Kindling

by Traci Chee

Genres: YA Epic Fantasy

Synopsis

From bestselling and award-winning author Traci Chee comes a standalone fantasy set against a war-ravaged world where kindling warfare—the use of elite, magic-wielding teenage soldiers—has been outlawed. In this rich and evocative novel, seven kindlings search for purpose and identity as they prepare for one final battle. For fans of the classic films Seven Samurai and The Magnificent Seven.

Once, the war was fought with kindlings—elite, magic-wielding warriors whose devastating power comes at the cost of their own young lives.

Now the war is over, and kindlings have been cast adrift—their magic outlawed, their skills outdated, their formidable balar weapons prized only as relics and souvenirs.

Violence still plagues the countryside, and memories haunt those who remain. When a village comes under threat of siege, it offers an opportunity for seven kindlings to fight one last time. But war changed these warriors. And to reclaim who they once were, they will have to battle their pasts, their trauma, and their grim fates to come together again—or none of them will make it out alive.

From bestselling and award-winning author Traci Chee comes a gut-wrenching, introspective fantasy about seven lost soldiers searching for the peace they once fought for and the future in which they’re finally daring to believe.

Release date: March 5, 2024

Publisher: HarperCollins

Print pages: 432

Sample

Leum

The war took you many places on the Kindar Peninsula (and in the years since the war ended, you’ve pretty much seen the rest), but you’ve never been to the northlands until now.

Too remote. Nothing up here but rocks and cattle—

Cow pies and dust—

It’s a harsh land, without a doubt, but that’s why it appeals to you. The ruggedness of it, the relentlessness of it. The plains rising and falling like waves while the wind howls across the countryside—

Pine, sage, rabbitbrush, stone—

The sun blazing, the heat rising from the road—

A few days in the high desert, and you’re parched and sunburned, with new holes in the soles of your sandals (though, to be fair, they were already wearing thin weeks ago when you set off for the north). But you’re almost there now, almost to the mountains—

The mighty Candiveras, where the Kindar Peninsula kisses the continent—

And the nation of Amerand ends.

Ahead of you, that vast and jagged border looms—sharp, immense, severe. The fortresses of gods or the gods themselves, at the tail end of summer and still capped with snow.

The Candiveras are all that stand between you and the kingdom of Ifrine beyond—

The rest of the world beyond.

You pause. You kneel. Scratch your dog behind the ears and adjust the tiny silver medal you wear around your neck.

If you had to take one last look at your country, you couldn’t ask for a better view than this.

 

The Kindar Peninsula had been tearing itself to pieces long before you entered the war. Amerand and Vedra. North and south. For a hundred years, those titans raged, back and forth on the fields, the beaches, the steep mountain slopes—

The flash of steel, the sound of the drums—

And us—

Kindlings. A force of elite, magic-wielding warriors, pink flames rippling from our balar weapons as we carved great swaths through the ranks of our enemies. We fought for Amerand. We fought for Vedra. For a hundred years, we were swept up in two violent, inexorable tides, ebbing and expanding, swallowing cities, villages, outposts—

You can still remember how it felt, fighting on the vanguard, there in the thick of it with a squad of your kin—

The weight of your armor. The give of the earth. The magic sparking wildly inside of you and rushing out through your blade—

But it’s been two years since you conjured fire from your fingers, two years since Amerand won the war—

The Vedran royalty slipping quietly into exile—

All the old maps redrawn—

As a testament to the Great and Harmonious Reunification, the Queen Commander (Long May She Reign) outlawed magic on the entire Kindar Peninsula, deemed it too cruel, too inhumane, unthinkable in peacetime. No more child soldiers. No more kids burning out by eighteen.

And the ones who remained?

The ones who survived?

We were given a choice.

Surrender our balar weapons for land and a stipend, or be turned loose, to live and fight and be put down if we ever dared to disturb the new and uneasy peace.

