Three long years have passed since Anna, First of Tomas, survived the purge in Malijad after being forced to use her scribe sigils to create an army of immortals. Safely ensconced in the shelter of the Nest, a sanctuary woven by one of her young allies, Anna spends her days tutoring the gifted yet traumatized scribe, Ramyi—and coming to terms with her growing attachment to an expatriate soldier in her company.
Away from her refuge, war drums continue to beat. Thwarted in her efforts to locate the elusive tracker and bring him to justice, Anna turns to the state of Nahora and its network of spies for help. But Nahoran assistance comes with a price: Anna must agree to weaponize her magic for the all-out military confrontation to come.
Dispatched to the front lines with Ramyi in tow, Anna will find her new alliances put to the test, her old tormentors lying in wait, and the fate of a city placed in her hands. To protect the innocent, she must be willing to make the ultimate sacrifice. For even in this season of retribution, the gift of healing may be the most powerful weapon of all.
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Books by James Wolanyk
The Scribe Cycle
Scribes
Schisms
Schisms
The Scribe Cycle
James Wolanyk
REBEL BASE BOOKS
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Copyright
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Copyright © 2018 by James Wolanyk
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First Electronic Edition: July 2018
eISBN-13: 978-1-63573-021-0
eISBN-10: 1-63573-021-X
First Print Edition: July 2018
ISBN-13: 978-1-63573-024-1
ISBN-10: 1-63573-024-4
Printed in the United States of America
Dedication
To the immutable goodness at the core of every person.
Acknowledgments
Many of us are not perfect, and I firmly place myself in this category of flawed humans. That being said, the difference between growth and stagnation is simply paying attention. Signs and helping hands and paths are often present, but we lose ourselves in the chaos that we mistake for living. Those who have dedicated their lives to preserving and sharing knowledge—not only on an academic level, but in regards to existence itself—deserve the highest praise. They are not bound by language or any one religion, but by a sense of unconditional love to the world and its flawed humans. Without these figures, we would not stop to listen, to see, to experience life as it flows around us. We would succumb to fear and violence. We would forever conflate suffering with being. Therefore, these words are owed to those who have created the conditions for their existence.
Chapter 1
When Anna donned the wool shawl of a goat herder, she’d thought nothing of murder. There had been only wind skittering over the lip of the rock overhang, the dry shuffling of boots and cloth wraps, the creaking of trigger mechanisms being locked in place. Four hours of collective meditation had settled her mind and made violence foreign to the core of her being. Of their being, she supposed. They’d stared at one another, through each other, so inwardly naked and still that anything beyond compassion was unthinkable.
But violence was a language imposed from birth to death.
“Where’s the fifth pebble?” Anna asked the Hazani girl as they knelt in shadow.
Ramyi sighed. “Five paces behind me, on the third ledge.”
“Second.”
* * * *
By the time the girl had memorized their shelter, the skies were endless mica and tufts of violet. Anna led the herders-who-were-not-herders and their goats down hills threaded by narrow switchbacks. They were a ragged procession of silhouettes and bleats and tin bells, bronze skin and threadbare coverings, a stream mingling with the wagons and traders flooding the valley’s night markets. It was jarring to see how many travelers had resorted to using century-old footpaths to reach a city’s outlying districts. But with the region’s kator networks torn up or taxed to the point of bankruptcy, a return to the old ways was inevitable.
Some of the foundlings jogged after her and called out, rattling handfuls of beads. Years ago the children of Leejadal had been charming, practiced sellers, but eagerness had soured to hurried barks at her back. “Five stalks, five stalks only. Just for you, morza.” Old men with milk-white eyes and mouthfuls of khat swiveled their heads as she passed.
They were strangers, outsiders in the most dangerous sense of the word, but not unwelcome: The market’s usual well of flesh peddlers and spicemen had dried up over the past two cycles, and only the foreign caravans—those from Malijad or Qar Annah—brought any hope of profit.
A sea of lanterns lay below her, giving shape to curtains of shifting sand, the hard edges of mud storehouses and ramshackle fencing, brick walls marred with soot stains. A black expanse of stars framed the curvature of the hills and the towers of Leejadal, which now stood high and unlit against the moon.
“Was it always like this?” Ramyi asked in flatspeak, surely knowing the answer already. She was young, but she knew better.
Anna glared at her, but the girl missed it. She missed many things.
Once they’d crossed a dry gully and its tariff checkpoint, Yatrin’s broad silhouette angled back toward Ramyi. His eyes were weary yet alert, sapphire in the light of hanging lanterns. Sapphire in a damning, eastern way. He must’ve felt it too, as he glanced away immediately; that sort of instinct couldn’t always be trained into operatives. “It’s no better.” He clicked at Ramyi through his teeth. “Watch the goats. They like to wander.”
“Yes, of course,” Ramyi said. “The goats.” She moved on the outside of their column, using her walking stick to herd the goats back into a tight cluster. The indolence in her walk said it all: She was too blunt to respect a plan’s subtlety. “What will we even do with them?”
“Sell them,” Anna hissed, and that was it.
But Anna had the walk of a goat herder, the strong yet labored gait of those who’d had their legs broken and mended