He Who Breaks the Earth (The Gods-Touched Duology)

Noa sat back in the wagon with her eyes closed, glad for the sun on her face. She could feel Altahn watching her as the wagon lurched across the street toward Castor’s temple, the heckle and cry of Rentara’s university district louder than any kind of applause. People were always louder when they were angry than when they were happy.

Everyone in this city was angry. Not as angry as Anwei, though Noa’s friend hid it inside the carefully formed mask she’d made of her face. Not as angry as Lia, back at the camp sharpening her sword. But angry enough, as if every person on the road had looked out their window that morning and decided everything was going to go wrong.

It made Noa want to do a handstand on the boxboard, somersault down, and ignite her fire tethers in a fiery swirl. Maybe that would be enough to make one person in this city smile. That’s what Noa was good at: making people smile. Anwei hadn’t let her bring the fire tethers though—something about sneaking into a library not meshing well with flame. She’d had that awful mask of a smile on her face when she said it too, almost as if she thought fooling Noa would be as easy as fooling everyone else.

“Are you going to help me brace this thing, or are you just here to keep the wagon from blowing away?” Altahn called from the other side of the wagon.

“I thought that was why you brought that lizard with you every where.” Cracking one eye open to look at the Trib, Noa got a full view of his firekey lizard instead, the little creature glaring at her from where its blunt nose stuck out from the back of Altahn’s collar. Noa closed her eyes again, relishing the way Altahn’s gaze just sank in deeper, as if he couldn’t look away. Maybe it wasn’t just making people smile she was good at. Catching people’s attention wasn’t hard—all it took was a little surprise, a little sparkle. Keeping attention required real talent. “Isn’t Galerey supposed to help you with all the little things you can’t do yourself?” she asked.

“Unfortunately, Galerey isn’t up to keeping fifty pounds of indecent stained-glass portrait upright in this traffic.” Altahn braced himself when the wagon jerked to a halt, Anwei swearing from the driver’s bench. “She’s better at burning people when they annoy me.”

“He thinks I’m trying to annoy him,” Noa said in Elantin to Anwei’s back, the bright crimson scarf she’d help tie over the healer’s long braids flapping in the wind like a flag. Altahn’s long tail of hair with the short bits in the front was covered too, both of them styled to look like artists, hopefully the kind no one looked at twice because their scarves weren’t knotted or braided to show rank. A Beildan healer and a Trib rider carrying a heavy load into Castor’s temple like drudges would have caught a few too many eyes. “You think I should show him what it looks like when I’m actually trying to annoy someone?”

“A show I’d love to see, but it’ll be hard to deliver that thing to the temple if it breaks in half on the way,” Anwei called back in Noa’s own language, the words bittersweet in Noa’s ears. Noa missed the Elantin docks, the smell of the southern sea, the playhouses and the people who played in them. Though she didn’t relish the thought of joining one now. It would just be an excuse to get out of a life that expected nothing of her except a good marriage and obedience. It was as if she were nothing more than a portrait herself, shrouded until someone impressive enough asked to admire her. Noa raised a hand to look at her extended fingers. She looked much better out here, in the sunlight.

“You can’t just tell me I’m handsome in words I understand?” Altahn asked.

“I wanted to pretend we were unrilthasen.” Noa sighed, leaning in to brace the portrait when the wagon lurched forward once again.

“I swear she can speak Common. She just won’t.” Altahn laughed. “I could start using only Trib, and then none of us would understand each other.”

“I’d understand you,” Anwei shot back, swearing when a silenbahk swung its tail just ahead of her, making their horse dance. Altahn’s horse, really. Most of what they had was Altahn’s. “She’s saying she wanted to sneak into the scholar god’s sky-cursed library as fire dancers.”

“Don’t help him, Anwei.” Noa grinned. “He needs to learn he doesn’t know everything.”

“Really? Fire dancing?” Altahn peered at her from around the side of the ridiculous portrait. “I’d pay to see that.”

“You wouldn’t get to watch—Anwei only convinced me to deliver this glass in place of the special window the First Scholar ordered because we know how bad you are at dancing.”

“I am not bad at dancing.”

“You are holding the glass, right, Noa? Because we’re—” Anwei’s voice cut off when a horse reared directly in front of them.

Noa wrinkled her nose, bracing the shrouded glass pane tight against its ties. Over the top of the wagon sides, the temple facade of thirteen white columns stood out like jewels in an ebony frame, one of Castor’s thirteen moon phases carved into each. Together, the columns made a sunburst that centered on the building’s front steps, the entrance itself populated with a crowd of wrinkled acolytes in blue robes chanting about Castor’s unending fight to rule the night sky. Why scholars chose such drab apparel, Noa would never know. Even the scholar god, Castor himself, knew how to put on a show, the moon a riot of blues and purples as he crossed the sky and danced with his brother moon, Jaxom. The scholars chanting on the steps looked, at best, very comfortable.

When Anwei turned the wagon down the little service road to the side of the temple, Noa eagerly looked past her to the university compound beyond it. She’d always wanted to come study in Rentara, but her father had said suitors in such places wanted more than a girl who knew how to shine, and that she wasn’t suited to do anything else. The sight of the buildings sprawled past Jaxom’s temple had walls of warped glass, all the different gods’ halls like squat little frogs getting ready to do battle, with students scurrying between them like ants. Noa sighed and looked away. It wasn’t that her father was correct—she could do more than shine—but the buildings here didn’t look so different from the university in Chaol, and everyone there had seemed to agree with her father about what Noa should do with herself.