 

Now you wear your sword across your back, for you no longer need it at your side. A less sentimental person would’ve sold it already, but you were always a sap, weren’t you? Splitting your rations with the replacements, filching a few apples or an extra blanket for the orphans who dogged our convoys, begging for scraps. We gave you a hard time about it, but let’s be honest, we all had a soft spot for orphans—

For kids made homeless

 by war.

If you were smart, you’d sell it. Crossing the Candiveras will lead you deep into the wilderness, or so you’ve heard, and that means provisions, pack animals, a guide. Since the war ended, you’ve already sold off most of your armor—

First the sabatons—

Then the shin guards—

The metal skirt that at one time protected you from the blades of your enemies—

The cuirass—

The shoulder plates—

Your helmet, dinged from use—

All you’ve got left are your sword, your gauntlets, and a handful of copper kidam that won’t even buy a meal for you and your dog, much less the supplies for the journey, no stops between the northlands and the outer settlements of Ifrine—

To be fair, you didn’t want a dog in the first place, and certainly not a speckled mutt with one half-chewed ear, but we don’t always get to choose our companions, do we? Sometimes we just find them, or they find us, clinging to us like sap on our shoe soles—

Sticky and warm—

You told yourself you didn’t want a dog, didn’t want attachments, not now, especially not now, not after your brother Zan (not your brother by blood, but your brother in all the other ways that matter) shoved you into the street and told you to leave him.

It’s none of your business, Leum.

Get out of here, Leum.

There’s nothing for you here.

He cried a little, then, and that shook you. You’d never seen him cry before, not in all your months together—

Eleven months together—

Eleven months on the vanguard together, until the official Vedran surrender. You or he or both of you should’ve been killed or at least wounded seriously enough to be taken off the line, but you weren’t. Inexplicably, incredibly, you weren’t. Had so much time together. So many furious days in the mud and the dust, your whole squad spattered in blood and stinking of sweat—

Sometimes, when it was quiet, you’d lie around your campfire, saying nothing, staring up at the stars—

Eleven months together.

For us, a miracle of time.

He told you to leave, so you left him, and as you skulked out of the compound, the dog followed. Some stray the smugglers fed from the back door of their kitchens, hungry and flea-bitten—

(A little like you, come to think of it. Both skinny, scruffy, and liable to bite.)

You tried to ignore

her as you made camp for the night. Her bright eyes and snuffling breaths just outside the ring of the firelight.

You yelled at her.

You told her to run.

You tried to drive her away, but it didn’t matter how much you shouted or how many stones you threw (not to hit her, just to scare her), and eventually you let her lick the dinner off your fingers—

Her tongue warm, her fur oily under your palm—

You fed her the last scraps from your bowl and lay down for the night, angry and heartsick, and when you awoke in the morning, she was still there.

A few days later, after you’d accepted that Zan was right, that there was nothing left for you in Amerand, you grew tired of chasing her off. You decided to call her Burk (which isn’t a name we would have chosen, but hey, we’re dead, and the dead don’t get to have opinions), and you allowed her to stay.

 

Shortly before noon, you and Burk come to a town at the base of the mountains. Windfall, according to the only trader you saw on the road this morning. It’s an auspicious name for an inauspicious-looking place: a collection of rickety wooden buildings topped with thatched roofs and smoking stovepipes, everything looking likely to collapse in the next good rainstorm—

If they get rainstorms up here.

(Of course they get rainstorms up here.)

Until then, the land’s cracked with drought, the creek running through the square going dry in the heat. Angrily, you glower up at the searing alpine sun, which, undeterred, glowers back.

Apparently unaffected by the heat, Burk trots ahead of you, sniffing at empty rain barrels and saloon stoops, where itinerants lounge under the awnings, waiting for dark.

In the center of the square, she finds a few merchants from Ifrine, conspicuous with their pale faces and high-bridged noses. You’ve seen Ifriners before, but you can’t help but stare. Near the end of the war, you watched a convoy of them escort a delivery of handcannons to the regiment your squad was attached to at the time. A couple weeks of training—

A few hands and feet blown off—

And every wet-eared grunt became as lethal as one of us.

