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

When Anwei woke, the sun was already high in the sky, the drummers in their tower rapping out the late-morning hour. She sat up with a groan, her shoulders and arms complaining.

Unbuttoning her high collar to expose her neck and shoulder, Anwei grimaced. The skin over her scapula was a muddy bluish purple where the guard’s pole had hit her, the color running under the long, raised scars that marked her from collarbone to shoulder blade. She tenderly touched her neck, wondering if it looked worse. The guard had, after all, tried to strangle her. Hopefully, with her high-necked tunic buttoned, Gulya wouldn’t see the bruises.

Flinching, Anwei reached for the pile of letters on her bedside table, correspondence she’d picked up from her lower city drops the night before, but then immediately shoved them back into place. She didn’t have to sift through reports to figure out where the snake-tooth man might be. The nothing smell had been at the trade advisor’s home last night, and now it was time to trace it back to the murderer who’d left it behind.

“Anwei?” A knock sounded at her door, Knox’s voice quiet. “Are you awake yet?”

“Yes,” Anwei called. She hurriedly rebuttoned her sleep tunic to hide the scars marking her shoulders, checking her sleeves to make sure the ones that wound down to her wrists were also covered before telling him to come in.

Knox was not so well covered, a sheen of sweat across his bare chest gleaming from doing forms in the apothecary’s rear yard. “Gulya thinks I’m trying to steal the chickens again.”

Anwei looked down. He had scars enough himself but was proud to bare them whenever possible, it seemed. “You should probably stop doing that.”

“I was trying to make her breakfast. The eggs are in the coop.”

“When shirtless young men try to make me breakfast, I usually accept.” She glanced up, pointing to a new scratch down his side. “Where did you get that, and why do you feel the need to parade like a Tanlir dancer instead of just telling me?”

“Let’s not pretend you care about bare chests all of a sudden.” He turned away, lines of sweat still running down his back as he started toward his room. Anwei forced her stare back down to her hands, not dignifying that with a response.

“Will you please remind Gulya I’m a paying tenant?” he called. “She was mumbling about calistet.”

Anwei sniffed, her nostrils flaring when all she could smell was Knox’s sweat threaded through the normal things in her room. Flowery green smells from the herbs filtered up from downstairs, but they were muted from this far away. She couldn’t detect the fiery red of calistet, but that didn’t mean Gulya hadn’t opened the jar. “Everything went smoothly after you left last night?”

“All fine.”

“Anything at the temple?”

Knox waved a hand at her before turning into his room. “Just a sad attempt to have you caned. Or maybe hung.”

“Wait, who wants me dead?” Anwei called, letting herself look up now that Knox was out of sight. He’d come in so late the night before that she’d almost gone out looking for him, something that had not sounded appealing after she’d spent half the night following those ridiculous auroshes to the governor’s compound on the Water Cay.

She’d only watched them long enough to see that the Roosters were the last to arrive, not the first. Devoted were already staying at the governor’s house.

“I don’t know if someone is really trying to kill you.” Knox backtracked into her line of sight. “There was a job offer—a very well-paying job offer—but only if we meet to discuss it in person.”

Anwei frowned and held out her hand. Sighing, Knox came back to her room, pulling one of Yaru’s prayer papers from his pocket along with a few coppers. She took the paper, the letters slanted oddly, as if they had been written by someone who did not wish their penmanship to be recognized. “I’ll have to ask the attendants who left it. Maybe I’ll have to find new ones if there’s a possibility someone bribed them into talking.”

“What if it’s worse than that?” Knox retreated to her doorway. “If the magistrate sent that note, he’s probably already watching the temple.”

“The magistrate? You think he feels like he overpaid for the figurine?” Anwei kept her carefree tone even as she considered the implications. If the wardens were after Yaru, it might be best to stay away from the temple and jobs altogether for a while.

