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  This one’s for Maddie, though I don’t think I’ll let her read it for a decade or two.

  —A. L.

  THE ASSASSIN

  There are more differences between an assassin and a murderer than there are shapes in the clouds, but that makes no difference to the victims.

  Yirol could forgive the lack of distinction made by those she was about to kill, but she found the lack of distinction by those she served deeply insulting, even though she would never say as much. Rising to the position she now held—signed and sealed as the apex assassin for the Council of Forty—took political cunning as well as mental ruthlessness. She was no common murderer and would never let her passions or desires dictate her dispatches. She did her job, and she did it by the most effective means necessary to its particular requirements. She had no love of poisons but would deploy them if called for. She truly enjoyed bladeplay but would never employ it on a job meant to look like a hunting accident. An assassin was herself the blade, whatever tools she wielded. And yet, to the kyrgs of the Council of Forty, she was defined by the corpses she created, not the efficiency with which she created them.

  And now the young man kneeling in front of her kept calling her a murderer, which she found irksome.

  “Please,” he begged. “You don’t have to do this. You don’t have to be a murderer.”

  Yirol shook her head and squatted so her eyes were level with her target’s. “A murderer kills for reasons of the heart—for want or hate or lust or a little of each,” she explained. “I want nothing from you, and I feel no hate for you. As to lust…” She hooked a finger under his chin. He had kind eyes and a boyish face in spite of the stubble. Light-brown skin that shone like desert glass, his youth a sun lighting him from within. How many ice-wind seasons did he have behind him? Twenty? Not many more than that, certainly. His full lips had yet to know all the kisses they were meant for, and now, thanks to Yirol, they never would.

  She leaned in and let her own lips touch his cheek. She heard his breath catch as she whispered in his ear, “That would be a reason to let you live.” She leaned back, and he looked at her hopefully. They always looked at her that way, imagining that her kindness might save them.

  It would not.

  The practiced blade came up in her other hand, silently spun from its sheath on her wrist, and made a clean slice across the pulsing artery in his neck. His shocked eyes went wide, and his hands grabbed at her wrists, tugging, as his life bled away. She held firm, stared down with the same expression as the statue of the ancient falconer watching over the courtyard from its high plinth. The artist had carved Valyry the Gloveless with as much emotion as the stone hawk that perched on her fist, and Yirol appreciated the sculptor’s stoic skill. She didn’t like the newer sculptures filled with lifelike emotions, as if the great heroes of Uztar’s past were made great by their humanity, not by their triumph over it. Greatness, she knew, only came to those who could stand as stone against the buffeting winds that blew through every living heart.

  The great and the dead share one trait, she thought. Imperviousness.

  She waited for the young man to collapse and join the unfeeling dead, then she turned him over with her foot so that his lifeless eyes could stare up at the stars. Someone would want to give him a sky burial. There would be wailing and lamentation, as there always was for her younger targets, but the life of the city would move on, as it must, as she had helped it to do. The kyrgs of the Council of Forty had decided that this young noble was a danger to Uztar, but that danger had now been eliminated.

  Yirol did not wonder what danger this young man might’ve been. That was not her purview. She’d followed him for days through the city’s winding streets. He’d only left the gates for close hunts with his cast of falcons, always with different young men and women of the Uztari nobility for company and a team of valets to serve their wants and needs, and then in the evening he either threw or attended rich dinners and decadent dances. In her youth, Yirol had attended such dances, too, before she’d found her calling in the assassins’ guild.

  Looking down at the dead boy, she wondered how many boys just like him she had killed in her time, whether for debts owed or politics played poorly. She preferred the kills that went like this, quick and smooth and peaceful. The violent endings were the ones that haunted. They suggested a lack of discipline or planning on her part, and she hated to think someone’s end could’ve been made easier had she only worked a little harder. Pretty though he was, she’d likely forget this boy’s death before the next moon rose.

  Except … this is odd. The boy’s skin had taken on a kind of texture it hadn’t had before. His eyes seemed misshapen. A trick of the light?

  Yirol bent down and wiped the blood from her blade on his shirt. She found the material strange, like a pelt. And had the shirt been this color before, the same light brown as his skin? As she stared at the body, it was like looking into a reflection in a mountain lake. She saw the young man, but through him, rippling, she saw something else, a double vision of horns bursting from his head, an elongated face and the hooves of a beast. While nothing moved, everything shifted. Her head spun.