Cheaper too. An ordinary soldier with a handcannon didn’t need seven years of training, didn’t need one of those rare and expensive balar crystals. Just pop a weapon into their hands and point them at the enemy—

Boom.

These Ifriners aren’t military, though. They’re just civilians, bloody and beaten, their carts robbed of whatever it was they were carrying. Whoever attacked them must have been ruthless. Among the Ifriners’ injuries you spy a shattered ankle, a gaping eye socket, more lacerations and bruises than you can count . . . In the shade of an empty cart, one of the men is weeping openly beside a dead body, covered by a dirty sheet.

You glance toward the Candiveras. You’d heard there were bandits in the mountains, but you didn’t know they’d be as brutal as this.

(And this is

supposed to be peacetime?)

Burk bounds over to the traders, docked tail wagging, but before she can reach them, one of the Ifriners lets out a cry, shooing her away with his large white hands. “We have nothing!” he shouts in his accented Kindarian. “It is all been taken! There is nothing here for you!”

“Hey!” You stalk up to him. (Hardly a menacing sight. You barely come up to his armpits.) “Leave my dog alone.”

He eyes you dubiously through his bruises. Let’s face it, you’re not much to look at. (Never have been.) You’re small. You’re grubby. Your robe, frayed; your belt, tied in the feminine style, stained. Your topknot, which should’ve signaled that you’re a warrior, is currently a mess, overgrown locks falling around your windburned cheeks.

“We have nothing,” he repeats.

“Raiders?”

He nods.

You know you shouldn’t ask (it’s none of your business, really), but you can’t help yourself. Compassion, duty, valor, honor—

Protect the weak—

Defend the defenseless—

You used to have a code . . . once.

“When?” you ask.

He shakes his head. “This morning.”

“Did they have handcannons?”

At your line of questioning, his gaze darts to the sword on your back. During the war, every kindling was given a weapon set with a balar crystal, that rare gem found only on the Kindar Peninsula, through which to channel their magic—

Some of us got daggers—

Gauntlets—

Spears—

Shields—

You got your sword. Since the war ended, you’ve taken to wrapping the hilt in linen, so no one can see the balar crystal there—

So no one will try to mug you for it—

So no one will know what you are.

(Were.)

(Used to be.)

The Ifriner may not have met any of us before, but in a hundred years we’ve become legends far beyond our borders. Kindarian fire soldiers. Young, ferocious, unrelenting. Given your age (only sixteen), your sword, your messy topknot, he must suspect. “Why does it matter?” he asks. “Who are you to know?”

And you hesitate.

You want to tell him you’re a warrior.

You’re a kindling. You could do something about this. You could dispatch a pack of bandits quicker than the Ifriners could bury their fallen comrade.

You’re—

“Nobody,” you say, and you turn away.

 

You find the antiquary in a particularly ramshackle shop in a particularly ramshackle part of town, squashed between the remains of what must have been a school and a one-room hostel renting straw sleeping mats for ten kidam a night.

Outside, a girl about your age is approaching anyone with a weapon (no matter the quality or how well they carry it) with some kind of job offer. Mercenary work, maybe, though you doubt she can afford it. In her frayed sandals and faded clothes, she looks almost as poor as you are.

Most passersby avoid her, shrugging her off and stalking away, others pausing only to laugh at her proposal and shake their heads.

As you try to slip past her, she catches your eye. Her gaze sharp, her jaw set. She straightens her shoulders. She takes a breath.

But you’re not interested in hearing her sad story or her offer of work. You’re not going to take it. You’re not going to be here more than a couple days. Before she can reach you, you duck behind some other fool with a staff slung across their shoulders, putting them between you and the girl as you bound up the steps to the antiquary.

