C. Redwine - Deception

Ripping at the laces on my tunic, I show the tracker my bare chest. “I told you the truth. I don’t have it with me. And if you and your men so much as injure one of my people, I swear on my life I’ll never tell you where I hid it.”

The tracker doesn’t seem surprised that I anticipated this moment. He got his information about me straight from Ian, who’s had ample opportunity to observe the way I think.

Which means Ian will already have accounted for this possibility, and he’ll be ready with a counterattack.

I stare the tracker down. “Where’s Ian? Expecting you to do his dirty work for him while he hides his face from those he’s betrayed?”

No sooner do the words leave my mouth than Ian separates himself from the thick hedges surrounding a meeting hall and walks toward us, clapping his hands in slow, deliberate movements.

“Well done, brother. Well. Done,” he says. The sly sincerity in his voice is at odds with the anger in his eyes.

I’ll see his anger and double it. I have the weight of Baalboden’s destruction and the loss of thirty-eight of my people to fuel me. Ian has a twisted sense of patriotism and a mile-wide streak of insanity.

I step in front of my people and hold my sword steady.

Ian laughs, an ugly, vicious sound. “Isn’t that heroic?” He turns to the other trackers and throws out his arms. “My brother, the hero! The boy who colluded with Jared Adams to steal from Rowansmark. Left his family to suffer the consequences. And then stole his followers away from their leader so that he could start his own city-state on the backs of Rowansmark technology and Baalboden labor.”

“That’s not what happened.” Adam’s voice is little more than a snarl.

“Well, look who’s decided to become a devout Logan follower. It wasn’t too long ago that I was vigorously defending his honor to you.”

“Why bother defending him if you’re going to turn around and do all this?” Adam gestures around us.

“I had to gain his trust, didn’t I?” Ian looks at me and slowly tugs on the silver chain he wears until the tiny copper dragon charm is visible. “You know, until I called the tanniyn that day we stopped by the Ferris wheel in the Wasteland, I wasn’t absolutely sure you still had the controller. I’d caught up with you a day before you met the Commander to give the tech to him. I’m afraid I lost sight of what happened to the controller after that. I was a little busy telling the tanniyn where to go.”

My jaw hurts from clenching my teeth. “That charm calls the beast? Does it also override the controller? Is that what happened when the Cursed One went inside Baalboden?”

Ian’s smile is fierce. “My father wouldn’t build technology meant for the Commander without giving us a way to shut it down. And if you hadn’t altered the strength of the controller with your little booster pack, I could’ve finished all of this that day on the field the way I finished your city.”

My voice shakes. “You killed thousands of people. Thousands .”

“Justice requires sacrifice.” He steps closer.

“Instead of listening to this lunatic, how about if I just put an arrow straight through his lying tongue?” Willow asks.

“If you shoot me, every single person inside Lankenshire will die.”

Willow shrugs and pulls her bow string back. “I’ll call that bluff.”

Ian gestures toward the top of the council building. “Do you see that?”

I follow his arm and see a dark gray box attached beneath the eaves of the building’s roof. The metal looks like the same that was used to make both the dart and the device.

“What is it?” Frankie asks, his tone belligerent.

“It emits a sonic pulse. A slightly stronger pulse than the one worn by every city-state’s leader to keep the tanniyn at bay. If a city dishonors its protection agreement with Rowansmark, any tracker in the area can change the frequency to summon the beast instead.” He smiles, a ghost of the charming Ian we’d come to know. “I did enjoy listening to you uneducated, superstitious people call the tanniyn the Cursed One. I bet you still believe there’s only one tanniyn left, too. You really never once thought to challenge anything the Commander said or did. How pathetic.”

“Neither did our father,” I say. “If he had, we wouldn’t be here now.”

Ian’s face flushes brilliant red and he stalks closer. Perfect. If I can make him angry enough to forget that he should stay out of sword range, I can end this.

End him.

My eyes graze the metal box attached to the building’s eaves, and my stomach drops. I can’t kill Ian while any Rowansmark trackers remain inside Lankenshire. Not if it means the Cursed One, or tanniyn —whatever we want to call it—will be summoned to turn Lankenshire into a pile of smoldering ruins. Not when I haven’t examined the tech to know if the power boost I gave our device is enough to override this new signal.

Rachel trembles beside me, and I cast a quick look at Quinn, who stands on her other side. He doesn’t look too good himself, but he wraps an arm around her and gently eases her back a few steps. The fact that she doesn’t fight to stay by my side speaks volumes about her condition.

Ian takes another step forward, his fists clenched. “He was not your father. He was mine. So was our mother. But you killed them.” Ian’s voice rises. “You killed them both. My mother couldn’t stand to suffer over the loss of you, even though I was right there . She chose death instead. And my father—”

“Paid the price for his loyalty toward the Commander with his life while you watched. I know. You told me, remember? While you were busy lying to me about your background, because unlike a man of honor , you chose deception and murder as a means to get the vengeance you crave.”

I step forward, as much to put distance between me and my friends as to get closer to Ian. Quinn has already moved Rachel back another few yards. Behind the trackers who line the council steps, the triumvirate exits the building and stops to stare. I look at Ian. “I guess you and the Commander aren’t very different from each other, are you?”

Ian’s entire body vibrates, and he spits his words at me. “I have more honor in my little finger than you could find in the entire group of pathetic refugees from Baalboden. I remained loyal to my leader. To my city. Even in the face of my family’s disgrace.”

“Honor and loyalty require you to murder children? To poison innocents?” My voice is rising too. “To burn an entire city to the ground because you thought your life wasn’t fair?”

“Fair?” Ian is yelling now. “Let me tell you what isn’t fair. You spent your life in the lap of luxury, coddled by the Commander as his precious investment, while I spent mine scrambling to stay one step ahead of the disgrace my mother’s suicide and my father’s theft brought down on my head.”

“You idiot!” Frankie roars, whipping out his sword and closing the gap between him and me. “Logan’s Baalboden mother was flogged to death in front of him when he was just six years old. He was declared an outcast. He survived on the streets by begging or stealing or eating trash just to have enough to keep himself alive. Until you destroyed our city, most of us still wouldn’t have anything to do with him. He had a mountain of loss, neglect, and downright cruelty to overcome, but he didn’t turn around and start killing innocent people because of it.”

“He betrayed his family!” Ian’s voice rings across the square, full of terrible rage. “He left us to our disgrace.”

“I didn’t know.” I speak quietly, hoping to calm Ian. Hoping to stop the violence I see in his eyes. “Until two hours ago when a Lankenshire man who’d spent significant time in Rowansmark nineteen years ago recognized me, I didn’t know I was anything other than Logan McEntire from Baalboden.”