Such a Daring Endeavor (2 page)

She explained it to Shasa once, how she was being raised to one day rule Itharia. The irony of the girl’s nobility has never been as stark to Shasa as it is in this moment, with the filth clumping Jomeini’s black hair together and the smears of dirt on her scarred cheek.

“I told you not to worry about coming back for me,” Jomeini says.

“And you know how well I listen,” Shasa replies. “What happened with the wine?”

Jomeini shakes her head. “You would know if it worked.” She continues scratching away at the paper, sadness marring her face like she’s mourning a recent death.

“We’ll find another way. You’re always telling me not to get upset. See how perfectly calm I am?” Shasa forces a grin in attempt to win one from her friend

Jomeini sniffs.

“What has he done to you?” Shasa asks with a hopeless sigh, sinking back against the crates.

“It’s not just him. I’m…I’m not…” The words fade away. Jomeini’s pencil treads harder on the page until black marks stretch over its surface. Her expression hardens, and she bares her teeth, fisting the pencil like a weapon. She slashes at the parchment now, over and over.

Shasa grips her wrist, stopping the frantic scribbling. “Stop,” she says. “What are you talking about? Are you—?”

At Shasa’s touch, Jomeini drops the pencil. She strokes her hairline, rubbing at a spot above her ears with trembling fingers. A slight chinking sound joins the movement, though Shasa can’t figure out why.

“I can’t set them free,” says Jomeini. “But I can’t keep them caged any longer.”

“Jo—” But Shasa’s words cut off. There it is again, that chinking sound. She pries the girl’s black hair up away from her shoulders.

Jomeini—her sweet, innocent Jomeini—has a thick, metal collar engulfing her throat.

“What is this?”

Jomeini’s fingers fly to the metal collar as though she forgot it was there.

“No,” Shasa says, tugging on the chain, following its lead link by link until she finds the eyelet it’s attached to. She licks her lips and pulls at the chain, desperate to rip it free, but that only draws out a cry from Jomeini.

“He smelled the poison. He knew what I was trying to do.”

“No,” Shasa tells her, flustered. “It wasn’t supposed to be like this.”

“Shasa—”

“No!” She draws out her pouch and thrusts it toward Jomeini. “This is how I’ve stayed away from him. I planned on using this to get you out once before, but…”

All senses of power over the situation slip from Shasa’s fingers. Of all the things she had tried to think ahead and plan for, Jomeini being chained like a dog was never one of them.

“How does it come off?” Shasa asks, prying at the metal, tilting Jomeini’s head this way and that gently, though she wants to tear the thing apart as quickly as she can.

Jomeini winces, pulling at Shasa’s hands. “It doesn’t. Ow, please stop. It won’t come off. Not unless Craven wants it to.”

“So there’s no key?”

“My magic is the key,” Jomeini says. “And he has it.”

Shasa feels like punching the glass over the boat’s dashboard. Shattering it. This is not how the rescue was supposed to go. Craven was supposed to stumble across the poisoned wine. And if that didn’t work she would sacrifice the last of her banshing powder for Jomeini. She was supposed to get her
out
. Now Solomus and Craven will return, and it will be too late for either.

Wait. Solomus.

“Your grandfather,” Shasa says in a blaze of inspiration. “He’s here with me. Maybe he can get this off.”

Jomeini goes so still, her eyes so wide, Shasa wonders if she isn’t going to cry again.

“He can’t come in here.” Jomeini’s voice breaks. Her quaking fingers touch the bumpy scars on her left cheek. Her skin was burned so badly that day. “You know what happened the last time he tried.”

“That’s why he didn’t come in with me. But he will, if I tell him what happened.”

Twice now she’s left Jomeini behind. She won’t do it a third time.

Jomeini shifts, sitting flat on the towel’s dingy surface. She smoothes a hand over her wool skirt. “You know I can’t leave, Shasa. Not just because Craven commanded me not to. He chained me to the boat so I’d be ready to leave at a moment’s notice. Craven…he’s taking me to Arcaia.”

