And she’d turned on him. Her skin burned in shame, thinking of it. Perhaps if she’d asked for his help with the assassination, they would have succeeded.

  “You don’t have much time.” He offered her the shoes, and she laced them on. “Tiral left for the north a few days after you went to the Tohr. He was sick of raiding Struri and Diyane and wanted a bigger prize.”

  “How many Snipes dead?”

  “Too many. He’s had the army wreaking havoc for weeks. The enemy has fallen, and he’s left most of the army up there. He’s on his way back to crow about his victory, and he’s ordered a gathering at the Aerie. He’s insisting the clerics attend.”

  “It’s to announce that he’s the Tel Ilessi.” Aiz was certain of it.

  “The clerics would have to declare him so,” Cero said. “And the Triarchs would never agree. He’d have to prove his power—that he was bloodsmither, windsmither, and mindsmither. He could never—”

  “He won’t need the Triarchs. And he wouldn’t have to prove his power,” Aiz said. “Not if High Cleric Dovan vouches for him. Which she will. He jailed a hundred more clerics in the Tohr. A quarter of the clergy. He’s left her no choice, and when she declares for him, the people will believe her. Because she’s their High Cleric.”

  Understanding dawned in Cero’s eyes. “No one can manipulate those with faith like a person who has none,” he said. “We underestimated his cunning.”

  “I have to stop him,” Aiz said. “I failed before, but Mother Div is with me now. This is my calling. Can you get me a Sail big enough to challenge him?”

  “You can’t face Tiral.” Cero paced in agitation. “Especially not on a Sail. You saw his power. You nearly died because of it.”

  “Holy Div did not let me die in the Tohr. She will not let me die now.”

  “I know you think Div communicated with you.” Cero spoke more carefully than Aiz was used to. It irked her. “But you got yourself out of that prison, Aiz. You’re stronger than you think.”

  “You must believe me, Cero. I have been chosen. Mother Div came to me and to you. How else did you know to meet me on the mountain?”

  “Just a feeling. Never mind that now.” Cero knelt before her. “Look at me, Aiz,” he said, and as she met his gaze, she lost her breath. She had not looked openly into Cero’s eyes in so long that she’d nearly forgotten their strange color, a deep green that mirrored the sea on days when it appeared calm but was something else entirely.

  “I believe you heard Div’s voice,” Cero said. “I will help you however I can, but you must leave Kegar. I do not think it is Div’s intention that you remain here. The Lady of the Air was many things, and a fool wasn’t one of them. The legends say that she, too, left our people for a time.”

  An old story the clerics rarely told, as it was not in one of the Sacred Tales. Aiz couldn’t recall it in full. She was surprised Cero even knew of it.

  “I’m meant to save our people from Tiral’s machinations, Cero. Not run away. Mother Div said—”

  “We don’t have time to argue.” Cero looked out at the sea. “I should be patrolling the northern border right now. If I’m discovered missing right when you escape, they’ll assume I helped you. Tiral knows that I—that we’re friends.”

  “Friends,” Aiz said softly. In the months before Cero had been chosen as a pilot, her relationship with him, as solid and reliable as the walls of the cloister, had changed. Touches that had felt casual no longer were; she’d found herself watching him more, and when his stormy eyes locked on hers, she felt heat ripple through her marrow.

  And then the night before he became a pilot—that kiss. She still felt it. Aiz thought if they were both selected to fly, they could talk about it. But that never happened.

  Cero pulled Aiz to standing and she followed his attention to the coast. Through the gloom, a ship approached.

  It was preternaturally silent, as if the creak of rigging and groan of wood had been swallowed up. It appeared nameless, the deck looked empty, and Aiz couldn’t tell if the vessel was real or if exhaustion had her hallucinating. But then she saw the ship’s sail, a deep forest green with an enormous eye painted on it.

  An Ankanese ship.

  “There’s a seer on that ship,” Aiz said. The Ankanese only flew a green sail to warn off pirates. Any approach by any nation would be viewed as an act of war.

