CHAPTER ONE

Gods did not dwell in temples.

It was profitable to insist that prayers between polished walls were stronger, and that gods listened for the clatter of coin into offering bowls. A sweet lie for those lucky few whose gold could fill the temples to bursting.

All prayers were equal, and a battlefield knew more prayers than a temple would ever hear. The birthing chambers, the sickhouses, hungry homes in the dead of winter; gods heard Their names on the lips of those who lacked. Food. Survival. Fortune. Blood.

A prayer is offered. 

Zajeira almost lost grip on the man in front of her. The brewmaster was tall and round, a man who could not be moved while he was sober nor halted when he was drugged. If he fell, she didn’t know how long it would take to get him back up. 

“Hrrrm,” he slurred, gait stumbling. 

Zajeira glanced between the mud-plaster walls. Outside their narrow alley, the festival crowd was too busy to spare them a glance. The swampy little town of Jalanna was a whirlwind of hopeful worshippers bickering over where to pitch their altars. The spirits of the Godless Mass were simple, animalistic things, and a good altar needed plenty of space to catch their attention. In a town like Jalanna, there wasn’t enough space to go around. 

With an irritated mutter, Zajeira steered the brewmaster toward the run-down storehouses on the town’s outskirts. They were too rotten to hold grain, and avoided by townsfolk who didn’t want mites in their clothes. They would be torn down and replaced come springtime, but now was not springtime. No one would look for the brewmaster there.

A prayer is offered. The call buzzed in Zajeira’s ear like a mosquito. Her fingers itched to grasp the leather pouch at her neck, but she couldn’t afford distractions. Losing one Tithe in favor of another would shame her Father.

Before she could shove the brewmaster into a storehouse, the man vomited on her boots. 

“Brewmaster Asapha!” a young voice echoed through the alley.

Zajeira cursed. The brewmaster was shaking off the haze, and a good portion of the drug now lay splattered across her feet. She couldn’t give him more with a witness charging at them. 

“Brewmaster Asapha!” A skinny slip of a boy darted through the first alley, then — curse her luck — spotted Zajeira. “Brewmaster, the family altar!”

“Dammit, boy!” Asapha tried to say something else, but it was lost in a dry-heave.

“He’s drunk.” Zajeira held up a hand. “I’d keep your boots at a distance.”

The boy grimaced at Zajeira’s feet. “Sir, your wife…”

“I’ll… be with her in a moment, just getting some candles.” The brewmaster leaned against the wall. “You, girl… oh. Hello.”

His eyes slid up Zajeira’s body for the second time that day. Twenty years old with bronze skin, black eyes, and locs pulled sensibly behind her head, Zajeira might have passed as a local if not for the fact she wore pants instead of a skirt. She hadn’t loaded herself with weapons today — too suspicious in a crowd — but the dagger at her hip and the dust on her pants were common signs of a traveler. 

“You’re not from around here,” the brewmaster slurred. “Do I know you?”

Zajeira chewed her lip. “You asked me back here, sir. Don’t you remember?”

“Did I?” The brewmaster blinked in confusion, but a bashful young woman proved too sweet for him to question. “I suppose we’d better be alone, then.” He glared at the boy. 

The boy hesitated. “I’ll, er, have to tell the brewmistress. Sir.”

“She has her side interests, I have mine. Get out of here.”

The boy sprinted off. Zajeira listened to feet crunch on stone until she knew he was out of earshot. A prayer is offered, whispered her leather pouch. Every wasted second was sacrilege.

“Now,” the brewmaster coughed, “why don’t you remind me of your name—”

Zajeira grabbed his collar, searching for… there. His own leather pouch. The spirit inside let out an alarmed buzz — sex, unusual, danger? — that made her skin tingle. 

“If you’re worried about being judged,” the brewmaster slurred, “my guardian spirit—”

Zajeira yanked the pouch off the brewmaster’s neck to ensure its spirit had no claim on his soul. His mouth fell open in shock as she pulled out her own leather pouch. 

