The Pirate's Wish (27 page)

The sneer disappeared from my face, and the assassin laughed. The cause of the first task? My kiss? I understood what the assassin was implying, but I didn’t believe him. Naji didn’t love me back. This assassin was making fun of me. I was certain of it.

I lifted up my knife and lunged at him.

A blur of shadows and the two Qilaris had me pinned to the floor and the desertland assassin had my own knife at my throat.

“You knew that wouldn’t work,” he said.

“Get off me!”

He lifted the knife up off my skin by a fraction. “You need to step outside now,” he said. “My associates and I have work to do.”

“Are you gonna kill him?” I asked.

“A true Jadorr’a welcomes death.”

“I ain’t a Jadorr’a.”

“Yes, but Naji is.” He pressed the flat side of the knife against the left side of my face – the same as Naji’s scar. The metal was cold, colder than ice. “Although I’m not going to kill him. He still has work to do.” He dropped his knife. “Now leave.”

The assassin grabbed my arm and yanked me back, hard enough that my feet lifted off the ground. He put his mouth against my ear. “You shouldn’t care for him so.”

“Let me go, you Empire ass.”

The other two drew their daggers. I stopped struggling.

“Love is a wound,” the assassin said. “Neither life nor death.”

I wanted to tell him to shut up, but I figured I better hold my tongue. He smiled at me, showing all his teeth.

“Whatever you’re thinking, girl,” he said. “Speak. I won’t hold it against you.”

“Love is a wound?” I said. “Sounds like something a killer would say.”

“So you must understand my metaphor well.”

His words slammed into me, and for a moment I faltered, thinking about Tarrin bleeding in the desert. Then I kicked him, hard, in the shin. He laughed and dropped my arm, and the two Qilaris lifted me off my feet and dragged me, kicking and struggling, out of the garden house. I slammed my feet into one of them, right in the hip, before the door swung shut and I landed face-first in the soft grass.

“Are you alright?” The voice was speaking Jokjani. I spit out dirt and looked up. One of the palace soldiers, his eyes wide with fear. “They wouldn’t let me go inside. I tried–”

“Ain’t your fault.”

The soldier pulled me to my feet. I smelled mint.

A few moments passed, and the smell grew stronger, drowning out the rainy scent of the garden. Bright blue light seeped out of the house’s windows. The soldier positioned himself between me and the house, gripping his dagger tight, and I wanted to tell him he didn’t have to do that for me, but I was too tired to try and get the words right. Plus it reminded me of Naji, and I was afraid if I spoke then I would cry.

A chill crept into the air.

I stepped away from the garden house and sat down beneath a banana tree. I kept seeing Naji stretched out on the bed, unmoving. I kept hearing his faint, slow heartbeat. And then the scent of mint flooded through the garden. It plunged me backward in time, till I was facing down Naji that first night, when he could’ve killed me easier than a bug, but he didn’t.

Don’t cry, I told myself. You’re a pirate. Don’t cry.

But I did anyway. The palace guard came and patted me on the shoulder like I was noblewoman crying over a suitor. I snarled at him until he went away.

The assassins stayed in the garden house for a long time, long enough that the afternoon rains came and went, that the sun sank into the horizon and turned the sky orange, that the soldiers changed places, the first one scuttling off into the palace and leaving another man, older, more grizzled-looking, in his place.

I didn’t move from my spot beneath the banana tree.

The assassins came out of the garden house one at a time, their robes swirling around their feet, the armor gleaming in the thick orange light. They ignored the soldier and walked up to me.

“We need your help,” the desertlands assassin said.

I glared at him. “Need my help how?”

“You don’t seem to understand much of anything, do you?” he asked. “Perhaps if I inserted more profanity–”

“Just answer my damn question! What do you need my help for?” My heart was pounding. “Is Naji dead?”

“Your blood-bond.” The assassin looked like he’d just swallowed a scorpion. “It seems we have use of it.”

“What?”

He grabbed me by the wrist and pulled me up close. “It’s not a difficult concept to grasp. We were unable to pull Naji out. We may be able to do so with your blood. It seems your bond was helping keep him alive.”

I stared at him.

“I’m not explaining all this to you, girl. I saw he had enough of you in his blood when I cut him – I was testing for the curse but got
that
nasty little surprise.”

“Not so nasty,” I snapped, “if it means you’ll get to save him.”

The assassin scowled at me and dragged me back into the garden house. I let him. I didn’t think it would work, but I let him.

“Stand here,” he said, lining me up at the foot of Naji’s bed. The floor was covered in rust-colored markings, and the air smelled like blood. One of the Qilari assassins bolted the door shut and they both stood behind me. I could feel their eyes on the back of my neck.

The desertlands assassin pulled out his red-stained knife. “Hold out your arm,” he said.

I was shaking. I didn’t want to let him cut me, but I didn’t want Naji to die, neither.

“I know you want him to wake up,” the assassin said, sneering a little. “I saw it when I cut him.”

“Are you going to kill me?”

“Would you let yourself die to save him?”

“Ain’t nobody wants to die,” I said, and I knew it wasn’t a proper answer.

The assassin moved up close to me in a blink. Another blink and he’d stretched my arm out over the bed. I thought maybe I should struggle.

Another blink and he cut me.

The cut was long and deep and this time Naji’s thoughts flooded over mine so deeply I stopped being in the garden house and started being in the black-glass desert. It was empty except for the wind. I shivered in my thin Jokja dress and called out Naji’s name. My voice echoed out across the emptiness. I took a hesitant step forward, and my knee slammed into something invisible, and invisible hands grabbed my arms and pulled me back.

