She Who Rides the Storm (The Gods-Touched Duology)

When Knox finally spotted Anwei’s purpled aura in the crush between Chaol’s gate on the other side of the bridge, he couldn’t help but stand up from his table. His muscles complained at the movement after an hour of sitting fused to his chair outside the riverbank malthouse while he waited for her.

He held himself in check, bobbing forward on his toes and almost knocking his head against the battered malthouse sign, a peeling affair sporting a bloodied auroshe with a broken horn. Running through the crowd to check Anwei for wounds wouldn’t do anything but draw attention, but every moment of waiting itched as if he’d swallowed a cupful of spiders.

Anwei walked right past Knox, eyeing a towering silenbahk as it lumbered past, before ducking into the crowd. The riverbank market was clogged tight, and by the time Knox had pulled out a coin to leave on the table, she’d lost herself among the hundreds of traders milling between stalls. He slid into the tide of wide skirts, scarves, dirty boots, and false silver, disconcerted when he couldn’t find Anwei’s dark aura in the flood. Even more so when following her, despite not being able to see her aura, wasn’t a problem, the spot at the back of his head that belonged to her pointing him through the crowd.

He looked back toward the bridge that led to the Sand Cay. He didn’t see any familiar auras, and not a single fleck of gold. No one had followed Anwei out of Chaol so far as he could see. How had she escaped?

Knox followed Anwei to the wagon lines at the edge of the market, snippets of her primrose accent easy to pick out from the thistly affectations of the Elantin trader she was speaking to. “You’re headed for Gretis?” she asked as he loaded bags of dried barley into the back of his cart. “Just two of us.”

“That’s a nice little place—right on the ocean. I can get you there in less than an hour.” The driver walked around the edge of the cart to check on the animal tethered to the front. A donkey? It had odd twisty horns that made Knox think it was at least part auroshe. “You’ll have to walk from the road, though,” the man called.

Knox couldn’t help himself, pulling Anwei around to face him. “You’re all right?” he asked.

“Why wouldn’t I be?” Anwei gave him a bright smile, the one she used to wrap people up and make pets of them. He fell back a step, surprised. To most people, Anwei looked soft, small, and bright, but it had been a long time since she’d bothered pretending with him.

“What happened?” he whispered.

Still she smiled. A sharpened blade in a sheath made of wildflowers. “Gretis is the perfect place for us to get away. Finally, we’ll get to spend some time alone together!”

Knox’s aurasight begged to expand, but he forced himself to fall in with what Anwei was doing, as he had the night before, pretending all he could see was her pretty face when he was looking for guards. The air seemed to hum with violence.

“How are you in once piece?” he whispered.

“Did you expect anything else?” She raised an eyebrow, lowered her voice. “We’re getting you out of here.”

The old man bumped Knox’s arm as he came back around the cart, then lifted another bag into the bed. “It’ll be a copper apiece, healer. I’ll settle for one and a split if you help me load the rest of these bags.”

“Perfect.” Anwei stepped away from Knox and hoisted one of the bags up from the ground.

Knox numbly followed her movements, flinching when a deep boom echoed out from the drum tower. He turned to watch the trade gate’s heavy timbers on the other side of the bridge shudder and begin to close. Panic of a new kind welled inside him, his mind suddenly full of the pockmarked sword.

Are you going to leave me again? Willow’s voice rasped in his head. Knox tried to swallow, his throat dry. He’d left her the day she died. Gone to see the Devoted play-fight in the town square while she and the rest of his family were being brutally murdered.

“Why are they closing the gate?” he croaked.

“I heard someone important went missing.” Anwei looked toward the gate, unconcerned.

Someone important. Like a runaway Devoted? Were they trying to shut him in and had just missed him?

Anwei touched his arm. “Not you. Someone from the governor’s house, up on the Water Cay.” She tossed her braids out of her face, bending to pick up another sack. “Are you going to leave all of these for me?”

Knox forced himself to turn from the closing gate. The sword’s voice carved lines in his head, crying acid tears. Anwei doesn’t care about me. Maybe you’ll be safe from Devoted in Gretis, but what will happen if they find me? It wasn’t enough earlier. It’s never enough. Now you’ll be far away, too.

He’d hidden Willow (the sword? Were they the same?) in his bags when he’d left with the Devoted for the seclusion. Buried her in the gardens outside once they arrived because Devoted weren’t allowed possessions. But Master Helan had seen Willow in Knox’s thoughts that last day at the seclusion. Sky-cursed spiriter. If Master Helan hadn’t found the sword in his mind, maybe Calsta would have let Knox stay. Maybe he wouldn’t have had to cut his way out, running from his life once again.

