The Assassin's Curse (3 page)

  Maybe the dream was the gods telling me I wasn't sure about leaving home. Well, I wasn't gonna listen to 'em.

  I took a couple more drinks from the skein then tucked my knife in the sash of my dress and headed toward the desert wall. I was still shaky from the dream and figured I wasn't going to be sleeping much more tonight, so I might as well take advantage of the night's coolness and get to the day market right as it opened.

 
 
 

The woman from yesterday hadn't lied; the day market was the biggest I ever saw, merchant carts and permanent shops twisting together to create this labyrinth that jutted up against the desert wall. I wandered through the market with my dress tucked under my arm, the early morning light gray and pink. The food vendors were already out, thrusting bouquets of meat skewers at me as I walked by. My stomach growled, and after ten minutes of passing through the fragrant wood-smoke of the food carts, I sidled up to a particularly busy vendor and grabbed two of his goat-meat skewers, even though I do feel bad about thieving from the food vendors, who ain't proper rich like the merchants we pirate from. I ate it as I walked down to the garment division, licking the grease from my fingers. Tender and fatty and perfect. You get sick of fish and dried salted meats when you're out on the ocean.

  The garment division was an impressive one, with shop after shop selling bolts of fabric and ready-made gowns and scarves and sand masks. Tailors taking measurements out on the street. Carts piled high with tiny pots of makeup and bottles of perfumes.

  It was a lot of options. I knew that I wanted a merchant who wouldn't ask me no questions, but I also couldn't use someone who was the sort to traffic in stolen goods, since I didn't want anyone who might have gotten word from the Hariris to be on the lookout for their missing bride. I decided it was probably safer going the slightly more respectable route, and that meant cleaning up my appearance some.

  I snatched a pot of eye-powder and a looking glass from one of the makeup carts and darted off into a corner, where I wiped the kohl off my face with the edge of my scarf – a mistake I realized too late, when I saw I'd stained it with black streaks. I flipped the scarf around and tried to tuck the stained ends around my neck. Then I smeared some of the eye-powder on my lids the way I'd seen Mama do it, a pair of gold streaks that made my eyes look big and surprised. Good enough.

  The market was starting to get busy, people walking in clumps from vendor to vendor. I kept my head down and my feet quick, scanning each dress-shop as I passed. None seemed right. One I almost ducked into – it was large, a couple of rooms at least, and full of people, which meant my face would be easily forgotten. But something nagged at me to walk on by, and I did, sure as if I had seen my own parents leaning up against the doorway.

  I was nearly to the desert wall when a shop – the shop, I thought – appeared out of the crush of people. It was tucked away in the corner of an alley, and I only noticed it cause someone had propped up a sign on the street with an arrow and the words We buy gowns written out neat and proper.

  The shop was small, but a pair of fancy gowns fluttered from hooks outside the door, like sea-ghosts trapped on land. I went inside. More gowns, some only half-finished. The light was dim and cool and smelled of jasmine. No other customers but me.

  "Can I help you?" A woman stepped out from behind some thin gauzy curtains. She wore a dress like the one I'd stolen, only it was dyed pomegranate red and edged with spangles that threw dots of light into my eyes. As she walked across the room, the sun splashed across her face. She was beautiful, which set me on edge, but there was something off about her features, something I couldn't quite place–

  "Oh, I apologize," she said in Ein'a, which was the language of the far-off island where I'd been born, the language my parents had spoken to me when I was a baby. "We don't normally get foreigners."

  Maybe I wasn't as inconspicuous as I thought.

  "I speak Empire," I said, not wanting to stutter my way through Ein'a.

  The shopkeeper smiled thinly, and I realized what it was that bothered me about her face – her eyes were pale gray, the same color as the sky before a typhoon. I ain't never seen eyes that color before, not even up among the ice-islands.

  Something jarred inside of me. I wanted out of that shop. But even so, I unwrapped my silk dress and laid it out on the counter, the movements easy, like I was acting by rote. "I was hoping to sell this," I said.

