Is this a trick?
When Eris reached to take it, though, the commandant’s hand fell away. She turned on her heel. “Come on. Let’s see what that cocky bastard has done this time....”
Concentrating on the alarm now, the commandant failed to notice that Eris didn’t follow.
The moment she strode away, Eris crouched down to draw a silver line across the floor.
Cocky?she thought, working quickly.
It felt like a challenge.
She shook her head. She couldn’t let herself get distracted this time. She needed to pour all of her focus into her destination.
As Eris finished drawing the line, the air grew thick and damp. The mist billowed up. But the sound of those diminishing footsteps drew her attention back. Eris paused, watching the commandant turn the corner. Watching her disappear from view.
Eris rose to her feet. Before putting Firgaard and the palace and that girl out of her mind, she thought:I’ll show her just how cocky I can be.
And then she stepped across.
Two
Ever since the door to the king’s treasury was found open and a bright red ruby missing, Safire hadn’t been able to sleep.
Someone had walked the halls ofherpalace, slipped past every single one ofherguards, entered a locked door, and stolen the very ruby King Dax intended to give the scrublands tomorrow. One that would be sold and the profits divided to help remedy the starvation caused by the blight—one known as the White Harvest. Years ago, it had spread like wildfire through the scrublands, destroying all their crops, cutting off their main sources of food. Every season, farmers would try again, but the blight would only infect the new harvests, driving the people further and further to the brink of starvation.
Safire knew things were getting worse, but it wasn’t until Queen Roa returned from her last visit home that Safire realized how dire the situation really was. Roa’s father was now bedridden. Unbeknownst to her family, he’d been going without food for some time now, so that those less fortunate thanhim could eat. But it wasn’t only Roa’s father who was at risk of starvation—her best friend, Lirabel, was also chronically malnourished due to her pregnancy. The physician told Roa if they couldn’t get access to substantially more food, and quickly, Lirabel would lose the baby.
When Roa returned to Firgaard, even Safire had seen the change in her. She looked exhausted and frail. At meals, Dax cast worried glances her way whenever she refused to eat—because how could she, when her loved ones were starving to death?
They needed a permanent solution, and quickly.
Dax planned to sell the ruby in the royal treasury—a jewel that once belonged to their great-grandmother—and use the profits to buy meat and vegetables and grain to supplement the weekly rations Firgaard was already sending, in hopes of keeping starvation at bay.
The fact that someone had stolen the jewel without a second thought? It was intolerable. Unforgivable.
It made Safire tremble with fury.
There was only one clue left behind: an ugly gray thistle. Safire had never seen anything like it, with its stem littered with thorns, some as long as her smallest finger and nearly half as thick. So she showed it to the palace physician.
A scarp thistle, he told her.It grows on the scarps of the Star Isles. A single thorn carries enough poison to make a person sleep for days.
More than both of these things, though, it was the mark of a criminal. A thief known as the Death Dancer because he walked through walls, was uncatchable, and constantly eludeddeath. He’d been haunting the halls (and treasuries) of barons and kings for years.
Well,thought Safire that day,he won’t elude me.
So she’d doubled the guards and started patrolling the palace herself.
Now, two days later, she stood staring down at asecondscarp thistle. Only this one lay on her own desk, behind her own locked door.
As the soldats in the room around her whispered to themselves, all of them watching their commandant, Safire’s eyes lifted to the wall beyond it.
This morning, a tapestry hung on that wall. It had been a gift from Asha, her cousin. The tapestry was gone now. The plaster wall stripped bare.
The thistle on her desk told her the thief had taken it.
Why?
Safire’s eyes narrowed. She understood the king’s ruby. It was worth more money than most people saw in a lifetime. But a ratty old tapestry? What could possibly be the value in that?
