Ashes of the Veil

The Duke of Veridia's head came off with a wet, final sound, and the last thing he said was how. Not why. Not please. How. I let him fall. The neck rolled out of the collar like a puppet's joint, and the head hit the marble floor with a c***k that echoed up the staircase we were standing on. Two guards were still running toward me. I dropped the body and turned. One of them had a sword already half-drawn. I put my elbow through his ribs and used his weight to push the second one into his friend's shield. They crashed together against the wall, and I was already moving. Three dead. Maybe four when I was done. It was a good evening. By which I mean: no witnesses who lived long enough to tell anyone, a clean exit through the servant's passage, and the duke's signature black-velen poison already diluted enough in his wine that no coroner would flag it. The poison was the easy part. The head was the expensive part. But the client had paid for a show, and a show is what the Brightlands had. I stood on the roof, breathing cold. The city of Veridia spread below me, silver-white and endless, the Ember towers pulsing like slow heartbeats at their cores. Every tower lit. Every window lit. The Brightlands burned with a light that looked almost holy from up here—almost beautiful, if you didn't know where it came from. You didn't get a choice about that. You were either born into it or you were born for it. My Ember flickered behind my ribs, the way it always did when I was close to a strong source. Not silver. Not the clean, noble white of the tower cores. Darker. Wrong. It pulsed black and grey against the silver, a bruise inside me that the empires had never managed to fix. I'd had it my whole life. Or the whole of the life I remembered, anyway. Six years old, they said I was when Seren took me. Or maybe it had been seven. Time was a thing that got done to you in the Ashlands; it didn't happen to you. I let the thought go. Thoughts about where I'd come from were like the rest of them—useless, and heavier than they looked. The letter arrived before my boots hit the street. It was the thing I feared most in the whole of Veridia: a paper envelope, sealed in black wax, slipped under the door of the roof-access I used when I didn't want to announce my arrival. No mark. No sigil. But I knew the wax. I knew it the way you know a scar you can't stop touching, in the dark, with the thumb. I should have burned it unread. That's what I told myself, standing in the thin roof-shadow, holding it like it was a live thing. That's what I always told myself. I opened it. One line. Her handwriting, the soft, careful script of the woman who had taught me to hold a blade and, before that, to hold my own grief without waking the household. Come home. I need you to kill me. The ember in my chest went out. Not flickered—went out. The cold behind my ribs that lived there when I was near the towers of the Brightlands just... stopped. And in the silence where it had been humming, there was only the letter, and the one line, and the fact that the woman who wrote it was the only person in either land who had ever, in every version of the story I'd been able to remember or invent for myself, actually given me a name. Kael. I stood there for a while longer than I should have. The city kept burning below me. Somewhere a bell tolled the last hour of the watch shift, and I heard a laugh—bright, careless, someone's. A Brightlands sound. A sound that had no idea it was purchased. I folded the letter into my coat, under the ribs, where the bruise sat. I could feel the paper's edge against my skin. I could feel what it did to the ember there: nothing. It had been dead for ten minutes now, and it would stay that way until I stopped being afraid of it. And I was afraid of it. Not of her. Not of what I'd have to do. I was afraid of how I wanted it. Because the first time I read that one line—I need you to kill me—the first, honest thought that came through, before I put the assassin's face back on, was not finally and not good and not any of the things a clean conscience wants you to feel. It was: home. Before I could stop it. Before I could sort it out into something defensible. Home. And she was the only home there had ever been, and the home was asking me to end it, and I wanted to go. I wanted to go so badly it sat in my stomach like a swallowed blade. That was the part I couldn't fix. Not the task. Not the blood. The wanting it. I took the stairs down. The Border was where the two lands agreed to be ugly to each other. The Brightlands side had a name: the Gilt Gate, and it looked like it—silver spires, watchtowers with ember-lights, and a line of soldiers so well-fed and so bored that they checked the manifest before they checked your face. The Ashlands side didn't have a name at all. People just said the Gate and meant the grey half, where the light came down from the