Jaxom’s temple rose a full story above Castor’s, blocking the scholar god’s view of the rest of the temples. Trying to needle his brother, as usual. There were devotees on Jaxom’s steps shouting back at the ones praising Castor, a war of words and wrinkles.

Noa touched Falan’s flower in her hair, grateful her own goddess was much more amenable to fun. She could feel the goddess like a hand on her shoulder, Falan eager to see their mischief. “Why are all these old people out chanting at one another?”

“Starfall last month. Remember, right before we left Chaol?” Anwei didn’t look back, pulling the horse to a halt and tying the reins to her bench. “They’re still yelling about who lost the battle.”

“I’m going to say it was us, since we have to listen to this racket.” Noa stood, waiting until Altahn had undone the tethers holding the frame on his side before she knelt to untie the ones on hers. It felt like years, not weeks since the two moons had gone to war in the night sky, their arrows darting as flashes of light. She’d been standing on the governor’s balcony, the boy to whom her father had deeded her facedown in his soup.

Anwei had given her the herbs to put Bear to sleep—to fight her own war in a swirl of light and fire, just like the moons in the sky—and it had been that moment she’d seen the way out. Noa had spent her life wrenching at the strings her father had fastened to her wrists and ankles, an unruly marionette that danced where she liked, until her father handed the controller to someone new. Bear wasn’t so controlling, but his father, the governor, had thoughts about what his son’s prospective wife should or shouldn’t be doing. Wearing. Saying. Being.

So, the night Anwei had invited Noa to help haunt the governor’s ballroom—nothing but little sparks of fire and some scary voices—Noa hadn’t minded when things escalated after she set fire to the governor’s prized Palashian drapes. It was slightly less amusing when the governor barred all the gates and locked her up right when Noa was supposed to be helping Anwei get out of the compound safely.

It wasn’t until Noa overheard the governor yelling at his steward that she’d realized he hadn’t locked the compound gates with all his guests still inside because of some burned drapes. A book had gone missing from his study. The lock jimmied, guards found collapsed on the floor.

The servants searched every guest, every servant, every hostler, every auroshe in the stables, probably. But somehow, despite the fact that Noa had seen Anwei on the ballroom floor right before the whole place had been shuttered, she and her little shadow friend, Knox, were nowhere to be found.

Standing there in the window, watching the swirl of agitation Anwei had left in her wake, Noa had realized the dance Anwei was performing was something wholly different from what she’d thought. It was on some other stage, in another version of life Noa had never seen before. Anwei wasn’t even dancing: she was the puppeteer, twitching people this way and that until she got her way.

So Noa had climbed out the window to join her.

Which had led to helping Anwei set a shapeshifter excavation site on fire right in front of the sky-cursed Warlord herself. Hiding in a sugarcane field shaking as the auroshe calls came closer and closer. The ground rumbling under her feet and Devoted scampering in the other direction like scared little children. Away from the tomb, as if it weren’t the Warlord’s job to ensure the shapeshifter down in that hole stayed dead.

All except one Devoted had run.

Noa’s mouth twisted at the thought of him—and what had happened to him. She wouldn’t take back any of what she’d done for a single coin from her father, because out here, the things she did mattered. To her. And to everyone else.

“You’ve got your side?” Altahn’s voice brought her back to the cobblestones. He peeked over the top of the glass, a smile still plastered across his face.

Altahn always smiled. It made Noa wonder what was beneath it.

“I don’t carry anything that weighs more than I do.” Noa stood up, stepping back from the glass. “My face would turn red, and my job is to be distracting in a good way.”

He shook his head, laughing, and Noa looked away, worried there wasn’t anything underneath his smile at all. That he was exactly what he looked like from the outside: a rich boy who had found a new and interesting place to spend his coin. Boys like that could be entertaining for days at a time, sometimes even weeks. Until they weren’t anymore, because, in her experience, rich boys cared for nothing but what they wanted next.

Noa hopped out of the wagon, making room for Anwei to help Altahn slide the ungainly thing toward the wagon’s lip. Patting the two loops of hair knotted just above her ear—Anwei had threaded them with gold before they left camp that morning—Noa walked up to the gate where the guard was staring curiously at them through the wrought iron bars.

“Would you please open this?” She gave the bars a slightly exasperated rattle. “You were supposed to be ready for us. Oh, and we’ll need one of you to help carry the ladder and tools, of course.”

“This gate is meant for gardeners.” The guard cleared his throat, his eyes brushing the two knots that marked Noa as second khonin, then jumping down to the gold and crimson embroidery coiling up her skirt. “Which you clearly are not. How may I help you?”

“Gods above and below,” Noa moaned. “They didn’t tell you to expect us? The First Scholar herself ordered this piece.” She gestured dramatically toward the shrouded glass Altahn and Anwei were sliding off the wagon bed. “She came to me. I promised her on my mother’s life that I’d find something suitably dramatic and yet… subtle for her study.” Drawing herself up, Noa gave the gate a rattle. “This is the only way to get such a large piece of art into the building without breaking it, and, frankly, you are in our way. Open this gate immediately.”