Leaving Burk outside, you enter the shop, where you’re greeted by a laughing wooden statue of the Rice Keeper, Lesser God of Merchants and Commerce, whose belly you rub (out of habit more than belief) as you close the door behind you.

But it doesn’t look like the Rice Keeper has been around lately. Inside, narrow shutters cast bands of light over the bare shelves: a rusty hand axe, a few bolts of cloth, an old plow propped in a corner. Briefly, you wonder if the supply shortage has anything to do with the Ifriners getting robbed, but you tell yourself not to care.

What catches your eye are the ceremonial knots displayed on a high, dusty ledge. One is a general’s emblem. One is a kindling commendation. Several more are shaped like spider lilies, presented to soldiers who were wounded in battle—

And they’re up there next to the chamber pots.

You want to be angry, but let’s be honest, in those early days, when we were hungry and the demand for war paraphernalia was high, we all pawned our medals first. Better our medals than our armor—

Or our balar weapons.

Behind the counter, the antiquary’s an old woman, broad-faced, with shrewd eyes and beaded bracelets of fine artistry you didn’t expect to see this far north.

“You’re wearing Vedran trinkets?” you snap. Can’t keep the accusation out of your voice.

Enemy trinkets.

She glances up from the shoulder guard she’s repairing, quickly taking stock of your grungy appearance. “They’re Amerandine trinkets now.” (Her eyes unkind, her smile thin.) Then she returns to the damaged armor, threading pink cord through each plate with

expert fingers.

You’re used to people dismissing you, but you’ve never learned to keep your temper, so you reach into your pack and slam one of your gauntlets onto the counter—

The clank and clatter—

Calmly, the antiquary sets down her needle, examining the tattered knots and flaking lacquer. After a moment, she squints at you. “You got the pair of them?”

“How much for just the one?” you ask.

“One fifty.”

A hundred fifty han is less than you’d like, but not much less than the armor’s actually worth, so you begrudgingly place your other gauntlet beside the first.

The antiquary barely bats an eyelid. “Two fifty.”

“Four hundred,” you counter.

“Not in this condition.” She prods a line of missing scales you lost during a fight with a Vedran kindling three years ago—

A boy—

One of us—

Maybe thirteen—

Behind his face guard, he had freckles like distant starlings, caught flying across his cheeks.

The memory of heat flashes along your forearm. Without thinking, you smooth your sleeve over the blazing red scar.

“How much do I need to cross the mountains?” you say.

The antiquary strings another length of cord through her needle. “Two fifty will fetch you a nice horse and something to feed it, but the journey over the Candiveras is long and dangerous. It’ll cost you at least six times as much, and that’s without protection.”

“From who? Raiders?” You tell her about the Ifrine traders, their empty carts.

“The Ifriners got hit?” She curses. “I was counting on them for resupply.”

“This been happening a lot?” you ask.

“Every summer since the war ended. But Adren’s gotten greedy this year”—the antiquary gestures at the barren shelves—“as you can see.”

“Who’s Adren?”

“A pain in my ass.” The old woman clicks her tongue. “She and her raiders would think nothing of robbing a little thing like you.”

Grumbling, you shove your first gauntlet back into your pack. “I can handle raiders.”

The antiquary’s gaze flicks to the sword on your back, then the small silver medal you wear around your neck. It’s no bigger than a thumbnail, stamped with the image of a dayfly, but she smiles knowingly. “Is that a Wind Runner medallion you’ve got?”

You scowl. Hardly anyone recognizes the Lesser God of Kindlings. Hardly anyone’s heard of the little boy with the wind in his limbs. But maybe it’s part of her trade. Maybe she heard of him from

 whoever sold her one of our commendations, sitting high on the shelf—

Outside, Burk begins to bark.