  And no nation would be thoughtless enough to test the Ankanese. Their navy and siege machines were powerful, their seers even more so. Most attacks on them had been turned away before they began. The Kegari didn’t cross them—the Ankanese were the only foreigners they traded with, and their language was the only foreign language spoken in Kegar. Aiz had learned it fluently, like all the other cloister children.

  “I know the seer.” Cero nodded at the ship. “She’s visited Kegar for years. A few days ago, she sent me a message. Told me I’d have need of her. Just now, I went to find her. The ship was waiting, ready to depart. I made sure Tregan was aboard.”

  Aiz spun toward him, heart leaping in hope.

  “You would come with me?”

  But Cero shook his head. “I wanted you to have a friendly face. Treg always liked you better.”

  He handed her the pack. “Some supplies and enough Ankanese silver talas to start you on your journey. I put Tiral’s book in here too. Tried to destroy it, but the damned thing won’t burn. Maybe you can reason out why he was so obsessed with it.”

  A splash sounded from the sea. A rowboat with a lone figure draped in green approached. The boat moved slowly—slower than it should in the rough surf. It stopped near an outcropping of rock jutting from the right side of the cave, a natural dock. Aiz caught a glimpse of pale skin within the green hood. The figure watched her, unmoving.

  The reality of what Aiz was facing suddenly hit her. Tiral would be searching for her. She’d be adrift in foreign lands. She couldn’t speak Kegari because it would be a dead giveaway. She’d have to only speak in Ankanese.

  “Tiral might hire a Jaduna to hunt you,” Cero said. “Don’t windsmith; they can sense magic. You’ll know them by—”

  “I saw one, once.” Aiz remembered the shine of her coins, and the fact that the woman spent so much time with the orphans at Dafra. “I will return, Cero.” Her surety was thunder in her blood. “I will defeat Tiral.”

  “Aiz, there are things I’m supposed to say.” Cero took a deep breath, cracks showing on his usually composed face. “But I can’t bring myself to say them. You don’t owe Kegar anything. No matter what you saw. You have a chance to make another life, a better one far away. One day, I’ll get out too, and I’ll find you. All of this”—he nodded to the distant hovels of Dafra slum, a dark smudge in the sleet—“will be a bad memory.”

  He slipped something onto her hand—her aaj. “Keep it,” he said. “Don’t use it unless you’re dying—the Jaduna can track this magic. If you truly need me, I’ll be listening.”

  They’d reached the boat, for Cero had walked her toward it, ever so slowly. Now he pushed her into the arms of the green-robed seer, who held Aiz with a vise grip. The boat lurched away from the rocky dock.

  “Wait— Cero—”

  Sudden fear gripped her. The farthest she’d gone from Kegar was a pilgrimage to Mother Div’s cloister at the base of the Spires. Suddenly, the days ahead felt vast and unknowable. She wanted to dive into the water and swim back to Cero, to her people, to Div and the holy labor she’d entrusted to Aiz.

  But the rowboat reached the dhow and hands pulled her onto the deck. The ship moved away from the shore impossibly fast. By the time Aiz ran back to the rail to look for Cero, the cave, her friend, all of Kegar, had faded into the rain.

  14

  Quil

  Quil composed his face as he wiped his hands and scim—wet from the blood of so many dead Kegari—on the scarf Musa had placed earlier. The prince was skilled at walling off his emotions. He’d learned through the gauntlet of court life, his every expression dissected and analyzed.

  So, even as Navium burned and the roar of fire marked the destruction of the world he knew, he forced himself to focus on what was before him: A girl with bitter laughter. A friend so terrified of losing the people he loved that he was willing to kill her. And the very real possibility that the Kegari would swoop down and blow this shabka to pieces if they didn’t get the hells away from Navium.

  “Quil.” Arelia scanned the ocean and skies. “We need to pick a direction.”

  The tracker stopped laughing. “The next time you talk to dear Da”—she glared at Sufiyan—“tell him I don’t appreciate him chaining me to a mission he wasn’t honest about. When my family finds me and subjects me to a brutal death, tell him my ghost will follow him around wailing and tormenting him until the end of his days!”

