Chapter Four: Trial of Blood
They told us the next trial would make us killers.
I already was.
I don’t sleep after I read the note. I sit on the floor of my room with my back against the door and the silver mask in my lap, and I turn the spiral seal over and over in the green light until it’s nearly morning.
Remember why you came.
Someone in this palace knows about my contract. Someone who can walk into the Tithe House, into my room, and leave a mask on my pillow while I’m dancing with a prince.
I think about the little silver spiral in Maren’s hair.
I think about how she knew which breath-shell to choose. How she knew my name was false before I’d even finished saying it. How she and Caius looked at each other in the throne hall on the first night, as if they were continuing an argument.
It would make sense. My client needed someone down here to watch me. Someone to make sure I didn’t lose my nerve, or fall in love with the view. Who better than another tithe?
It makes sense. That’s what bothers me. In my experience, the things that make the most sense are the things someone wants you to believe.
I hide the mask under the mattress and the note inside my boot. I don’t say anything to anyone.
That’s rule two.
The next day, there’s no trial. Oriel tells us to rest.
The others sleep, or try to. I go exploring.
Nobody stops me. The servants look at the blue scar on my throat and step aside, and the courtiers I pass in the corridors look at me the way you’d look at a dog that’s learned to walk on its hind legs: amused, curious, faintly disgusted. I’ve been looked at worse.
I’m looking for exits. Guard rotations. The route from the Tithe House to the prince’s rooms. The things you need to know if you’re going to kill someone and then, ideally, not die yourself.
What I find instead is the Hall of Brides.
It’s a long, narrow gallery near the heart of the palace, lit by jellyfish drifting in iron lanterns. Along both walls, set into the stone, are mosaics. Faces made of thousands of tiny chips of shell and sea-glass and pearl, each one taller than me, each one framed in silver.
There’s a plaque beneath each face. I can’t read Veylish, but I can read numbers, and the numbers are dates. A hundred years apart. Every single one.
They’re the winners. The mortal brides and grooms of the heirs of Veyl, stretching back and back and back.
I walk the length of the hall slowly. A woman with brown skin and gold rings in her ears. A broad-shouldered young man with a fisherman’s hands. A pale girl with a wine-stained birthmark on her cheek. Every one of them is from the shore. Every one of them walked out onto the sand the way I did.
None of them are smiling.
The last mosaic, at the very end of the hall, is the oldest. The shell has faded to the colour of bone, and the glass is clouded. But the face is still clear. A girl, no older than sixteen, with black hair and wide dark eyes and a small, stubborn mouth.
I stop in front of her. Something about her is familiar in a way that makes my skin crawl, and I can’t work out why.
“The first bride,” says a voice behind me.
I turn. It’s one of the grey servants, an old man with a bucket and a brush, cleaning the lanterns.
“What was her name?” I ask.
He shrugs. “Nobody remembers. It was nine hundred years ago.” He looks up at the girl’s face with an odd expression, almost sad. “You shouldn’t linger here, tithe. The queen doesn’t like people looking at old faces.”
The third trial is held that night in a place called the Well.
It’s a round pit carved deep into the seabed, maybe thirty paces across, its walls smooth and black and too high to climb. Galleries ring the top, full of the court. At the bottom, the seven of us stand in a loose circle on a floor of white sand.
The white sand makes me nervous. It’s the kind of floor you’d pick if you wanted blood to show up well.
Oriel stands on a ledge above us, her coral staff in one hand and a small bag of black cloth in the other.
“The third trial,” she says, “is a trial of blood.”
Nobody moves. Beside me, Tam’s breathing has gone shallow and fast. I can hear the flutter of his breath-shell working.
“The sea takes,” Oriel says. “That is its nature. Tonight, you will take in its name.” She lifts the bag. “In here are seven stones. Six white. One black. Each of you will draw. The one who draws the black stone is the sea’s portion. The remaining six must spill that one’s blood upon the sand before the tide bell rings.”
“Or what?” Hollis says hoarsely.
“Or the sea will take all seven.”
She lets the bag fall. It drifts down through the water, turning slowly, and lands on the sand in the middle of our circle.
For a long moment nobody touches it.
Then Maren steps forward, reaches in without looking, and pulls out a white stone. She holds it up for the galleries to see and steps back into the circle, perfectly calm.
Hollis goes next, hands shaking. White. He lets out a breath so deep his whole body sags.
Nell Cotter. White. Ada Cotter. White. The sisters grab each other and cry.
Tam looks at me, and then at the bag, and I can see in his face that he can’t do it. That his legs won’t carry him those three steps.
So I go instead.
I put my hand into the bag and feel two stones in there, smooth and cold. I close my fingers around one and pull it out.
White.
I give the bag to Tam. His hand is shaking so hard he nearly drops it. He reaches in and pulls out the last—
No. The second to last. There were two in there. His is white.
Which means—
We all turn, together, to look at Sable.
She hasn’t moved. She’s been standing on the far side of the circle this whole time with her arms loose at her sides and her scarred face perfectly blank. She hasn’t drawn. She doesn’t need to.