The guard backed up a few steps, gesturing toward the main building. “I’ll just check—”

“Priceless art. Commissioned by the First herself.” Noa gave the glass an aggravated flick as Altahn drew up next to her, huffing. His arms looked quite nice in his Trib vest—they never saw the need to wear shirts under those things, which made sense because it was hot. “And it’s heavy. One slip, and six months of painstaking work—” She slapped her hands together with a flourish. “The First has been waiting most impatiently to see this masterpiece I’ve created for her, and I don’t like to think what could happen if we’re made to stand out here a moment longer.” Noa refrained from batting her eyes prettily. Anwei had advised against smiles since scholars at Castor’s temple were much more likely to be moved by fear of politics rather than long eyelashes. A role she didn’t usually play, but Noa didn’t mind pretending to be a doltish rich lady. She’d done it often enough back in Chaol. “Perhaps you might tell me your name so I can bring it to the First’s attention once we are finally allowed to deliver this one-of-a-kind, highly valuable, extremely fragile—”

“Fine.” The guard extracted a set of wrought-iron keys from his coat pocket and jammed the largest of them into the lock. Anwei had brought Noa with her to scout the temple grounds two nights before to identify the entrances that would allow them to pass the fewest number of guards before they made it inside the temple itself. Normally, she said, they’d have snuck in at night, but according to her contact at the university, the scholars of Castor’s great library doubled the guard at night and were more likely to be present at their desks and in the stacks during those dark hours. That wouldn’t have been a terrible hurdle except that the restricted collections underground were locked up with iron and chain, three guards at each door. Since the underground collections were where they needed to go, Anwei had opted for something less stealthy.

Luckily, the First Scholar’s real window was set to be delivered that very morning. Even more luckily, it had broken the night before due to an unfortunate incident with the apprentice glazier, two knuckles of malt, and a dropped hammer.

Noa had been the one who dropped the hammer.

The apprentice was probably waking up now, remembering nothing but the girl he’d met at the malthouse, not how the priceless work of art his master had only just finished had ended up in pieces on the shop floor. With any luck, he’d stew until the master glazier arrived after his midmorning tea to deliver it to the Holy First.

Just enough time for them to get inside and steal whatever it was Anwei wanted from the library’s dusty old shelves—something that would lead them to her snake-tooth man and the cursed sword he’d managed to lift right out from under them at the tomb. Tual Montanne. The shapeshifter.

Prickles of excited horror bristled down Noa’s arms at the thought. She gave the gate one last shake that sent it flying open and walked through. Watching Anwei with her puppet strings had been fascinating—Anwei was so wild and free, doing exactly as she pleased and getting everyone else to do as she pleased as well, almost like magic.

But Tual Montanne was the same. Lia Seystone, too. They were all made from the things they wanted. They were people who acted, who did, and the whole world held its breath as they passed. And pass they did, leaving whole cities hanging askew.

Each of them was running toward something, which was very different from running away. Noa had never been much good at anything more than making her father angry. She consoled herself that, at least on that front, she was probably doing rather well. But since running away, she’d found that defining herself as the dull ache behind her father’s eyes seemed less and less meaningful.

The guard gave Noa a slightly anemic bow as she walked into the compound, reaching to pull back the glass’s shroud as Anwei and Altahn passed. Anwei slapped his hand away just in time, the very picture of an artist lugging six months of work that she didn’t mean to waste on someone who wouldn’t appreciate it. “You honestly believe I’ll let you look at this masterpiece before the Holy First herself gets to see it? You’d be lucky to set your eyes on this even after it’s put in place.”

“Right.” The guard gritted his teeth, turning back to Noa. “A ladder, you said?”

“And the tools, yes, thank you. They’re in the wagon bed. Oh, and bring the wood for the armature, of course.” She started down the garden path, not bothering to look back at him.

The side entrance to the temple was only fifty feet back from the gate, the guards standing there already prepared to block her way, but Noa was ready with the honorable master glazier Fanilig Berstrom’s seal (Anwei had snagged it after Noa had broken the window the night before). They opened the doors just in time for Anwei to “trip” over the top step so the glass swung wild again, Altahn shuffling to the side with a groan. One of the guards darted forward to steady it.

“Castor’s quills,” Anwei swore, and Noa was impressed by the hint of tears in her friend’s voice. “You heathen, Marcus. I might never hold a grozing iron again after shaping this piece, and you choose today to stumble?”

Altahn didn’t bite back because Galerey had chosen that moment to scuttle down the back of his shirt. Noa slid between him and the guards to block the sight of his tunic moving all on its own, wondering what little lizard claws felt like skittering down his spine. “Can you believe these two?” she whispered to the door guard, leaning a hair closer than was perhaps strictly necessary. Old habits. “Perhaps you could escort us so they don’t destroy my masterpiece before it’s been installed.”

The guard’s smile in return was hesitant, baring the temple’s v house mark on his front canine. “I see there’s a delivery scheduled from a Master Benedict later today….”

“That’s me.” Altahn’s voice sounded forced. He was a terrible actor and a terrible dancer.