Of course, there were more-dangerous people who could be watching the temple than the stuffy old magistrate. Anwei’s stomach lurched at the idea of auroshes pawing the ground outside Yaru’s scented hall.

Really, Knox should leave. He should. Anwei knew it in her head, but the idea of his room empty had Anwei reaching out like she had the night before, wanting to take a fistful of his tunic so he couldn’t float away and never return.

There were too many people who had left Anwei. Arun, though it hadn’t been his fault—dead people don’t have much choice in leaving or staying. Her parents, who had had all the choices in the world.

Anwei put a hand to her collar, twisting the button between her fingers, her scars burning with the memories of that day: Her final braid, which Arun was supposed to tie in front of the whole town council. Her twin’s blood on the hem of her skirt. A storm gathering in the sky like Calsta herself had seen Arun fall. Arun had known something was wrong and had tried to leave. He’d tried to take Anwei with him, and she hadn’t gone.

That couldn’t happen to Knox.

But she couldn’t leave now. Not with the nothing smell wafting from the Water Cay after she’d spent so long searching for it.

Knox’s shrug caught her attention as he pointed to the note clutched in her hand. He was still talking about the job offer. “What if the Trib figurine was the first test? To see if Yaru really was what the magistrate suspected. Then he sent wardens to set a trap?”

“The note came after you delivered the figurine?”

“It was there before I got to the temple. I guess that timeline doesn’t make sense. Could it be someone from the Fig Cay trying to unmask you?”

Anwei shook her head slowly. She’d been too careful with her contacts in the lower-cay gangs for them to know much more than that the goddess Yaru made poison that left no trace for the magistrate’s wardens to find. And that she’d exchange it for information.

Knox licked his lips and looked at the paper in her hand. “It could be a real offer.”

Twenty thousand in silver. Anwei folded the paper and set it on her bedside table. “Doesn’t matter. I don’t work with people who want to see my face.” She braced herself for what had to come next. “I followed the Roosters last night. I know you don’t like talking about Calsta, but we need to make sure you’re safe. Devoted are already here.”

“In the city?” Knox’s head came up. “Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

Knox stepped back from the doorway, hands scrubbing through his hair, still short enough to look like he belonged nowhere. Too long to be a servant, too short to be much of anything else. “Did you see who it was? How many?” He swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down. “Were there any who were… covered? Veiled?”

Anwei shrugged. “I didn’t see them. I just knew they were there.” She could smell them inside, the slippery metal tang of Devoted swords, the sweat and leather of their armor.

“Don’t go near them, Anwei. It’s dangerous for you, too.” He rubbed a hand across his scalp again, and Knox’s fingers froze in one of the spots she’d seen his Devotion scars before his hair had grown out. Three shiny pockmarks on his skull as if he’d been burned. It bothered Anwei that she didn’t know what they meant.

“Sure. Everyone’s scared of the Warlord’s terror crew, but they leave most of us alone. Unfortunately, you’re not one of those people, so I need you to tell me whatever you can about them.” It felt odd to so casually shed their unspoken agreement as if Anwei were taking off a coat. But she didn’t really feel like watching her friend creep around in the shadows until the Devoted found him and then die once they had. “I know there’s some weird rule that keeps you from talking about Calsta and whatever magic stuff you do—”

“It isn’t called magic.”

“Fine.” Anwei shrugged. “But… what are they looking for? We can put them off the scent. Unless they’re literally capable of sniffing you out? And I don’t mean your not-magic. You could do with a bath.”

“I can’t.…” Knox’s lips twisted into the serious expression always lurking under his smile. “All I can say is that leaving the seclusions isn’t allowed. And I left.”

“All right. Any more useless tidbits of information you could share? They’re really helping.” Anwei held the next suggestion in her mouth, not wanting to let it out even if it was the most logical. Logic and loneliness always seemed to go together in her life. “I don’t want you to go, but I don’t want to just hope we stay lucky.” Her tongue seemed to lock around the words, but she forced herself to spit them out anyway. “Maybe you could get a temporary job with a caravan headed south? By the time you got back—”

Knox shook his head before she could finish. “It’s either here or over the border, and I haven’t saved enough yet. The only reason I’ve lasted this long is because I’m with you.”