A voice whispered on the wind. Not Naji’s. It belonged to the desertland assassin.
Look for him
, he said.
Stop shouting. It won’t do any good
.

“I can’t look for him!” I shouted, struggling against the invisible hands. The Qilari assassins. I knew it and didn’t know it, all at once. “I can’t move.”

With your mind, girl
.

I stopped struggling. The wind swirled around me, icing over my bare arms and my bare cheeks. My bones rattled in my skin. The cold was worse than the Isle of the Sky had ever been. But I forced myself to concentrate, to reach out with the fingers of my mind.

I found him.

I found his thoughts, warmed by blood, thin blood, weak blood. He was thinking about food and water. He was thinking about me.

The invisible hands yanked me so hard my head spun round and around and then I was back in the garden house, sagging between the two Qilari assassins. The desertlands assassin was leaned over Naji, tracing blood – my blood, I knew – in patterns over the scar on his chest. My blood was all over the bed. It dripped down my arm, stained my clothes.

“He was thinking about me,” I said, dazed.

“Shut up, girl.” The desertland assassin didn’t even glance up at me from beside Naji’s bed, and the two others dragged me over to the corner. I slumped down on the floor, still dizzy and confused. In my head was an image of myself, standing on a boat, looking out over the ocean. And I was beautiful somehow, like all my insides had turned to light.

He was thinking of me as he lay dying in a world between worlds.

And it was real. I could feel it. I
knew
it.

I leaned against the wall, taking deep unsteady breaths. The Qilari assassins were singing, the desertland assassin was chanting. Their eyes glowed pale blue in the darkness. My spilled blood steamed and smoked, and it smelled like mint and the ocean.

After a while I couldn’t see much of anything but the blue of the assassins’ eyes and the ghostly trace of magic-smoke.

And then I heard someone say my name.

The singing and the chanting stopped. The smoke lingered in the air. I could feel the walls of the garden house shifting and squirming just outside my vision.

And then a warmth flowed into my thoughts, familiar, barely there–

“Ananna?”

“Naji!” I pushed myself up to my feet, tottering in place. All three of the assassins turned and glared at me.

“Not yet, girl,” hissed the one from the desertlands.

“No,” Naji said, his voice rough and faint. “No, it’s fine, I’m here–”

The assassin turned back to him. The glow faded from the Qilaris’ eyes. I stumbled forward, my arm aching, my head spinning. “Naji,” I said. “You’re alright–”

“Not exactly.”

I knelt beside the desertland assassin, who made no move to send me away. He just stood there glaring. Naji was stretched out on the bed the way he’d been all week, but now his eyes were open and his fingers fluttered against the sheet.

“Naji,” I said, because I couldn’t say what I wanted to. I buried my head into his shoulder. The scent of medicine and magic lingered in the room, and although the smoke was drifting away the air still seemed thick. Naji laid his hand on top of mine.

“You’re here,” he said.

“I had to save you. These buddies of yours ain’t worth a damn.” I blinked, trying not to cry. I was aware of his hand touching mine. “Besides, where else would I go?”

“I don’t know. I thought you might take off with the
Nadir
, plundering.”

I tried to laugh, but it came out strangled-sounding. “Thought? How could you think anything? You were…” I didn’t know what to call it. Dead?

“I was trapped in between here and the Mists,” he said. His hand was still on mine. “The Order found me, sent Dirar to bring me back.” He glanced over at the desertland assassin and nodded. “Thank you.”

Dirar scowled. “It was lucky the girl was here.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Yes,” Naji said. “I suppose you’ll be alerting the Order of my blood-bond.”

Dirar huffed and crossed his arms over his chest and didn’t answer. Naji chuckled. I didn’t understand what was going on. I wasn’t sure I wanted to.

“By the way,” Naji said. “It worked.”

I stared at him for a long time.

“One more,” Dirar said. “I suppose you plan on taking another four months with this one? Or maybe you’ll just go for another four years. Why not?”

Naji’s eyes took on that brightness that replaced his smile. “It worked,” he said again. “Can you feel it?”

“No,” I said, except as soon as I spoke I did: a lightness in his presence I hardly noticed. Missing weight. Missing darkness.

“You do,” Naji said, his eyes still bright. “Come here.”

“What?”

“Lean close,” he said. “I have something to tell you.”

Dirar stomped over to the garden house door with the other two assassins. All three of ’em stared at us. But I leaned over anyway, tilting my ear to his mouth. He put one hand on my chin and turned my face toward his.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

I kept watch over Naji for two weeks, long after the other assassins left. We had to move him to a room in the palace, because the garden house was destroyed by the magic-sickness, its walls turning into thick ropy vines, the bed transforming into an enormous moon-colored flower. I stayed away from the place where the garden house had been.

But tucked away in the palace, Naji did get slowly better. The color returned to his face. His tattoos stopped glowing. He ate every bite of food Queen Saida had brought to him.

Sometimes he kissed me.

Some days I would lay my head on Naji’s chest, the way I had when he was asleep. I listened to his heart beat strong and sure. He let his hand drift over my hair and down the length of my spine. It was nice. I was afraid to say something about it, though, afraid that if I opened my mouth it would all disappear.

When he felt good enough to stand up, I walked with him around the perimeter of the palace garden, the way he had with me on the Island of the Sun. He pointed out flowers to me, identifying them by name, telling me what sorts of magic properties they had, but all the while his hand was on the small of my back, and I didn’t remember one word of what he said.

Jeric came to visit. He knocked on Naji’s door while I was there, and when I answered, he scowled at me and said, “I’d hoped you’d be gone.”

“Go away,” I said.