The Sky Weaver Read online

  She often talked to the ghost. It never talked back.

  Except this time, it did.

  “Who hurt you?” Its voice was like wind scratching at a door.

  Eris’s hands fell still. Slowly, she set down the skein and looked up. The ghost loomed over her. Black as the night sky and shaped like a man. But it wasn’t a man.

  Her heart beat fast.

  The ghost stared her down, silent as death. Eris knew that stare. It had watched her for years now, ever since the first time she’d stepped across.

  But why talk now when it never had before?

  It seemed to be staring at her arms, studying the damage the stardust steel had done. Her wrists were bloody and raw where her flesh had burned away.

  “Does it hurt?”

  She nodded.

  The ghost moved closer. Eris held herself still. It reached for her wrists, and as it touched her, a rush of feelings swept through her, all of them familiar, none of them her own:

  The terrible longing for someone you can never have.

  The empty ache of forever being alone.

  The soul-crushing darkness of despair.

  If she’d been standing, she would have fallen to her knees with the overwhelming weight of them all. She shuddered. But as the ghost’s feelings flooded her, they expunged the stinging, throbbing pain in her wrists.

  The ghost stepped back. And though its sorrow lingered in her, everything else had been taken.

  She drew her hands into her lap and stared down at her wrists. They were sore and festering just moments ago. Now the pain was gone and there were ugly red scars where the open wounds used to be.

  Scars that would be there, she knew, for the rest of her life.

  “Thank you,” she whispered.

  The ghost said nothing.

  “What are you?”

  “Nothing good,” it said.

  She frowned. If it wasn’t good, why had it taken her pain away? “What’s your name?”

  “I’m . . . Crow,” it said finally. “Or I was, once.”

  And then it melted back into the shadows.

  Twenty-Three

  “What in all the skies was that?”

  Dax’s jaw hardened as he ran his fingers through his curls, staring at Safire like he suddenly didn’t recognize her. Which made two of them.

  Not only had Safire let the empress’s fugitive slip through her fingers—a fugitive who was now free to hunt down Asha—she’d kissed her.

  Safire shoved the thought out of her head. She was desperately trying not to think about that kiss. How it felt like waking up. Like every day before this one, she’d been asleep and hadn’t known it.

  She tried to quickly stopper the emotions swirling inside her. Confusion, shame, fear—they were all foreign feelings. She didn’t know what to do with them. “She was trying to blend in. To escape detection.”

  She was just using me.

  Safire looked back over her shoulder. New songs started up again as new lovestruck couples moved into the dancing circle.

  “And you let her,” said Dax, his voice accusatory. But she could see the confusion in him, too. He was trying to make sense of what he’d seen. Trying to come up with a logical reason. One that would allow him to still trust and admire his cousin—who knew just how badly he needed this visit to go well.

  But there was no sense to make of it.

  A commotion broke out behind her. Dax reacted, stepping to Safire’s side. She turned to see a flash of black uniforms and silver stars. Several Lumina soldiers surrounded them.

  Safire’s stomach knotted at the sight of the man leading them. It was the same soldier from the alley. The one whose club she’d intercepted.

  “Kindly move aside,” he told Dax, though his eyes were on Safire. “She’s under arrest.”

  Dax’s eyes widened. “What?” Safire saw his hand reach for his hilt. She grabbed his wrist to stop him. Their eyes met as he whispered, “For what crime?”

  “Impeding the law,” the Lumina answered.

  Suddenly, Dax and Roa’s guards were there, forming a protective ring around their king, queen, and commandant.

  This was not good. Roa and Dax hadn’t even arrived at the citadel yet, and they were already making enemies of the empress’s army.

  This was Safire’s fault. She needed to fix it.

  “He’s right,” she said, remembering the woman cowering in the alley. “I did impede.” She held the gaze of the soldier in command. But not a just law.

  Safire knew a couple of bad soldiers didn’t mean an entire army was corrupt, though. The empress, she was sure, would want to hear her story. And once Safire gave it, the Lumina involved would be punished for their abuse of power.