You glance over your shoulder. There’s some kind of commotion out there. Whooping, cheering—

“Balar weapons are illegal in Ifrine, you know,” the antiquary continues, jabbing a crooked finger at your sword. “If that’s what I think it is, you might as well turn a profit off it now while it’ll still do you some good. I promise you, selling that will get you over the Candiveras with more than enough left to get you settled wherever you want.”

But you’re no longer listening. Can’t concentrate on leaving when Burk keeps barking like that, and now over her racket you can hear the noise of a scuffle: shouting, wheezing, the soft sounds of flesh on flesh—

You know those sounds—

Someone’s being beaten out there—

But you tell yourself it’s none of your business, like the Ifriners were none of your business—

Like Zan was none of your business.

You may wear the sign of the Wind Runner, but you’re not a kindling anymore. Technically, there are no kindlings anymore. We’re outdated, outlawed—

Relics, like the ceremonial knots up there on the shelf—

You’ve almost convinced yourself you shouldn’t interfere when someone comes crashing through the door. She stumbles, knocking over the statue of the Rice Keeper, and they both tumble to the floor.

It’s the girl from the street. Her lip split, one eye swelling. She’s clutching her ribs—

Kicked, most likely—

Multiple times. You can see the scuff marks on her robes.

As she lies there, groaning, a boy in rusty greaves leaps in after her, grabbing her by the chin. “You learned your lesson yet, peasant?” He sneers. Contemptuous, cruel. “Your kind has no business talking to our kind.”

You should intervene—

You can’t intervene. Fighting isn’t your job anymore—

But you’ve still got your sword, Leum—

Use it.

You don’t move.

“Get out!” the antiquary snaps from behind the counter. “Keep your business on the street where it belongs!”

The boy laughs. Starts hauling the girl off by the collar. Outside, Burk continues barking, hopping from foot to foot in her rage.

You should warn the boy. You should give him a chance. If he lets the girl go, you might not have to fight him—

But your pack is already dropping from your shoulder. Your sword, though still in its scabbard, is already in your hands—

You vault after him, through the doorway and into the road, where he and two other boys are wrestling with the girl, who’s recovered enough now that she’s bucking and shouting, nearly throwing them off her

with a desperate, panicked strength.

Across the street, a crowd has gathered, eager for violence. Like they forgot they lived with it for generations. Like two years was more than enough to erase all those lifetimes of war.

One of the boys sees you coming. He runs at you with an antique-looking spear, but you duck easily. You’re under the arc of his weapon and appearing again inside his reach, striking him in the stomach, the arm, the chin. He staggers, dropping his spear, and you kick it away before he can grab it again.

Whirling, you turn on the other two—the one in the greaves and another in pauldrons—who shove the girl at you. Before you can extricate yourself, there’s a cry, a quick tangle of limbs, giving the boys time to draw their swords—

Cheap things. The kind given to draftees—

And these boys are too young to be draftees. Must have bought their armaments, or stolen them, thinking it’d be funny to play warrior, to walk a path of violence—

But they have no idea.

The boys rush toward you. They try to cut you, but you’re too fast for them, hitting them above the greaves, between the shoulder blades—thwack! thwack!—your sheathed weapon finding them again and again and again unchecked.

The boy with the spear runs at you, but he’s still unsteady from that blow to the chin—

You catch him by the arm and send him sailing over your shoulder, into the front of the antiquary, where he smashes through the shutters, splintering them from their frames, while Burk barks at him from the stoop.

“Not helping, Burk!” you shout.

Maybe the boy in the pauldrons thinks this is enough to distract you, because he lunges. You block him easily, twisting his sword out of his grasp, and take his hand in yours like you’re dancers, or lovers (not that you ever had the inclination for such a thing)—

You snap his wrist.

Shrieking, he staggers away from you, and now you’re turning for the last boy, the one in the greaves, but he doesn’t charge you again. No, he’s got the girl on the ground—

His foot on her back and his blade at her neck—

He points at your sword, its hilt still covered. “Is that a balar weapon?” he says, panting. “Are you one of them?”