“The First will be waiting for us. This window is possibly the most beautiful thing I’ve ever created.” Noa lowered her voice. “Those two did the actual designing and cutting and painted the details and all that”—She flipped a hand toward Anwei and Altahn, the latter of whom seemed to be actually shaking, though if it were from laughter or strain from holding the glass window, Noa couldn’t tell—“but the commission was mine. She sent two messengers just this morning to hurry us along, but I said no, you cannot rush an artist. I hadn’t even had my breakfast.”

The guard started to laugh, but then stopped himself, lowering his voice to match Noa’s. “The First isn’t even here.” His smile came a little more naturally and he leaned forward a bit, and Noa knew she’d done the right thing. He undid the latch and propped the door open. “Given the circumstances, I suppose it’s all right. I probably shouldn’t let you in, but…”

“Oh, I agree. You probably shouldn’t.” Noa kept her smile, wide and full of teeth, as she gestured for Altahn and Anwei to come through. “But intelligent folk like you and me understand true urgency.”

The temple’s inside was all high ceilings and rows upon rows of bookshelves, the way into the main stacks blocked by a jeweled grate. They followed the guard up to the barrier, Noa letting him explain who they were to the woman in long scholar robes with a single khonin knot draped across her forehead. The scholar held a book in one hand, and the pinch between her eyebrows said that she’d rather be reading than conversing with real people. “The First isn’t going to be here at all today, so any rubbish about messengers and fancy windows will not be tolerated.” She turned her glare on Noa. “I suppose she was supposed to pay you upon receipt? Scholars are not fool enough to fall for such a story, girl. I’d be willing to bet there’s nothing under that packing but bare wood.”

“Bare wood…?” Noa feigned shock, something Anwei had made her do in front of a mirror for an hour before she’d been satisfied. The First being absent was an eventuality they’d been anticipating, seeing how Anwei had poisoned the woman’s tea that very morning. Just enough to make her ill, of course. “It’s so difficult to move, and every moment it’s unmounted is a moment of risk.” She’d rehearsed this too with Anwei, liking the way it felt almost like a dance. “I’m not worried about being paid. True art transcends silver rounds.”

Anwei made a good show of not agreeing.

“Maybe it’s better the First isn’t here?” Noa continued. “We could install it now before she returns. It was designed for the space in her office, so where else should her first sight of it be but in that space? Just think, the reveal.” She put her hands up, looking toward the high ceiling. “The drama!”

The old scholar was clearly trying very hard not to roll her eyes. “Fine,” she said. “If all you want is to leave that thing in her office, I can show you where to go. There will be no money, and you will not just be set free to roam the stacks. The time it will take to supervise this ridiculous scheme will set my precious studies back ages.” She closed her book with a disgusted sniff and gestured for them to follow her past the gates.

The guard craned his neck to get a look under the glass’s covering as Anwei and Altahn passed, but it was tied tight, thank the sky. Once they were through, the scholar led them down the aisles between shelves, bright beams of light coming from the blue-stained windows above to paint Castor’s phases on the floor. Past thousands of books, past the scholars copying old manuscripts onto new vellum and illuminating the margins, all the way to the grand staircase Anwei had marked on their map of the temple that would take them up to the First Scholar’s office.

The staircase was quite long. Noa felt very positive about her choice not to carry anything during this particular performance. By the time they got to the upper landing, the guard carrying the ladder was red in the face, and Altahn was sweating. The scholar went to a jeweled door, sunlight streaming through to cast a kaleidoscope of colors across the floor. Opening it, the scholar shooed them inside, Noa impressed by the imposing desk covered in books, a pane of glass behind it etched with Castor’s moon so when the First sat there, it would frame her head like a corona. The scholar cast a sharp eye across the laced vellum tomes stacked neatly on the desk.

Maybe this was an opportunity for the scholar as much as it was for them. Noa gave her a moment to examine the books and bound papers piled on the desk before clearing her throat. “Perhaps you could give my artists some space to work?”

The scholar didn’t even look up from inspecting the texts, wide-eyed with barely concealed awe as she picked one up. “I can’t in good conscience leave you unattended, especially after the Warlord herself defiled the lower stacks earlier this week—”

Noa lurched toward her, grabbing hold of the scholar’s arm and dragging her squawking from the room, the scholar clasping the book to her chest like a newborn child as if she expected Noa to wrench it from her hands. There was a reason Jaxom triumphed in every battle with Castor—scholars might believe words were enough, but it didn’t stop people from pushing them around. Noa grabbed hold of the guard by the door, barely giving him time to deposit the tools and ladder before pulling both of them out onto the landing.

“Start with the hammer, Altahn,” she called over her shoulder before letting it swing shut. She let go of the scholar, standing between her and the jeweled door. The guard looked with great uncertainty between the two of them. “Surely you, a seeker of knowledge, understand just how inappropriate it would be for you to see this window before the First does?”

“That is ridiculous—”

The scholar made to push past her, but Noa held her ground, maneuvering the old bat backward toward the stairs. “Perhaps this pride of yours is something I should speak to the First about when she returns? Or I could tell her the name of the book you stole from her office?” Noa snatched it away before the scholar could stop her. “Surviving Reliefs That Reference the Nameless God. Interesting.”

The guard gasped, both hands over his mouth.

Noa held the book up. “This is what you take from the Holy First’s office?” She wished this was the part where she could ignite her tethers, or the book, or something, and twirl in a circle of flame. Unfortunately, she was stuck with being judgmental, which was much less fun. “I didn’t think such disrespect and blasphemy existed among Castor’s scholars!”

