The smell hit hard, falling in a stinking curtain. Manure, spoiled meat, bad water, rotten fruit, sweat, butcher blood, sewage of all kinds. Oversweet perfume, spilled wine, beer gone stale. Smoke, salt, the rare brush of a fresh breeze like a gasp of air to a man drowning. And, beneath it all, the incessant cling of damp, so deep Corayne wondered if the entire city had gone to rot. She pressed her sleeve to her nose, breathing in the familiar scent of home still holding to her cloak. Oranges, cypress, the Long Sea, her mother’s precious rose oil. For a second, her eyes stung with sharp, unshed tears.

“Where is the palace?” she asked, blinking away the sting. “I assume we can’t just walk up to the gates and ask to speak with a squire.”

The crew began their work in the sails, while the oarsmen below slowed their pace. The drumbeat keeping their time boomed like a heart.

“No, I doubt we can,” Dom said, taking an experimental breath. His face pulled in revulsion. “I’ve never smelled anything so foul,” he mumbled. Corayne had to agree.

“You’re an Elder prince,” Sorasa scoffed. She tied off her hair in a neat braid, careful to let it hang so her neck was still covered. “If anyone can knock on a palace gate, it’s you.”

Dom shook his head. “I did not suffer a week below deck to be spotted now. Taristan knows Andry Trelland escaped with the sword, and a squire of Galland is easy to track home. They could be watching the palace and the Queen.” He spat the words out like a poison. On the rail, his fingers curled.

He wants to wring Taristan’s neck, Corayne knew.

She shoved her own hands into her pockets and bit her lip. “He could have the sword already,” she said softly. Her fingers brushed the Jydi charm, useless and dusty, the beads smooth and cool. It slowed her thrumming pulse. “And all this is for nothing.”

Dom frowned. “We can’t think like that, Corayne.”

Banking on hope without sense is a certain path to failure. “Well, I do.”

“The alternative is to accept the realm is doomed,” he replied, forceful. “I will not.”

Torches flared in his eyes, reflected from the docks jutting out on either side of the river. Their own berth was near, cleared and waiting on the north bank of the waterway.

Again Corayne saw white faces, skin worn to bone, blood, and black armor. The silhouette of a man with her own eyes. Even now she could not believe it. I stand on a ship that is not my mother’s, in a kingdom not my own, chasing a quest the man who abandoned me could not fulfill. The last week caught up with her in a blur. It did not seem real. It did not make sense. Not like the stars or her charts and lists. This did not balance. Her nerves prickled.

Adjusting his green cloak, Dom fixed Sorasa with a challenging glare. His sword, bow, and quiver were hidden, giving him a hulking shape. “So, assassin of the Amhara, legend of the shadows, quick with tongue and blade, what do you suggest we do now?”

“I suggest you bribe a guard at the kitchen gate like everyone else,” Sorasa said.

Dom grumbled in annoyance. “Less conspicuous?”

The Amhara did not answer, eyes on the dock. Her thoughts were elsewhere—in a tavern, a gambling hall, a brothel, with friends in Ascal. Though Corayne doubted Sorasa Sarn tolerated friendship. Or she’s looking forward to getting rid of us. Her job is nearly done. We need only set foot on the dock and she’ll be gone. She didn’t agree to anything else.

With a sigh, Corayne nudged Dom in the side. It was like being a ship’s agent again, haggling a price between two opposing sides. If both sides despised each other, and one didn’t quite grasp the concept of currency to begin with. An exhausting proposition.

“You’re going to have to give her more money,” Corayne explained, “if you want her to get us into the Queen’s palace.”

“I’ve paid quite enough,” the Elder snapped. Corayne elbowed him again, shoving against the granite wall of his abdomen. He didn’t seem to notice. “We’ll find our own way.”

“Fine,” Corayne huffed. Then she put her hand to the Amhara, palm out in a gesture of goodwill. “I suppose this is goodbye, Sorasa Sarn.”

Sorasa eyed her fingers with distaste.

Just as Corayne suspected. She pulled her hand back, her voice sharpening, meant to sting. “Enjoy watching us blunder our way toward what could be the end of Allward, for the sake of your pride and few more coins to rub together while the realm crumbles.”

A hiss rattled past Sorasa’s bared teeth, her eyes dancing in the torchlight. The ship bumped into its berth with the groan of wood and snap of rope. The Amhara swayed gracefully as the deck bobbed beneath them. Again her mask slipped. Corayne saw anger. The useful kind.

“Well, when you put it that way,” she finally snarled, shoving off the rail.

Corayne grabbed Dom’s arm and pulled him along by his cloak, like a dog on a leash. They shouldered through the crowd together, nearly losing Sorasa in the scrum. Her face flashed ahead of them, rigid with frustration. She slowed, letting the other travelers break around her.

“Keep up,” she snapped, before muttering more Ibalet under her breath.

Corayne smirked. She’d grown up with sailors. She was no stranger to foul language.

“I am not a meddling monkey,” Corayne answered.

Sorasa startled. Even she could not hide her flush. “You speak Ibalet?”

“Don’t worry, I won’t tell Dom what you called him.”

Behind them, Dom huffed along, his boots calamitous on the docks. “I do not care for a murderer’s opinion,” he said, a clear lie.

Corayne suspected he would care very much. After all, Sorasa had called him a stupid, stubborn ass. Although, she thought, my translation might not be accurate.

The Ibalet words for stupid and handsome are quite similar.

11

THE ASSASSIN’S BURDEN

Sorasa

She did not think herself a woman of conscience. Whatever morals she’d been born with had not come with her past the gates of the citadel. No Amhara could be made with such weights. And yet she felt the pull of something unfamiliar and sharp, tugging her off her path, like a hook in the gills of a fish. Sorasa wanted to rip it out, flesh and blood be damned. Be off with the current, to wherever opportunity might lead. Instead she found herself grinding her teeth in Wayfarer’s Port, assaulted on all sides by stink and noise, with two very persistent hooks buried deep. She dragged them along the streets against her better instincts. Certainly the Cor girl and the Elder can find their way to the New Palace without dying. Or, if they die, so be it.

But Corayne’s words gnawed at her. The end of Allward.

Those specters of another realm had certainly felt like it, fleeting as they’d been. Sorasa had seen men gutted, burned, crushed, poisoned, and devoured, in all states of death and decay. Killed for contract, practice, sport, or Mercury’s favor. Assassinations disguised as cult rituals or gruesome accidents. Corpses dismembered, scattered, or dissolved in lye. Bodies wrung out by torture or deprivation. She’d witnessed all and done most. But there was nothing, not from the snows of the Jyd to the jungles of Rhashir, that rattled her so much. This memory refused to be forgotten, the taste and smell of it sharp in her mind. Blood, rot, iron. And heat like she could not understand. For a woman born in the sands, that was the most unsettling piece of all.