  She leapt up and away and poised herself to fight, but what she meant to fight was unclear. She now stood over the dead body of a mountain elk where the young man’s corpse had been.

  You can never plan for everything, she told herself. You’ve missed something vital, and now you’ll pay dearly for your failure.

  “You should see the look on your face,” a young man spoke from behind her. She whirled and flung her knife, but he dodged and the blade sparked against the stone and clattered away. He was the mirror image of the noble she’d just killed … or thought she’d killed. He was dressed finely in a black tunic and black pants. His bare arms were brushed with the light golden powder that some hunters wore to mask their scent from prey. It’d become a fashion statement in the last few seasons, finding its way from practical use in the brush to cosmetic use in the parlors of the elite. And this young man was certainly one of the elite. If he survived this night, he would be named to the kyrg, one of the Council of Forty, and the Council had wanted to avoid that outcome.

  Yirol had never before failed an assignment. She drew another blade from the sheath on her arm as she kicked back gently at the prone elk, making sure it was still dead and still where she’d left it. She had the courtyard layout memorized and was plotting her next move.

  You’re a failure, she thought. End yourself now before the Council does it for you.

  “What trick is this?” she demanded, knowing these thoughts were not her own. “How are you doing that?”

  “I’m not doing a thing,” the young lord said, then looked up. “It is.” A wide-winged shadow drifted in a spiral over the box of sky framed by the courtyard. As it whirled, it lowered, visible only by what it blotted out. It was the largest bird of prey Yirol had ever seen, but it was more than its size that rooted her feet to the stones. This bird was darkness itself, oblivion on the wing. She knew its name, or at least, she knew what it was called: the ghost eagle.

  The assassin stepped back over the elk’s body as she searched for her route out of the courtyard. She’d been an assassin long enough to know when she was outmatched, when retreat was not cowardice but prudence. She never entered a space without at least two escape routes, and yet now, her mind was cloudy, her thoughts scattered. All she saw were high stone walls. Where had all the doorways gone?

  “REEEEE,” the terrible bird shrieked, making one great flapping turn high overhead, preparing to dive.

  You’re careless. You forgot your way out, Yirol thought.

  “No, I didn’t,” she said out loud, arguing with herself, trying to clear her head. The ghost eagle’s shriek was rumored to unleash horrors in the mind, but these things were lies. It was just a bird.

  “It was a strange thing watching you slit an elk’s throat, thinking it to be me,” the young man said. “But they say the ghost eagle can torment your thoughts before tearing you to pieces. Philosophers claim the world is nothing but what we perceive it to be. Our minds can make an elk into a man, a door into a wall, a dream into a nightmare. If all the world is air and thought, then that which masters thought masters all.”

  Yirol spun and searched. They were in her head, the eagle or the man. She put her hand out to make sure the stone of the wall was real, was solid. Somehow she had been tricked into believing that which wasn’t there. She’d whispered in an elk’s ear and listened to an elk’s plaintive cries, then answered them with words. She remembered it clearly now, as it actually happened, not as she had hallucinated it. And now, as realization dawned, she heard the young man laughing at her
.

  “I know … nasty stuff, this eagle’s tricks. Hard to know what’s real, isn’t it?” The young man chuckled. “Some think the bird is magic. Personally, I think it has a mind so different from ours that it’s not bound by the same rules of consciousness that we are. It can alter consciousness—its own or others’—to suit its needs. Of course, this isn’t really a concern of yours at the moment, is it?”

  “REEEEEE,” the eagle screeched, and her vision of the young man wobbled. She saw herself standing where he had been, looked down at her hands and saw the light dust of powder he wore. She focused on her breath, regained herself. Her hands were her hands, his were his, and he stood across from her. The dead elk was still dead, still just an elk. She searched the sky for a sight of the eagle. How could you fight something that could muddle your thoughts so completely?

  If she did not regain control of her mind’s eye, that elk would be her last kill. She had to focus. She had to tame her perception. She looked at the statue of Valyry the Gloveless. A climb up the plinth, a leap off the stone falcon’s head, and she’d be on the rooftop.

  But running toward the sky would not save her. The sky belonged to the ghost eagle and to the dead.

