CHAPTER 1
CAVAR
The Hummingbird Café was one of those few Leithonian establishments that boasted a long tenure, aided mostly by the fact that they had surrendered to Aelrian rule almost the very day it had been declared. As an outsider, Cavar didn’t feel qualified to judge their behavior, but the shop had flourished since the occupation, becoming a favorite of the citizens of the Imperial Quarter. And the coffee was quite good. It was worth the glare his companion shot him as he stood underneath an awning just outside the shop, sipping at the paper cup he’d bought to go.
Outside, dusk was falling over the city, the thin sliver of sky visible through the gaps in the rooftops painted with orange and violet and gold. At street level, the shadows were deep enough that the lamps had been lit, dappling the narrow streets in alternating swaths of light and shadow. An island city-state, Leithon hadn’t had much room to expand outward, not without trampling over what little farmland they had. So, over the centuries, the city had expanded up. It became a maze of looming buildings and narrow streets, divided by two large thoroughfares. The Road of Law, which led from the docks at the southern end of the city to the Bastion, the enormous stone complex at the north of the city that was the seat of government and military power, and the Road of Shadows, the east-west thoroughfare that led from the land gate to what was left of the Spire. Outside of those roads, whether poor area or Imperial Quarter, the view from the street was mostly the same. Tall buildings of varying degrees of finery, stretching up and up until only the faintest gleam of sky could be seen from between them, rooftops crisscrossed by rickety-looking bridges that only the very brave or the very foolish used and everyone else avoided.
In Leithon, even before the occupation, it was a generally held truth that respectable business only occurred close to the ground.
But Cavar wasn’t interested in respectable business. And he’d had a tip from a reliable source that if he kept his eyes turned skyward, he might find something worth seeing.
“I don’t understand why we’re here,” his companion remarked, leaning against the wall beside him and folding her arms across her chest. Linna had declined to buy anything inside the shop, which Cavar thought was poor camouflage on her part. Like him, she was dressed like a merchant, silk shirt and fine trousers and embroidered coat pulled close around her to protect herself from the damp chill of a Leithonian night. Her long, dark hair was pinned up in a severe bun, and her dark eyes glittered from behind the fake glasses she wore to make herself seem more respectable. She was an even worse fit for the Imperial Quarter than Cavar, with his black hair and light brown skin, but the city’s Aelrian rulers looked favorably on well-dressed foreigners.
They certainly counted.
To a casual eye, they blended in perfectly with the evening scenery. Only their shoes—soft, well-worn leather boots—and the knives concealed inside the sleeves of their coats and hidden pockets of their clothing suggested that they were anything other than what they claimed to be. That they had any other motive for being here tonight.
“I thought I’d see the city,” Cavar said with a smile, swirling the coffee around in his cup before taking another sip. “Get a feel for the place before we begin.”
Linna snorted. “For a Weaver, you’re a bad liar. Tell me what this has to do with finding the Star.”
Possibly everything, Cavar thought, remembering what his mother had told him before he left the Wastes. Since taking on the position of the First Weaver, Reiva eth’Nivear had become a harder and harder person to read, but she’d been his mother again when she pulled him aside the night he left and told him who he should find in Leithon. She’d called it a favor for a friend, a personal request separate from his mission, but Cavar had a feeling that if things went well, he could kill two birds with one stone.
“We’re going to need help if we’re going to reclaim the Star,” he told Linna. He had to tell her something, but the details of his plan were best saved until he had confirmation. Until he knew that they were really what he was looking for. “I thought we could hire on some local color.”
Linna did not look impressed. “The underground, in this city?” she asked, her nose wrinkling in derision. “It’s a shadow of its former self, except for the Resistance. And you’re out of your mind if you think the Resistance would let you walk away from here with an artifact like the Star.”
“I wasn’t talking about the Resistance,” Cavar murmured, turning his eyes back up to the rooftops. Above, the sky was darkening, shadows replacing orange and gold. The first stars would come out soon. He rolled his stiff shoulders, taking another sip from his cup.
Any minute now.
There was a sudden blur of motion. Two figures darted across the wooden planks that spanned the roof, so quickly that no one would have been able to see them unless they were looking up just as Cavar and Linna were. From this distance, it was impossible to pick out any details, only that there were two of them, moving quickly, heading west over the roofs.
“What was that?” Linna asked, puzzled. “I thought the rooftop paths in the Imperial Quarter were closed. They’re too well guarded.”