Maybe he would never have met Anwei.

He hoped the Roosters he’d fought had recovered.

Knox swallowed, bending to pick up the last sack of barley. “How long are we going to be gone?”

Anwei heaved her bag into the cart with a grunt. She glanced back toward the wall. “You can’t be away from… it?” Her hand strayed to her shoulder in an odd pantomime of Knox’s own reaching for the sword. She looked back at him. “Or is it your money box that’s got you worried?”

The words were, once again, flower-petal soft. Knox searched through them for thorns. Anwei had found him today with the sword in his hand after he’d promised not to touch it. Was this some kind of… ending? His money box was supposed to be his way over the border, but when the Trib had started chasing him, it hadn’t been Lasei or bribes he’d been thinking about.

It had been Anwei.

He threw the last sack into the cart, then climbed in and held a hand out to help her up after him. “Please just tell me what is happening. Tell me you’re okay.”

A shadow crossed her face, softening something in her expression, but then it hardened again. She took his hand and climbed in next to him, waving for the driver to prod the bony mule into a walk. Anwei grabbed hold of the side of the cart as it jerked into motion. “You know I’m okay.”

“And?”

“And you are going to stay at the inn at Gretis. I’ll get your sword, your money, and let you borrow some besides. I just got an advance on a new job.” Anwei’s fingers made knots of one another as she crossed her feet at the ankles next to him, holding herself away so there was space between his legs and hers. The air between them felt cold even in the afternoon heat. “It won’t be enough to bribe your way over the border, but it’ll be a good start. You could go north first and see if the bribe is less if you cross from Trib land.”

“Don’t firekey lizards infest the whole mountain range? I’d get roasted before I got close.” Knox sat back, the cart’s sideboards pressing into his spine. Only the night before, when they’d seen the auroshes, Anwei had been full of reasons he should stay. What had changed? “Tell me what happened.” He kept his voice low, pitched so the driver wouldn’t be able to hear. “Please, Anwei?”

Anwei smoothed braids back from her face, twirling one and then another. Counting them one by one as if she meant to check there really were a hundred. “The men who followed you from the Sand Cay were the same ones who left the bid in the temple last night.”

Knox’s forehead crinkled. They’d asked him to come to the malthouse, then tried to corner him? “That makes no sense, Anwei. Why would they chase me home?”

“They’re very motivated.”

“And you’re…” He watched her face, the way she was looking away from him. “You’re taking the job.”

Anwei scanned the streams of people parting for the cart as it bumped down the road, her eyes seeming to find every face that passed. Every face but his.

“And I’m being sent to Gretis? You don’t want me to help?” he asked.

“Not this time.”

“Are you angry at me?” Knox scrubbed a hand through his hair, hating this fake version of Anwei that she was putting up around her like a shield, trying to remember what had happened at the apothecary. It was murky, full of Willow’s voice and the sword. “I know you told me not to go, but… it was so much money. And I didn’t mean to pick up the sword.”

“I know.” She arranged a smile on her face, a small, parched thing he’d never seen before. “I’m just beginning to see that I should have asked more questions before inviting a Devoted to live down the hall, that’s all.”

The words jabbed like bony fingers in Knox’s stomach. “Like what?”

Anwei touched the back of her head with tentative fingers, and Knox could feel a sort of echoing twinge in his own head. “It doesn’t matter now.”

“It does matter. Anwei, whatever is happening—”

“It isn’t safe for you in Chaol, Knox.” She spoke a little faster now, as if even she was tired of having to put on her pretty apothecary face for him. “I didn’t want the cart driver to hear, but whatever that was on the wall—you’re only safe because the Devoted were distracted. One went missing, I guess, and they’re searching for her. If something happens with you again, you won’t have that kind of luck.”

“Me? What about you, Anwei?”

“What about me?” She was losing patience.

Knox sat back against the cart’s slats, trying to think. Devoted didn’t just go missing. Not unless they were him. “How do you know one of the Devoted went missing? It’s too soon for your contacts to be feeding you information. The only one you’ll see in person is that Neela girl.”

“Noa. She doesn’t know she’s a contact. She thinks we’re friends.”

“Aren’t you?”

Anwei shrugged. “I went by the governor’s house to see if you were right about Devoted coming after you.”