A little warmth bled into her chest at that. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Now he was looking down, one hand sneaking up to his shoulder. To where the sword was supposed to sit against his back. The hairs on Anwei’s arms stood up even after he let the hand fall back down to his side. “I don’t know.”

“So you—the one who turned to stone in the alleyway yesterday—want to just keep your head down?”

“I guess so.”

“All right.” Anwei wished there were more she could do. She was worried if Knox spooked enough, then he’d do something, and he wouldn’t tell her before he did it. “We’ll keep you out of sight until the Devoted leave.” Anwei let her eyes drift back down from his face, skipping over his bare chest to focus on the angry red abrasion under his ribs. It smelled clean, like it would heal easily, but it had an odd aftertone, almost like salpowder, an explosive that came from Trib traders. “Are you going to put clothes on, or do you need me to threaten you with medicine before you’ll spare me staring at you half-naked?”

“You’re the one who’s looking.” He pushed off the doorframe and headed for his room.

Anwei slid off her bed and stuck her head through the doorway to keep him in sight. “It would heal faster if you would just let me—”

“I’m filling the bathtub, so no surprise witch attacks for at least the next half hour. Otherwise we’ll both be traumatized.” Knox pulled his door shut behind him.

She let her breath out in a huff, sitting back on her bed. Witch. As if all the years and knowledge passed down through her family of healers could be distilled into that one ugly joke. Beildans hardly ever left their island, and Chaol was less than a day’s ride from the Lasei border, the exact opposite end of the Commonwealth from Beilda. Anwei wouldn’t be surprised to find she was the only one within a hundred miles. Two years ago Gulya had jumped at the chance to have Beildan braids sitting behind her apothecary sign, an assurance that in this shop, fevers would go down, bones would mend, and the world would be made right. But still, Knox wasn’t the first person she’d heard mutter “witch.”

Knox was the only one who wouldn’t let her fix him when he broke, though, as if medicine were worse somehow than being sick. The winter before, he’d been sick in bed for a week and wouldn’t even let her brew him tea, much less examine him. It was only when he was healthy that Knox liked prancing around half-clothed, as if he couldn’t see the way it made her look at the floor.

Or perhaps he could see and liked watching her not look. It was hard to tell.

He was right that she’d seen about five thousand bare chests too many in the years since Calsta’s storm had chased her away from Beilda in a leaky boat. Men, women, and everything in between. Something about healers made people itchy to shed their clothes, as if Anwei couldn’t smell exactly what was wrong the moment they stepped into Gulya’s shop. It was as clear as if each one came wrapped in bright silk, a pristine color manifesting for every complaint. Chaol healers looked with their eyes, searched with their hands, listened with their ears, and shirts usually came off before Anwei could stop them.

With Knox, though, it was different. Harder to look away and think only of humors and the way bones and muscles fit together.

Once Anwei had buttoned her gray apothecary tunic up to her throat and donned her favorite green skirts underneath, she went downstairs to see if Gulya really had opened the calistet jar.

The workroom at the bottom of the stairs seemed as if it had switched the floor and the ceiling, herbs hanging in clumps that turned the room into an upside-down field studded with dried flowers. Anwei paused long enough to extract a stalk of linereed, planning to make a poultice for her bruised shoulder and throat.

In the main part of the shop, Gulya stood lecturing a young woman from among the rows of blown-glass globes filled with dried herbs. The herbs seemed almost to sing when Anwei inhaled, as if they were happy to see her awake. Dried linereed, growel, and yuli. Carsom flowers and ground beil. It’s almost like home, Anwei thought, spoiling the moment of happy.

