“What broke you?”
The tracker tilted his head lower, glaring down at her with eyes that spoke of murder, of solitude among broken peaks and howling caverns.
Of hate.
“You’ve taken far too much of my time already,” Anna continued. “See him off to his den, Konrad.”
Anna surveyed the white-clad brother, her gust of pride taking on a sharply sour note. Nothing pleasant was born of ignorance.
“He knows where the others fled,” Konrad said. His eyes flicked up at her with haunting prescience, with the weight of passions he’d learned to bury, yet had not forgotten. The Breaking was a return to emptiness, but those with dark cravings often found a way to regain their appetite.
“And what?” Anna’s gaze darted between the two men. “They have no refuge in this world or the next.”
“A curious sentiment from the hunter herself,” the tracker mused. “How many of your precious scribes have put blades to the inquisitors’ necks? Seems you’re keen on dragging the beasts from their holes.”
“For stability, not vengeance.” Some shard of her heart raged against that. There was no denying that Anna had done everything in her power to withdraw them from the currents of the world and its wars, urging transcendence over domination in every forum to which she’d been summoned. But nobody could ignore the parallel truth: The orders were pillars of the new regimes in Rzolka and abroad, a mystical flurry of arms and blades resembling the hundred-limbed guardians in Kojadi murals, ready to sever the head of whatever serpents rose against a fragile peace. And they—she—had proven that in ample measure. “When I said that we have nothing to discuss, I meant it.”
“Don’t remember what a few bitter men can do?”
Anna’s jaw ached. “I recall the cost of compliance far too well.”
“They have networks, Anna,” Konrad said grimly. “These are the architects. The ones that kept us awake at night. If they could do that to Golyna, right under our—”
“They won’t,” Anna snapped.
“How can you be so sure?”
“The eyes of the world witnessed their crimes,” she said. “It acts as one gaze, Konrad, and it sees everything. Soon every hollow will have its shadows burned away.”
The tracker snorted. “Must’ve been a blind spot everywhere I went.”
“You know how a fire rages, Anna,” Konrad whispered. “If one ember remains…”
“And if only you knew how the flames were spreading,” the tracker said.
“Fear had its time,” Anna said, narrowing her eyes at Konrad. “We left it all behind and nothing will drag us back. Especially not something so pathetic.” She regarded the tracker with bare pity, looking him up and down as one might examine a lame horse. “Go back to your shadows, and never return to this place. There’s mercy in my heart, but I speak for none of my followers, nor the things they’ll do once they seize you. Nothing will trouble my mind if they seal you in a place of unending pain. Silence would be my protest.” She gathered up the pleats of her robe and moved toward the chamber door, bowing her head as she went.
“Then I suppose the girl will find you,” the tracker growled.
Anna’s foot hovered above the carpet. “What?”
“The girl,” he said. “The Starsent.”
Her bemusement was raw and swift, burning away any trace of disbelief as it hardened to rage. “Don’t call her that.”
“Struck a nerve, have I?”
She turned to face the tracker. “You’re lying.”
“Up in arms over shadows then, aren’t you?” His laugh was sickly, hoarse. “But as you want it, panna. No more barks from this old hound. Even if you’ll spend your nights counting slats on the ceiling, thinking all the while, ‘what if?’”
Anna looked to Konrad, but the man’s unease rivaled her own. Plenty of nights had already come and passed with the girl weighing heavily upon her mind, threatening to strangle her in dreams of blighted cities and fallow fields. “Where is she?”
“You know my price,” the tracker said.
“Yet I trust none of your words.”
The tracker gave a wheezing sigh. “All good things in time, eh?” He twisted his neck to the side, filling the chamber with dull cracking. “You get your pup and I get the cuts I’m owed. Swear on that.”
Anna studied the man’s jaundiced eyes under a creeping shroud of nausea. It was a safer deal than any she’d ever forged, but it still carried an omen of lessons ignored and promises obliterated. She suspected that its suffering might somehow eclipse whatever the girl would bring to bear when she rose from the shadows. The cruelty of a wicked man, after all, had no end, no final flourish. And—
The Starsent.
Even that title was enough to tighten Anna’s throat.
“Send a missive to the captain in the Kowak chapter,” Anna said to Konrad, still gazing into the dark clouds of the tracker’s eyes. “Tell him I’ll need their best.”
Chapter 2
In the womb of the Halshaf monastery, reborn under every mica-strewn nebula and passage of the shattered moon, Anna had grown to perceive herself as the world rather than its wanderer. In fact, she’d found kinship in the world. She’d fixed it in her mind as some macrocosm of what she was, some seed that had germinated before time itself. No matter how often its shoots and saplings were cut down by the swings of a woodman’s ax, it had held fast to its roots within the soil, waiting for the mercy of spring to venture forth once more. But even that had been a concept that she’d wishfully forced upon the world.
It was a child’s fantasy, a projection of forlorn hopes.
Soaring high above the patchwork fields and forests of central Rzolka, Anna saw—seemingly for the first time—the truth of her enduring seed. It had been torn from the earth, scorched and cracked, scattered to the winds like the ashes of cities she’d once known. Between masses of wispy ashen clouds, the lowlands stretched out in blackened meadows, in freckled expanses of cut and cleared logging sites, in great tracts of empty huts and halls that jutted from the mires as rotting bones. Most of the sacred groves had been abandoned to overgrowth, or worse, trampled and desecrated by the heretics that had flooded the region in Volna’s absence.
Roads that had once been knotted with caravans now appeared as desolate, withering veins, slashed here and there by rusting kator tracks. Furnaces bled their black fumes on the horizon.
Perhaps it had always been this way, Anna considered. Perhaps the higher she ascended, the further back she drew from her insect ignorance, the more the truth of the world revealed itself. But mutation was a constant truth, for better or worse. There were no marking stones for the grave of the Rzolka she’d known—only the soot-stained, oily shrine of what it had become.
“What’s that glint in your eyes, girl?” the tracker asked. Seated directly across from Anna on a quilted bench, his hands iron-bound and tucked snugly into his lap, it was nearly impossible to avoid his chilling stare. “Not what it was, is it?”
“Your comrades did their work tirelessly,” she replied, sparing a momentary glance at his reflection in the window before gazing outward once more.
“My kind? Wasn’t a grain of cartel salt in Rzolka before the war.”
“Of course,” she said. “Mass killings were the lesser evil, I’m sure.”
“You laugh, but time’ll tell. Mark