She glanced up at him as he looked down at her. Aiz let her eyes drop to his mouth. She should have looked away quickly, kept him on edge. Instead, she found herself fascinated at the shape of his lips, the top one fuller, a stark contrast to his square jaw, his overly sharp cheekbones.

  Quil cleared his throat. “We can practice tomorrow,” he said. “With wooden swords.” He pointed to a rocky hill ahead. “Good view up there. Better than anything in Antium, anyway.”

  Aiz suppressed a frown. She thought he’d kiss her. He must be shyer than she realized.

  “Was Antium really just boring meetings?”

  “Sort of. My aunt’s pulling me deeper into the running of things. She wanted me to stay longer, but Tas and I convinced her to let me go.”

  “What’s his job in the Tribe?”

  Quil laughed. “Embarrassing me and breaking hearts.”

  “Breaking hearts. Not something I have to worry about with you, I hope?” Aiz looked up at him through her eyelashes, smiling to herself when he reddened and shook his head.

  “Your aunt,” she said. “She’s young, no? Does she expect you to rule soon?”

  “She never wanted to be Empress.” They trudged up the hill along a well-trod trail. A ravine fell away to their left. To their right, the hill rose in a jumble of rocky crags, blocking the view of the Saif encampment. The wind prickled at Aiz, as if in warning, and she kept away from the edge of the ravine.

  “She’s told me since I was a child that she’s holding the throne for me.”

  “Do you want it?”

  “No one ever asks that.” Quil looked at her in surprise. “I don’t know. I—I suppose I don’t have a choice.”

  “This makes you unhappy.” She watched his face. “Because you will not be with the Tribes?”

  “I’ll be in the capital. Antium. Eventually I’ll marry and have heirs, and…try to be as good a leader as my aunt. I’m afraid I won’t be, though. I’m afraid I’m not even a fraction of the ruler she is.”

  It was the most honest thing he’d said to her, and she was both moved by the sincerity of it and determined to get more out of him.

  “Because you feel unprepared?” she pressed. “Or because she was trained as a Mask, and you weren’t?”

  Quil looked at her in surprise and Aiz cursed herself. Perhaps the conversational leap had been too great.

  “She trained me as a Mask, even if I don’t wear one.”

  “They are strange,” Aiz said. “Metal, but…not.”

  “Liquid metal,” Quil said. “Elias always hated his. Took it off before it could join with him.”

  “The metal,” Aiz pressed. “Where does it come from? And is it…alive?”

  Quil nodded. “No one living knows where it’s mined. And it’s sentient, according to Elias. He might still have his mask. I’m sure he’d show it to you if you asked. I’m guessing Ankana doesn’t have anything like them?”

  Aiz shook her head. “We have seers. We don’t need Masks.”

  “So, your people—your group is ruled by the Eye of Ankana?”

  Aiz, like most who’d been educated in the cloisters, knew much about Ankana. Still, she felt a bead of sweat trickle down her neck. “The Eye is not to be questioned.”

  “Might the Eye be persuaded to help your people? I’ve met the High Seer. Maybe if I know more about what your people are suffering, I could talk to him. Try to help.”

  Aiz glanced at Quil in surprise, nearly tripping face-first into the ravine. Quil’s hand shot out, warm on her wrist as he pulled her back from the edge.

  “Careful,” he said.

  Her pulse quickened at his closeness. Then confusion hit. He offered his influence so freely.

  Perhaps he did this out of kindness, and it was hard for her to recognize because she’d known so little of it. But the part of her that survived the Kegari gutters hissed that he must have an ulterior motive for helping her.

  “Maybe the High Seer could help,” Aiz answered his question. “Though in truth, I would like to speak to your Empress of my people’s troubles.” It was the Empress who had power here. The Empress who could help the Kegari, if she was willing to listen.

  Aiz intended to ask Quil more about his aunt when a breeze nudged her in warning and her magic tingled. Something—someone—approached.

  Aiz realized that she and Quil were in a perfect spot for an ambush. They couldn’t escape up the mountain, nor into the ravine. She hunched quickly, knowing to make herself a smaller target, just as a volley of darts flew toward her companion. Assassin!

