visiting and trading gossip with men and women she had come to know over the last months and Vincen following her lead. At last, the sun began to reach down toward the western wall of the city, and Vincen came to take her arm and lead her home to the boarding house.
“We should talk,” he said as they stepped into the shadowed alleyway. “I’m starting to get worried about staying in the city. I’d like to speak to my uncle about going out there for the summer.”
“That’s sweet,” Clara said. “No.”
“I’m afraid there’s going to be more trouble. Not right away, but soon.”
“All the more reason I should stay,” Clara said.
“It would be safer if—”
“I’m sure the letters I wrote from your uncle’s farmstead would be fascinating,” Clara said. “‘There may be more piglets this year than expected.’ No, if I’m going to do this, I have to do it from here.”
“Then perhaps you shouldn’t do it,” Vincen said. His voice was so gentle she almost laughed.
“Of course I’m going to continue with it. It’s what I have left.”
“You have me.”
This time she did laugh, and the flicker of hurt on his face was terrible and hilarious both. She leaned up and kissed him on the corner of his mouth. The taste of his sweat was surprising and immediate, and Clara wondered whether she’d just crossed some unspoken boundary. And if she had, whether the boundary was his or her own. Vincen’s light brown eyes were fixed on hers, his cheeks flushed. She didn’t realize they’d stopped walking until someone passed them.
“My work’s here,” she said. “But I hope you’ll stay with me.”
“To avenge your husband,” Vincen said, and she could hear the complexity of sentiment in his words.
She shook her head and pressed two fingers to the huntsman’s lips. “To redeem my country,” she said. And then, a moment later, “By betraying it.”
Marcus
Looking back at it afterward, the journey from the heart of the Lyoniean rainforest to the rocks and crags of the northern coast took on the feeling of a dream. Marcus remembered bits and pieces—the bone-deep exhaustion, the day an annoying welt on his leg had opened and spilled out live maggots, the tension between taking time to search for food and pressing on to reach the end of the forest—but they formed no single coherent string. They had walked and hidden and been bitten and starved and tried to find water that wouldn’t fill their guts with worms when they drank it. When Marcus thought back to the morning he had stepped out from the trees and onto a paved road, his ribs showing through his skin and half naked where his clothes had rotted away, he saw the scene as if he had witnessed it, as if he had been outside of his own body watching it happen to someone else.
It was only on the ship back north that his mind returned to him enough that he understood. After months lost in the interior, he’d been starving and fevered and prey to insects that had been feasting on the blood of humanity since before the dragons. He told himself that the sword and its venomous magic likely didn’t have much to do with it. As weak as he’d been, he would likely have fallen just as ill, been just as confused. Still, as their little ship bobbed on the summer waves, Marcus left the green scabbard in with his things. He had no need of it on board, and less time carrying now meant more time later.
The only disturbing thing was coming back to his cabin to find a circle of tiny dark-carapaced bodies around his bags where the fleas and insects had come out to die. It wasn’t that Marcus had doubted Kit about the sword’s nature, but seeing it confirmed was unsettling.
Kit was looking skeletally thin as well. But as the days passed and the pair ate the sailor’s diet of fresh fish and old limes, salt pork and twice-baked bread, the flesh of the actor’s cheeks began to fill in, and Marcus felt his own strength returning. By the time the expanse of the Inner Sea began to break into islands and reefs, Marcus was near enough himself that he could keep pace with the sailors. Or at least with ones his own age.
Kort was an island city, and ancient. In the story it told of itself, Kort was the site of the last battle, where Drakkis Stormcrow arranged the death of