CHAPTER TWENTY: The Figure

She moved swiftly, as if she weighed no more than the sheer, midnight linen veiling her features. A face that strongly favored her father, yet held so little of Eoine; of Alora. Luscia Darragh Tiergan embodied the shadow, as skillfully as any najjan, and he often felt as if he was chasing a wisp.

From the heights of Marketown, the figure had trailed his mistress’s niece for a fortnight. Initially, her haphazard routine had perplexed him. Each night, the young al’haidren ran through Bastiion’s streets, eventually navigating back to the palace. Only last night had he realized that she’d completed a spherical formation. By charting the imagined spokes on a wheel, night after night, Alora’s niece was mapping the city proper.

From memory.

The figure leapt from one rooftop to the next, two buildings behind her. It was difficult to keep up without drawing attention to his presence. Amaranth’s lilac feathers rustled as the hawk dove ahead, recognizing their game. Below, the little al’haidren dodged a vacant stall, jumped to an overhang, vaulted her body through the empty space, and caught a railing off a second-story ledge. Without decelerating, she surveyed the street from her new, higher vantage point.

Approaching a junction between structures, she flew around a corner and froze. Alora’s niece cocked her head, listening. The figure shrank back when she peered over a shoulder into the night. When she turned forward again, seeming pacified, he crept along once more, pulling the scratchy hood tighter over his unevenly balding scalp for concealment. The material aggravated the fresh sores and tempted infection, but he couldn’t risk being seen.

After another block, she halted abruptly and frantically glanced about. As she pressed a pale hand to her skull, the figure leaned forward, concerned. Reaching into her cloak, she withdrew a familiar vial—one of Alora’s—and hurriedly drank the contents. Shaking her head as if something rattled inside, she took two steps, then paused again. Angling herself a second time, the figure strained to hear what had caught her attention so intently.

Rash laughter from a nearby tavern tickled his blistered ears. An elderly woman coughed in a merchant tent. A group of men squabbled in the next. Blocks away, an infant’s cry pierced the common melodies of Bastiion proper.

Without warning, the al’haidren took off. Bounding forward, she bolted into a maze of abandoned alleyways. When she finally stopped, the figure caught himself before he careened into the open, panting wildly. A strange nostalgia awoke his lungs. It’d been ages since he’d needed to gasp for air.

He watched her hesitate before entering a soundless backstreet, as if being irresistibly drawn into its depths. Carefully, he kept pace with her from above until she came to a halt and collapsed to her knees.

“Niit,” he heard her breathe out.

The figure’s decaying insides contorted. Beside Alora’s niece rested a cross-caste corpse, propped against soiled brick and mortar. Squinting, he distinguished an adolescent in a tattered velvet dress. Moving to touch the lifeless face, the al’haidren’s eyes started to glow. Their light flickered with what he presumed were unseen threads of lumin, mingling around the body. Furrows of concentration decorated her brow as she witnessed an invisible dance the figure could not see.

Entranced, he didn’t notice the intruder until it was too late. Panicked, the figure searched the skies for Amaranth. He’d remain hidden unless there was no alternative.

Gradually, Alora’s niece tore her attention from the corpse and stared blankly at the man. He fumbled with a crate in his hands, adjusting his grip to avoid dropping the burden he carried.

“You!” he said accusingly.

She offered no reply. The figure chewed on his scabbed lip. Whoever the intruder was, he’d recognized the al’haidren’s identity immediately, even under layers of masking.

“Step back!” the man shouted with authority. In one swift movement, he deposited the unsteady crate on the ground and unsheathed a Darakaian sickle sword from the weapons belt at his waist. “Back! Against that wall, y’siti, or I’ll be carrying the skin of a sorceress into Thoarne Hall.”

The figure suddenly realized he’d seen this man before. The night they both gave Yannis the slaver a well-earned beating.

Alora’s niece ignored the alpha’s derogatory slur and his threat alike. Her disregard seemed to rile him further, and the figure prepared to leap when the Darakaian alpha brought the tip of his Southern kopar to her throat.

“Now, Lady Boreal.”

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She blinked a few times, withdrawing from the Sight. Unconcerned, she swatted the blade away with the back of her hand and untied the veil covering her mouth.

“Why don’t you make yourself useful, Lord Darakai?” she said dryly. “Those rampant emotions of yours are rarely of any value.”

The al’haidren to Darakai? the figure speculated, stunned by his appearance in the alley. What business does the son of Nyack Kasim have in Marketown this time of night?

He had always wondered what became of the child. The brutish result standing on the cobblestones was less than shocking, though the way Nyack’s son had protected that cross-caste’s body from a slaver… that compassion was very like his mother. Perhaps their son had inherited something of hers after all.