  Quil stepped in front of her. “Ilar, run!”

  Aiz lashed out with her windsmithing, thinking the word shield! The darts dropped to the ground. Along with Quil.

  The assassin came surging down the trail. Aiz remembered what Mother Div had taught her before. To call the wind, hold it, and shape it into a spear. She did so now, flinging the wind at the assassin. The woman gasped as it hit, her boot slipping off the narrow trail and sliding into the ravine. She screamed, the sound fading as she dropped down the canyon. Distantly, Aiz heard a thump.

  She was already turning to Quil. His eyes appeared glassy and unfocused, and she wasn’t sure if he could even see her.

  “Where are you hit, Quil?” She leaned over him, trying to make out his body in the moonlight. “Can you tell me?”

  “N-neck. Poison. Could be Nightweed. Could be Anithas.”

  Aiz felt methodically along his throat, going slow. The darts were small.

  “S-sorry I—I don’t always know what to say to you,” Quil continued gabbling. “I feel out of my depth when we talk. You smile and it does strange things to me. Which is odd because I’ve hardly spent any time with you. And Tas said to be careful, and I want to listen to Tas—”

  Not on the left side of his throat. Aiz moved her fingers to the right.

  “But Tas doesn’t know anything about love—had his heart broken once and he’s hopped from bed to bed since. Anyway, I’m not in love! Skies, I don’t even know you. But you’re good to Ruh and— Am I talking too much? Why am I talking so much?”

  Aiz had no idea, but she’d found the dart. With careful fingers she plucked it out, thin and featherlight—almost impossible to see.

  “Oh hells,” Quil said. “It is Anithas. That’s why I’m talking so much. Um—you’ll—have to get the poison out.” He looked away, and despite herself, Aiz smiled.

  “Is the mighty Prince of the Martial Empire blushing because I’ll have to suck poison out of his neck?”

  She put her lips near the bite before he could answer and drew out the poison quickly, spitting the bitter liquid to the ground.

  “Thank—thank you.” Quil shuddered as if to shake off the poison’s lingering effects. After a few moments, he stood with her help. Sudden horror dawned on his face.

  “Oh hells,” he whispered. “I don’t know what I was saying. I’m sorry—”

  “Nothing to worry about,” Aiz said, relieved that he was all right. “We should get you back. Have the healer look at you. And Elias will want to do a sweep of the area—”

  “No,” Quil said. “I have an antidote in my tent. I don’t need the healer. And I don’t want Elias to know. He’ll tell my aunt. What happened to the assassin?”

  “Dead.” She nodded to the ravine. Far below, a dark lump was splayed on the rocks, a pool of blood spreading out from her head. “Tripped coming down the hill.”

  “Huh. I thought I saw—” He shook his head, and Aiz spoke quickly.

  “We should tell Elias,” she said, because doing so would make her appear honest. “He’d want to know. And—perhaps deal with the body.”

  But Quil shook his head.

  “Scavengers will take care of the body, and she tried to kill me, so she doesn’t deserve any better,” he said. “I’ve fought off thirteen assassination attempts in just the past few years. Sometimes, it’s another Martial Gens. Sometimes a Karkaun. It doesn’t matter who’s trying to kill me. After every attempt, my aunt and I argue about whether I should have guards trailing me. I hate being caged, Ilar. I hate when choices aren’t my own.”

  “I’d hate that too.” She thought of the Tohr. “I won’t say anything.”

  She told herself it was because he’d now owe her a favor. But some part of her also felt gratified at the relief on his face.

  When they returned to camp around dawn, Elias, sharpening his scim and chatting with Tas before his own watch duty, approached them.

  “Anything?”

  Quil shook his head, and Elias shifted his gaze to Aiz. She felt pinned, and forced herself to smile.

  “All quiet!” she said easily in Ankanese. Tas glanced up at her, head tilted as if she’d said something fascinating.

  Elias’s eyes narrowed ever so slightly, and Aiz felt a twinge of frustration. Somehow, he’d sniffed out her lie.

