“You’re saying it wrong,” Ziya said.
“The fuck does that mean?”
“It’s your accent. This won’t work with you butchering the words like that.”
“You do it, then.” Riga spat something else under his breath. Mugenese words, a slur he’d picked up as a child. Horse lover.
“I don’t know the words,” Ziya said.
“Yes, you do.” A malicious edge crept into Riga’s voice. “She taught them to you first.”
Ziya stiffened.
Don’t do it, Daji thought. Let’s kill him and run.
Ziya began the incantation. His voice turned gradually from a hoarse whisper to a shout, forceful and fluid. This time the words sounded closer to how they’d sounded on Tseveri’s tongue. This time they held power.
“Now,” Riga whispered, and they raised their knives to slaughter the last necessary innocent.
When it was over, the void flung them back into their material bodies with a shock like icy water. Daji lurched forward, gasping. The earth felt so solid under her legs, the air so sweet. The world became the familiar made strange—solid and beautiful and mystifying. Daji was burning inside, shaking from the sheer power arcing through her body.
She felt more alive than she’d ever been. Now she was three souls instead of one; now she was complete; now she was more.
They hadn’t fully returned yet from the world of spirit. Their connection hadn’t severed. She was still reading into Ziya’s and Riga’s souls, and their thoughts crashed into her mind so loudly she struggled to separate them from her own.
From Ziya, she felt cold and naked fear combined with a terrible relief. He didn’t want this. He’d never wanted any of this. He was so scared of what he might become but also grateful for his deliverance from the alternative. He was grateful to be bound.
From Riga, she felt both giddy delight and a dizzying rush of ambition. He wanted more. He wasn’t even paying attention to the panic radiating from Ziya. His thoughts were on greater things. He saw them on a battlefield, at a negotiating table, on three thrones.
To Riga, this had been the last obstacle. Now they were tipping forward into the future he’d always imagined for them.
Daji wanted it, too. She just wasn’t sure she’d survive it.
Slowly she opened her eyes. The blood coating her hands looked black in the moonlight. The fire had nearly gone out, yet the smoke threatened to suffocate. Daji almost fell forward into the embers, almost smothered her face in the ash and let it end there.
Strong fingers gripped her shoulder and dragged her back.
“Easy.” Riga grinned.
Daji couldn’t share in his euphoria.
Years later, when she tortured herself with memories of the three of them at the beginning, before everything had gone so dreadfully wrong, she could never remember how it felt when they were first anchored. Couldn’t remember the thrill of power, or the terrifying yet delightful sense of being known. All she remembered was a curdling dread—the certainty that one day, the secrets they’d stolen would be paid for in blood.
And Tseveri. Always in her mind she saw the dead girl’s wretched face, and heard so clearly the last warning she’d uttered before Ziya ripped her heart out of her chest.
Here’s a prophecy for you, she’d said.
One will die.
One will rule.
And one will sleep for eternity.
Part I
Chapter 1
Rin’s wrist throbbed.
The air always felt different on the morning of an ambush, as if an electric charge, the crackling residue of a thunderstorm, thrummed through her and every soldier around her. Rin had never felt energy like this when she’d fought for the Republic. In the beginning, Yin Vaisra’s troops had been consummate professionals—sullen, grim, there to finish the job and get out. By the end, they’d been fearful. Desperate.
But the soldiers of the Southern Coalition were angry, and that force alone had driven them through grueling weeks of basic training, had quickly shaped them into capable killers even though not so long ago many of them had never even touched a sword.
It helped that their fight was personal. Khudla wasn’t their town, but this was their province, and everyone in Monkey Province had suffered the same way under Mugenese occupation. Displacement, looting, rape, murder, mass executions. A thousand Golyn Niis–level massacres had played out over the land, and no one had cared, because no one in the Republic or the Empire had ever cared much about the south.
But some in the south had survived to avenge their dead, and those were the men and women who comprised Rin’s troops.
As the minutes trickled past, the gathered ranks bristled in anticipation like hunting dogs straining against the leash. And Rin’s wrist stung like a conducting rod, a million little jolts of pain shooting through her elbow every second.
“Stop rubbing,” Kitay admonished. “You’re irritating it.”
“It hurts,” she said.
“Because you’re rubbing it. Leave it alone and it’ll heal faster.”
Rin ran her fingers over the cracked, bumpy skin that covered the bone of her wrist where it should have extended into a right hand. She clenched her jaw, trying to resist the urge to dig her nails into flesh long rubbed raw.
She’d had the hand amputated the night they made port in Ankhiluun. By then, after two weeks at sea, the appendage had all but rotted into a gangrenous mess. For all of the Black Lily physician’s efforts to sterilize the wound, there had remained so many points of exposure in her skin that it was a miracle the infection hadn’t spread farther up her arm. The procedure was short. Moag’s personal physician had cut away Rin’s hand, trimmed down the rotting flesh, and sewed her skin into a neat flap over the exposed bone.
The wound itself healed cleanly enough. But when Rin stopped taking laudanum, the wrist became a torch of unbearable agony. Phantom pains flashed through fingers she no longer had several times an hour. Sometimes they were so bad she slammed her hand at the wall to dull the pricks with a greater pain, only to remember that the hand wasn’t there. The pain was imaginary. And she couldn’t dull pain that existed purely in her mind.
“You’re going to make it bleed,” Kitay said.
Rin had, without thinking, begun to scratch again. She cupped her fingers over the stump and squeezed hard, trying to drive out the itching with sheer, numbing pressure. “It’s driving me mad. It’s not just the itching, it’s the fingers. It’s like I can still feel them, and they’re being pricked with a thousand needles, only I can’t do anything about it.”
“I think I get it,” Kitay said. “I feel it, too, sometimes. Little tremors out of nowhere. Which is strange, if you think about it—I’m the one with fingers, but the pain is coming from you.”
Before her surgery, they’d worried that cutting away her rotted right hand might also sever Kitay’s. They didn’t know the limits of their anchor bond. They knew that death for one meant death for both. They felt each other’s pain, and injuries to one manifested in pale, faintly visible scars for the other. But they didn’t know what that meant for amputations.
By the time they docked in Ankhiluun, however, Rin’s infections were so inflamed that the pain for both of them was unbearable, and Kitay had declared through gritted teeth that if Rin wouldn’t cut away the hand, he’d gnaw it off himself.