder and held it out to him. “You can carry my things and look very worried when I tell people how sick they are and how expensive it will be to treat them.”
Knox rolled his eyes but held his hand out for the bag.
She looped it over her own arm instead. “You really think I’m going to part with this when we have Devoted on the loose? You use your weapons, and I’ll use mine.”
Hitching a ride back to Chaol wasn’t too difficult, Anwei flipping a driver some coins and clambering into the back of the cart before it had come to a complete stop. Knox lodged himself between sacks of onions, amused when Anwei covered her nose with one hand, as if the smell was more than she could bear.
The trade gate was open again, but Knox couldn’t help but notice a Rooster stationed just inside. He didn’t recognize the girl’s aura, but he slumped down all the same, keeping out of sight.
When the cart turned off the trade road toward the Sand Cay’s main wet market, Knox hopped out and started for the tunnel that would get them to the Fig Cay. Anwei kept pace beside him, waving to farmers and traders rowing their boats up and down the green-tinged channel. On the other side of the tunnel, they followed a little offshoot waterway that snaked through the Fig Cay, the walkway cobblestones sprinkled with last night’s malt and, in some places, shards of last night’s malt glasses. Men and women with black feathers stuck into their braids sat on street corners, observing the early-morning hawkers shouting to passersby as if they owned them. Knox watched them from the corner of his eye and with his aurasight, waiting for one to challenge him and Anwei. Not many of the lower cay gangs appreciated outsiders barging in. It had probably been years since any warden had set foot in this part of town.
No one stopped them, though, and one of the watchers even went so far as to nod to Anwei. A gesture his partner enthusiastically returned before running to the woman to ask how her new twin grandbabies were faring.
Knox hung back, watching bits of unidentifiable trash float along the ditches of water that ran across the cay from the main waterway. The whole island stank of refuse and urine.
“And who is this you’ve brought us?” The woman’s voice turned Knox back around. She was carrying at least three knives and had a Crowteeth feather in her hair, but she had a smile for him because he was with Anwei. Everyone smiled for Anwei.
“This is my assistant. In fact, we’re late—we were supposed to be here yesterday.” Anwei looked around. “You’ve heard about the sickness spreading around here?”
The woman’s face blanched, and she grasped the silver amulet around her neck. “The ghost talkers?”
Anwei cocked her head. “I heard it was more of a rash.”
“Starts that way. But it’s making problems for… for people down here, if you know what I mean.” The woman touched her gang feather before sitting back down in her chair and pulling out a skein of hairy yarn and a crochet hook. “Best be careful.”
“Thank you, we will.” Anwei leaned forward to give the old woman a hug. Knox watched the old woman’s hands, particularly the one with the crochet hook, but all she did was hug Anwei back. His partner was quiet as they hopped the ditch that connected to a much larger waterway, where stalls selling fruits, vegetables, weapons, and who knew what else were open both to the walkways and to the boats floating by.
“This is it.” Anwei looked up toward the two tall buildings leaning tiredly out over the waterway. “Gulya said the south side.…” Knox tensed as a man pushed past a pair of students toward them.
“Thank Calsta. You were supposed to come yesterday, healer,” the man hissed, snatching Anwei’s arm.
Knox grabbed hold of the man’s shirt and wrenched him away from her, pinning his arms to his sides. He rooted his feet and held the man fast while Anwei brushed herself off. “Hello,” she said, smiling. Always smiling. “You must be Jecks. You asked for a healer?”
The man had only a single braid, a yellow scarf, and knuckles with enough calluses to account for every black eye in Chaol. He squirmed against Knox’s arms, his words coming out in a sputter. “My boss doesn’t know you are coming. He wasn’t going to be here yesterday.” Jecks gave a particularly violent jerk to the side and Knox let him go, sending him stumbling clear to the waterway’s lip. He teetered on the edge for a moment before he regained his balance, and when he turned, it was fear in his face, not anger. “We’d better get you inside before it goes up the string.”
Anwei nodded slowly, her smile dimming. She jerked her head for Knox to follow. “This is a gang plague house? It was all members of the…” She looked him over. “You’re a Blackheart. Right next to Crowteeth territory?”