Shasa freezes. “He’s what?” She glances around at the boat, at the pathetic provisions; the preserved meat and fruit, the chain locking Jomeini to the bar along the boat’s walls, the filthy blankets.

Craven can’t possibly think he can cross Hollin’s Strait in an aluminum fishing boat. Shasa herself has never attempted crossing the Strait, but from what she understands the creatures between the two countries don’t like boats. A wussy little thing like this one will never make it.

Jomeini swallows, fingering the collar with slender, dark fingers. “I had another vision after…after the last one you witnessed.”

Shasa hangs her head down with several nods. She doesn’t need Jomeini to elaborate. Shasa already knows she’s talking about
the
vision. The one that caused her to break through her grandfather’s magical barrier. The one that made her cry.

Shasa still doesn’t know what Jomeini Saw, or what she drew about it afterward. And if Craven knew about it, they sure wouldn’t be sitting here now. He would have taken the tears that came as a result of it. That vision was exactly what Craven demanded of Jomeini for so long; it was the reason he took her in the first place—for Jomeini to See a way to overthrow Tyrus and for Craven to get his revenge. Too bad the old man was as deranged as a bat, Shasa thinks, or he might come in handy.

“And Craven knew about this one?” Shasa asks.

Jomeini chews her lip. “I Saw Tyrus crossing an ocean.”

“And you told him that? Lie to him, maiden! You should know better than to tell him the truth! You can’t give in. What’s he going to do with you now that he’s gotten a vision about Tyrus out of you?” Drag her around like a pathetic dog?

On that note, Shasa doesn’t want to think about what Craven will do to
her
now if he catches her here. Craven kidnapped her as a companion for Jomeini, an attempt to get Jomeini to have the vision he craved so badly. Now that Jomeini has finally had one—especially since Shasa wasn’t here for it—will he think she’s no longer needed? He has her magic, and he probably won’t want to give that up. But Shasa isn’t about to wait and find out.

Jomeini inhales. “He thinks it meant the Wending Ocean; he thinks it meant Tyrus is going back to Arcaia.”

Shasa scoffs in incredulity. “So he’s determined to go and beat him there? Tyrus isn’t going anywhere—not without finishing this war he’s concocting here in Itharia. Has Craven always been this idiotic?”

Jomeini pauses before her face breaks into a timid smile, her brows slightly lifted. A snort escapes from Shasa, and then the two girls laugh in spite of the seriousness. They both know what the answer to the question is—a resounding
yes.

Shasa fingers the edges of the blanket, one of the few spots not soiled by dirt. “You’ve told him time and again how those visions work. Did you draw him anything for this one? Do you know what it really means?”

Jomeini clears her throat and pulls out a single card from her pack beside the upturned crate. She hands it to Shasa.

It’s a sketch, stenciled in magical lead from the Seer’s pencils. A star bursting across the sky, drawn with surges of light streaking in its wake. Shasa isn’t sure how this ties in to Tyrus sailing away.

“And this means…?”

“The visions don’t always tie directly into the drawings. Before I met you, my grandfather was teaching me how to use wizard’s bleakfire. I had just touched one of my favorite plants and accidentally withered it because of the fire in my blood, and I was feeling heartsick. I was sitting alone in my room after that when a vision came.”

Shasa is surprised to hear this. Jomeini never mentioned it before.

“In the vision, I was sitting on a bench,” says Jomeini, her eyes distant. “The sunlight beat warm against the stone I sat on, but the wind that blew was brisk and harsh. A storm rode on that wind, a storm I knew I wouldn’t be able to stop. Afterwards, I drew this.”

Jomeini pulls another card from beside the others and hands it to Shasa.

“It’s a coat,” Shasa says, confused. She traces a finger over the handless, headless trenchcoat, drawn as though it’s blowing in the very wind Jomeini claims she felt during its vision.

“I assumed it meant that I wouldn’t be comfortable in my home much longer, that I would need protection from whatever storm was riding on that wind. I assumed it meant that Grandfather was taking me from my refuge, my home in Xavienke, and that I would need to find protection in Valadir. And it did, in a sense. But the drawing was also literal. Whose coat do you see?”