“You just… went back there?” The idea of it sucked the air from Knox’s lungs. He touched her arm, trying to give weight that didn’t sound like instruction. “Anwei, Devoted will be able to see what you are. You can’t—”

“What is that supposed mean?” Knox startled back from the sudden raw sting to her voice. “What I am. I’m a person. I heal people. I find things. I’m good at both.”

“I know.” The rose in her cheeks had darkened, the plum hue in her aura churning around her head. Anwei’s teeth dug into her lip, and for a moment Knox wished he could read thoughts, but he immediately regretted such a flippant want. Gifts from Calsta never came without sacrifice, and the ones that went with reading thoughts were the kind he was glad had never been asked of him. “But, Anwei, I thought a Devoted was going to come over the wall with your body draped over his shoulder because—”

“Because what?” Anwei turned to face him head-on now. No shielding smile, no soft words, no compliments. Her fingers worried at the top button on her apothecary tunic, tight against her throat. “You’ve been calling me a witch since we first met. I always thought it was a bad joke. But was it ever? Today it got a little too close. Do you think I don’t know what Devoted do?”

Knox suddenly couldn’t breathe. Devoted kept the peace. Watched the borders. Kept an eye on the governors.

And they killed Basists before they could become shapeshifters.

He shook his head, hardly able to control the movement. “Anwei, it was a joke.”

“Which explains why you won’t let me come anywhere near you when you’re sick. You’re afraid I’ll witch you.”

“No. I mean…” Yes. In the year he’d been with Anwei, Knox had seen her use her aura. When she was helping sick people, it glowed around her like a plague lantern in the dark. But he knew dirt witches could do more.

“You mean you’re worried I’ll suck your soul out through your eyeballs? You think I’m the reason the Devoted haven’t tracked you down, but also the reason they’re going to find us now?” Anwei twisted the button at her throat so hard, Knox heard threads pop. “I’m really good at smelling things. That’s it, Knox. It doesn’t have anything to do with magic or… whatever you said today. Auras. Or shapeshifting or anything else.” She gave an experimental sniff. “And unless your soul stinks like dry sweat, I can’t smell it to steal it.”

“I didn’t mean…” Knox shifted against the bags, rubbing a hand across his face, the gritty dirt from the marketplace scratching his skin. “I don’t have an excuse. I’m sorry.” He tried to sort through the muck that coated the conversation they’d had at the apothecary. He’d handed her his sword, then run because she’d told him to run. And he’d said…

Oh, he’d said some things. In exactly the wrong way. The twist inside of Knox wrung tighter. “I am not afraid of you, Anwei.” He shivered as he said it, the truth much more complicated. “And I wish you were right about smelling things.”

Putting his hands up when she glared, Knox tried to keep his voice calm. “I mean, not about my soul. I wish it were true that you were born with a parchwolf’s nose. But that’s… not a thing. You know it’s magic. Don’t you?”

“No. I don’t know that.” Her eyes pinched closed, and Knox began to worry that he’d truly broken something between them. Or maybe that she’d broken something inside herself, and talking about it wasn’t going to make it better. But she brushed it away, forcing her eyes open again. “And even if it was, what does it matter? Is my nose going to slit your throat?”

The crowded booths had given way to an open road. Fields of some crop swayed beyond that, deep enough to hide just about any kind of monster, a salty wind swishing up from the ocean to ripple through them from the ocean cliffs beyond.

Knox lowered his voice and leaned toward Anwei. “It doesn’t matter to me that you can do banned magic. You are a good healer. Some of the old Basists were too, before they found the oaths to grow so much stronger. Devoted aren’t going to find me because of you, they’ll find me because me. But if they find me, they’ll see you, too. Except for some reason it seems like they can’t see us when we’re together.”

“That makes absolutely no sense, Knox. I wasn’t with you on the wall.”

“No, but then you were.… I called out to you when I fell. And you answered. And then… this happened.” He touched his head.

Anwei was shaking her head. “Still doesn’t make sense. I don’t even believe in any of your stone gods.”

“You know what doesn’t make sense?” Knox sat forward, trying desperately to make her look at him. “A year ago I was lying in the street, so drained that it’s a miracle I was still alive. I wasn’t even trying to hold in Calsta’s energy. I was on fire. They could probably have seen me all the way back in Rentara. And the one who was hunting me…” Thinking of Ewan and the years of bruises and scars that went with him made Knox’s fingers clench. Of Ewan spitting on the country boy who bested him in the training yards. Ewan trying to cheat and stab Lia when the masters weren’t looking, of broken glass in her sheets, and sugar in Knox’s tea. Ewan would never stop trying to stomp out a light that looked even a little brighter than his own. “He never would have stopped looking, not out of pity, not out of a sense of decency. Not for anything. But you picked me up and took me in, and there wasn’t anything for him to find.”

