Amelie Wen Zhao - Blood Heir

He slid the sketches carefully back onto the table. The girl’s eyes followed his every move. “I’m sorry,” he said, injecting as much sincerity into his tone as he could. “I was looking for a map.”

“Get away from there,” she snapped again, and he obeyed. She was at the table in an instant, her fingers scurrying across the papers, checking to make sure that nothing was missing. She snatched up the sketch of the boy and glared at Ramson, livid. For a second he thought she would change her mind and kill him on the spot. But then she took a deep breath and swiped a strand of dark hair from her face. As though she had wiped a slate, the fury in her expression was gone, replaced by cool sternness. “We made a Trade last night. You have a funny way of showing diplomacy.”

“Well, you know what they say about diplomacy. It’s the only proper way for two parties to lie to each other’s faces and be happy about it.”

“Don’t lecture me.”

Ramson raised his hands. “All right, I was prying. But as you said, we made a Trade, so what’s the point of being stuck with each other for the next six weeks if we can’t trust each other?”

Behind them, on the bed, May had sat up and was listening with her head cocked to one side. The witch’s eyes flickered to the girl and her expression softened momentarily. “All right,” she said, lowering her voice as she turned back to Ramson. “Since you mention ‘trust.’ Here.”

Ramson took the drawing she offered him. This sketch was swathed in shadows. Whereas the others had seemed to capture moments and memories, this one had captured the subject like a portrait. He recognized the man on the page: bald, with distrustful large eyes that were set far apart from his thin nose. It was a sketch of the same man she’d shown him in prison.

Her alchemist.

This sketch bore the same painstaking detail as the other one, which had likely been destroyed in their waterfall escapade. Ramson studied the drawing more closely, taking in the man’s white priest’s robes and the circlet of the four Deities that hung around his neck. “This is a good start, Witch. I need you to tell me everything you know about him.”

“He worked in the Salskoff Palace ten years ago. He disappeared and was back in … in Salskoff eleven moons ago.”

He waited for more, but she clamped her mouth tightly shut. “That’s it?”

“I know nothing else,” she said curtly. Her eyes burned, and her hands had curled into fists as she spoke. Whoever this man was, this girl had a debt to settle with him.

He’d find out why soon enough. For now, Ramson settled on a different question. “An alchemist, you say,” he mused. “Was he an Affinite?”

Many alchemists possessed unique Affinities and were hired by the upper crust of Cyrilia to lengthen and strengthen lives with their peculiar practices. Some of the most powerful alchemists, Ramson had heard, had metaphysical Affinities. Pain. Calm. Happiness. Intangibles, coveted by those who had coins to spare.

“I’m not certain,” the witch said, looping a strand of her hair behind her ear. Ramson had already picked this up as a nervous tic of hers—like the way she fidgeted with her hood. “He brewed Deys’voshk and other elixirs.”

Likely an Affinite, then. His mind snagged on another detail, on the Deys’krug and the prayer robes. “Was he a priest—or a devout man? Have you tried starting from there?”

“He wasn’t a devout man,” she said bitterly, and then sighed. “I’ve tried that. I’ve looked all over the Empire for him, but I haven’t found a thing. The bounty hunters I hired never even got close.”

“Amateurs.”

She looked as though she wanted to slap him. “I wouldn’t be so confident. If this man isn’t standing in front of me in three weeks, I’ll bleed you dry.”

“Relax,” he said lazily, waving the sketch in front of her. “I have a plan.”

Ramson tapped his fingers on the sketch. Two sightings, ten years apart—the trail was colder than death by now. But he had two leads: First, this man used to work at the Palace. And that the man was likely an Affinite on the run meant he might’ve had to reinvent his identity and reestablish himself.

But if there was one source that tracked Affinites’ movements as closely as an eagle tracked its quarry, it was Kerlan’s brokers. The thought of strolling into their territory was one he didn’t care for. Ramson glanced at the witch and the child, unease twinging in his stomach. Could it be that they were victims of the very brokers that they needed in order to find this alchemist?

“Good.” Ana launched herself from the table and marched toward the bed, where she retrieved a small satchel from beneath the furs. May glared at Ramson, and then promptly began folding the few items of clothing on the bed and slipping them into the satchel. “We leave in one hour. I assume you’ll have figured out where we’re going by then.”

“I already have.” There was only one city in the vicinity of Ghost Falls that was crawling with ruthless Affinite traffickers hungry for information and bounty. “We’re going to Kyrov.”

The morning air was crisp, the snow glittering and dusted with gold from a distant sun by the time they set out. The quiet was broken only by the huff of their breath, that clouded in the cold air, and the crunch of their boots through snow. The boreal forest stretched from the Krazyast Triangle at the northernmost tip of Cyrilia to the Dzhyvekha Mountains that bordered Nandji in the south. Here, up north, the snow never melted, but farther south, Ana knew, summer saw the tips of green grasses and conifer pines peeking out from beneath a veil of white.

Ana hoisted her rucksack farther up her shoulders, the rustle of her parchments and the clinks of her remaining globefires strangely calming. By her side, May plodded along, turning her head this way and that to whatever sensations she felt coming from the earth buried deep below. She held a freshly lit globefire between her hands, the flames inside crawling along the oil that coated the glass, warming hands and providing light during nights. They’d spent many moons traveling like this, just her and May, a globefire, the compass she held in her hands, and the eternal silence of the forest.

Which, at the moment, was being disrupted in the most irritating way possible.

“So, how did you two beautiful damas end up all the way over here?” Quicktongue’s cheerful voice drifted to them from a dozen paces behind.

Ana gritted her teeth. May shot her a knowing look and rolled her eyes.

“Rather far north for a girl from the Aseatic Isles,” the con man continued. A flock of pine harriers burst into flight from some shrubs ahead.

Ana was about to spin around and snap at him, but the meaning behind his words settled into her with a chill. Everything Ramson Quicktongue said was deliberate, every word carefully chosen—it could hardly be coincidence that he was questioning May’s origin. And the last thing Ana wanted was for the con man to know about May’s status: a lost Affinite with no identity and no protection.