  “I have a question,” she said, hoping to distract him. “About—about your mask. Quil was telling me about them. Do you—still have it?”

  Aiz smiled guilelessly, hoping Elias would think she was a breathless kid hearing stories from the boy she liked. Sweet. Foreign. Harmless.

  “No,” the big Martial said, sliding his scim into its scabbard. “Sufiyan’s on breakfast duty,” he informed Quil. “Get something to eat.”

  “Hells, Elias, don’t scare the poor girl,” Aiz heard Tas mutter as she and Quil walked away. “She only met us a few weeks ago.”

  Quil reached out and squeezed Aiz’s hand as they walked away. “Thank you. I owe you.”

  Aiz shrugged it off, magnanimous. When she glanced back over her shoulder, Elias was contemplating them, a hand on the dagger at his waist. Aiz looked swiftly away, but the message was clear.

  She was being watched.

  26

  Quil

  The woman appeared out of nowhere. She wore shades of green that blended into the jungle so seamlessly that at first, Quil thought he was hallucinating a pale floating head.

  Then she crouched beside Sirsha, the pelt of emerald feathers woven into her blond hair giving her the look of some delicate bird. Quil drew his scim, but Sirsha croaked, “Loli Temba,” before her lids fluttered closed over her ghostly white irises.

  Quil knelt and felt for her pulse, expelling a breath when he felt it, strong and rhythmic.

  “She’s alive.” He’d no sooner said it than Arelia turned on Sufiyan.

  “What the bleeding hells did you put in that porridge this morning?”

  “Nothing!” Sufiyan crouched beside Sirsha, trying to figure out what was wrong with her. “We all ate it. Let me check her for injuries.”

  “Boy.” Loli Temba spoke so quietly that it wasn’t until she fixed her pale blue eyes on Quil that he realized she was talking to him. “When did it pick up your trail?”

  To Quil’s surprise, she spoke fluent Serran.

  With a Karkaun accent.

  Arelia noticed at the same moment that Quil did, and glowered. The temperature in the little clearing seemed to drop a few degrees.

  Most Karkauns had the sense to stay away from Martials. Quil still remembered the day he’d learned about the horror they’d inflicted on Antium twenty years ago. His aunt had insisted on telling him herself.

  They mutilated and murdered their own women and children, then used unholy magic to resurrect their spirits and unleash them on us. They brought us to our knees in mere days.

  Quil had been born in the middle of that war, as the capital around him fell. He’d been spirited away to safety. But those left behind endured Karkaun atrocities that still haunted the city.

  Loli Temba regarded Arelia dispassionately. “You hate my people,” she said. “Good. I hate them too.” She turned her full attention to Quil. “I ask again. When did it pick up your trail?”

  “Sirsha’s sister’s been tracking us,” he said. “But we haven’t seen her for days. We were looking for you. We have questions—”

  Loli hissed through her teeth as if in sudden pain and held up a hand to cut him off. She hummed and the air shimmered in a strange, diamond pattern, like a net made of dew.

  Overhead, the clouds shifted and blocked out the sun. The jungle, dim from the thick canopy, grew darker.

  Near the road they’d turned off, something moved.

  Quil couldn’t make out a shape, let alone a face. But the hair on the back of his neck rose, and he drew his scim. The familiar slide of metal against leather was small comfort. Beside him, Arelia stepped forward, peering at the road.

  Loli Temba grabbed Arelia’s arm, shaking her head.

  A moment later, Arelia’s surly frustration turned to fright. Quil tried to lift his scim, but terror crept into his chest.

  The feeling was horribly familiar, though he’d encountered it only once in his life: when he was twelve and an assassin nearly got the best of him. He’d never forget her grinning face as her knee pressed down on his chest, squeezing the air from his lungs.

  Now, in the Thafwan jungle, he felt that soul-deep fear again. Sufiyan’s face went pale, his lips blue. He opened and closed his mouth the way he had that awful day a year ago, when he realized his little brother was dead. Quil tried to shake off his own dread and grabbed his friend’s shoulder. “I’m here, Suf,” he whispered. “I’m here.”