  The captain nodded to the two soldiers at his left. “Restrain her.”

  Frowning fiercely now, Dax moved to intervene. But Safire gripped his wrist harder and shook her head. She’d ruined enough things for one day. She didn’t want to ruin the alliance between Dax and the empress before it even began—especially if Leandra really could help the scrublands.

  “What happened?” asked a familiar voice as the two soldiers gripped Safire’s arms, their hands pinching like vises. “Where’s the fugitive?” A newly arrived Raif stood near her now, his gaze sweeping the scene. In his hand was the rope Safire used to bind Eris’s hands. Eris had picked the knot.

  “I lost her,” said Safire.

  On their way to the citadel, the Lumina marched Safire through three checkpoints, with Dax and Roa following closely. At the third and final gate, the checkpoint guards stopped them, taking the Lumina captain aside.

  The checkpoint was a thick, wrought iron gate that rose nearly as high as the walls of Firgaard. The steel twisted in a repeating star pattern all the way around, and when Safire glanced up, she found the top fixed with tall, serrated points—to dissuade climbers.

  Beyond the gateway was what seemed like a vast, empty courtyard. Only Lumina marched across it. Anyone getting past the gate would have to walk or run to the fortress wall, which was heavily guarded from the top, meaning any runners would be spotted—and likely shot with arrows—long before they reached the wall.

  “Take her to the holding area,” Safire heard the Lumina captain say as she studied the last gate. The iron twisted like frothing waves. “The king and queen you may show to their rooms.”

  Roa moved through the soldiers, flanked by her personal guards, each of them handpicked by Safire. “We would appreciate it,” she said, her dark brown eyes flashing as she tried to join her commandant, “if you took all of us to the holding area until this is sorted out.”

  The captain grabbed Roa’s wrist, halting her. “The holding area is for criminals, my lady.”

  A flame ignited within Safire. Roa’s guards all drew their weapons.

  The dragon queen was considerably smaller and shorter than the Lumina captain, but her defiant stance and withering gaze made them appear equally matched. Her voice was thunder as she said, “Kindly take your hands off me.”

  “Step away from the criminal”—the captain glared down at her—“and I’ll think about it.”

  And then Dax arrived.

  “First you detain my commandant like a felon”—the dragon king’s voice belied just how much restraint he was demonstrating as his gaze pinned the captain—“and now you manhandle my queen?” His hand wasn’t on his hilt, but it might as well have been. The look in his eyes was murderous. “Is this what hospitality looks like in the Star Isles?”

  Faced with the implacable king and queen, surrounded by their guards, the Lumina captain released Roa. But he didn’t stand down. Safire could feel the tension building like a coming storm.

  And a storm was coming. A storm in the shape of a woman.

  “Someone please explain to me why my guests are detained at my gate.”

  All eyes turned toward the one approaching from beyond the iron bars. She spoke with the authority of someone who was used to being obeye
d, completely and immediately, but she didn’t look like a queen.

  No guards trailed her. She wore no extravagant fabrics or ornaments and nothing but a pale braid crowned her head. In fact, as Safire’s eyes trailed her, from her calf-high boots, to her shining belt buckle, to her fitted blue jacket that buttoned down the left side, she thought this woman looked more like a navy captain than a monarch.

  She seemed neither young nor old, but something in between.

  “Tides, Caspian.” The soldiers parted for their frowning empress, who was staring at where two Lumina gripped Safire’s arms, keeping her hostage. Her eyes were the color of a raging sea as she turned her gaze on Caspian, the captain. “I hope there’s a very good explanation for this.”

  Caspian gave her a swift account of the events leading up to this one. He tilted his chin toward Safire. “We were punishing a miscreant when this girl interfered.”

  Safire narrowed her eyes at the word girl. In Firgaard, she was commandant. Had they been there now, she would have shown him just how greatly she outranked him.

  “In interfering,” he continued, “she lost the fugitive we were bringing to your gate.”

