Ivy

“Wake up! The Emperor wants to see you!”

The jangling of a bell outside her tent flap woke Ivy up. She rolled upright and scratched her head grumpily. She was still tired from being up so late searching the mines for an opal to test Bayne’s theory. They’d found one, but by the time they’d gotten back, they were too exhausted to test it.

She threw open her tent flap and saw that Bayne’s tent was still sealed up tight even though the sun was well up in the sky. Good. If she was fast, she could get back before he started working on it. She didn’t want him to do it without her.

She drank some water from a deerskin and wandered past the cooking tent on her way to the litter. Kenji Zamora was there, filling a plate and berating the other soldiers. Ivy snagged a piece of breaded fish, then ducked between two tents to scarf it down, watching the others from a safe distance. She didn’t like to be around the rough, crass soldiers. Men like that weren’t safe.

Kenji Zamora guffawed at one of their jokes, then turned his back on them and headed her way, the plate of food in hand. Ivy held her breath, hoping he wouldn’t notice her. He stopped right in front of her, looking all around. She froze in the shadows.

Then he reached into his pocket and pulled out a paper envelope. He sprinkled the contents over the plate of food, then returned the envelope to his pocket. With long strides, he headed off.

Ivy finished her fish in her hiding place, then headed to the Emperor’s litter. “You took a long time,” he complained as she settled onto the cushions, licking the grease from her fingers.

She shrugged. “I was asleep.” He looked even sicker than usual, the dark circles going all the way around his eyes, his chest sunken, his robes like bed sheets hanging on a rack to dry. “What do you want?”

He grinned wryly, shaking his head. “When will you learn how to speak to me properly?”

She showed him all her teeth. “Do you have some candy for me?”

He tossed a honey chew her way. “Do you have some information for me?”

“What do you want to know?”

“We delayed the march this morning at the request of a Dwarven engineer. Why?”

She popped the candy into her mouth and rolled it around. “If you’re the Emperor, why don’t they tell you anything?”

He sniffed the menthol on his handkerchief and leaned back against his pillows. If Ivy had walked in on a stranger looking the way he did, she would have thought he was at death’s door.

“The information they give me is high level. The Dwarves are looking for a way to power their golems that won’t use up so many crystals. That’s all they tell me. But I want to know how it works. How the golems work. The Dwarves won’t let my Imperial soldiers near those things. And they insist we leave first, as vanguard, so they can power them up after we’ve all left. I’ve never seen one up close, can barely see them from far away. Not with this.” He banged the metal lattice.

Ivy shrugged. If the Dwarves didn’t want the Imperials to know how their golems worked, there was probably a reason. She didn’t feel good about revealing their secrets. He said he’d pay her, but did she really need all that money? She was fed here. She had a safe, warm place to sleep. She had Bayne.

“I know you spend a lot of time with that Dwarf engineer. The ginger with the short beard and the headlamp.”

“He lost the headlamp.”

“Pity. It suited him. What do you know about the golems?”

Ivy froze. Should she tell him? She didn’t want to hurt Bayne.

“I have your money.” He reached around himself for a coin purse, but the movement sent him into a coughing fit that turned into uncontrollable retching, which he did over a gold spitoon.

Ivy, still frozen, just watched.

“Sorry about that.” He spit into the receptacle. “It’s been rough on the march. It might be the camp food.”

As if on cue, a fist banged on the lattice. “Your dinner, your Highness.” It was one of the errand boys.

“Keep it,” the Emperor replied.

A young face peered through the holes in the grate. “Forgive me, your Highness, but your Sentinel says you must keep your strength up.” The slot opened, and the plate was shoved through.

The Emperor sighed and set the food down beside him on the pillow—fried fish, wildberries, and a greasy biscuit—just like the plate Kenji Zamora had walked away from the cook tent with. He looked like he might retch again. “You want some?” He held the plate toward Ivy. When she shook her head, he picked the biscuit apart to reveal the drier bits inside, nibbled a few, then set the plate aside.

“Do you want to play that game again?” he asked.

Ivy nodded. He reached behind him into a little cupboard and pulled out the deck of cards. Ivy loved to watch his nimble fingers as he shuffled them. The cards seemed to dance. Then he dealt them, one to her one to him and back and forth until they each had seven.

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“So tell me what you know about the golems,” he said, arranging his cards.

Ivy put her cards in order from smallest to largest, the way he had taught her. She was pleased with her hand, but she knew not to let her face show it.

“They’re like carriages. The Dwarves ride inside them. They have controls here.” Ivy showed him with her hand where the controls were; that didn’t seem to be dangerous information. “You can move the arms up and down. You can open and close the hands. Make them walk.”

The Emperor’s glassy eyes shone. “You’ve been inside one, haven’t you?”

Ivy sunk into her cushion, uneasy. “‘Twas just a moment.”

The Emperor laid down a card. “What I wouldn’t give,” he whispered. He shuffled his skinny legs and Ivy saw them peeking out from under his robe. They were like stork legs. “So how do the Dwarves power them?”

She laid down a card. “Bayne made a quartz generator. It’s powered by the purple crystals, but the power doesn’t last. He’s trying to find a way to make it last longer.”

