The Assassin's Curse (27 page)

  A shimmer appeared up ahead, a curl of mist, pale silver and hazy. I took a step backward, trying to figure out the best way to run. I was in the chiming forest, all those skinny trees covered with bone-white bark, weird transparent leaves disintegrating in the rain–

  "Ananna of the Tanarau."

  A woman stepped out of the mist, her body long and thin, her eyes that same eerie silver as the woman in the dress shop. But this was a different woman. The woman in the dress shop had been human enough to fool me; this one had a narrow feral face, her chin too pointed and her cheekbones too sharp. And the silver in her eyes blocked out all the white.

  "I don't know who that is," I told her.

  The woman laughed. Her teeth were filed into points.

  "You don't know who you are?" she asked me.

  "I know I'm not Ananna of the Tanarau."

  The woman laughed again, and I knew it was pointless to lie. I wished to the deep dark sea that I had waited for Naji to finish his magic.

  "Who are you?" I asked.

  She tilted her head and little lights danced in the shadows around her. Whenever I looked at them I felt dizzy.

  The woman drifted up beside me. It took me a minute to realize that she didn't have feet, that her skirts ended in a cloud of creeping mist that got up under my clothes, all cold and damp. Those little lights swirled outside my line of vision, and I used all my willpower to keep my sight focused on the bridge of her nose. I knew better than to look her in the eye.

  "Surely you know," she said. "You've met my kind before. Harbor. Although she did insist on a fully human body." The woman laughed. "Stupid of her. At least she bled all over your world and not mine."

  "That ain't what I'm talking about. I know you ain't human." I took a deep breath and steadied myself. "You know my name. Only seems fair I know yours."

  The woman gazed at me for a long time. I stood my ground, even though the mist crept and crept around me.

  "You can call me Echo," she said.

  "You expect me to believe that's your name?"

  "I didn't say it was my name. I said it's what you can call me." She gave me this sly, slow smile that reminded me of a fox. It showed just enough of her teeth.

  "So what do you want?"

  "Now that," she said, "I'm certain you already know."

  "You'd be wrong." A lie, of course. I knew damn well what she wanted.

  She stared at me for a long time, like she couldn't decide if I was lying or just that stupid. I could tell she figured either one was a possibility.

  "Your companion," she said finally. "The assassin."

  "Oh, him." I frowned. "I don't know where he is."

  She tilted her head. "Don't confuse me with Harbor," she said. "I've been doing this much, much longer than she. That charm she lent you was one of my own devising. It should have worked. But the assassin had taken precautions I didn't realize."

  The woman ghosted her hand along the line of my throat, coming close but never quite touching. I could feel Naji's charm pressing against my heart. "You seem to have taken precautions yourself."

  "Figure I can't be too careful, out in the wild."

  She drifted closer. Her body gave off cold the way a normal person's gives off heat. She still didn't touch me, though, and I figured I could thank Naji's charm for that.

  "You can still help me," the woman said. "It will be of your own accord, and that way is always better. And I would never expect you to work for free."

  Her silvery eyes drifted over my face and came to rest on the charm.

  "Oh yeah?" I asked. "What would you give me?"

  She laughed. "Whatever you want."

  "Money? Empire money, I mean, not some worthless Mist coins."

  "We can acquire wealth, yes. Human wealth."

  I looked past her, to the gray space where she'd first appeared. It shimmered in the trees, a thundercloud that lost its way out of the storm. From where I stood, the Mists were grayness. They were nothing.

  "My lord would be pleased if you brought him the assassin," she said. "He would grant you a boon." She smiled. "A hundred boons."

  Her hand traced over the line of my forehead. She couldn't touch me, but it was still like walking straight into a typhoon.

  And I got these pictures in my head. Me with my own ship, sleek and tall, with sails the color of blood. And that ship of mine, she had a crew that listened to me even though I was a woman, and together we sacked the coasts of Qilar and all the lands of the Empire. The Confederation fell cause of me and that ship. All Confederation pirates became part of my armada, and I ruled the oceans, the richest woman in the world. I took lovers more handsome than Tarrin of the Hariri, more handsome than Naji. I wielded Otherworld magic that put the seas under my control and gave me power over typhoons and squalls and sunshine and steering winds.