  Arelia’s arms shook, her head tucked into her knees, and Quil reached for her hand. With Loli Temba hovering, the three of them crouched around a prone Sirsha, waiting, unable to countenance the terror in their chests, to explain it, other than that it felt as if the reaper himself whispered in their ears all the ways they could suffer. All the ways they could die.

  The clouds shifted. The sun poured weakly through the trees, and whatever ill creature they’d briefly shared the jungle with appeared to have moved on.

  “What in the bleeding skies,” Sufiyan said, “was that?”

  Loli answered no questions. Instead, she ordered Quil to pick up Sirsha, and faded into the jungle as swiftly as she’d appeared, expecting them to follow. When Arelia attempted to engage Loli in conversation, she responded with a forbidding growl.

  Quil knew he should ask Loli Temba about the Kegari as soon as possible, but all he could think about was how light Sirsha was in his arms. How awful it was not to hear her wry mutter. Ilar’s angry face rose in his memory. The last time he’d seen her whole.

  Not Sirsha. Sirsha will be fine. But what if she wasn’t fine? Skies, he couldn’t even help her. He was depending on a Karkaun who didn’t seem to want them there. Stupid, Quil. He should have noticed something was wrong with Sirsha. He should have done something.

  They took a circuitous path through the jungle, toward a thunderous, white-water cataract. It boiled through a narrow slot before plunging into a shallow pool a hundred feet below.

  Loli led them down a damp, vine-choked trail to a rock shelf at the back of the waterfall. There, she put her hand to the stone and sang a few low notes. Quil thought of what Sirsha said about magic. An emotion exerted on an element. The stone split right down the center, creating an opening wide enough for them to pass through.

  Quil cursed. Arelia and Sufiyan still looked sick and weak, and he was holding Sirsha. If Loli had an ambush planned, this would be the ideal place to do it. But she merely closed the stone and motioned for them to follow.

  The sound of the waterfall faded to a distant hum, and they emerged into a room with rough gray walls and thick columns of light pouring from above. A settee sat in one corner with a knitted blanket folded over it, and plush rugs lay on the floor. Beside shelves packed with cooking implements, a cold hearth vented into a chimney that disappeared through the cave’s ceiling.

  Loli Temba closed her door, passing her hand over it once. Then she nudged Quil toward a side bedroom—small, but lit like the rest of her home, with a broad beam of light.

  “Stop gawping and lay her down.” Loli pointed to a rope bed softened with thick, handwoven blankets. “It will take rest and quiet for her to come out of this.”

  “But…she will come out of it?” Arelia, at the door, whispered the question Quil was about to ask.

  Loli didn’t answer, and Quil didn’t budge. “I’ll stay with her,” he said. He wouldn’t leave her alone. Wouldn’t let anything tear her apart the way Ilar had been torn apart.

  Loli put a firm hand on Quil’s arm. “I would die before I saw her harmed,” she said. Quil was about to tell her to piss off, but something in the woman’s uncanny stare assuaged his misgivings.

  “Door stays open,” Quil said, and Loli nodded and bade them sit on the settee.

  “She is strong,” the Karkaun woman said. “Even if she is a fool.” She considered Quil. “You truly did not feel it tracking you?”

  Quil’s frustration finally burst out of him. He was worried about Sirsha, and he didn’t know what the hells was stalking them, and he didn’t want to answer questions—he wanted them bleeding answered.

  “What do you mean it?” he snapped. “What was that thing? What did it want with us?”

  Reli and Sufiyan exchanged a glance at his rare show of temper. Loli shook her head.

  “I do not know. I only felt it when it breached the barriers I’ve put near my home. It stinks of death.” Loli shuddered. “And guile.”

  “You have magic, then.” Arelia leaned forward. “What is your emotion—and your element?”

  “Sirsha has been instructing you, I see.” Loli’s voice was cold. “Did she not teach you that asking such a question is akin to asking the contours of your heart? Who you love? How it makes you feel?”

  Arelia flushed and crossed her arms. “I’m trying to understand.”

  “You seek to understand the fibers that make the world,” Loli Temba said, “but not your own pain, nor that of others. You’d be better served understanding the latter.”