He laid down a card, his long-lashed eyes flicking to her. “Did he find a way? Is that why this morning’s march was delayed?”

Ivy studied her cards without seeing them. She wasn’t sure how much she should say. She didn’t want to get Bayne in trouble. “I don’t know.”

He sniffed his handkerchief again. “Your turn.”

She set down her cards and got up. “I should go. He’ll be working on it this morning. I can... tell you more later.”

“Wait!” The Emperor’s hand was pale against the dark skin of her wrist. “I haven’t paid you.”

Ivy hadn’t expected to be paid for so little information, but she sat back down as he counted the coins out of his change purse.

“There’s something else I want you to do for me.” His glare was grim as he placed the coins one by one into her palm. “I want you to watch my Sentinel, Kenji Zamora. I don’t trust him.”

Ivy counted the money as it arrived in her palm. “What shall I watch for?”

“Anything treasonous. He’s been keeping me in the dark, on purpose I think. He means to undermine my authority.”

Ivy thought about the plate of food and the envelope full of powder as she dropped the coins into her pocket. She felt better about spying on Kenji Zamora than she did about spying on Bayne, but the leering dragoon frightened her. “He might hurt me if he finds out.”

The Emperor reached into his coin purse and pulled out a second handful of coins. He held them out to her. “Hazard pay.”

Ivy grimaced and shook her head. “‘Tis enough money already.”

“I see that I am paying you too well.” The Emperor’s dark eyes flashed. “But what of this? Be my informant, and when we have won this war and you are of age, I will marry you and make you Empress. You will help me rule all of Terris.”

Ivy’s pulse jumped, fire flashing in her veins. That would never happen. Never could happen.

“I will never marry! Not you! Not anyone!” she yelled, pushing open the litter door. She jumped down and fought with the filmy curtain clinging to her hair as she slammed the door behind her and ran back to her campsite.

She caught sight of Kenji Zamora watching her out of the corner of his eye.

Bayne was already up and cutting the opal to size when she got there, shoulders heaving. She could see he wanted to ask where she’d been, but thought better of it. She hid the money the Emperor had paid her in her tent, grabbed her camp stool, and slammed it down hard beside Bayne. She could tell he wanted to ask her about that, too, but didn’t. That was one of the things she liked best about him. His silence.

“Yer just in time,” Bayne said, setting his cutting tool aside. “Where’re yer safety spectacles?”

Ivy hurried to get them. Though the sun was already high, their campsite was in a quiet, shady spot on the edge of the camp, as close to private as one could get. The bustle around them wasn’t intrusive enough to compete with the excitement of the moment—how that small, white gem with the rainbow flecks inside it that they’d spent most of the night digging for might be the solution to the problem. Ivy felt her anger transform within her, like the crystal’s power running through the opal and being converted to something less toxic. At least that’s what Bayne was hoping would happen, and she got to be a part of it. It was her birthmark that had given him the idea in the first place.

It was the first time Ivy had felt truly special. She was used to being treated as something superfluous, something that needed a place found for it, not something a space was created for, like the gems the Dwarves worshiped. Ivy had never been wanted. Never sought after. Never considered essential, like the opal. She’d been given away, used and thrown away, or she’d run away herself. And when she ran, no one ever tried to find her and bring her back.

Bayne smiled at her once she’d donned the spectacles. “Are ye ready?” he asked. When she nodded, he flicked the switch.

The purple crystal lit up, followed by the opal, a bright, burning star freckled with color. The quartz hummed and the bulb came to life with a steady glow.

“Don’t ye get too excited yet,” Bayne warned.

They waited, but the bulb didn’t burn up, didn’t explode. It didn’t even fade out, its energy spent. It glowed and glowed, for fifteen seconds, thirty, a minute and longer. Ivy and Bayne just stared at it, waiting. Ivy thought she saw Bayne’s lips moving to a count, but eventually, he even stopped doing that. His friendly face relaxed as he lifted the bulb up and said, as if in confession, “It works!”

Ivy squealed and threw her arms around Bayne’s neck. He laughed, and it was a strange sound. She realized she’d never heard it before.

“Yer my lucky gem!” he said, patting her back as she squeezed him tighter, hoping to hear that laugh again. “Ach, but yer gonna choke me to death!”

And there it was again—his laugh. A sound that made every bad thing run and hide. He smelled like sweat and campfire and the funny herbs Dwarves liked to smoke when the sun went down, and Ivy was starting to feel safe when she smelled that smell, though that thought itself kind of scared her. She peeled her arms from around his neck and stepped back.

“Now what do we do?” she asked.

“We give it a little more time, just to be sure,” Bayne said. “And a good engineer tests his work several times. He doesn’t just assume because it worked once, it’ll work again. That’s lazy engineering, and don’t ye forget it.”

“No, sir.” She grinned.

A rustling in the bushes behind her captured her attention. She whirled, prepared to face a bold raccoon, but there was nothing. Then she saw it on the ground, under a thatch of underbrush—Bayne’s headlamp. What was it doing there? She padded toward it.

“Bayne, I found your hea—” she said, then froze, staring straight into the face of the Wizard faction’s Summoner.