“I didn’t do anything but give you a bed, some soup, and a lousy landlord!”

“Then”—Knox couldn’t let her talk over him—“when I panicked on the wall, I lost control and was on fire again. I called for you, and suddenly… you were there. Your aura or… something. It covered me. It got deeper.” He shivered, touching the back of his head.

“I didn’t do anything.” Anwei’s brows crunched down, her rosebud mouth flattening into a frown. “I am not a shapeshifter.”

“I didn’t say you were!”

“You of all people should know I’m not. It was a shapeshifter who made that sword of yours!”

“I know!” Knox’s stomach pulled, his throat bubbling with bile as his sister’s gaunt face reappeared in his head.

“You think I could make something like that?”

“No. I know you couldn’t. You’d be better suited as a… pri…” Once again Knox couldn’t remember the word. “A… pineapple.”

Anwei stared at him, her mouth hanging open. Then she clapped hands over her lips, her eyes scrunching shut with a laugh she couldn’t keep in. When she finally had control of herself, she let her hands drop, the smile still unwilling on her lips. “Priantia. Of all the words you could learn in Trib, why is that the one you keep reaching for?”

Her smile was a relief, even reluctant the way it was. Knox knew Anwei wasn’t a murderer, but it was banned magic that had left his parents cold and his sister some kind of ghost festering inside a sword. He tried to find the right words. “I don’t think of you as one of… one of them.”

“A wandering Trib holy man? That’s probably good, because I think Calsta would be upset with my methods. I’ve never once tried to give up my food and clothes in order to convince her I’m worthy of power.”

Knox shook his head, not wanting to think about the northerners so devoted to Calsta that they attempted to sacrifice the way Devoted did in the hopes she would touch them. “It was my job to find people who were using the nameless god’s power before. You aren’t like them. I mean, I guess you are in some ways. But they were…”

“Bad?” She licked her lips and pressed them together. “If there’s an ‘us’ and a ‘them’ based on whatever you’ve decided is wrong with me, then why do I get to be part of your ‘us’ instead of your ‘them’?”

“I guess because I know you?” Knox waited for her to look at him. She didn’t. The night was cooling, sweat on him drying sticky and uncomfortable.

“Did you try to know any of the other ones you met?”

“They were hurting people, Anwei. And it isn’t something I ‘decided’ about you. Auras don’t lie. They only change color if you’ve been using energy from an outside source. Magic, if you prefer. It marks you forever. When you’re actively drawing it in, you burn brighter than a normal person. I can see it in you.” He looked down, the sinking feeling inside his chest dropping an inch or two. “Those Devoted in Chaol will be able to see it too. Unless there is…” He pointed to her and then back to himself. “Something here.”

The button on her tunic was about to come off between her fingers. “You don’t understand. I can’t—”

“I’m not going to tell. You’re not hurting anyone, Anwei.” Knox reached out to touch her arm again. “I mean, not really. There are a few high khonin who might disagree with me.”

Mouth twisting, Anwei looked out into the fields. Her voice came out in a croak. “I’ll meet you at the inn in Gretis tomorrow morning with all your things. You can’t stay with me anymore.” Then she hopped off the back of the cart.

Knox caught one glimpse of her dark outline against the swaying stalks before she was in the field and out of sight. He breathed in deep, the air around him suddenly so much colder. Then he jumped off after her.

“Anwei?” He plunged into the shivering plants just as a bright light flashed from somewhere across the field near the cliffs—a trail of lanterns moving in a tidy line like ants in the distance. The light blazed in front of Anwei’s form ahead of him, the milky yellow making a halo around her face and down her shoulders.

Knox drew even with her, letting her lead him through the maze of stalks toward the ocean, assuming that if he just kept following, she’d either tell him to go away or tell him what they were doing, but she didn’t.

“I don’t want to go to Gretis without you,” he said. “You saved my life a year ago, and you saved me again today.”

“The Trib weren’t going to kill you.”

“We didn’t know that. You’re the only good thing in my life. I don’t want to leave.…” The words choked in his throat because they were wrong. I don’t want to leave you. The rest of the sentence sat like a stone on his tongue. He swore at himself under his breath.