  The woman ran her hands over the dress, idly examining the seams, rubbing the fabric between her thumb and forefinger. She looked up at me.

  "It's dirty."

  I bit my lower lip, too unnerved to make a joke.

  "And it reeks of camel." She glanced back down at the dress, tilted her head. "I recognize the cut, though. It's from court. Last season. How'd you come across it?"

  "My mother gave it to me." Avoid lying whenever possible. Always leave out information when you can. Another one of Papa's lessons.

  "Hmm," she said. "Looks like it's been through quite the adventure. I suppose I can use it as a guide. Merchant wives tend to be a bit behind on things." She folded the dress up. "I'll pay you one hundred pressed copper for it," she said.

  "Two hundred."

  "One fifty."

  "One seventy."

  She paused. Her lips curled up into a faint smile. "That's fair," she said. "One seventy."

  Kaol, I wanted out of that store. The haggling went way too easy, and that smile chilled me to the bone. It was like a shark's smile, mean and cold.

  She glided off to the back of the store, carrying the dress with her. When she came back out she handed me a bag filled with thin sheets of pressed copper. I slid the bag into the hidden pocket in my dress and turned to leave. Didn't bother to count. Felt heavy enough.

  "Wait," said the shopkeeper.

  I stopped.

  "Be careful," she said. "I don't normally do this for free, but I like the look of you. They're coming. Well, one of them. Him."

  I stared at her. She said him like it was the proper name of somebody she hated.

  "What are you talking about?"

  "Oh, you know. Your dream last night."

  All the air just whooshed out of my body like I'd been in a drunkard's fight.

  "I ain't had no dream last night."

  She laughed. "Fine, you didn't have a dream. But you know the stories. I can tell. I can smell them on you."

  "The stories," I said. "What stories?" All I could see was the gray in her eyes, looming in close around me. And then something flickered in the room, like a candle winking out. And I knew. The assassins. That bogeyman story Papa used to tell me whenever I didn't mind him or Mama.

  "Ah, I see you've remembered." The shark's smile came out again. I took a step backwards toward the door. "You're going to need my help. I live above the shop. When the time comes, don't delay."

  I tried to smirk at her like I thought she was full of it, but in truth my whole body was shaking, and I was thinking about Tarrin yelling at me yesterday afternoon, trying to get me to come back. My father isn't afraid to send the assassins after his enemies. But men'll say anything to get you to do what they want. If Tarrin couldn't charm me onto his ship, he'd try to scare me. Well, it wasn't gonna work.

  The shopkeeper tilted her head at me and then turned around, back toward the curtains. I darted out into the sunny street and took a deep breath. The eeriness of the shop faded into the background; out here there was just heat and sand and sun. Normal, comforting. Plus I had money hanging heavy in my pocket. I reached down to pat it. Enough to pay for a room at a cheap inn.

  Fear still niggled at the back of my head, though. I hadn't thought about the assassins in years and years.

  Papa talked about them like they were ghouls or ghosts, monsters come to take me away in the night. The stories always ended in the death of the intended victim. "They're relentless," he had said, one night when I was ten or eleven, my face red and itchy with anger. I'd sassed him or Mama or both, and probably spent some time down in the brig for it too, but by then we were in the captain's quarters. The lanterns swung back and forth above our heads, the lights sliding across the rough features of Papa's face. "You can't escape an assassin." He leaned forward, shadows swallowing his eyes. "Hangings, bumbling bureaucrats, dishonest crewman, jail – those you can talk your way out of, you try hard enough. But this kind of death is the only kind of death."

  He always said that when he told me assassin stories – the only kind of death. It was this refrain I'd get in my head whenever I did something bad, like playing tricks on the navigator or trying to read one of Mama's spellbooks without permission. The assassins were blood magicians in addition to skilled fighters. They lived in dark lairs hidden in plain sight, like crocodiles. They were the last refuge of a coward, of a man too afraid to fight you himself – and that was why they were so dangerous. They gave power to cowards.