Cavar grinned. Maybe it was the coffee, or maybe it was the sudden charge in the air, but he couldn’t help the thrill of excitement that ran through him then. His informant had been right. He crushed the empty cup in his hand, tossing it into a nearby wastebasket.
“Apparently nobody told them that.”
A clamor rose from the east, a discordant alarm. The people in the streets looked up, but of course there was nothing more to see. Cavar slipped his hands into his pockets and started to walk, thinking. The Imperials would be out in force. A theft in the maximum-security vault of the First Aelrian Bank wasn’t something they could overlook. He had to catch them first.
If they were heading west, they would have to get down off the rooftops to cross the Road of Law. That would be where their pursuers would try to catch them, and if Cavar was lucky, that was where he would meet them too.
Linna hurried to catch up with him, a shadow at his side. Together, they cut through Leithon’s evening crowds, its Imperial citizens stopping to murmur at each other in wonder and confusion at the rising alarms. She didn’t try to stop him, but he could hear the impatience in her voice when she spoke up.
“You can’t tell me you mean to go after them. We’ll walk right into an Imperial patrol.”
“Aren’t you curious how they’ll get out of that?” Cavar asked, grinning.
“I’m more concerned with keeping us out of an Imperial prison.”
“It’s a little too late for that, isn’t it? After all, we’re here to take their most prized artifact.”
Linna rolled her eyes. “And those are the thieves you want to hire to help us do it? Do you even know a thing about them?”
He knew a few things, thanks to his mother. But he couldn’t blame Linna for her skepticism.
The Athensor twins, the last children of eth’Akari.
He felt a shiver run down his spine, a flutter of excitement in his belly.
It was said that the Weavers were the agents of the world’s fate, weaving its loose threads together to keep them from getting tangled. But in that moment, Cavar felt as if he had been woven into the tapestry, by some hand other than his own. As if fate had gotten tired of their hubris and had decided to show the world that she could make even a Weaver dance on her strings.
It was an utterly exhilarating feeling, and Cavar couldn’t wait to see what would happen next.
CHAPTER 2
ARIAN
Arian raced across the rooftop paths, her heart pounding with the thrill of the chase. Alarms rose up around her, the entire Imperial Quarter working itself into a frenzy. She knew that she should have been upset about that, should have been upset that they had tripped the bank’s security at all, but the sound of the alarms made her lips curl back into a grin.
It had been a long time since she had been able to stretch her muscles like this. A long time since she had been able to properly run.
She let her hand drop to the pouch at her waist, where their cargo rested. Breathless, she looked over her shoulder at her brother.
“You had to go back for that, didn’t you?”
Liam was out of breath, sweat plastering his dark hair to his forehead. Even after three years, he still had trouble keeping up with her. His pace probably wasn’t helped by the piece of stone he’d hung around his neck, its carved face peeking out from where he was using one hand to press it firmly against his chest.
“Mena’s Amulet”—he gasped, speaking the words between puffs of air “—is an immensely—valuable artifact—”
“You say that about all of them.” A gap between rooftops appeared ahead, narrow enough to jump over. She stopped talking to focus, kicking off the ground and clearing the gap easily. Liam stumbled as he landed on the other side. His form, which had never been all that great to begin with, was not helped by the fact that he still hadn’t let go of the damn amulet.
“Put it in your pocket,” Arian said as Liam pushed himself up off the ground and started running again.
“Then it’s useless!”
“It’s useless now!” she said, but she knew better than to argue. Liam treated magical artifacts like they were children. Arian, on the other hand, had a slightly more tempered view. They were valuable pieces of cargo, but not worth their hides. And if they had survived centuries, surely they could handle being shoved into a pocket.
At the edge of the rooftop, she drew up short, catching her breath. The wind whipped strands of pale, sweat-soaked hair out of her face, cooling her overheated skin. Beside her, Liam drew to a grateful stop, chest pumping like a bellows as he rested his hands on his knees.
“Why are we—stopping?” he asked between breaths. Behind them, the alarm was still ringing. Stopping was a risk, especially in the Imperial Quarter, where the rooftop paths had fallen out of the underground’s control and no one knew exactly which routes the Imperials had compromised, but Arian had a feeling that pursuit on the rooftops wasn’t their biggest problem. The Imperials didn’t have to catch them right away; they only had to make sure that they couldn’t leave the Quarter.
And if Arian were a lazy, greedy little Imperial, she wouldn’t bother chasing them on the roofs. Instead, she’d wait for them where the rooftop paths were nonexistent.
The Road of Law.