A PRAYER IS OFFERED, Zajeira’s amulet screamed through her fingers. She pressed it to the brewmaster’s collarbone and drew her dagger. 

“What—” he started. 

“In the name of Calliofex,” Zajeira said, and slit his throat. 

The brewmaster didn’t try to scream until his voice was already gone. He fell to his knees. She crouched next to him, her shy half-smile gone like mist in the sunlight. It was a type of undressing, the way she took off the mask of a smitten woman and folded it back in the wardrobe of people she had been. It was a type of nakedness, the way she gently leaned the brewmaster against the wall and met his horrified gaze. She never felt guilt over a kill, but there was always respect. Always the sense that prey deserved courtesy as it died.

The collar of the brewmaster’s tunic kept the blood from spraying too badly. His chest heaved. He reached out, perhaps to grab her, hadn’t the strength. And then he was dead. 

Zajeira’s leather pouch shivered as the brewmaster’s soul passed through it, caught by the Blood In Whispers like a fly in His divine web. A prayer is offered mixed with pleasure, acceptance, the Tithe is paid, but the moment was short. Zajeira had another Tithe to answer.

She pressed the bloody amulet to her chest. As an innocent traveler, she had given in to the hurry. Now herself again, the impatience was merely cold knowledge that she had somewhere else to be. The physical jitter of impatience, the emotion of it, sat neatly folded in the mental wardrobe of people she had once been. 

“I am a blade to brandish,” she said. 

A PRAYER IS OFFERED, the voices chorused, accompanied by the sensation of fingers clutching her heart. North, those fingers tugged her. Nearby, and urgent. Too urgent to properly dispose of the corpse? Yes, a prayer is offered, NOW.

She looked toward the nearby storehouse where she had planned to kill the brewmaster. It was too early to toss him in a pigpen, and time was too short for a burial, but laziness was a sin of the highest order. She couldn’t leave him, but she could hide him. 

Zajeira dragged the corpse inside by the feet. The storehouse was bare of any crates, barrels or other convenient cover, but it did have a hayloft and a rickety ladder. She took the traveler’s axe from her belt, rolled up her sleeves, and got to work chopping the brewmaster’s legs off. With messy strikes that would make a butcher cringe, she had them off in five minutes, nearly fifty pounds each. Once they were in the hayloft, the rest of the corpse was much lighter.

Zajeira covered the mess with moldy hay and broke the ladder to pieces. The alley ground was churned from the dragging, but not overly bloody. The brewmaster’s amulet lay discarded, but there was no spiritual energy when she picked it up. As expected, whatever spirit had inhabited the thing was long gone. Zajeira pocketed the amulet to toss off the road once she departed. If the spirit changed its mind and decided to come home, she had to make sure it wouldn’t find the body and alert others to the crime.

North, chanted the whispers in her amulet. Hurry.

The dirt grew softer and mossier as she left town, until eventually the buildings opened into wooded swampland. The sun was hidden by the trees, their brittle, half-naked branches echoing like bones in a spirit rattle. A golden glow tried and failed to warm her skin. Late afternoon was turning fast to early evening.

Jalanna was a modest hamlet, built as a midway point for the dozen isolated farms, fisheries and lumber mills scattered through the wetlands of Deiabrach. Zajeira’s horse, a young palomino mare called Blithe, waited at one of the many travelhouses along the main road. Townsfolk were too busy with their altars to notice the departure of one horse and rider. 

Once the town disappeared behind them, Zajeira grasped her amulet.

“I am a blade to brandish,” she whispered.

The chorus answered, north, nearby, off the road.

A spirit hummed at the edge of her senses, there and gone again. Another rattled in the trees, while a third slithered along the road. She couldn’t see them, but she could feel them like breezes against her skin, each drawn to Jalanna like beasts to the smell of blood. 

The road was dry, but the ground beside it grew deeper and wetter as Zajeira rode. Her amulet’s call of north and slightly east turned into northeast, and eventually east and slightly north. With the sun setting, any ride through wetlands would be difficult.