Jecks dodged into an alleyway. “Would you move? We don’t have a lot of time.”
Knox opened his aurasight as far as he could without drawing on Calsta’s power, one hand on his knife as they followed the man. No one was lying in wait that he could see, only buildings so close together that sunlight made it to the ground in dapples and strings. Long vines trailed from windowsills above, and clotheslines were strung from window to window in a web that any spider would envy. Jecks turned toward a rickety building with stairs sticking out between floors like old bones. Knox’s aurasight flickered, doubling and redoubling. The building was crammed to the brim with people.
Knox put a hand on Anwei’s shoulder at the same moment she stopped dead in the middle of the street. The auras inside the building had a sickly, pearlescent sheen. Knox had never been able to tell much about people from their auras—no more than he could probably have seen by looking at their faces—but at least half of the auras inside the building were… wrong. Not tainted with lavender and ink like Anwei’s, and not buzzing with Calsta’s golden energy, either. They were dimmed somehow. A dying man would grow so bright, it hurt to look at his aura… but this? Anwei’s hand snaked out from her wide sleeves to grab hold of Knox’s tunic, weighing him down.
The wrongness felt familiar, like something he’d tasted before but couldn’t place. “What’s wrong with them?” Knox whispered.
Her hand clenched harder and she didn’t move, her cheeks paling as she stared up at the building.
“Quick!” Jecks held open the door to let them in and pulled it shut behind them. He started down the hall at a run. “We’ve probably only got a few minutes before one of the lookouts comes to check in. They’re down here—leeches don’t know how to help them.”
Anwei followed after a little more slowly, a hand covering her nose. Her voice croaked as she pulled open her medicine bag. “Stay close,” she murmured to Knox, then walked into the door Jecks held open for her.
Anwei gripped her bag to her chest as she followed Jecks deeper into the tenement hall. Knox followed close behind, coiled as tight as a spring in her head. The wooden floors were soft and rotting, pallets lining the hallway, doors open to sickrooms that were crammed with beds. A lower-cay healer—one of the leeches, as Jecks had called them—stood up from the pallet closest to the door Jecks led them to, interest sparking in his eyes when he saw Anwei’s braids.
“This one,” Jecks said, pointing to the bed by the door, a man lying pale against his pillow. Anwei knelt beside him, putting a hand to the patient’s forehead just as people liked her to do. Then she closed her eyes and took a shallow breath.
The biting cinnamon hue of gamtooth poisoning hovered all around the man, so strong that it seeped out to coagulate in the hallway outside. Gulya was right about the spinner poison, but that wasn’t what concerned Anwei. Underneath the smell of poison there was a tiny spiral of nothing.
Just like the guard at the trade advisor’s home. She hadn’t been able to smell any gamtooth on the guard, but it might have already left his system by the time she found him. This man had a rash down his arm and peeking from the collar of his shirt. She pulled up the shirt and found more on his chest.
Definitely gamtooth poisoning. If all the victims were here, where Crowteeth and Blackhearts collided, the likelihood was that the sickness was her fault. Knox touched her shoulder, and she looked up at him before switching to Jecks. “They’re all shut in here because they’re telling the truth, yes?”
“How did you know?” Jecks knelt down next to her, eager. “You know what it is?”
“Your boss won’t be happy you let an outsider in here.”
“That’s why you need to hurry.”
Anwei went to the next bed, occupied by a young girl. She felt for her pulse, swallowing hard at the string of nothing smell coming from her. Unobstructed truth was a little inconvenient if you happened to be in a gang. “You’re recruiting very young, it seems?”
“She’s not…” Jecks knelt next to Anwei to take the girl’s hand. He glanced at the man Anwei had just checked. “You can help them?”
“These two aren’t Blackhearts.…” Anwei stopped, her eyes weighing on Jecks’s soft touch on the man’s shoulder. “Your daughter and partner?” she asked quietly. “That’s why you risked bringing me in?”
“The people upstairs are worse. We’ve already lost three today,” the healer said quietly.
Jecks looked down at the little girl. “Can you help them before they get worse?”
The little girl’s eyes cracked open, then widened as they found Anwei hovering over her. She blinked twice, the rash a ruddy band of pustules across her cheek and down her neck. Reaching up, she took one of Anwei’s braids in her fist. “Your hair looks like snakes,” she croaked.