The open sky above the Road of Law taunted her, wide enough that there was no way of crossing it unless one could fly. Bridges never lasted very long when they were made above the Roads of Law and Shadows. The thoroughfares were too easy to patrol, and even before occupation, Leithon’s police had been quick to cut down any they could find.
If Arian were an Imperial, she would head them off at the road.
She grinned, letting her hand fall again on the pouch at her waist, on the little ink-filled vial that was going to buy them enough food and supplies to last the rest of the year. She didn’t much care about magic, but it was still a valuable artifact. A valuable artifact they had snatched out of the vaults of the Aelrian bank, right underneath the Imperials’ noses.
Arian would be damned if she let them catch her and take it back.
“We’re gonna run into a problem,” she told her brother, inclining her head toward that empty space.
Liam straightened up, finally releasing his hold on that damn amulet. It better have been worth it, Arian thought, because if that thing was going to get them killed—
“You ever figure out how to make people fly?” Arian asked.
“You know that’s impossible,” Liam said. “Come on, even you were there for those lessons. I don’t have the power to move that much air. Now, the two of us together…”
He trailed off, which Arian was grateful for. She didn’t want to hear him talk about how much her potential was wasted, how she should have stuck with her magical training instead of dropping out and running away from home. None of that mattered anymore.
“We don’t need to fly to trick Imperials,” she said, walking to the edge of the rooftop. She could see Imperial guards running in the street below, and took a step back out of view in case one of them got smart enough to look up. This particular gap was wide enough that they needed a bridge, and unless the Imperials had gotten to this route, there should be a temporary one stashed in a small hidey-hole in one of the attics around them.
She smiled.
“We just need to be smarter than them.”
* * *
Getting on and off the rooftop paths meant using one of a number of access points, hidden staircases and ladders in varying degrees of repair and equally varying levels of terror. The ladder that Arian found hadn’t been in good shape before the occupation, and after the occupation it was more rust than steel. But it was in a less-populated section of the Quarter, one that the Imperials hadn’t yet fully expanded into, and because of that, it had been left alone.
By the time she reached the ground, her heart was pounding again, the rush of adrenaline making her feel sharp and alive. Above, the buildings of Leithon still pressed in on her, but she wasn’t far from the Road of Law, and she knew that as soon as she burst onto the main throughfare, the Imperials would be on her.
Good. It was time to give them a show.
Arian pulled up the hood of her coat, tugging it over her pale blond hair. And then she took off at a run, bursting out of the narrow alley and into the orange light of fading day. The sky yawned open overhead, the paved road filled with end-of-day traffic in Leithon. Carts and carriages, streams of people walking home or to nights out or pausing to buy dinner at the food stalls that lined both sides of the road, two deep in some places. And patrols, of course.
Arian felt another jolt in her heart as first of the patrols spotted her, although she wasn’t trying very hard to stay hidden. She heard one of them shout, a voice ringing in the square before they all took off running, heading toward her. Arian ran into the road, ducking out of the way of a carriage, then changed direction and plunged, heart in her throat, into a procession of white-robed penitents walking the Road of Law as part of their evening prayer. There were shouts of alarm as she tore through the group, shoving aside Imperial and Leithonian alike and making some drop their candles and prayer beads, but the diversion had the intended effect. The Imperials pursuing her hesitated, letting her burst through the group and into the nest of alleys on the other side of the road.
A handful still pursued her. She could hear their footsteps behind her as she darted through darkened alleyways. It took her eyes a moment to adjust to the change, heading from bright sunlight into darkness, but Arian knew this city like she knew her name. She could be blindfolded, and she would still know where to run.
Her Imperial pursuers didn’t have that advantage. And that was why Arian was able to dart into an alley so narrow that she was practically wedged in, breathing in the foul, stagnant air while her pursuers ran right on, screaming at her to stop.
They didn’t see her at all, and she was dizzy and breathless with relief, bright flashes gathering in her field of vision until she closed her eyes and gulped down huge breaths of air.
Her hand dropped to the pouch at her side, feeling for the vial. It was still intact. It had been a gamble taking it with her, but one that had paid off.
Now, if Liam made it out alive, they could count this as another win for the family business.
Arian waited until the sounds of pursuit dwindled down to nothing, then waited thirty slow counts more. When she was certain she wouldn’t be followed, she slipped out of the alley, grimacing as she pulled some of the grime on the walls away with her.
She’d done her job. Now it was time to go find her brother.
Copyright © 2022 by Elisa A. Bonnin