When Anwei had first left Beilda, healing had been impossible. Eating, drinking, living, had been the antithesis of whom she’d become. Her first month in the city across the channel from Beilda was a blur of searching for the murderer’s nothing smell. He hadn’t just taken her brother. He’d taken every bit of Anwei’s twelve years, leaving nothing inside her but a hole. It wasn’t until an apothecarist offered Anwei a scrap of bread that she sat still long enough to remember she was hungry. Thirsty. So tired she might as well have been dead.

While Anwei was eating, the apothecarist lamented her empty jar of frelia, because a local gang was hoarding the stimulant and charging ten times what it should cost to street buyers. Anwei sat up, thinking of where she’d last smelled frelia’s lemony pepper scent. “I could find that for you,” she said.

The old woman smiled. “First eat. I don’t want you getting into trouble on my account.” But then Anwei did it. Followed the scent to a warehouse, the high windows too small to be guarded. She went in and took enough for the apothecary, and the apothecarist paid her without asking any questions. She tweaked one of Anwei’s braids, saying, “You know you could be put in the stocks for impersonating a Beildan.”

“I earned these, every one,” Anwei whispered.

“Then why don’t you stay?” The old woman brought out a crusty roll and a bowl of soup that smelled like safe. “I could use someone like you to help me tell people what to do about the funny bumps on their behinds.”

Anwei’s stomach turned at that safe smell. The idea of mending funny bumps and rashes and deep humors and holes inside people jolted all the holes inside Anwei loose: Memories of Arun pushing her off the bench at their mixing table and laughing when she kicked the bench out from under him so he landed on the floor next to her. Of lying out under the stars talking about when they would open their own shop, but it would have salpowder explosives and frosted cupcakes. The memory of the apothecary so empty and cold because what had been left of Arun wasn’t a person anymore, it was less than a thing. It was a hole in the air, a nothing where so much had been before. Anwei’s heart, mind, and soul had been braided together with her twin’s, as if they were only one person, so when the snake-tooth man had ripped Arun apart, he’d ripped Anwei in two as well.

Then came the memories of Anwei’s mother behind the counter, a knife hidden in her skirt and thunder rumbling overhead.

Sitting at that apothecary’s counter, the smell of frelia peppery in her nose and soup in her stomach, Anwei shook her head. “I can’t work here.”

Nodding, the woman let Anwei sit quiet for a moment before smiling. “It’s part of who you are, isn’t it? It doesn’t have to be my shop or my counter. But if you earned those braids, then you’re a healer.”

Shaking her head again, Anwei ate the last of her bread. She didn’t know what she was anymore, but she was fairly certain there wasn’t room to be more than a hunter, a finder, an avenger. “Maybe I could find more herbs for you?”

That, the woman took with a smile.

So that was what Anwei had done. Find things. There were people all over who loved a finder once Anwei learned where to look. Tracking down things, people who had become lost. Sometimes helping people to lose the things they didn’t want anymore. Every job took her to a new part of the city, then new parts of the Commonwealth, to look for the man who had ruined her life. The snake-tooth man. But she’d always gotten her hair rebraided like clockwork, as if giving up her braids would be too much.

Anwei breathed in deep one more time, trying to love the smell of herbs despite the memories. Chaol was the first place she’d decided to work in an apothecary, after Gulya had made her laugh and then offered her enough money to buy her way past most guards clear to the Ink Cay. But it wasn’t the first place she’d healed—that old apothecarist had been right. All the memories of Arun’s hands grinding herbs next to hers never did dull. Anwei’s nose had always found the funny bumps even when she tried to ignore them. They were always there, calling to her. Her parents hadn’t been able to take that away from her, though they’d tried.

Anwei rubbed her scarred shoulder again, checking her collar to make sure it was buttoned tight. Then she curled her fingers through her braids, newly oiled and retied the week before. She’d earned them.