  As I got older I realized, for all the stories, I ain't never heard of a pirate's out-of-battle death that couldn't be explained away by drink or stupidity. And at some point, I decided the assassins weren't real, or if they were, they weren't interested in tracking down a captain's daughter as punishment for not minding her elders. Or refusing marriage, for that matter.

  So that's what I told myself as I cut through the sunlight, back toward the food vendors to buy myself a sweet lime drink. The woman was probably a witch in her spare time, trying to drum up business for her cut-rate protection spells, and the only thing stalking me in the night was some memory from my childhood. A story.

 

I paid for a room at an inn on the edge of town, not far from the day market. It was built into the desert wall, and my room had a window that looked out over the desert, which reminded me a bit of the ocean, the sand cresting and falling in the night wind. The room was small and bright and filled with dust, although clean otherwise – cleaner than my quarters on Papa's boat anyway.

  I stayed in the inn for four days, and for four days nothing happened but dreams. They were the same one as the first night, me wandering around the black glass desert, waiting for somebody to find me, knowing I was going to die. I took to sleeping during the day – though that didn't stop the dreaming none – and went out as the sun dropped low and orange across the horizon, wasting my nights at the night market that was conjured up by sweet-smelling magic a few streets over from the day market's husk. The vendors at the night market hawked enchantments and magic supplies instead of food and clothing, spellbooks and charms and probably curses if you knew who to ask. It was a dangerous place for me to go: not cause I'd started believing in the assassins, but because you get a lot of scum hanging around the night markets, and the chance of somebody spotting me and turning me into the Hariri clan or my parents was pretty high.

  But I went anyway, wearing my scarf even though the sun was down so I could pull it low over my eyes. I liked to listen in on the sandcharmers who worked magic from the strength of the desert. Mama could do the same thing but with the waters of the ocean, and it occurred to me, as I listened to the singing and the chanting, that I missed her. The most I'd ever been away from her – and from Papa too – was the three weeks I spent failing to learn magic with this sea witch named Old Ceria a couple years back. But that had been different, cause I knew Papa's boat would pick me up when the three weeks were up, and Mama'd be waiting for me on deck.

  That wasn't going to happen now.

  I spent a lot of my time daydreaming during those four nights, too, letting my mind wander off to what I was gonna do now that I wasn't tied to a Confederation ship no more. I knew I had to hide out till the Hariris got over the slight of me running away from the marriage, but once that all settled I'd be free to set out from Lisirra and make my fortune, as Mama used to say of all the young men who set sail with ships of their own. A ship of my own was what I really wanted, of course – what Confederation child doesn't? Course, the Confederation won't let women captain, and the Empire ain't nothing but navy boats and merchant ships, but I could always make my way south, where the pirates don't take the Confederation tattoo and don't adhere to Confederation rules, neither.

  It was a nice thought to have, and there was something pleasant about spending the early mornings before I fell asleep planning out a way to get first to one of the pirates' islands – probably Bone Island, it's the biggest, which makes it easier to go unnoticed – and then down to the southern coast. The daydreams took my mind off the Hariris, at any rate, and most of the time they kept me from feeling that sharp pang of sadness over my parents.

  On the fourth night, I woke up the way I always did, after the sun set, but my head felt heavy and thick, like someone'd filled it up with rose jam. I skipped eating and walked down to the night market, thinking the cool air would clear my thoughts. It didn't. The lights at the night market blurred and trembled. The calls and chatter of the vendors amplified and faded and then thrummed like a struck chord.

  I'd barely made it through the entrance gate when out of nowhere I got stuck. I couldn't move. I stood at the entrance to the market, and my feet seemed screwed to the ground. My arms hung useless at my sides. I smelled a whiff of scent on the air, sharp and medicinal, like spider mint. It burned the back of my throat.

  And then, quick as that, I was released.

  The whole world solidified like nothing'd happened, and I collapsed to the ground in a cloud of dry dust, coughing, my eyes streaming. I could hear whispers, people telling one another to keep a wide berth and muttering about curses and ill omens. I pushed myself up to sitting. Onlookers stared at me from out of the shadows, and I did my best to ignore 'em.