“Well,” she says. It’s the most I’ve ever heard her say. “That’s that, then.”
And she moves.
She’s fast. Faster than I would have believed. The shard of coral she’s been sharpening against her wall for three nights is in her hand before any of us see her reach for it, and she isn’t going for the strongest of us, or the cleverest.
She’s going for Tam.
Of course she is. I would, if I were her. If one of us dies before the bell, the sea is satisfied. It doesn’t matter which one. Her blood or ours. She’s not going quietly; she’s trying to trade.
Tam sees her coming and freezes. His mouth opens. Nothing comes out.
Hollis shouts. The sisters scream. Maren steps back, out of the way, and watches.
And I’m already moving.
There’s a thing that happens to me when it’s time. My father used to call it going quiet. Everything slows down, and all the noise in my head just stops, and there’s nothing left but where I am and where I need to be. It’s the only time I ever feel calm.
I get between them. The coral shard comes at my face. I turn my head and it opens a line across my cheek, hot and bright, and my blood spills into the water in a thin red ribbon.
Then my knife is in my hand, and I put it where it needs to go.
It’s quick. I make it quick. I owe her that.
Sable looks at me in surprise, as if I’ve told her something she didn’t expect. Then her knees give, and she sinks slowly to the white sand, and the sand doesn’t stay white for long.
High above us, the tide bell begins to ring.
For a long moment, nobody in the Well moves.
I’m standing over Sable’s body with my knife in my hand and my own blood still drifting from my cheek, and I can feel every eye in the place on me. Not just the court. The other tithes too.
The sisters are clinging to each other, staring at me like I’m something that crawled out of a nightmare. Hollis has gone grey. Maren’s expression is impossible to read, but she’s looking at me very, very carefully, the way you’d look at a snake you’ve just realised is venomous.
And Tam—
Tam is looking at me as if he doesn’t know who I am.
“You didn’t even—” He stops. Swallows. “You didn’t even think about it.”
I wipe the blade on my sleeve and put it away. “There wasn’t time to think.”
“I know. That’s not—” He shakes his head. “Thank you,” he says, and he means it, but he takes a small step back from me when he says it.
I tell myself it doesn’t matter.
I look up, toward the galleries, because I can’t look at him anymore.
The court is applauding again. That same soft, polite sound, like rain on the surface of the sea. The queen sits in the centre of the highest gallery, her hands folded in her lap, watching me with an expression of mild, pleasant interest.
And beside her, a little apart, as always, stands Caius.
He isn’t applauding. He’s just looking down at me, at the knife and the blood and the body at my feet, with an expression I’ve never seen on his face before.
He’s smiling.
That night I sit on the edge of the fountain in the common hall of the Tithe House, trying to get Sable’s blood out from under my fingernails.
The fountain doesn’t pour water. There is no pouring water at the bottom of the sea. It pours light instead: pale blue light, rising from a basin of white stone and streaming upward like smoke. It’s useless for washing. I scrub anyway.
The others have gone to their rooms. None of them said goodnight.
“That won’t come out.”
I don’t look up. “Doesn’t anyone knock in this palace?”
“It’s my palace,” says Caius. He sits down on the edge of the fountain, a careful distance away. “I don’t need to knock.”
“Everyone needs to knock.”
“I’ll bear it in mind.”
We sit in silence for a while, with the blue light rising between us. I keep scrubbing. He keeps watching.
“You didn’t hesitate,” he says finally.
“Hesitating gets people killed. Usually the wrong people.”
“Is that what happened to your father?”
My hands go still.
“You’re not the only one who’s good at finding things out,” he says. “Oren Hale. Smuggler. Lost with his boat eleven years ago, in a storm he should have seen coming. You were twelve.” A pause. “Your brother was one.”
“Stop.”
“You’ve been taking care of him ever since. Every job you’ve taken, every man you’ve—”
“I said stop.“
He stops.
I stare down at my hands. The blood’s mostly gone now. It doesn’t feel gone.
“Why do you know all this?” I ask quietly. “Why me? There are a hundred people on the shore who’d kill for money. Some of them are better at it than I am.”
“I doubt that,” he says. And then, after a moment: “Because you gave your name for a girl you owed bread to. Because you put yourself between a boy and a knife tonight when you didn’t have to. Killers are easy to find, Wren. Killers who still care who lives are rare.”
He says my name like he’s said it a hundred times before, when he was alone.
“They’re afraid of me now,” I say. “The others. Tam.”
“Good. Fear will keep them away from you.” His mouth twists. “It works, for a while. Then it doesn’t.”
I look at him properly then. At the way he sits: straight-backed, careful, his left arm held stiffly against his side, the way it always is. I noticed it on the first night. I’ve noticed it every time since.
“Who hurt your arm?” I ask.
I expect him to deflect. To smile that almost-smile and change the subject.
Instead, he looks at the rising light for a long moment. When he answers, his voice is very quiet, and very steady.
“My mother,” he says.
See next: Chapter Five: The Current