“I did not take it from her office. You took me from her office and—”

The guard looked as if he meant to cry.

Shattering glass sounded from inside the office, and Noa’s heart began to race, even as she blocked the scholar from pushing past her. She hadn’t thought Altahn would be able to bring himself to do it. Laughter bubbled up inside her, and Noa wanted to pull open the door to see what Altahn looked like while defacing an ancient temple. But she had a job. “We all knew the old window would have to be broken—old traditions are meant to be documented. Remembered. But not kept on top of us, demanding we continue on. This is the beginning of something new.”

“But—” The scholar’s spindly fingers latched on to Noa’s wrist, trying to wrench her out of the way.

“I’m going to go assist.” Noa pulled free, tapping the book thoughtfully before turning back toward the door. “I’ll have to think very carefully about what to say about what happened here to my aunt Vesper.”

Vesper. One of the hundreds of useless old women draped in gold and jewels with whom the First was quite chummy. The very name caused both the guard and the scholar to blanch. Noa opened the jeweled door. “Don’t interrupt us, please. Creating something new is a holy thing, is it not?”

She stepped through, pulling the door shut after her and setting the latch so it couldn’t be opened from the outside. Altahn was perched at the top of the ladder, his whole face screwed up in horror at the gaping hole where the moon had been etched into the glass. Anwei was nowhere to be seen “Please tell me some god isn’t going to smite me for this?” He reached up to tap at the glass with the hammer again, cringing when it cracked.

“The scholar god will probably just have people write nasty things about you.” Noa began unwrapping the glass they’d brought. “Anwei found the way down?”

“Before the door even closed behind you.”

Getting down to the restricted stacks was no easy feat when you didn’t have a million keys hanging from your belt—only scholars would think to use keys as some kind of status symbol. The Holy First, however, had a special stairway set aside just for her use that led directly to them, which was why they’d had to get rid of her, then break into her office. Altahn finished cleaning out the last of the glass just in time to avert his eyes when Noa pulled away the last of the wrapping.

“I’m afraid if I look at it again, it’ll be stuck in my head for the rest of my life. When I fall asleep, all I’ll be able to think of is—”

“The Chaol shipping advisor missing his skivvies?” Noa shuddered as she looked over the glass, skillfully pieced together and painted with, perhaps, more detail than anyone could have wanted.

“Where did Anwei come by that thing, anyway?”

“It was in the load we brought from Chaol. I don’t think she brought it on purpose, but apparently the shipping advisor paid her to steal it out of his mistress’s apartment. She showed it off to some of the wrong people, I guess.” Noa opened the bag of tools they’d taken from the glazier’s shop. It was full of sharp things and heavy metal-looking things and jars of liquidy things that looked quite poisonous. She pulled out a small mallet and turned to face the gap in the framing over the First’s desk. “I guess he didn’t pay the rest of his fee, so Anwei kept it. I think she’s glad to give it the attention it deserves now.”

“You don’t think Anwei actually wants us to put it up, do you? We only brought the shipping advisor because they wouldn’t have believed we were installing a window if we had no window.”

“But just think of the First’s expression when she sees it! A whole day’s worth of appointments where she’ll have to sit with the shipping advisor looking over her shoulder before they can get a glazier to remove him.” Noa took hold of the glass’s frame and began dragging it toward the desk. “Anwei said we had at least ten minutes before we had to get out. Don’t be a drag—this’ll be fun.”

Altahn sighed. Smiled. He always smiled. But then he picked up the other end, still averting his eyes. “I’m not sure fun is the right word.”

Anwei stole down the stairs, pulling up the hood of the scholar robe she’d snagged from the First’s office, and stuffed the key that had been under the false bottom in her desk’s top drawer into her pocket. It was hard to keep herself from running, the black pall Knox made at the back of her mind freezing and stabbing at her in turn.

The connection between them felt hot, warping the air around people walking by, as if suddenly she had a flicker of his Devoted aurasight and a taste of his strength. Since saving him in the tomb, her sense of smell had blossomed larger, so even stone seemed to sing as she walked by, inviting her to touch it when before it had only moodily acknowledged her existence. Herbs were what she knew.

Now, with her aura all mixed together with Knox’s, there was more.

More to worry about too. Although their minds were still connected, Knox had only come out of his sleep in fleeting moments since the snake-tooth man had stabbed him. Every day Knox’s presence seemed to wane. He tossed in his sleep, thrashed when she forced food and water down his throat. Anwei had barely managed to keep him alive. She bit her lip, ready to demand godly help, to poison, fight, steal, destroy, if it meant saving him. There had to be a way to bring him back. She just had to find it like she’d found everything else she’d ever needed. But the snarl of ice and thorns that she felt in his mind worried her. She wasn’t sure who he’d be if—when—he woke.

He’d been a ghost when he fell. A ghost who had been trying to kill her.

Anwei had reacted the way she always did—with her herbs. She’d thrown calistet at him, the poison no one could recover from, without thinking. As soon as she’d done it, the energy coursing through her had blazed bright, golden and hot, worse than the panic of realizing Knox would die the moment it hit him. With that energy, Anwei had managed to grab hold of the calistet with her mind midair to stop it from reaching him. All while wondering if she couldn’t poison him, would he stab her?