Brightlands in thin, sick strips and the ground was cracked all the way into the dark, and the people stood with their hands behind their backs and said nothing, because that's what people did in the Ashlands. You said nothing. You were quiet. You didn't get what you didn't get. I crossed the Gilt Gate under a travel writ I'd stolen from a dead courier's pocket three streets back. The writ was good for one passage, Ashlands-bound, and it bore a seal I could feel humming against my ribs every time the watchmen looked at it too long. They looked at it a lot. I made it through the first three checks before the fourth one stopped me. The fourth one stopped me because the commander of the watch was not watching the manifest. The commander of the watch was standing in the middle of the gate with his hands clasped behind his back, and he was looking at me, and he had been looking at me for the length of one of my breaths. "You're the V-seventeen," he said. It was not a question. It took me a moment to remember my own number. V-seventeen. Seventeen. The Brightlands had stopped counting me like a person somewhere between my second contract and my first, and I'd stopped counting myself back, because it was less work. "V-seventeen doesn't travel on courier writs," he went on, in the flat, pleased tone of a man who'd found a good mistake and didn't want to let it go. "And V-seventeen doesn't get out of the Gilt Gate without an escort, not since the Ashlands incidents. You know that." I did. I'd known it since the Ashlands incidents, whatever they were. Nobody told you what the incidents had been; they just stopped letting you go, and it was easier to make up a story than to ask. So I'd made one. The story I was about to hand him. "I'm here on contract," I said. "A private one. Off the registry." He didn't look convinced. He had the face of a man who was never convinced about anything, which I'd learned in my time to read and respect. His eyes kept coming back to me, to the dark patch under my ribs where the ember was being very, very quiet about itself. Before he could answer me, the watch's line parted, and another set of boots came down the gate ramp, slow and even, and I watched him change. The way a man changes when the only person in the room with a higher rank walks in. "General," the commander said, into the shift of his shoulders. The general stopped three paces from me. He was taller than I'd guessed him to be from the dispatches the Brightlands put out—the perfect general of the Veil-watch, made in the crown's own hand, a man the empire has given every reason to be—and the way the dispatches described him was a lie I recognized, because it had been written about me, and about him, and about anyone the crown decided was a thing instead of a person. He was just a man, taller and harder-edged than the rest of them, with dark hair cut military-short and a face that would have been unremarkable if it weren't for the stillness of it. He stood the way you stand when you're used to being expected not to move. He looked at me. I looked back, because I'm a professional, and because he was the kind of looking-at that most people would have broken under and I was, at that moment, running on nothing. "Kael," he said. Not the number. The name. The whole gate went quiet in the space between us. I heard the commander's breath. I heard the wind in the thin, sick strip of light that was the Ashlands half of the Gate. I heard my own ember, far down inside me, flicker back to life for the first time in an hour. The general—General—did not move his hands. They stayed clasped behind his back, or maybe not clasped, I couldn't tell, and I realized that was the point. He was deciding, on the spot, how much of himself he was going to show me, and I was the one who had to guess. "I know why you're here," he said. It was not the thing a commander would say to an unregistered assassin standing in his gate. It was the thing a man who'd been waiting for me to walk in would say. "You're not on any list I've been given. That means whoever sent you didn't want me to know. That means you're not here for a contract. And that means you're here for something else. So I'm going to ask you one question, and I'm going to do it the way I was trained to ask it, which is: you are going to tell me the truth, and you are going to tell me only enough of it. And then I'm going to decide whether you walk or you don't. Is that clear?" I had a word ready for him. It was a sharp one, and it was a kind one, and it would have made him smile if he ever smiled. Instead I met his eyes, and I gave him the truth, the whole, unedited version, because I'd run out of anything better than honesty and he'd just said he'd decided what he wanted and I was tired. "I'm here to go home," I said. He looked at me for a long moment. Then he said, in the same flat, unbothered voice: "I need a runner for a border patrol.