Luckily, there was enough light to spot another horse and rider galloping from the west. Zajeira pulled Blithe to a halt. Annoyance, real and unholy, curled her mouth.

 “Bloodfather preserve me,” she whispered. 

The other rider caught sight of Zajeira and slowed his horse to a trot. 

“Beloved,” he said through gritted teeth. 

He was ebony-skinned, dark-eyed and only a year older than Zajeira, and he might have been handsome if not for his permanent scowl. They were both dressed in the same hard-boiled leathers, but he wore all of his weapons openly: sword on one side, dagger on the other, another dagger in each boot and a crossbow on his back.

“Beloved,” Zajeira monotoned. “Put some of those away. Mercenaries travel in bands. You cannot pretend to be one if you travel alone.”

He rolled his eyes. “Strangely, no one dares ask about my weapons.” He nodded to the dagger at her hip. “Perhaps if you carried more, you wouldn’t waste time answering our Father’s call.”

She fought to keep her voice calm. “I was already on Tithe.”

“So was I. Go to the rendezvous point. I’ll join you when I’m done.”

“This one is mine, Lazhan.”

“My horse is faster. I’ll reach it first. Fourteen kills against your thirteen.”

She gritted her teeth. “You haven’t made a fourteenth yet.”

Lazhan raised an eyebrow. “We both know you can’t stop me.”

She should have walked away. She knew this scene by heart, but her beloved had a talent for stirring up unholy emotions. She spurred to a gallop. She took the fading sunlight into her mind and wove it like thread upon a loom.

The light obeyed. It avoided her, avoided Blithe, and for a moment they were invisible. But invisibility was never enough to fool her beloved.

When Lazhan threw lightning, Zajeira knew the air must have shattered like porcelain. There would have been thunder, and a burnt-air smell almost like copper, but in the moment, she experienced none of it. She was on her horse, and then she was on her back. Her whole body thrummed with static, like ants crawling under her skin. 

Lazhan dismounted, took her arms, and hauled her off the road. He settled her below a leaning willow, and cleared away any sticks that might press into her back.

“How many times have we done this, beloved?” His sigh was more tired than angry. “You can be second-favorite for a year. Go to the rendezvous point, or go home. The Godless Mass is a poor time to be wandering.”

Zajeira was unable to slap him. All she could do was listen in fury as he stood, mounted his horse, and forged eastward. Farther down the road were more hoofbeats, and a twinge of relief cut through the static. Blithe had fled, but not far.

Zajeira gulped a mouthful of air. Her body remembered itself, her lungs expanded, and she forced her fingers to move.

With a concerned whuff, Blithe’s yellow head appeared above Zajeira. 

“Gi… give… a curtsy, girl. Give a curtsy.”

Blithe knelt on her front legs. Zajeira laced fingers through the cream-colored mane and rolled across the saddle.

“Up, girl.”

Blithe stood. Zajeira set herself awkwardly upright. Every movement was needles against her nerves, but the humiliation was worse than the aftershocks. She could move. That meant she was not yet defeated.

Zajeira followed the eastward gap Lazhan had made in the swamp. Blithe was well trained, but she was still a horse, and whickered unhappily when asked to step in soggy moss. The branches hung low, gray lichen in their faces. No gold was left in the sunset, only red, and soon enough that would be gone, too.

Zajeira gripped her amulet. “I am a blade to brandish.”

East, nearby.

Once the road was behind them, Zajeira steered Blithe to a high and dry hill crowned by scraggly willows.

“Easy, girl,” Zajeira murmured as she hitched the mare. “It won’t be for long.”

She continued on foot. The air crackled around her, so thick with spirits that it made her ears ring. They were small, wild embodiments of Hunt, Fear, and Hunger. Most of them were too young to have a true name, or so old that no worshippers lived to remember them. But every now and again, like an alligator through muddy water, Zajeira felt the passage of a wraith. Heavier than the rest, their names echoed in her mind whenever she got too close. Svex, with fractured memories of hunting in groups, cooperation, social creatures. There was Iylen, a wraith of food storage, careful rationing, enemy of gluttony. Greater than spirits, lesser than gods, the wraiths knew the taste of worship and swam toward Jalanna for more. They ignored Zajeira entirely.