  Sufiyan hadn’t released his knife, and Quil stepped between him and the tracker. More death wasn’t going to solve anything.

  “What did you do to him?” Sufiyan demanded.

  “Nothing! As if anyone could take that ring off your father.” The girl rolled her brown eyes and shimmied back to put distance between herself and Sufiyan. Despite her bindings she moved with grace. “Do you even know the man? He could crush my skull with his bare hand. I told you, he gave it to me.”

  Quil eased the dagger from Sufiyan’s hand and pulled him a few steps away, toward Arelia. “I don’t think she’s lying, Suf.” The prince glanced at the shoreline, where Sails patrolled. “We’ll get more answers later. Right now, we need to get the hells out of here. I’m thinking we head south.”

  He didn’t elaborate. He’d told Suf and Arelia about Aunt Hel’s orders as soon as they left the palace. If they were to find Tas, then they needed to get to the Ankanese capital, Burku.

  Arelia understood Quil’s intent and spun the shabka’s wheel. The tracker shook her head.

  “You understand geography, yes? The Kegari are coming from the south.”

  While Quil didn’t think the girl was a spy, he didn’t trust her enough to tell her anything significant.

  “We have friends there,” Sufiyan spoke up. “Though—maybe we should head to the Tribal Lands. Take shelter. Or ask the jinn for help.”

  Arelia spoke up from the helm. “They won’t help,” she said. “The palace engineers wished to visit their capital. Their ruling council told us to get stuffed. They want nothing to do with humans.”

  “Head west.” The tracker fidgeted, not-so-surreptitiously pulling at her bonds. “To Jibaut.”

  “The Kegari are using Jibaut for their reserve troops.” Sufiyan was calmer now, though still cautious of the girl. “We can’t go straight into the maw of the beast.”

  “No one will expect anyone fleeing Navium to head west,” the girl said, and Quil wondered if he was imagining the slight desperation in her voice. “I have friends in Jibaut. Kade, a rare books dealer. He knows everything that goes on in that city—he’ll know how to avoid the Kegari.”

  “That’s not worth our lives.” Sufiyan turned to Quil and Arelia. “If we go east, we can get a proper ship, clothing, weaponry.” He looked down at his finery in disgust. “We don’t even have armor.”

  The tracker groaned. “You can get those things in Jibaut! I could—”

  “Jibaut is too dangerous.” Quil spoke firmly, lest the tracker think she had a say in where they went. “The Tribal Lands aren’t safe. If the Kegari attack—”

  “We should be there,” Sufiyan said. “Tribe Saif is wintering in Sadh. We must warn them.”

  “Musa will have done it already.” Arelia lowered her voice. “With the wights. Quil’s right.”

  “You should untie me,” the tracker called out. “Whichever way you’re going, we need to move faster. I can help.”

  Quil met her gaze, trying to read the intention behind it, trying to glean any information at all. She spoke Serran with a slight lilt, but Quil couldn’t place where she was from. One might say she had the long lashes of a Scholar, or the high cheekbones and square jaw of a Martial, and yet on closer inspection, she looked like neither. She wore tight-fitting leathers and deep red boots, and though she was tall, Quil was taller. She was striking, and from the smirk on her face, Quil suspected she knew it.

  “Like what you see, Martial?”

  Quil flushed and looked away.

  “What do we do with her?” Arelia lowered her voice. “We can’t keep her tied up all the way to Ankana.”

  “If Aba hired her,” Sufiyan said, “I want to know why. He’s been traveling for months looking for…”

  The murderer. Sufiyan didn’t say it, but they all knew.

  “But Ama asked him to come home,” Sufiyan said. “You know he can’t say no to her. Maybe he hired this tracker to continue the hunt.”

  If that was the case, Elias wouldn’t want the girl anywhere near Sufiyan. He’d wanted to join his father and hunt his younger brother’s murderer—had fought for days with his mother and sisters about it before acquiescing to their wishes and staying behind in the Tribal Lands.