You don’t answer. You’re considering, now, the best way to kill him—

Your blade through his gut, or maybe his ribs—

Or just the old standby,

removing his head—

“Throw it over here,” he continues, oblivious to the danger he’s in, “or I’ll—”

But we never get to know what he’d do, because a hooded figure, a girl (tall, slender, swathed in fine, airy garments), strikes him like lightning out of the clouds. One second, the sword is in his hands; the next, it’s gone—

It’s in hers—

She’s got it leveled at his throat.

You blink. You’re fast, but you’re not that fast.

The boy’s got this look on his face like he can’t believe what just happened, can’t believe the fact of his own empty hands. He stands there, bewildered, while the girl in the hood lifts the sword, tapping him in the chin with the flat of his own blade.

“Run,” she whispers.

And he does. They all do. Stumbling, they scoop up their cheap weapons and scamper off down the road. For a moment, you consider going after them. You might be able to sell off those swords, that spear, that rusty armor. Would they fetch you enough to cross the mountains?

Not likely.

Gradually, the crowd disperses, muttering with disappointment, while the girl in the hood goes to fetch her horse: a beautiful, enormous bay with striking white socks, more fitting for the battlefield than the backwoods.

Settling your own sword across your back again, you walk up to the girl on the ground. Extend your hand. “You okay?”

For a second, she doesn’t look at you. Shakes her head, wipes her eyes. (You wonder if she’s ever been in a fight or if this is her first time.) Finally, she takes your hand, hauls herself to her feet. “No,” she says. This close, you notice another wound at her collarbone—

Deeper than the rest but scabbed over—

Maybe a week old at this point—

“What happened?” you ask.

She leans over, gagging, blood dribbling from her lips. “I asked them for help, but they said it was beneath them. I guess roughing me up was just for fun.”

“Bastards.” You grunt. “You should be more careful who you ask.”

She looks at you like you’re joking.

(You’re not. You don’t have enough of a sense of humor for that.)

“I don’t have that luxury. It’s hard enough getting anyone to listen.” Straightening, she wipes her mouth with the back of her hand. “You didn’t.”

You don’t know what to say to that, so you glare at her. Then, reaching into your pocket, you offer her a handkerchief.

She takes it, her expression softening. (Weariness, grief.) “Thank you, though, for stepping in when you did.”

You nod.

“I’m Tana,” she says.

“Leum.”

The other girl slides by you, leading her horse. “And I’m going.” With a flick of her fingers, she twitches her hood into place, although up close you can see it’s not a hood at all but a scarf (a nice one, nicer than any you’ve ever seen, much less worn or even felt between your chapped fingertips), dyed a brilliant gold you can't

find anywhere in Kindar—

Of Yansenite origin, maybe—

From the empire across the sea—

But she’s not Yansenite. In the shadow of her scarf, you glimpse angular Kindarian eyes, straight Kindarian hair that flows from under her head covering and down her back like an ink stroke.

Your breath hitches in your chest.

You know her. You’ve only seen her once before, high on a mountaintop with the clouds amassing behind her and a balar crystal blazing at her forehead. You’d assumed she would’ve burned out by now. She was, what, sixteen, when you saw her on that ridge, calling bolts of fire from the heavens?

But it’s her. After that night, you’d know her anywhere.

“The Twin Valley Reaper,” you whisper.

 

Amity

You haven’t heard that name in months. Truth be told, you never thought you’d hear it again, anonymous as you are in the northlands, without any of the pageantry that used to accompany your rank and renown.

(Which was, of course, why you came to the northlands in the first place.)

You turn around, leaving your old charger, Comet, stamping impatiently in the street. His temperament’s mellowed since the war ended, but whether that’s out of old age or boredom, you can’t say.

The girl with the messy topknot (Leum, she said) hasn’t stopped staring at you. She’s got the quiet intensity of a dog, head lowered, neck taut—

But you’ve never been partial to dogs.

