She had a round face with dark eyes nestled cozily above prominent cheekbones. Her nose sloped starkly, ending in wide nostrils set above even wider lips. Lips that scowled down at him.
“You’re not the one I want,” she spat before dropping his chin and stepping back.
He stopped his chin just shy of the ground. Straining his neck, he turned his head to look at the girl. Wild black curls stretched from her forehead to her ears and all the way down past her shoulders. On anyone else, her face might have gotten lost in so much hair. But not this girl. No, if anything, her ferocious hair seemed to amplify her every expression.
“You’re her,” he said.
She stared down at him, lips stretching from cheek to cheek. “Oh? Who am I?”
Damari’s question felt like a trap, in the same way Nes’s words often did. “The one I’ve been hunting,” he said.
Damari laughed, the sound starting hearty then fading as if hitting a hollow bottom. “A guard has been hunting me? While I’ve been hunting all the King’s Guard. How ironic.” She shook her head. “Sixty-three people. That’s how many your guards killed. Do you know how many guards I’ve killed? Twenty-four. I’m not even halfway there. If I had more magic, I could mark you all and let the dead come for you in the night. But I have my limits. So I work with what I have, ticking you off when I get the chance. I will finish. Sixty-three of you will die as they died, ending with the one who started it all.”
She nodded fervently, and he got the sense this was something she’d recited to herself many times. “The only way to right a wrongful death is to make a righteous kill.”
“But you haven’t killed me.”
She stopped nodding. “All in good time. I’ve marked you so you can’t escape.”
Toran tried twisting an arm free, but whoever held him down was strong. “What does it mean?”
“The symbol on your neck? Loosely translated, it means ‘to bind.’ There’s a slight amount of magic bound to the symbol.”
“And the others? On the trees?”
She shrugged. “ ‘To pull.’ ”
Both of those made sense. They already knew Damari had stolen magic from the trees and was then using it against the guards.
“How did you learn these symbols? Where do they originate? Are you the one who left the message on the rock wall under the castle?”
Damari knelt down beside him, tilting her head so far she was nearly upside down when she met his gaze evenly. “So many questions.” She clicked her tongue. “But to answer one, no. I am not the monster you think I am. The symbol on your neck is the only one that matters right now. It’s like a beacon to me. I will find you no matter how far you run. And with magic keeping Yonvere under my control, you have no hope of escaping death.”
She stood upright again, a slight smile crossing her face. As if she was enjoying this. Perhaps she was. Telling him the truth only gave him more questions.
He had no reason to believe she was lying. Not when she’d been forthcoming about the meanings of the other symbols. And if she wasn’t lying, then who— “Yonvere?”
“That was his name—”
Damari raised the lantern, and Toran felt the weight holding him lift. He climbed to his feet. Cavallis slid from its sheath with a hiss. It was the only sound aside from his heartbeat as he turned to face his attacker. A dead man stood before him, rigid, with too-sharp angles in all the wrong places and the same symbol as the one on Toran’s neck carved into his bare chest.
The corpse’s eyes were jagged and cut, irises gone as if they’d been nothing more than spools of thread to unravel. The worst were the centers. There was no life in the black, no depth in the holes. The pupils were gone, and in their place was an emptiness ending only in puckered, dry flesh.
“—before your captain killed him.”
“He’s not my captain,” Toran spat.
Damari grinned, and it reminded him of a cat. The kind with fangs so long they curl under chins.
“So you do know him,” she said. A flick of her wrist, and a dead hand wrapped around his arm.
He whirled, and Cavallis sliced through what was left of Yonvere’s arm. The corpse didn’t stumble. It barely bled. Bone protruded from the elbow socket like a drumstick picked clean.
Idiot. He could almost hear Nes’s voice in his head. Magic resided in the heart. Chopping off an arm wouldn’t do him any good. And it didn’t. Yonvere’s hand still gripped him, half the arm hanging from him like a leech. He yanked it off and tossed it among the trash, where it wriggled.
“Where is the captain?” Damari demanded. “The one who started this, who massacred all those people?” She lifted a fist and opened her hand. Coins—guard registry coins—dropped into the dumpstreet. “Tell me where I can find him, and maybe you won’t end up among the sixty-three dead.”
Toran laughed. He couldn’t help it.