  At the mention of her fugitive, something flashed across the empress’s face. Annoyance or disappointment. Maybe both. After all, she’d spent years hunting the criminal who burned the scrin.

  The empress turned to Safire, her hands linked behind her back. “And do you wish to give your own account?”

  For someone who—according to Eris—despised the truth, this woman seemed deeply interested in it.

  “All of what he said is true.” Safire threw the captain a look. “I saw six heavily armed men beating a defenseless woman. It didn’t occur to me not to intervene. But, yes. Unfortunately, I lost your fugitive in the process.” She tried not to look at Dax, whose gaze was currently boring a hole in her. And because she needed to fix this mess—and still needed to stop Eris from finding Asha—she said, “I captured her once; I’ll capture her again. That’s a promise.”

  The empress went quiet, her lips pressed in a thin line as she studied Safire. Finally, she turned to Caspian. “Release her.”

  Caspian’s jaw twitched, as if he wanted to argue. Instead, he looked to the soldiers detaining Safire. With a swift nod, the pressure on her arms let up as the soldiers stepped back.

  “My army has been unable to catch this criminal,” the empress said to Safire, who was massaging her upper arms where her captor’s fingers had dug in. The skin was tender, already bruising. “I’d like to know how you caught her, as well as what you’ve learned. Perhaps we can find a time to speak more about it while you’re here.”

  Safire nodded. “Of course.”

  “As for the rest of it”—the empress looked to Caspian, waving her hand dismissively—“an honest mistake, I’m sure.”

  Safire paused, about to correct her. It was no mistake. Those soldiers had been severely abusing their power. She had seen it.

  But when Safire looked to Dax, she saw hopeful relief in his gaze. The empress had invited them here for a purpose. Leandra had heard of the suffering in the scrublands, and she wanted to help alleviate it.

  Safire had undermined Leandra’s soldiers, then botched things further by losing Eris. She didn’t want to sabotage Dax and Roa’s visit further.

  So she held her tongue.

  “You must all be tired,” the empress said, leading them forward. “I’ll show you to your rooms so you can rest before dinner.”

  Being inside the citadel felt like being underwater.

  Every room and hall was painted a shade of the sea: from velvety blues and cold grays to bright teals and turquoises. The lintels and crown moldings were the pale beige of sea-foam and the sound of trickling water came from nearly every room, due to the fountains at their centers. Each one featured a marble statue of a ship in full sail or a mermaid hiding behind her hair or a breaching whale.

  It was why, when the empress led them down the next hall, Safire paused.

  This hall was different.

  The walls were hung with floor-to-ceiling paintings that swept from one end to the other. Safire followed Dax and Roa, studying the shining brushstrokes that transformed the paint into a froth of white waves or swirling dark eddies. In the beginning, the pictures inside the frames depicted squalls and tempests and maelstroms.

  “Some time ago,” the empress said to Roa from several paces ahead, “news of the blight in your homeland reached me.”

  Safire was only half listening. Because now the paintings depicted monsters, too. Dragons and kraken and sea spirits with their needlelike teeth, crunching the bones of sailors whose ships they’d wrecked.

  It made her think of Eris saving her from the creature on the dock—a choice that came at the cost of her freedom.

  Unless protecting Safire had been a calculated move, like the dancing and the kiss. Both had been a way for Eris to blend in, unseen by Lumina. What if protecting Safire—just like giving her a contradictory account of the night the scrin burned—was a way to make Safire sympathetic to her cause, ensuring she got what she wanted?

  And now Eris was loose in the Star Isles. Hunting down Asha this very moment.

  The walls felt too close suddenly. Safire didn’t want to be here. She wanted to be out there, looking for her cousin.

  “I invited you here because I know what’s killing your crops in the scrublands,” the empress was saying from much farther ahead, making Safire realize she’d fallen behind. “It’s the same disease that struck these islands when they were under the Shadow God’s dominion.”

  As Safire’s pace quickened down this hall, out of the corner of her eye she noticed a reoccurring image in every painting on the walls: a looming shadow on the horizon.