Inhaling deeply, you adjust your scarf. It was presented to you by the lord of some castle you helped liberate from Vedran occupation. Imported, beautiful, made from lotus silk and dyed a luxurious saffron. You harbor no sentimental feelings toward the lord, whose name you can’t even remember, but that battle earned you your title. That battle made you a legend long before you or anyone else had ever heard of Twin Valley. You may have abandoned most of your belongings when you left the capital five months ago, but you couldn’t bear to part with this scarf.

“It’s just Amity now,” you say firmly.

Leum nods, and you wonder how she knows you. Not just your nickname (practically everyone in Amerand knows that) but your face. Maybe she’s another kindling, Senary or perhaps Quinary Class—

A vanguardian, most likely, with a heavy two-handed sword like that—

Maybe you were stationed together once, attached to the same battalion before being called off to other slaughters—

Or maybe she’s Vedran. The south knew you by a number of monikers too, both flattering and not.

“Amity?” The other girl, Tana, looks startled, the way most people look when they realize who you are. What you’ve done. The destruction you’ve caused and the lives you’ve taken. “You’re the Rea—”

“Quiet.” You glance across the street, where a few bystanders, alerted by Tana’s tone, turn toward you curiously.

“My brother used to tell me stories about you,” she continues, softer now. “He—”

You cut her off with a smile. “It’s a little hot out here today, don’t you think?” She looks confused, but you don’t have time for her confusion. All you wanted when you left your cabin this morning was to run your errands and slip away unnoticed, same as you’ve been doing for months, but you can’t do that if you get caught in a crowd. You need to get out of here, lie low until the furor dies down. More importantly, you need to make sure Leum and Tana, who know who you are now, don’t cause you any more inconvenience than they already have. You motion them down the street, toward the taverns at the town entrance. “How about I buy you both a drink?”

“No one’s going anywhere!” The antiquary, who’s been surveying the damage to her storefront, smacks you on the shoulder, which, in other circumstances, would amuse you. (During the war, no one would have dared.) “Look at this mess! Look what you’ve done to my shop! Who’s going to pay for this?”

Your gaze darts to the crowd again, some of whom have started in your direction now, eager for more action.

Swiftly, you press a handful of han into one of the antiquary’s wrinkled palms. “For the repairs,” you tell her, “with extra for your silence on today’s events.”

She eyes you thoughtfully, bouncing the money in her hand. “Feels light. This won’t cover—”

“Don’t haggle with me,” you interrupt. “I know what those shutters are worth.”

At the edge in your voice, she retreats a step. Can’t help herself. You could be her granddaughter, but in your limited years you’ve cowed older, more formidable forces than she.

The crowd’s almost reached you now, moving with a purpose that reminds you of certain court toadies and minor lords, so you turn back to Tana (who’s dabbing at her bloody lip) and Leum (who’s looking impatient). “Now, how about that drink?”

 

The others have scarcely agreed when you lead Comet off at a brisk pace, forcing Leum and Tana, who are both shorter than you, to jog to keep up. True, you ought to slow down. Behind you, you can hear Tana’s uneven gait, her labored breathing—

A broken rib, most likely—

Terribly painful, but there’s nothing anyone can do except wait for it to heal—

And it’s not like you’re responsible for her well-being. You just need to get her out of there, buy her silence. That’s the extent of your obligation to her.

Nothing more.

“Hey,” Leum says, trotting up to you. “Hey, Amity.”

Neither you nor Comet slow down. “What?”

“How are you here?”

You purse your lips. Decline to answer.

“I mean, how old are you now? You’ve got to be at least nineteen . . .”

“Twenty next month,” you say.

“And you haven’t burned out?” she asks, blunter than you’re used to, although, let’s be honest, you’ve barely spoken a word to anyone in months.

You shrug, tightening your scarf around your throat.

That was always the problem with kindlings, wasn’t it? The reason the Queen Commander was so eager for the power of powder and shot—

We die too quick. ...