  Quil put a hand to his head. Skies, he needed time to think, to consider all the implications of keeping this tracker on the ship.

  Far ahead, the land curved and Quil could make out a thin white band of beach. In the sun, the water would be pale blue.

  Aunt Helene taught him to swim in those shoals as a boy. He’d feared the deeper water, the way the ocean dropped away and he couldn’t feel anything beneath his feet. You must learn, his aunt insisted. You can’t trust someone else to save you. You must do the saving. Do it enough and you’ll develop a knack for it. An instinct you’ll learn to trust.

  He wouldn’t throw this tracker in the sea. That instinct his aunt had tried to drill into him now told him that he needed to give her a chance to prove herself.

  “She’ll stay on board,” Quil said.

  “Oi. Martial,” the tracker called out beside the shabka’s rail. “As much as I enjoy being tied up by you, I really think you should unbind me.”

  “Quil!” Sufiyan grabbed his arm. At first, the prince couldn’t make out what he was pointing to, but then he caught a flash of movement in the distant skies behind them.

  Kegari Sails. Heading straight for them.

  “They can’t possibly see us from that far away,” Arelia said, but she didn’t sound particularly sure of herself.

  “They’re coming right at us.” The blood drained from Sufiyan’s face. “There’s nothing else out here.”

  Quil’s stomach lurched, the way it used to when he had to face a room of courtiers. But with Sufiyan and Arelia staring at the Sails in stark terror, he forced himself to speak calmly.

  “Can you make this thing go any faster, Arelia?” he asked.

  “Maybe if I had a few days to tinker with the engine. But I’ve only ever seen schematics.”

  “You can’t outrun them,” the tracker said, staring at the Sails. “Even if you had ten engines. Untie me. I can help.”

  Sufiyan and Arelia ignored her, the latter scanning the shore. “We won’t make it to land,” she said.

  “You should jump.” Sufiyan’s voice was flat. “You and Quil. I’ll stay here, distract them—”

  Arelia frowned. “That serves no purpose. The odds are that—”

  Quil clenched his fists as Arelia and Sufiyan argued. They couldn’t run. They couldn’t hide. They couldn’t even fight, because the Kegari would rain down fire and death.

  “Martial.” The tracker spoke, low enough that only Quil could hear her. She squirmed, panic creeping onto her features. “I’d say we have seven minutes before they start circling. Another three before they drop one of those infernal bombs on us. Let me go—I swear, I’ll get us out of it. You can trust me. I’ll prove it.”

  Quil approached her warily.

  “Lift up my shirt. I want you to see something,” she said, and at Quil’s scandalized expression, she sighed. “Not that. Lift it!”

  He did as she asked, her skin warm against his fingertips. She had an injury above her hip that had bled through a binding. He winced at the sight.

  “I’ll deal with it later.” She flicked her gaze down to a pouch strapped at the flare of her waist. “Untie it,” she said. “Quickly.”

  At the surprising heft of the pouch, the prince realized what was inside.

  “Bleeding hells,” he said. “How much—”

  “That’s the ten percent Elias paid me to take on this mission.” She spoke with an intensity that startled Quil. He wasn’t used to it. Probably because so few people were willing to meet his gaze for an entire sentence.

  “You don’t know me. I understand that,” she said. “But consider: Sufiyan’s father and the hero of the bleeding Empire trusted me enough to hire me for a job. To pay me for it.”

  If Quil reached out to touch her, if he let his magic out of its cage, he’d see her memories. He’d know in an instant if she was telling the truth.

  Yes, his magic whispered.

  No, Quil growled back. He had no intention of digging around someone’s mind.

  “Your friend was right—I’m tracking a murderer.” Sirsha glanced over Quil’s shoulder at the swiftly approaching Sails. “Elias trusted me because he knew my reputation and because I gave him my word.”

  Quil quashed his sadness at how desperate Elias must have been to hire an unproven tracker from skies-knew-where to hunt down the fiend who killed his son.