The red sky became purple. The darkness thickened. When she could no longer see the difference between a shadow and a trench in the ground, Zajeira closed her eyes and wove. 

Her Gift came slowly, on account of all the spiritual noise. The light split into reds, oranges, yellows, greens, blues, purples, and everything beyond. When she opened her eyes, it all appeared in tapestry, millions upon millions of threads from the sky to the ground.

Compared to Lazhan’s lightning, Zajeira’s Gift was harmless. She could not strike a person with light, but she loved how every sunbeam contained a rainbow, hers to admire and sculpt as she pleased. And compared to Lazhan’s lightning, Zajeira’s Gift was more practical to the everyday needs of an assassin. She could see perfectly well in the dark, and easily spot hoofprints in the moss. Lazhan had slowed his horse here, then turned south. 

On a grassy swell between two hills, Zajeira found Lazhan’s black piebald gelding tethered alone. Assassins were not vengeful, so Zajeira chose to think of it as a training exercise when she approached the horse with soft murmurs, stroked its proud neck, and cut the saddle strap. If Lazhan didn’t check his equipment before every ride, like they were supposed to, it would be his own fault if he fell into the swamp.

Zajeira squeezed her amulet. “I am a blade to brandish.”

East, just over there, there there there.

The wetlands sloped into a basin of water, reeds and cypress trees. In the distance, someone laughed. Zajeira’s heart sank, although it shouldn’t have. Racing Lazhan had been a losing game to begin with, and now, with negotiations started, she was forbidden to interrupt. A dutiful assassin would have walked away. If it were anyone but Lazhan, she would have.

Zajeira’s feet took her down the slope.

“Surely you joke.” Lazhan’s voice echoed through the reeds. “The Whispering Blades sell death, not miracles.”

“I’m not asking for a miracle,” replied a smooth baritone. “Unless you’re telling me you don’t have the skill.”

Zajeira commanded the light to bend around her. Invisibility was easier in the dark, and soon no prey would have been able to see her even from six inches away.

“It’s not a matter of skill,” Lazhan said, “but of timing. If you had offered this contract yesterday alongside a mountain of coin, I’d have taken it gladly.”

Zajeira found a cypress tree slanted over the reeds. Her shoes were silent against the bark.

“Money is no concern,” insisted the other voice. “Name a price.”

“It’s a four-hour ride,” Lazhan replied. “Three, if I push my horse. Faking a suicide takes weeks if done properly.”

“Lord Vadahoc is old and prone to bursts of emotion. He already suspects his wife of infidelity. No one would doubt a suicide.”

“He could be a regular madman, and the most skilled Whispering Blade would not accept. If you need him dead tomorrow, perhaps we could negotiate, but before this coming midnight is insanity. I’d have less than two hours to scout, infiltrate, get him alone, kill him with no witnesses, then stage the body in an appropriate manner.”

At last Zajeira spotted her beloved amongst the reeds. He stood by the water, and across from him stood the Tithecaller. Between them lay the corpse of a young man, presumably the life which had been used to call Tithe.

The Tithecaller was of equal height to Lazhan, and a few inches taller than Zajeira. His skin was bronze, his wavy black hair long enough to fall below his shoulder blades. His clothing was plain, and the dirt suggested several hours spent on horseback.

“Any risk can be bought,” the Tithecaller pressed. “Money has value, but political influence, political protection―”

“Still cannot change reality.” Lazhan shook his head. “What you ask for simply cannot be done, and my life is forfeit if I fail. The only suicide you’re buying is my own.”

Movement whispered in the reed-crowded shallows: a wolf, black as night and tall as a newborn foal. The wolf halted at the base of Zajeira’s tree and looked up, yellow eyes passing over where she sat invisibly on a branch.