“Shh, that’s not very nice.” Jecks untangled the girl’s fingers from Anwei’s hair, his voice soft.
“It’s all right. She can’t help it.” Anwei stood. “It’s two things, if I’m not mistaken. One of them I can help.” She had the herbs she needed back at the apothecary to make an antidote to gamtooth venom. “The other, I’m not so sure. Are all the patients from the Fig Cay?”
The healer shook his head at the same time Jecks nodded. The Blackheart blinked, gesturing for the healer to speak. “We just had five people from the Coil dumped on our front step this morning,” he said. “Same symptoms. We think the wardens dragged them down here while it was still dark.”
The Coil? By the apothecary? Even if someone had dumped gamtooth venom in the channel there, it wouldn’t have done much. The water was too deep and clean. Anwei went to the door. “Show me.”
Jecks shook his head. “No, I want you to help my—”
“Show me now. The poison that did this shouldn’t be enough to kill anyone. It doesn’t make sense that someone from another cay would have the exact same symptoms, either. Not unless someone is poisoning unconnected groups of people on purpose.” That didn’t seem possible, because she hadn’t sold enough gamtooth to account for two sets of victims, and Anwei hadn’t cracked the spinner jar in a month except to feed the little monsters.
The healer bustled toward the door and took her to a set of stairs. Only halfway up, Anwei’s knees began to quiver. The nothing smell was stronger here. Not just threads but ropes around the victims inside. She stopped, a hand to her stomach. “Where are the bodies? Have they been burned?”
“Blackhearts carted them out as soon as they died.” Jecks peered around Knox, who had followed her up the stairs, and was now standing with a hand to his head as if he was in pain. His eyes were wide, worried.
Anwei gripped the railing, the nothing smell winding its way inside her, making her feel unmoored. The shapeshifter had been here. He’d done something, but she didn’t know what.
What she did know: gamtooth spinners weren’t common, even in the tropics. The likelihood that anyone other than her and Gulya would recognize the symptoms was very, very low.
But what if the shapeshifter had recognized the poison? Had made up his own batch of gamtooth secretions so that he could use the rash—a very odd and troubling one that most healers wouldn’t know how to treat, nor how it was spread—as a cover for something else? Something bad.
An odd mass sickness like this could have looked like an opportunity for him, to poison more people so he could put those nothing spirals in them, counting on the fact that no healer would even be able to recognize what the rash had come from. But what was he really doing?
Stealing souls? He’d stolen hers.
Not like this, though. When the snake-tooth man had taken Arun, there hadn’t been much left.
Anwei only glanced into the first two rooms, pausing when she saw the guard who had collapsed at the trade advisor’s compound the day before. Knox hovered close beside her, tensed as if he thought fighting would be a good answer to the situation. The nothing smell had begun to curdle inside her, making her dizzy. “Come on. We have to go.” She started for the stairs.
“Wait.” The healer darted to block her. “You aren’t going to examine them? You haven’t said what we can do.”
“I have some recommendations that should help.”
“But—”
“We have to leave.” Anwei pushed past the healer and Jecks, striding toward the door as fast as her feet would go without breaking into a run.
“Healer, when can we expect—” Jecks’s voice came at her, panicked.
“I’ll send someone with the herbs today. Don’t worry, your husband and daughter will be all right for that long at least.” She pushed through the front door, gasping down the muggy, corrupted air outside. But at least it wasn’t full of nothing.
Knox followed her down the street as she headed toward the canal. “What is wrong with them?”
“You could feel it too.” She threw a glance over her shoulder at the plague house, wondering if the shapeshifter was there even now. “Could you see anything in their auras?”
“Not like…” Knox glanced around them, lowering his voice. “They’re not different the way we are—their auras have no color. But there’s something wrong. I feel like I’ve seen something like it before—it’s as if they’re fading away.”
“Dying?”
“No. Like they’re leaking. Can you help them?”
“I can heal the rashes. But more than that?” Anwei hazarded one last glance at the building before turning into Crowteeth territory. Jecks was still standing in the doorway, his shoulders slumped. “They’ve all been touched by the shapeshifter.”