“Don’t take it more than twice a day or you’ll end up with sores under your tongue,” Gulya was calling after the customer she’d been talking to. The woman was young, two knots jauntily placed in the twist of hair lining her face, marking her second khonin. She glanced over her shoulder at Anwei before fleeing the shop, her green eyes familiar.

Anwei blinked with surprise. It was Noa, a high khonin contact she hadn’t expected to see for weeks at least. The girl paused in the window, pointing toward the dock outside the apothecary before scampering away to avoid Gulya seeing her. Anwei turned toward the glass globes, hiding a smile at the prospect of talking to the second khonin. She was always good for a laugh, and something interesting must have happened to bring her all the way down to the Coil.

“And make sure you give an offering to Freia.” Gulya had gone to the door to call after Noa, her voice a shade terser than Anwei thought the old woman realized. “Or she’ll take it all back!”

“You know most people don’t like being commanded to get better, don’t you, Gulya?” Anwei grinned at the old woman, picking up one of the oiled bags they used to transport remedies. A good chat with Noa sounded nice, but Anwei had things to do today up at the trade advisor’s compound, so whatever gossip she’d brought would have to be quick.

“Sick people are too busy dying for me to muddle through niceties.” Gulya raised an eyebrow as Anwei opened one of the glass globes to extract a silvery-white root. “Where are you taking that?”

“To a man with a deteriorating lower humor. He isn’t seeking proper care, and I’m going to help if I can.” Anwei added the root to her bag, choosing her words carefully. Gulya didn’t know why Anwei had agreed to work only a few days a week in the apothecary and spent the rest of her time ranging through the city like a hungry parchwolf, and she didn’t want to supply any extra clues.

“That root won’t combat stomach issues. You need—”

“He was seeing an aukincer, Gulya.” Anwei’s smile melted off her face as she glanced toward the old apothecarist, Gulya’s mouth open to argue before Anwei could even finish the sentence. “No, I don’t want to fight about it. So long as none of that poison is in this shop…”

“I’ve seen positive results, Anwei. There are enough who don’t understand your methods who’d find it easy to call you a dirt witch.” Gulya’s words were soft, but still they jolted through Anwei. Witch.

The old healer unfolded her sleeves, which she’d tucked back in order to get whatever nonsense herbs Noa had asked for. The noble couldn’t have requested her normal order from Gulya. “Sometimes you have to experiment a little. There could be benefits to—”

“No. There couldn’t. They want people to call them dirt witches because that’s what they’re pretending to be. Using five-hundred-year-old remedies without the magic that made them work?” Anwei finished adding herbs to her pouch. She buttoned it closed, then crushed it between her fingers, the leaves and dried blooms inside making a satisfying crackle as she ground them together. “That’s poison. Also, could you please stop harassing Knox?”

“That boy isn’t right, and you know it.” Gulya went to the large wooden mortar, opening a packet she’d made of her own, and dumped the contents inside.

Anwei pressed her lips together, walking to one of the two wide windows that flanked the heavy front door, blue swirls of paint marking it as an apothecary. There was nothing wrong with Knox. Knox was just difficult to explain. “He does his fair share of work here and—”

“And keeps a sword under his bed. Only two places he could have gotten that. Devoted don’t need a room over a crumbling apothecary, and apothecaries don’t need thieves among their tenants.”

It was true. In the Commonwealth, from the northern border with Trib land to the Southern Sea, only Devoted were allowed to carry swords, but there was something very different about Knox’s weapon. There was little chance he’d stolen it from his seclusion. The blade had been the reason Anwei had stopped that day in the street. It had smelled like him—Arun’s murderer, the man who changed faces and had a snake carved into his tooth. It was initially why she’d let him follow her onto jobs, carefully concealing who she was in the hopes that he’d give something up.

Anwei squeezed the packet of herbs a little too vigorously, and the smells from inside blended into a perfect answer to the sickly yellow color of the trade advisor’s illness. “I’ll only be gone for an hour or so. Will you please refrain from burning any of Knox’s things or attempting to give him diarrhea before I get back?”