Anwei’s face was an unnerving blank as she methodically moved through the plants towering over their heads, her eyes never straying from the lights. Auras fizzed into existence when they got closer, arranged around some kind of compound with high walls of wood where field should have been, running clear to the edge of the ocean cliff. Just as Knox was about to speak again, she stopped, sniffing quietly.

“Did you see the guards?” Knox whispered.

“No.” She sniffed again. “What are we up against?”

We. Knox felt the tension in his chest lessen a tiny bit. “There are three on this side. But I can’t see far enough to know if they go all the way around. If there are only cliffs on the other side, they probably don’t watch it as closely.”

Anwei nodded, squinting at what they could see of the compound. “Do you trust me, Knox?”

She’d said it back in his room, the sword between them. “Of course I do.”

“Then go to Gretis. This job isn’t for you.”

“This is the job?” Knox looked toward the torches. The compound wall was so new that sap wept from the boards. “What inside there is worth twenty thousand in silver? Worth trying to force a thief into working for you?”

“I can’t say I understand it, but they need us. Me, anyway.” Anwei circled toward the back side of the compound. She sniffed again, her nose wrinkling. “Are those bael wreaths hung under the torches? It’s like they’re afraid of something in there.”

Knox squinted at the herbs strung across the walls, able to see the shape of them, but he didn’t know enough about herbs to agree. How could he have been so stupid to think the Trib were working for the Warlord? “What did they do to you? Did they threaten you?”

She shook her head, not quite looking at him. “Bael is supposed ward off ghosts.” He could practically feel her rolling her eyes at the idea before she moved on, but Knox’s neck prickled, and he barely stopped himself from reaching for the sword that wasn’t there. Ghosts weren’t so easy to dismiss for him.

Anwei muttered to herself as they circled back toward the compound’s gate, stopping every few feet to make notes on the pad she kept in her medicine bag. “Wall is about ten paces high, and it’s all lit.…” She took in a deep breath as the wind swished over the compound and into their faces. “I can smell fresh-turned clay. Metal and glass—tools probably. And I can see the governor’s house mark on some of the equipment out here.…” Another gust touched her face, her long braids blustering around her like blades of grass. “Uh-oh.”

Knox froze at the same time she did, because the wind had brought something to his ears just as she smelled it. A high, cackling whinny that belonged to no horse. The tall, grassy stalks rustled about thirty paces to the south, an aura suddenly in range and headed toward them.

Bad things always came in threes. “Let’s go, Anwei.”

“Why are there auroshes here?” Anwei whispered, her brow furrowed.

Panic welled up inside Knox, and he grabbed her arm, meaning to pull her back from the aura steadily pushing toward them through the field, but Anwei halted, her hands flying up to cover her mouth.

A figure had appeared at the top of the compound wall. A hood shadowed his face, his coat rippling behind him in the ocean wind. Though he was too far for Knox to sense his aura, something inside Knox went still, Calsta’s energy leaking past his barriers to fill him before he could stop himself.

The torch glow turned the man’s hood a fiery red as he scanned the fields. Knox forced himself to let go of Calsta’s power, though it was obvious this man wasn’t Devoted or he would have seen their auras at once. The patrolling guard was less than twenty paces away and would see them for sure if they didn’t move.

“We have to go, Anwei.” Knox’s arms erupted in goose bumps as the figure’s hood swung in their direction. “Now.”

Anwei didn’t move, eyes stuck tight to the form on the wall, her nose flaring. She sucked in air until Knox was sure she’d implode. He grabbed her hand and pulled her back through the stalks, the spiky leaves whipping across his face and clawing at his sleeves. He glimpsed the woman patrolling the field, a Rooster’s three underbraids tight against her head.

Though it was too dark for the man on the wall to see them with torchlight at his feet, Knox couldn’t shake the feeling he was watching them go. That there was something very wrong inside that compound, and he didn’t like the idea of finding out what it was.

Anwei let him shepherd her back through the field. Just as their feet found the road’s pressed dirt, the high whinny sounded again, like teeth scratching on bone. Knox took hold of Anwei’s shoulders, all thoughts of swords, the border, even Devoted, becoming unnaturally small in his head. Castor’s anemic light painted Anwei’s face with purple lines. Her aura was, for once, quiet.

“Who was that?” he whispered.

Anwei dragged her eyes away from the pinpricks of light in the distance. He flinched when a tear ran down her cheek.

“All these finding jobs…” Her voice was brittle. “Yaru. Breaking into people’s houses.” She looked up, finally meeting his eyes, and it was as if her iron coating had cracked and she was letting him see a sliver of what was really inside. “I never told you what it is I’ve really been looking for.”