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01: Eira
Later, Eira would tell herself that she’d known something was wrong. The smell of storms in the air was more than the misty rain; the chill that ran up her spine was more than the cool morning air. But in the moment, she didn’t notice any of it.
She tugged a day cloak tighter around her shoulders and kept walking through the gloomy morning. It was summer still, but it felt much more like the looming fall, and she would rather be doing anything except traipsing through the gray city streets after her father.
She glanced into a few shop windows as they passed, all full of people preparing to open for the day. Some were still dark, reflecting her warped reflection back at her in flashes of white-blonde puffy clouds and bright blue summer sky. She’d worn her best dress in hopes of brightening the morning, but now she regretted wasting it. Wasting it on this empty street, on this spitting rain, on her father’s stern eyes, on the strangers they were going to meet who would scarcely glance her way.
Eira watched her father’s purposeful stride and reminded herself that she only had two more years until she was eighteen. She was too small to ever look it, but she would be an adult, and she would have her proper place at the table. Someday, Valens wouldn’t be next to her anymore, and it would be Eira commanding a meeting, Eira looking down her nose at people, Eira changing the world.
Something flashed in the corner of her eye, and she slowed to look at a navy and gold jacket in one of the shop windows. Once upon a time, a boy with golden hair and careful hands had given her a jacket like that. Once upon the last good night of her life.
“Eira. Come along.”
She shoved the thoughts away and hurried after her father, trying not to slip on the slick cobblestones. There was little Valens Gatien hated more than unpunctuality.
“Sorry, Father.”
He strayed from his determined, always-forward glare to glance down at her. “You look nice. Straighten up.”
What Eira looked was fourteen, and standing straighter wouldn’t fix that. She did as she was told, though, and tried to match Valens’s gait. The only thing Eira had inherited from her father—the tall, sharp-edged, dark-haired king of this side of Ach Rhean—was his ambition. Everything else was her mother’s light and softness. She did her best to make up for it by copying his mannerisms.
“We’ll have to step carefully today,” Valens added. “There was word yesterday that we lost another ship.”
Step carefully was Valens’s way of saying shut up and stay out of the way, Eira. Not that he ever spoke that harshly to her. Eira may be his heiress, and she may have been preparing for this life since she could walk, but she still bore the great sin of not being her father. His business partners tended to distrust her on principle.
Two years, and then there would be no more sin attached to being Eira Gatien. Not if she kept on working quietly the way she was told.
She didn’t so much hear or see or feel anything change so much as she simply knew that it was there. Valens’s powerful stride slowed to a tentative halt, but she drifted a few steps past him uncertainly.
“Father?”
“Something isn’t right.”
Eira slid a hand into her dress pocket, gripping the nyxium stone she carried there. Valens was always paranoid the magical monsters would come after them and insisted she carried it for protection. She doubted a chunk the size of her fist would do much, but with its sharply pointed end, she could at least do a little natural damage.
Any other day, she would have laughed at her father’s worry. Once upon a time, she and a golden boy had laughed at him in secret in the dark. But now fear crawled up her spine, and she knew, somehow, that nothing about this was funny.
The only sound was the drip drip drip of rain as father and daughter stared at one another.
“Maybe it’s noth—“ Eira tried, but before she could finish, six shadows snaked out of the alley behind Valens.
She screamed. Valens spun around, and Eira darted across the street. Run away, run away, run away. No one survived a fight with magic.
She didn’t get three steps before a hand snatched her wrist, yanking her backward. Her nyxium stone clattered to the ground, a spot of sparkling indigo that bounced away and disappeared. Useless. Not that it would have helped.
As two of the attackers grabbed her arms, she realized that they weren’t using magic. Monsters never wasted an opportunity to use magic. These people were human.
Eira kept screaming even as the shadowed figures wrestled her into the alley and pinned her to the rough brick. One of them slapped her, the impact cracking her head to the side. She got the message. Shut up.
She bit her tongue. The world was dark and gray, blurred by rainwater and tears.
She was going to die here.
Three more of the shadows dragged Valens into the alley, the fourth stalking right behind. As soon as Valens saw Eira, he thrashed in their grips, lunging towards her. He was shouting something. The rain was coming down in earnest. Eira couldn’t hear him over the downpour and the thunder of her heart in her ears. His mouth formed the word run, and she shook her head, helpless, hopeless, useless. One of the figures kicked at the back of Valens’s legs, forcing him to his knees.
Eira turned her face away, absurdly thinking that Valens wouldn’t want to be seen like that. Brought low.