Gulya’s brows drew together as she dug into the wooden bowl with her pestle, her hesitation evidence enough that at least one of those things had been on the menu for the day. “I need you to go down to the Fig Cay this afternoon, Anwei. There’s something worrisome brewing down there—a rash that’s putting people in bed. Don’t want it to spread. Crowteeth boss asked me special, and we both know you’ll figure it out first.”

Anwei paused. “What kind of rash?”

“Cross-humor, blotchy bruising. First case is coughing up blood—almost sounds like gamtooth poisoning, though I think I would have heard if we suddenly had subtropical spiders infesting Chaol. I haven’t heard tell of random spurts of the truth landing people with the magistrate yet, though I suppose there’s still time.” Gulya cackled. Gamtooth poisoning, among many things, caused truths to spill out of people before lies could take hold. “You’ll find the sick down by Fig’s afternoon market. South side, by the waterway. Ask for a man called Jecks.”

“I’ll go as soon as I deliver this.” Anwei tucked the packet into her medicine bag, her thoughts circling the bottle of gamtooth venom she’d extracted for a Fig Cay customer only the month before. The spiders had come home with her on her last trip south, kept safe in a jar under the herb room’s floorboards, where Gulya would never know to look.

Mostly, Anwei didn’t mind when the Crowteeth or the Blackhearts or any of the gangs who knocked things over in the lower cays used her poisons to clog up one another’s humors, but if her poison had accidentally been dumped into one of the dirty waterways that webbed through the Sand and Fig Cays… Anwei shrugged off the itch of annoyance at whoever had been so careless. She never sold enough to do too much damage, but it wouldn’t be the first time she’d provided the antidote to her own poison.

She walked out the door, something inside her relaxing when she found Noa lounging by Anwei’s little canoe where it was bobbing at the apothecary dock. “Sky Painter protect you.” Noa grinned, a few too many teeth showing.

“And may she send her storms far from us.” Anwei finished the greeting in Elantin, Noa’s native language from the south. The high khonin had dark green eyes Anwei had never seen outside the southern provinces, and her dark hair and amber skin made her look like a jewel flashing in the sun. “I’m so glad to see you—everything’s been so…” Anwei shrugged through the rest of the sentence and the list of things she could never say out loud.

“I know what you mean.” Noa’s smile twisted. “Where are you headed?”

“I’ve got business to get to in the Water Cay.” Anwei started toward her canoe. “Come with me! I thought I’d have to wait until you ran out of galrot.”

“Oh good, you can take me home. I have run out of galrot. Can you imagine what that old woman would have said if I’d asked for some?” Noa sighed. “I have something terrible to tell you.”

“You’re out? How many people did you put to sleep, Noa?” Anwei stifled a laugh as she stepped into the boat. Noa had first come to her looking for herbs to sleep. Anwei had seen through her too-casual request in a second and had snatched Noa up as a contact on the Water Cay in exchange for the plants she wanted. It had started strictly as business, but Noa was so full of wicked smiles and gossip and ruining people’s days that it had been hard not to look forward to her visits. Even Anwei could do with a laugh now and then. Noa stepped into the front of the boat, keeping her balance as it bobbed under her. “My father is trying to destroy my very existence as usual. I had to put him to sleep every night last week, or I wouldn’t have been able to push over that statue at the university with Bear. His father was so angry—I think he might have paid for it. And there’s a ball in a few days that requires a few doses of galrot, or I might actually shrivel up into nothing.”

“The governor built a statue of his own son at a university he can’t seem to graduate from? And Bear didn’t even like it?” Anwei snorted, dipping her paddle into the channel’s murky water to push them away from the dock. “So, what’s the bad news, and which high khonin ball are we destroying?”

“Oh, the governor’s.” Noa leaned back in the boat, putting her hands behind her head. “Bear proposed, so I have to get rid of him before my father finds out and makes me marry him.”