  I became the most perfect version of myself, fierce and terrifying and even beautiful.

  I wanted to take her up on it. I wanted to wrench that charm off my neck and stomp it into the ground and race through the woods till I found Naji crumpled up in pain in the shack. I wanted to, cause on the surface it was the most common-sense thing to do. Always take the money, Papa said. You can always doublecross on the deal later if you don't like the terms.

  But I also wanted to do it cause Naji didn't see me, he would never see me, and for reasons I couldn't decipher, that bothered me.

  I wanted to do it. I just couldn't do it.

  I stepped away from her, my forehead damp from where she'd almost touched me.

  "You liked that, didn't you?" she asked.

  "It had appeal, ain't gonna lie." I took another step back, hoping my legs weren't shaking too bad. "But I think I'll leave you to it on your own. You don't need my help."

  Echo's eyes turned flat as mirrors. Darkness roiled through the woods. The trees shook. The earth rumbled.

  "You can't hurt me," I said, thumping the side of Naji's charm with my thumb. "I ain't afraid of you."

  She bared her teeth, sharp and bright, and let out a low, snaky hiss. But I was right. She didn't move to attack. I was protected.

  "Protected?" she sneered. "You think you're protected?"

  "Course I do. You can't even touch me." I tried not to think about her reading my thoughts.

  "Why do you think you threw your sword into the woods?" Her voice was nothing human. She glided up to me, and there was that cold dampness again, but I held my ground. "I can control you, I can force you to lead me to him–"

  "Then why don't you do it?"

  She snarled, her face twisted and wild. I was not going to flinch. I was not going to run away.

  And then something darted out from the underbrush, something swift-moving and black as pitch. A sword flashed. It sliced through the woman and her dark mist, and this time there wasn't any starlight to splatter all over my clothes. She just evaporated. The entrance to the Mists dried up like it'd been left too long in the sun.

  I sat down on the transparent tree leaves and the damp ferns.

  A branch snapped off to my right. I didn't bother looking over. I knew who it was.

  "I told you it was dangerous," Naji said.

  "Is she gone?"

  "For now." Naji paused. "Thank you."

  "For what?"

  He stood beside me, his sword hanging at his side. I kept my gaze down on the ground and tried not to think about tossing it off into the underbrush.

  "For not telling her where to find me."

  I kicked at the fallen leaves, splintering them into shards, digging a ditch in the soil with the heel of my boot. The forest noises had come back, the chittering and shaking and rustling of the rain, the crystalline chiming of the surrounding trees, but the silence between the two of us swallowed all that noise whole.

  "I almost did," I said after a while.

  "Almost did what?"

  "Helped her find you." I couldn't look at him. "She showed me all these things that could happen if I did – amazing things. My own ship, my own crew." I stopped, not wanting to remember some future that wasn't ever gonna happen.

  Naji got real still. I knew he was staring at me even though I refused to look up at his face.

  "Why didn't you?"

  "Cause."

  "That doesn't answer the question." The hardness in his voice sliced through the liquid air of the forest. This time, I did look at him. Lines furrowed his brow. His eyes were sunk low into his face. "I can't keep doing this, Ananna, not if there's a chance you might turn me over to the Otherworld. Not if you're going to run away when I explicitly told you…" He took a deep breath. "What stopped you? Why didn't you help her?"

  "Cause you're my friend," I said.

  All the hardness in his features melted away. "Oh."

  "I'm not going to turn you over to your enemies." I stood up, swiping the forest floor off my dress. "So you can stop fretting about that. But I'm thirsty still. That's why I left – you were in a trance and didn't bother to get water."

  He didn't say nothing. I started kicking around in the underbrush, trying to find the water jar. I didn't remember dropping it, but that was probably just more Otherworld trickery.