“So the Whispering Blades cannot kill everything,” the Tithecaller stated icily. “My mistake for calling you, then.”

“The Whispering Blades are only human. There is no deal here.”

Lazhan turned away, stalking through the reeds to higher ground. The Tithecaller was left alone with the corpse at his feet, comforted by the chirp of crickets and the hum of spirits on their way to the Godless Mass.

The Tithecaller pinched the bridge of his nose, then hauled the corpse by one foot into the water. “Flint!” he called out. “Here!”

The wolf, presumably Flint, looked between the Tithecaller and Zajeira. It barked.

After sinking the corpse, the Tithecaller approached. “What’s the matter, girl?”

Flint whined, looking up the tree but not quite at Zajeira.

“Agnas,” the Tithecaller said. A green flame sparked in his palm. Sorcery?

Up close, Zajeira saw more details. His bronze skin was smooth, save for one scar on his chin. Older than twenty years, younger than thirty. Dark scruff lined his face, though shaving lines suggested it was normally tamed neat around the jaw. His brown eyes were narrowed in suspicion, or perhaps exhaustion. His long, wavy hair was held back by a pin of solid gold, and on his thumbs glittered two rings. His plainclothes were new-sewn, and his traveling boots looked as if this was their first journey out of the cobbler’s shop.

Perhaps he actually did have a mountain of gold. 

Zajeira wasn’t forbidden from this contract if Lazhan refused, but he’d been correct to call it impossible. Staging the suicide of Lord Vadahoc by midnight, after a three hour’s ride? Lazhan certainly couldn’t. Zajeira might succeed, but it was a dangerous gamble.

She and Lazhan had each killed thirteen Tithes this year. Zajeira had been their Father’s favorite since they were children, and she had no intention of losing that honor now. Favoritism meant she could leave home whenever she wanted, without any other Blades looking over her shoulder, but she couldn’t seal a contract under such punishing terms.

“There’s nothing there, girl.” The Tithecaller stroked the animal's head. “We can’t worry about spirits tonight. There’s plenty of mortal trouble headed our way tomorrow.”

He snuffed out the light in his hand. The wolf threw one last puzzled glance over her shoulder, then followed him south.

Lord Ranya Vadahoc was liegelord of Jalanna and three more towns in the wetlands, not to mention master of a reputable merchant empire out of Deiabrach’s capital, Anaaj. Zajeira had been to his estate years ago. A swift horse could take her there in three hours, and she knew Blithe was up to the task, but once she arrived…

To fail a Tithe was a cardinal sin, punishable by death if the Blood In Whispers chose. A mountain of money, the Tithecaller offered, to stage a suicide before midnight. Midnight was some five hours away, and Blithe could give her between one and two hours to pull it off. 

It was an impossible task for Lazhan. The Gift of lightning was ill-suited to infiltration, but an invisible assassin could slip past guards with no trouble at all. The thought of Lazhan’s face when she was named favorite because of his rejected Tithe… no. Fantasizing about victory was a distraction, and worse, unholy.

If she killed Ranya Vadahoc without sealing a contract, failure wouldn’t cost her life. But would it count toward her yearly number? It was a minor sin to kill out of contract, which would be punished with pain instead of death. Her Father loved money almost as much as He loved blood, so if anything might soothe a minor sin, a mountain of coin would surely do it. 

If she could actually kill Ranya Vadahoc. 

If she could find the Tithecaller again.

In the distance, leather creaked and a tired horse groaned. The Tithecaller mounted a black steed. 

Zajeira grabbed her amulet and whispered, “Thou art become a witness.”

Like a snake through her fingers, one of the spirits in her amulet wriggled toward the Tithecaller. He rode southward, but Zajeira felt the spirit at his back. It tugged at her amulet with the gentleness of a spider thread, hers to follow when the task was done. 

“A mountain of coin, sorcerer,” Zajeira murmured. “For both our sakes, I hope you tell the truth.”