Her father screamed her name, and she turned back to him. The world slowed, raindrops hanging, quivering, in the air as their eyes met. Valens struggled; Eira didn’t. The figure not holding his arms stalked around in front of him but didn’t block his body from Eira’s view. In fact, they glanced back at Eira, and she imagined she could see a grinning slash of cruel teeth. They wanted her to watch what was about to happen.
A knife appeared in a black-gloved hand, glinting in the weak morning light. Eira lunged forward, but didn't get farther than a few inches before the hands shoved her back. All the air left her lungs.
She couldn’t breathe in. All the sound had been sucked out of the world.
The knife hesitated for a beat in the air as if ensuring it held a captive audience. Then it plunged down and disappeared into the folds of her father’s jacket.
When it emerged, it was dripping in red.
Eira couldn’t breathe.
The sound crashed back in: the rain's frantic crescendo, the shadow's triumphant snarling, the deafening sound of Valens’s body hitting the cobblestones. The vise around her chest loosened. Electricity crackled in the air, prickling all along her arms and the back of her neck.
Eira breathed in.
She exploded.
A scream ripped out of her with all the force of a hurricane, louder than the rain, the voices, her father’s damning silence. Eira closed her eyes, but the world was white even behind her eyelids. She had the strangest thought that something was being erased, or maybe born.
When the scream finished, Eira stayed where she was, eyes screwed shut, chest heaving. Gradually, she realized that her arms were still splayed against the brick, but no one was holding them there now. The voices had gone quiet. The rain was slowing to a drizzle. The storm was wringing itself out.
Eira opened her eyes.
Everyone else in the alley was dead.
Eira lowered her arms and stepped away from the wall. The nearest of her attackers slumped a few feet away. Their sleeve was torn, revealing a jagged pattern marking their skin like lightning.
“What?” Eira whispered to no one—there was no one left to hear. She stumbled back, turning just in time to avoid tripping on the splayed leg of another body. The world blurred as tears filled her eyes again. “What did I… What… How-“
She turned again, and her eye caught on Valens. Every other thought evaporated from her mind. With no memory of how she got there, she was kneeling beside him, pushing at his shoulder, rolling him onto his side.
There was so much blood. It puddled under her legs and ran in rivulets between the stones. Valens’s clothes were slick under her searching fingers.
He was so still. Her father was never still. He was always in motion; he never sat down in meetings because he was too busy filling up the room with his presence. He paced the floor, he took notes, he drummed impatient fingers on the table. He was not still. He was the force of change in the world, and Eira had never been able to keep up.
Now she was moving ahead, and he was not.
There was so much red seeping into her best dress. There was too much blood.
Eira sobbed and rubbed at her nose, then sobbed harder when the movement smeared blood across her face.
Someone screamed. She jolted, spinning to see an older woman at the end of the alley, clutching a young boy against her skirts.
Eira stumbled to her feet, reaching out with a bloody hand. “Please,” she whispered. “Please, my father...We were—and he’s-“
“Witch,” the woman snarled in a toxic mix of disgust and horror.
Eira froze. “No, no, I’m not, I’m not! Please, you have to help me—"
“Someone help!” the woman screamed, looking wildly around the street. “Magic! Witch! Murderer!”
Eira took one step back, then another. She slipped in blood and crashed to the ground, landing hard on her elbows. The woman was still shouting and pointing at her. Other voices started to join the woman’s, growing closer and louder by the second.
There was nothing to do but follow her father’s instructions. Eira scrambled to her feet and ran.
She tore through the streets with no real idea of where she was going, half blind with tears and fear. People were venturing into the morning now, and she dodged around them. Some cried out in shock, and more than one leapt back out of her way, but no one stopped her. Then one older man caught her upper arm, spinning her around. He was surprisingly strong, fingers digging into her bones.
“Are you alright, little miss?” he asked, frowning at her. “What is it you’re running from? Are you hurt?”
“Let me go,” Eira said in a breathless voice, trying and failing to pull free. “Let me go, sir, you’re hurting me.”
“You’re the Gatien girl, aren’t you?” he asked, frowning at her face. “I know your family. Let me—"
Eira tore away, sprinting down the street again. She was getting close to her house, surely—
A flash of blue and gold was all she saw as she whipped around a corner before she was on the ground again. Standing over her, golden hair glowing like a halo in the strained sun, was a boy.
“Tyrian!” she cried.
Tyrian Bray, oldest son of her father’s biggest rival and her best friend of ten years, stared at her as if she was a ghost. He didn’t move, so she scrambled up and tugged him into a small alcove between two buildings. The space was small enough that they were almost touching.
“It’s not my blood,” Eira blurted. As soon as the words hung between them, she regretted them.
Tyrian opened his mouth and closed it again. He reached for her, hesitating at the last second, his fingers trembling in the air over her shoulder.
“Eira,” he whispered. “Eira, what happened?”