  "It's a few feet behind you," Naji said. "Beneath that tree there."

  I glared at him and then fumbled around in the wet greenery until I felt the smooth cold stone of the jar. Naji waited for me, his arms crossed in front of his chest, and then we walked the rest of the way to the spring, our silence heavy with our unspoken thoughts.

  The spring was waiting for us as though nothing unusual had happened. It bubbled and frothed in its usual place beneath the pine trees. I plunged the jar into the spring, and the water flooded over my hands, cold as ice and reminding me of Echo's almost-touch.

  I know that Naji saw me shivering.

 
 
 

Naji paced back and forth through the chiming forest, knocking down tree branches and those sparkling, transparent leaves. I watched him from beside the spring and waited for the thoughts to stop jangling around inside my head.

  Finally I got so tired of listening to him trampling through the underbrush that I asked, "So I guess you found out where the Wizard Eirnin is, then."

  "Yes." He stopped his pacing, glanced at me, and then looked away. The wind pushed through the trees, and the leaves shimmered and threw off dots of pale light, and the tree trunks bent and swayed. The chiming was everywhere.

  "That's it?"

  "What else is there to tell?"

  I narrowed my eyes at him. He still wasn't looking at me, and I could tell he was leaving something out. He'd done it so much when we first left Lisirra I'd become a master at spotting all his omissions.

  "I don't know," I said, "or else I wouldn't be asking."

  "The Wizard Eirnin lives in the center of the island," Naji said. "It isn't far from here. That's all I know."

  I sighed and refilled the water jar one last time. "Well," I said. "I guess we ought to go look for him." I straightened up and rested the jar against my hip.

  "Are you going to take that with you?" Naji asked.

  "Course I am. It's impossible to tell east from west on this damned island. Chances are we'll wind up wandering back around to the shack before we ever find the wizard."

  "I tracked him," Naji said. "I know exactly where he is." His expression darkened. "Exactly how I knew where you were when the Otherworld attacked."

  I shoved past him, jostling water. He didn't say nothing more about the Otherworld attack, and I let him lead me out of the chiming forest and into the darker parts of the woods. The rain had been threatening us the whole time I laid out by the spring, and now it started again in earnest. Naji plowed forward like it didn't even bother him, like he didn't even notice the rain and the gray light and the scent of soil.

  We walked for a long time. The rain hazed my vision and filled the water jar to overflowing. The trees crowded in on me, looming and close, and I started wondering if it was the Mists. Echo coming back for one last fight. My hands started to shake.

  And then, like that, the trees cleared out and there was this little round house built of stone sitting in the middle of a garden, smoke trickling up out of a hole in the roof.

  Time seemed to stop. I forgot about the Mists and about the island: when I saw that house, there was only Naji's curse, which was also my curse. And we'd come so far across the world to get it cured.

  This stone-built house hardly seemed capable of that sort of magic.

  Naji was already knocking at the front door. I ran through the garden to join him. They looked like normal plants, not the weird ghost-plants Leila'd had growing in her cave. They drooped beneath the weight of the rain.

  The door opened up a crack, and a sliver of a face appeared. Naji didn't say nothing. Then the door swung all the way open and this man was standing there in a rough-cut tunic and trousers. He had that look of the northern peoples, like somebody'd pricked him and all the color had drained out of his hair and skin.

  "Well, look who's on my front porch," he said, speaking Empire with this odd hissing accent. "A murderer and a cross-dressing pirate."

  I looked down at my clothes, ripped and shredded and covered in mud and sand and dried blood. I'd forgotten I was dressed like a boy.

  "So are you here to kill me or to rob me?" the man said. "I generally don't find it useful to glow when undertaking acts of subterfuge, but then, I'm just a wizard."

  You know, that pissed me off. We'd traveled half around the world to get to him, and there were monsters chasing us and Naji's curse was impossible to break, and here he was cracking jokes about our professions. I took a step forward, pushing Naji out of the way and spilling water on the porch.