  Slowing again, Safire looked from one painting to the next. The first depicted a ship in the distance. In the next, it was joined by several others. Then a whole fleet. And leading them all, standing at the helm, was a younger empress. Her cheeks red with windburn, her hair tangled by wind and salt.

  The paintings showed her mooring on the Star Isles, climbing the rocky gray cliffs, traversing dark boreal forests and mossy meadows, then finally arriving at a tower with a thousand steps. And all the while, the shadow on the horizon grew bigger and more ominous.

  “I have a solution to your problem,” the empress said.

  At the very top of those thousand steps, sitting at a loom, was another woman. A crown of seven stars rested atop her head, and her hand held a spindle.

  Skyweaver.

  It was a near-identical image from the tapestry hanging in Safire’s office. The one Asha gave her. The one Eris stole.

  “What is this?” said Roa, at which point, Safire looked to find the empress lifting a silver chain over her head. Instead of a pendant, a small egg-shaped capsule hung down.

  “My gift to you,” Leandra said, letting it drop into Roa’s cupped hand. “The reason I invited you here.”

  Safire tore herself away from the paintings and came toward them, staring as the empress clicked the capsule open and a tiny seed fell out and onto Roa’s palm.

  “Salvation for your people.” She studied Roa as she said this. “It’s impervious to the blight. I have several granaries full of that same seed. Before you leave, I’ll have my soldiers fill up your ship.”

  Roa’s fingers trembled as they curled closed around the seed, holding it tight. As she looked up into the empress’s face, her eyes glimmered with tears.

  “You don’t know what this means to us. To me.”

  The empress smiled kindly back. “I think I do.”

  “There must be something we can give you in exchange,” Dax said, his arm curling gently around Roa’s waist. To a stranger, he would seem calm and composed. But Safire heard the smallest tremor in his voice. “To show our deep gratitude.”

  Ever since the news arrived of Roa’s father, of Lirabel and her baby, Safire had watched Dax retreat inside himself. He wasn’t just f
ailing the scrublands, he was failing his wife—who’d stopped eating due to grief. Before the empress’s invitation arrived, Dax could hardly look Roa in the eye.

  Now, as Safire watched the horrible weight of the blight lift from her cousin’s shoulders, as Roa’s face shone with hope, Safire knew whom she believed. And it wasn’t Eris.

  As the empress refused any kind of payment for her gift, Safire returned to the last portrait hanging in this hall. It showed Skyweaver descending the steps of her tower to meet the young empress. This time her hand gripped not a spindle but a knife, curved like a slivered moon.

  As Safire’s gazed traced the blade, her thoughts were on Asha, who was carrying a similar-looking knife at this very moment, trying to locate its maker here in the Star Isles.

  It’s only a matter of time before Eris finds her, thought Safire.

  She needed to get to her cousin first, then bring her here to safety. Because if there was anywhere Eris would never set foot, Safire was certain, it was inside the citadel of the enemy she’d spent seven years running from.

  Safire didn’t go to dinner. The empress had no sooner escorted them to their rooms when Safire knocked on Dax’s door and told him she was leaving to find Asha. Still overjoyed with Leandra’s generous gift, Dax was eager to put the issue of Eris behind them and forgive Safire’s mistake. More than this, he wanted Asha safe as much as Safire did, so he gave her the letter Torwin sent him, along with a map of the Star Isles, showing her the small village on the southern tip of Axis Isle, where the letter said they were heading. Dax told her to take Spark—his golden dragon—with her.

  One of the conditions of Dax and Roa traveling with dragons was that they had to be stabled inside the citadel for the duration of the visit, ensuring they wouldn’t be flying over the city and scaring the people of Axis, who were not familiar with the massive monsters. Permission therefore needed to be granted from the empress for a rider to fly a dragon into and out of the citadel.

  But when Safire arrived at the covered courtyard where the dragons were kept, she found them not stabled, but muzzled and chained to the floor.

  She nearly dropped her letter of permission.