Chills brush across Shasa’s skin. “Color it yellow, and that could be Craven’s.”

Jomeini rubs her arms as if chafing away whatever memory fills her mind at that moment. Shasa wonders if it’s the same one she’s recalling, the sight of the dingy yellow trenchcoat Craven wore the day he snatched Shasa from right in front of the Triad Palace into an abandoned building and stole her magic then and there.

“What does the star mean, then?” Shasa asks. When Jomeini doesn’t answer immediately, Shasa continues thinking aloud. “Stars provide light in the night sky. They’ve held their places for years, giving sailors something to sail by.”

“But this one is a shooting star,” Jomeini says. “This one is setting off on its own course.”

“And you think it pertains to Tyrus?”

Jomeini shakes her head. “I thought so at first. I Saw Tyrus, yes. But I Saw others with him. Among his soldiers was a blonde woman I didn’t recognize.”

“A group of stars,” Shasa says inwardly. “With one straying from all the rest.”

“It means change is coming, and someone is at the center of it. I thought it was Tyrus, but now I’m not so sure. See the other star beside this? See how the bursts on the star go one way, so it looks like the star can be spearing to the left? But if you look at it this way…” Jomeini turns the card until it’s upside down. “Now the star could be shooting to the right.”

“So Tyrus isn’t leaving?”

“Not in so many words. It’s more complicated than I can explain, but something Tyrus is going to do will be as vast as the effort of crossing an ocean with no other guide but the stars. It’s going to change the world as we know it. And depending on what we do, that change is going to veer the races one way or the other. For good.” She holds the star picture one way. “Or for ill.” She turns it the other direction.

Shasa swallows and takes the card, experimenting. The star’s direction turns with each flip, more indecisive than the weather. It’s like the picture of a smiling man with a furrow in his forehead her mother used to draw. She would turn it upside down, and though the picture hadn’t changed at all, the man would look sad and menacing instead. All because of one or two carefully placed lines.

“So how do we get this change to veer in the direction we want it to go?” Shasa asks.

Jomeini doesn’t answer. Instead, she fingers the collar at her throat. The two girls sit in the boat in silence, bathing in the deep wake of their thoughts.

W
arwick Cunningham could have sworn nothing would ever surprise him again. How wrong he was.

He eyes his surroundings in the lower level of the Triad Palace and rubs the talisman on his wrist. It’s thick metal, tarnished like his grandmother’s silver. With his hands strapped together by the thin Prone, also around his wrists, he imagines earlier days, romping through wheat fields in the blazing hot sun and being called in by his grandmother to polish that silver. The acrid smell of the polish is so vivid he can almost smell it now, the way the cloth felt in his hands and the residue that left his fingers slick like grease.

“Like that, do you?”

Tyrus Blinnsdale’s voice breaks across the lab, echoing off empty glass beakers and silver pans resting over unlit stoves.

The general—not just any general, but the Office of the Arcaians—comes into view from behind stacks of metal sheets that are larger than the walls of Warwick’s meager home back in Jienke. General Blinnsdale wears a tan uniform, a stiff, short hat with a narrow black brim tucked under one arm. His head is bald, and a sturdy mustache nestles above thin lips.

Warwick isn’t sure if he
likes
the talisman or not. Some type of technology wired into the metal released his emotions the instant Miss Hawkes’ will overrode his own. Though it’s been a day since it happened, his thigh still burns where the blonde girl thrust her Xian claw in and claimed him for her minion.

She struts behind the Arcaian general now, her face beaming in Warwick’s direction. Fear layers itself in at the sight of her. Fear and anger so hot it makes sweat bead down his spine beneath his tweed shirt. And the realization of it all makes him weak. So weak, his knees give out, and he collapses to the marble floor of his new chambers.

The instant the blonde Miss Hawkes snapped this bracelet on, the wharf blocking his emotions opened. A collision of pain welled at the wound, searing a heavy, wretched pulsing clear into his bones and back. His eyes bulged, burning away any moisture that should’ve been there.