“Do you honestly think anyone would believe your innocence?” the young Kasim spat in a harsh whisper. “A lone y’siti next to a cross-caste corpse…it only proves your reputation as the twisted, heartless witch—”

Ignoring his slander, she began a verbal assessment of the body, raising her voice above the other al’haidren’s. “Look—incisions were made along the wrists, neck, and ankles. Whoever did this was educated in human anatomy. That much is evident. Here, do you see?” Alora’s niece pointed to a wound on the right arm. “Each cut was cleaned thoroughly. They killed her, drained her, cleaned her, and left the body for us to find…like a rag doll.”

“I said, step back!” Kasim’s kopar pointed toward the wall. “This isn’t a game, Witch.”

“Whatever gave you the impression it was, Lord Darakai?” She bent her nose to the cut and inhaled deeply, as the figure had done with the body in Arune.

“What the Depths are you doing!” Kasim yelled, stepping back in fear.

Jerking away, she covered her mouth. The figure shifted uncomfortably. She smelled it—the depravity, the lingering wrongness where the corpse had been touched. Tension curled his thoughts. The girl was another victim, like the young woman in Arune, but this time, the killer had been deliberate—careful, even, as with the boy discovered in the bay.

“Wait.” Suddenly less concerned with Alora’s niece, the Southern al’haidren bent to look closer. “I know that dress—the style, I mean. Uni, yeah, that…she’s one of Salma’s girls.”

He cupped his chin and studied the lacerations. As Kasim reached to sweep a clump of hair off the wound across the neck, her hand shot out and grabbed his arm.

“Don’t touch it,” Alora’s niece warned, wide-eyed. “It has been defiled. Something’s not right.”

“Nothing about this is right,” he snapped, ripping his forearm out of her grasp. “You speak of Darakai like we’re the animals, but look at this! Look what the northmen do to their own children! Depths, the girl probably didn’t even live to see her own Ascension. Now she never will.”

“Boreal has no part in this wickedness!” Alora’s niece bared her teeth. “Our blood is precious. We never waste it. It’s Darakaians who crave bloodshed in their lust for power, not my kinsmen.”

“The Boreali drained the color from your eye.” Kasim shook his head violently. Evidently, he’d heard, and believed, one of the more ridiculous rumors about her people. “They blinded you from your own savagery.”

“You claimed you know the girl’s mistress,” she said, considering the other al’haidren. She nodded, appearing to make a decision. “You will take me to her at once.”

Alora’s niece rose on her heels, secured the linen veil across her face, and waited expectantly.

“Tonight, Lord Darakai.”

“The only place I’m taking you is a dungeon, for whatever you’ve done to this poor girl,” Kasim asserted, visibly unsettled by the body at his feet.

The figure bent over the roof slats, intrigued. It was extraordinary behavior—a Darakaian caring for the fate of yet another cross-caste, especially of Boreali lineage.

“Those wounds were cleaned, but the corpse is covered in refuse. Had I any part in her death, the evidence would be on my person, which it is clearly not.” She stalked past Kasim in the direction he’d originally come. “We are speaking to her mistress tonight.”

“Ano. No, we are not. This body belongs to Bastiion. These deaths fall under the pryde’s investigation. And Boreali participation is not welcome,” he snarled.

“Neither is your own, apparently,” she shot back. “I heard this investigation was taken from your pryde. But I have a feeling you will seek out her mistress regardless, and when you do, I expect to be there.”

“I found you stalking the streets of Marketown, unescorted, at the scene of the crime.” Kasim’s son started toward her. “I’m within my rights to take you in on that alone.”

“Lord Darakai, I may not know what exactly lies in that crate, but it’s obvious you’ve gone to great lengths to avoid trafficked areas with it in tow.” She crossed her arms and stopped just short of his chin. “There are a number of goods prohibited by our allies, goods which come in bottles just like those in your care. I wonder what our prince would say about that? His beloved friend, a common criminal.”

Alora didn’t give her niece nearly enough credit, the figure decided. Were she to ease her strict governance, she might see the cleverness of her Luscia. It was one of the few traits the al’haidren had inherited from her aunt; a quality Alora had not displayed so brazenly since their youth.

An ache panged through the figure’s chest at her memory. Though Alora was not lost to this world, she was almost entirely lost to him. And to the man he used to be.

“Then we are at an impasse.” Kasim glared down his nose at her, a creature his superior in so many ways, then sighed with disgust. “If I take you with me, we go my way. No arguments. None.”

She stared at him for a moment before giving a stiff nod. “Wem. Agreed.”

“Good, because you aren’t going to like it,” he muttered under his breath with a smirk, and knelt to pick up the crate.

“I am more than capable of discretion. You’ve no cause for concern,” she replied defiantly to his back.

“I have to sneak Boreal’s self-righteous al’haidren into a house of ill repute. That’s plenty of cause for concern.” He grinned into the darkness and headed deeper into the alley, calling back, “I better see you holding two wraiths at dawn.”

The figure thrust his arm in the air and awaited the bite of Amaranth’s talons as they clutched his sleeve. It was time his mistress learned of the rebellious pattern her niece was weaving, and the young Darakaian who held her by one very dangerous thread.

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