Then the snake-tooth man had arrived to stab a sword through Knox’s gut since he hadn’t taken enough from her yet. Everything after that was a singular blur of pain, light, fire, and roots writhing like snakes all, the whole world fading to nothing as she tried to heal Knox’s terrible wound.

The shapeshifter she’d been chasing for eight years, the one who was supposed to have murdered her brother, had been there. Right there within reach. And she’d let him go.

It was hard not to stomp, or yell, or run at the memory. But Anwei had to stay focused. She’d told Noa and Altahn they only had ten minutes in the temple before they needed to retrieve the wagon and meet her three streets over. She didn’t have time to start hyperventilating.

Anwei reached the first floor a good thirty seconds ahead of schedule. The staircase let her out just behind the guards keeping people from wandering into the restricted stacks. Moving quickly, Anwei walked down the hall as her contact at the university had told her to. The hallway would end in a door—

Only it didn’t. It turned a corner. Anwei slowed, taking in a breath. She smelled nothing but the dusty brown of aged vellum and old gray stone. No people. So she raced around the bend only to find a two-story picture window: a very large, very cross-looking scholar glaring down at her in white and red glass.

There was no door. Anwei’s gut twisted. Ten minutes. She had already used one and a half of them. Inhaling again, she caught braised lamb and roasted greens slipping through the layers of color, closely followed by dusty blue-gray cotton, sweat, and the clammy scent of ink.

Anwei stared at the glass because the smells were somehow coming from inside it.

After a moment, she walked straight toward it, bracing for her nose to hit glass, but it never did because the picture was an optical illusion, the frame a doorway that lined up perfectly with the window at the far end of a hall. Leave it to scholars to try to trick people with their own minds.

Once she was through the opening, Anwei turned past the glass toward wrought-iron doors blocked by a dusty little scholar at a desk.

They’d been following the snake-tooth man for weeks when he’d suddenly disappeared from the road, almost as if he’d crumbled to nothing, setting Anwei into a panic. Until she remembered so many years before when she’d tried to learn which family marked their servants with a snake.

The scholars had written down her name that day. One had even scrawled a little picture of her, she’d thought, then told her the mark was associated with a specific estate, only the last family to live there had died seventy-five years earlier in a fire. That there was nothing else worth sharing And also to get her dirt-crusted hands away from his precious records.

But his mouth had been tight as he said it. Extra care taken as he checked her name again, almost as if he was addressing a letter at that moment to tell the snake-tooth man someone had come looking for him. There was information here. Hidden. An address, perhaps. Maps. Maybe even plans of the house where the snake-tooth man had taken Lia’s younger sister and Patenga’s cursed sword. A house where her brother had…

She strangled that thought. Her brother, who was not dead

Anwei fanned away the anger burning in her throat as she approached the desk. The scholar looked up from a very beautiful illustration of a tree he was embellishing with a little pot of gold paint. “Did you need something?” he asked. “You have to have direct orders to get something from these shelves—”

Nodding, Anwei pulled out a little bottle of malt from her bag, uncorked it, then held it out to the scholar. “Would you hold that please?”

He took it even as he protested. “What is—”

“Hold still now.” She extracted the wooden funnel from its place in the bag’s side pocket and jammed it into the bottle’s open mouth, then poured in a little stream of powder. Stowing the packet of powder and the funnel, she took the bottle back and corked it, giving it a good shake. Flashing a smile at the scholar who was staring at her open-mouthed, she shook the bottle one more time, waiting for the harsh citrine smell to turn to fiery red. Little splatters of powder had gotten on the book, the scholar staring at the page with horror. “Sorry.” She tried to sound it, though she wasn’t particularly. “A bit time sensitive, this stuff. Thank you so much for your help.”

It wasn’t changing. She swirled the bottle around again, anger pricking inside her, her energy reaching out to touch the little bits of powder, the acrid white burn of malt. You have to push it, the thought came. Just a little bit, to make it bond correctly…

The scholar’s yelling wasn’t helping her concentrate, of course. “What in Calsta’s name do you mean by—”

She breathed in again, pressing the smells together in her mind, and the liquid warmed her palms through the glass, the crimson scent dimming to a sickly gold. Perfect. Better than perfect. Anwei uncorked the bottle and emptied the liquid over the scholar’s head.

“You sky-cursed initiate’s pen nib of—” The scholar lurched back from the desk, half trying to save his precious illumination, half scrabbling at his face as the concoction dripped down. “Are you trying to destroy years of work on an irreplaceable—”

In her mind, she cheered the concoction on, and suddenly it snaked down his collar as if it were alive. Anwei’s breath caught, the energy inside her burning. She’d never seen the compound do that before.

Grunting, the scholar fell facedown onto his vellum. He lay there, gold paint smeared across his cheek, and a dribble of saliva beading on his lips to drip onto the page under his chin

Anwei blinked, fear like a rotten pit in her core. It had taken her whole soul to stop the calistet from killing Knox down in the tomb, but this had just… happened. She grabbed the little lamp sitting next to the fallen scholar on the floor, lit the wick with her own flint and steel, then ran through the doors to the restricted stacks a little too quickly.

