Five
SOREN
Soren pulled the trigger, but Harald was already moving, not startled at all by the starfire burning so hot it felt as if they stood in an oven. Harald jerked back into the hallway, out of sight, Soren’s bullets slamming into the door rather than a living body.
“I only want the girl! She’s worth more than you!” Harald shouted.
“She was asleep in the bed you just shot up!” Soren snarled.
Harald let out a harsh little laugh. “I think the queen of Daijal could make use of a princess whether she was dead or alive.”
Soren shifted on his feet, eyeing the starfire eating its way through the walls while Raiah sobbed against his shoulder. He kept his pistol pointed at the entrance to the room. “The girl is a tithe.”
“You lie about her as well as you lie about your place in her father’s bed.”
To hell with bullets.
Soren holstered his pistol and reached out his hand to the starfire burning like molten fiery gold all around him. Flame licked at his fingertips, making him shiver. The aether churned against his awareness, a vast power distilled into the starfire Raiah had inexpertly called out of instinct and fear.
He tugged at it clumsily, guiding it how he had before, an ache blossoming in the back of his head as he did so. The starfire twisted itself around his hand and wrist, snaking up his arm like an almost living thing. It was—warm, but it didn’t burn him. Soren drew in a steady breath, hiking Raiah up farther in his other arm, keeping hold of her and the starfire both.
“Keep your eyes closed,” he told her.
She’d stopped screaming, but she hadn’t stopped crying. Soren desperately wanted to comfort her, but he had to keep her alive first in order to do that.
Footsteps thundering up the stairs heralded the arrival of Coralie, her voice ripping through the air. “What the bloody hell is going on? The room is onfire!”
A pistol went off in quick succession, the heavy thud of a body hitting the floor making Soren grimace. He couldn’t believe Harald would attack a fellow warden so ruthlessly—but he could believe it if Harald wasn’t himself. Jealousy was one thing for a warden. They all had moments of wanting something easier, a life less fraught. Betrayal, though, that went against who they were as a people, stateless though they were.
But mind magic could twist anyone, as he’d seen in Oeiras.
“Give me the girl. I won’t ask again,” Harald snapped from the hall.
Soren gathered more starfire in his hand, the bright heat of it almost otherworldly. He extended his arm toward the door, flexed his fingers, andpushedas he had at the quarry. The aether tore through him, spinning the starfire ever outward to encase the hallway and the warden in burning heat.
Harald screamed, the same way thepraetorialegionnaires had when Vanya set them aflame. Raiah whimpered loudly, face tucked against his neck, shaking in his arms. He wished she didn’t have to keep listening to people die around her, but Vanya would be the first to say every child of a House had to face the threat of assassins whether they liked it or not.
Soren’s hand shook with the effort to keep the starfire contained. Unlike at the quarry, he couldn’t let it rage here in a border town people called home. Distant, hazy memories of another night, another city burning, flickered through his mind before he pushed them aside. That life he’d come from had no bearing here, for all that starfire fell from his fingers.
He curled his hand into a fist, teeth clenched tight as he sought to put the starfire out the way he’d seen Vanya do before. Soren was a novice at this, and the power of it wasn’t easily controlled in such a refined way, and he had no clarion–tipped wand to help him focus the aether. But desperation aided him, and Soren managed to snuff out the starfire after a fraught few moments.
The walls of the room were blackened and charred, smoke drifting hazily through the air, making him cough. He needed to get Raiah out of there. A garbled moan drifted up from the hallway, spurring him on. Soren reached down and grabbed the strap of his rucksack and poison short sword, knowing they only had so much time before peacekeepers and the fire brigade arrived.
Raiah clung to him, keeping her eyes squeezed tightly shut. Soren stepped into the burned hallway, finding Harald sprawled on the floor, his field leathers a charred mess and the rest of him not much better. Soren couldn’t recognize his face, burned as it was, skin pinked and blackened, shiny in the way of deep damage.
His clothes had all but been burned away, revealing damaged skin and the puckered scars of vivisection cutting over his chest. Despite the heat all around them, Soren felt doused in ice water at the sight of those scars.
“Rionetka,” Soren said, staring down at Harald.
He received no response to that statement, as he knew he would. Soren wasn’t a magician. He didn’t have the skill or the ability to pick apart a person’s thoughts with mind magic how Captain Javier had in Oeiras. Regardless of the starfire he could not acknowledge, he had no ability to pry answers out of the near dead.
Soren did not know where Harald had been assigned—whether here in Ashion or across a country’s border—but he’d been a warden and now arionetka. Soren knew in that moment he couldn’t trust that no one else at the Warden’s Island would be the same. For all that the wardens’ governor knew about the mechanical clockwork hearts, he hadn’t reported back to Delani yet about therionetkas.
He realized he couldn’t be sure she wasn’t one herself.
Soren knew Harald wouldn’t survive the burn wounds. If they were anywhere else, Soren would put the other warden out of his misery. But Soren had Raiah in his arms, and he wasn’t going to put her through that. He stepped over the bodies in the hallway, clattering down the stairs. He paused only long enough to go behind the counter and shove boxes of ammunition into his rucksack.
Rather than leave out the front entrance of the resupply station, Soren took the rear exit, coming out into a narrow alleyway. He paused long enough to set Raiah down on the ground, secure his poison short sword to his back, and haul the straps of the rucksack over both shoulders. Then he picked her up again and squeezed past the trash bins, coming out onto the gas lamp–lit street just as a fire brigade truck came racing around the far corner, its bells ringing shrilly in the evening air. It startled Raiah badly, the little girl clamping her hands over her ears with a shriek.