Books. I’m looking for books, pages, records about the estate that uses a snake house mark. The shelves were laid out in long rows that disappeared into the darkness, the air a dry, underground cold. Running into the first aisle, Anwei forced herself to calm, losing herself as she systematically checked for signs of the house mark. How much time did she have left? The guards outside wandered back to check on something about every eight minutes based on her observations the day before, and knocking out the scholar hadn’t been timed the right way.

She had to hurry.

The air somehow breathed thicker between the ancient shelves, the scents of dust, cured hide, ink, and mold strangling Anwei. The records are hidden down here, she whispered to herself as she moved on to the next set of shelves. He has scholars reporting on anyone who comes looking for them. I’ll be able to see it, whatever it is. I have to.

The family name, I remember the name they told me all those years ago—

She crashed between bookshelves crowded together like old gossips at the well, searching for a section with property records. When she found the right aisle, Anwei recoiled, something foul twitching in her nose.

There was a pot sitting in the middle of the aisle, its contents a slippery cinnamon red that reached for her, sticking in her lungs.

Aukincy. In Castor’s library? Excitement surged in Anwei’s gut. Aukincy was hardly an accepted practice. Scholars wouldn’t allow it down among their precious records. Which meant that scholars hadn’t put it there.

Keeping watch on records that referred to Tual’s own history made sense to Anwei—a shapeshifter able to survive as long as he had to be monitoring who was asking questions about him and why. Anwei did the same herself, rewarding her contacts if they told her about anyone who came asking.

But aukincy in the restricted stacks themselves? Why bother? If the information was so dangerous he needed this kind of precaution, wouldn’t he just destroy records? But then she smelled it. The awful scent of nothing that followed Tual everywhere he went, the reek of stolen soul.

She darted into the aisle, noting records about rogue Devoted, Basist collectives, crimes against children. All hidden in the dark to keep Devoted from destroying them like they had every other record of Basists from temple donation ledgers to property sales, no doubt. According to what Lia had learned in Patenga’s tomb, the centuries of attempting to cleanse Basists of the nameless god’s touch had been for nothing. It wasn’t Basists that were dangerous; it was bonded pairs of gods-touched working together, the danger only coming when one betrayed the other.

The scars marking Anwei’s arms and legs, her collarbones, and her back began to burn at the thought. A rush of anger seemed to wait inside her all the time now, looking for the tiniest trigger to flood her humors. All these years the Devoted had been protecting the Commonwealth from shapeshifters. Soul stealers. The creatures who made themselves gods, who stole energy from others instead of sacrificing for their own magic. Dirt witches. Basists.

But the shapeshifter tomb in Chaol hadn’t belonged to a Basist. The shapeshifter king had been touched by Calsta. Lia had seen the reliefs with her own eyes showing a Devoted stabbing the man he loved most—a Basist—to take his life and power. Any gods-touched could become a shapeshifter so long as they were bonded with someone touched by a different god. A truth the first Warlord had hidden, eradicating the threat of future shapeshifters by destroying the kind of magic that wasn’t hers. You needed both a Basist and a Devoted to make a shapeshifter, so if Basists were all dead, no new shapeshifters could emerge. Devoted still taught the horrible lies the first Warlord had used to make herself the Commonwealth’s new leader. If we don’t destroy Basists, they’ll eat our souls.

Anwei tripped, the clatter of a metal pot against stone ringing in her ears, and a bloom of something clouded up toward her face. Of all the ridiculous moments to get angry and stop looking properly for threats—Anwei jerked back, but it was too late. Her vision had begun to warp.

No. She stumbled back, jamming a hand into her medicine bag, the smoke burrowing down her throat with ferocious glee that was too many colors. Her mind ticked through all the scents coming from her medicine bag, her fingers closing around a fistful of packets that would counter the poison before she…

Anwei suddenly found herself staring at the wall, one hand deep inside her medicine bag and her mind blank. Lost in thought when Anwei only had five minutes at most to find the information that would lead her to the snake-tooth man. Maybe I’ll have better luck in the next aisle. Her legs shook as she squeezed between a gap in the shelves, her eyes settling on a pot…

A pot. Hadn’t she seen a pot a moment ago? It had seemed so important.

She looked down at her hand inside the bag. One of her fingers was prickling with heat, knuckle-deep in a packet of belur stamens, the acid eating into her skin. When she pulled it out, two other packets came with it. Ground piphor scales and a dried husknut shell cut into neat strips. Taking an experimental step forward, Anwei held out the lantern and saw a single tendril of smoke spilling over the pot’s lip, the smell of it pleasant, like herbs and—

The door at the entrance rattled, and Anwei jerked to life, her eyes tracing the same spot on the wall, her arms limp. She stumbled backward, the air around her no longer sweet. Light bled into the stacks, footsteps slapping against the stone. The guards must have found the incapacitated scholar. She was out of time.

Turning back to the row she’d been searching, she saw a pot.

A pot with a cloud of smoke pouring from it.

Her hand was once again thrust deep into her medicine bag, herbs burning her fingers. This was the second time she’d tried to take them out, the taste of them a perfect answer to the smoke. Holding her breath, Anwei tore the scarf from her hair and twisted the herbs inside it. She shoved the scarf against her nose, then ran into the cloud of smoke so thick she couldn’t see through it anymore. Her skin, her mind, every inch of her crawled with the feel of magic trying to worm its way back in through her ears, her eyes, her mouth.

The herbs were there to stop someone. To delay them, to make sure they got caught. Perhaps so Tual could come himself to find out who had gone to such lengths to find him.

Anwei touched book after book, squinting at the spines, then going by feel until she stumbled over another pot. They were boxing in this section of shelf, belching smoke that roiled in poisonous waves, as if kicking over the first pot had triggered some kind of trap. Pressing the herbs tighter against her nose and mouth, Anwei turned back to search through the section again, gasping down a single lungful of herb-laced air.

Lantern light flashed past her, the shouts close now.

Anwei’s lungs burned. She fell to her knees, pulling books from the shelves one after another, but she couldn’t smell, not with aukincer smoke clouding around her head. Rage rose like a monster inside her. Anwei gulped down another orange-tinged breath through the scarf, lashing out toward the shelf where she’d smelled the nothing smell before, throwing all of the bound papers to the ground. None of it looked right, property records, edicts, books of history… Anwei’s eyes began to fuzz at the edge, making her wobble. She caught herself on the top shelf.

And her fingers found leather. She pulled the object down, not a book but a folio jammed tight with papers. A snake had been tooled into the leather. It had been pulled from the shelf and left open on top as if someone had recently been reading it but had forgotten midsentence why they would want to be down in this dark, awful cave. There was nothing down here worth her attention, just useless books.

Grunting, Anwei wrenched herself free of the sticky thought and grabbed the folio in both hands. She took it and ran, upsetting the shelves behind her to stop the scholars from easily seeing what she’d taken. Shouts echoed up from all around her, closing in.

She was surrounded.

A guard stepped into the aisle just next to her, lantern held high. The smoke didn’t seem to confuse him, and she had only a moment before he saw her over the tops of the books.

Drawing in another poison-tinged breath, Anwei threw herself up against the shelf, groaning with effort until it tipped. Books began to fall with sickly thuds into the aisle on the other side of the shelf, the wooden joints creaking until the shelf fell to the ground with a terrible crash of old leather and fluttering paper on top of the guard.

Figures appeared at both ends of the aisle, guards cautiously approaching. “Do not move!” one shouted, only thirty paces between them.

Thrusting the folio into her bag, Anwei’s fingers closed around the calistet packet with its distinctive button. Flashes of Knox on the ground, of powder in the air—

—of energy being violently sucked out of her chest, the herbs burning in the air right before her eyes—

—the snake-tooth man holding Knox’s sword—

“Grab her!” the guard shouted.

Anwei let go of the packet and grabbed the one filled with ground corta instead, sprinting for the pot billowing with smoke. Hands grabbed for her robe, but Anwei skidded down onto her knees, tore open the packet, and emptied half of it into the gushing smoke. Arms grabbed her around the ribs, lifting her off the ground, but Anwei had already twisted to grind the last of the orange powder directly into the guard’s nose and mouth. Jerking back, he let go of Anwei, scrubbing his eyes with his hands.

Stumbling away from him, Anwei found the strength to run. She scooped up the pot as she passed it, corta granules bonding with the elements in the smoke to turn a sticky toxic red where it tried to push past the herbs protecting her breath. It made a cloak around her as she ran, any guards who came close clutching their throats and retching.

I said ten minutes. The herbs in her scarf were fading, one last breath all Anwei could gasp down. The weight of the folio seemed to drag against her shoulder, but Anwei was full of sunlight, of hope, excitement, and vengeance even as the smoke swirled out to catch another guard in the face. Whatever was in that folio, it was going to change everything. It had to.

Down the last aisle, up the stairs, through the door, smoke churning around her like a storm cloud. Past the desk and the scholar just beginning to blink his eyes open, and on to the grumpy man in the picture window to whom Anwei gave a cheeky salute.

But as she crossed into the main library, something in Anwei’s mind gave a sharp twist.

Anwei stumbled past the two guards keeping people out of the restricted stacks, clutching the pot around the belly as she tried to find her balance. Her thoughts contracted around the spot at the back of her mind that was tied to Knox. A lightning burst cracked out from Knox’s consciousness, and Anwei gasped, pitching forward onto her knees.

And then the pain was gone, leaving only Knox there, the warm touch of him pointing her back toward the camp. He was awake.

Fists grabbed hold of her robe, wrenching her up from the ground.

Anwei smashed the pot into the guard’s head. The contents swirled up into the air in a poisonous, cinnabar sparkle. He let go of her, stumbling back even as Anwei gagged, a mouthful of poison and corta and only the nameless god knew what else was in that pot going down her throat.

Unwrapping the herbs tied into her scarf, Anwei shoved them directly into her mouth, the taste of them burning her tongue. She lurched past the stacks and the frozen scholars shouting with confusion, the herbs turning the angry red of the smoke to a breeze of yellows and blues. Shaking, she crashed through the door that opened onto the main steps, chanting scholars crying out with surprise as she stumbled through their midst, then heaved herself into a wagon full of palifruit.

The driver turned to shout at her, but Anwei wasn’t listening, hopping out again once the guards had raced past. She rushed down the next few streets toward where Altahn and Noa were waiting.

Knox was awake. The thought sent a nauseating swirl of relief, excitement, and worry through Anwei’s humors. But there was fear as well. Because if Knox was awake, then that meant Willow was too.