  She couldn’t see any other ways out of the courtyard to the street, but there was a drain for snow melt, a drain that led down, under, into the depths of the city on the mountainside. Even now, crystal-clear meltwaters flowed along its channels, guiding her path in the dark. Like a hunted rabbit, she would go to ground!

  Like a frightened rabbit, she thought.

  No, like a rabbit that survives.

  She threw her blade straight up toward the black, winged shape in the night, more in the hopes of causing a distraction than to slow the attack.

  “Iryeem-na,” the young lord said, and Yirol had no time to wonder what that meant, because she was running for the drain as the ghost eagle dove, a scythe from the stars. Before she was even halfway to the sewer opening, the eagle swooped. Its massive talons tore her head from her body. She ran three more steps before she fell. The eagle rose away, clutching its grim trophy and painting the assassin’s blood across the rooftops like a bee spreads pollen.

  The eagle screeched, sending all who heard it into the dregs of their bottles or below the furs on their beds, and then eagle and young lord alike vanished into different shadows.

  What was left of Yirol, the Council’s assassin, would not be found till morning, after which a new kyrg would take his appointed place and a new apex assassin would be needed.

  KYLEE

  PARTNERS

  1

  “Do you want to die like this?” Üku screamed.

  The white-haired Owl Mother had the back of Kylee’s tunic bunched in her hand, thrusting her forward, and that bunched fabric clutched between her shoulder blades by a wrinkled fist was the only thing holding Kylee over the precipice of the Sky Castle’s walls. The clouds below roiled and broke against jagged cliffs.

  “I could let go and spare us all the time you waste shambling to your death. If you plan to die so young, why not leap headlong for it?”

  Kylee wanted to tell Üku that she did not want to die like this, had no intention of dying young, and that the featherbrained old woman better pull her back up. But she couldn’t find her voice just then, so she swallowed and considered the strength in Üku’s arm, how long she’d been holding Kylee, and how much longer she could. Finally, Kylee managed to scrape the word no from the gravel in her throat.

  “Then show me the reason you’re here,” Üku snapped. “Show me how you plan to survive! Call the eagle to hunt. You know the word. Speak it!”

  Kylee cleared her throat, focused her mind away from the sheer drop and onto the giant bird of prey that lurked somewhere in this dusky sky.

  She searched the low clouds for any sign of the black-winged ghost eagle. She looked at the mountain elk idly picking their way up the cliff below the Sky Castle’s walls, as comfortable on a nearly ice-smooth rock face with a foothold no bigger than a baby’s skull as an eagle was on a breeze. They chewed cloudgrass without care or worry. None of the local hawks were big enough to take a mountain elk, and none of the nobles would risk injury to their finest hunting eagles just to catch some gamey meat.

  But the ghost eagle was ten times the size of the next largest bird of prey, and there was no prey in the world it couldn’t hunt, that it wouldn’t hunt if Kylee could marshal the Hollow Tongue she’d been studying and command it.

  “Raakrah,” she said.

  The elk stayed calm. How could they know a ghost eagle prowled the low clouds? When had that terror ever haunted the Sky Castle’s air, and why should a bird of the night stalk them in the day? Their lives up to that point had offered no clues for the situation they were now in.

  Just like me, Kylee thought.

  The wind blew her cloak around her. The braid of her black hair whipped, and she felt Üku’s arm shudder. How much longer could she hold Kylee there, tilted over the wall’s edge?

  Maybe the elk were right not to fear her.

  The Hollow Tongue was the bird’s lost language, known now only in fragments, and Kylee had little grasp of it, even after two full moon turnings spent studying. When you spoke the Hollow Tongue, you had to mean what you said, deeply and truly, or your words might as well be lies. No bird of prey ever listened to a lie. There was no word in the Hollow Tongue for lying. But there were infinite ways to say “kill.”

  “Raakrah,” she said again.

  Nothing happened.

  The nobles and kyrgs and their valets, who had gathered on the outer walls to watch her, chattered nervously in huddled clumps. While there were others with some abilities in the Hollow Tongue, Kylee was the only one in the castle who had the interest of the ghost eagle, and so she had the interest of everyone else, but she had yet to command the dreaded bird successfully.

  “Think!” Üku scolded. “What have you learned?”

  * * *

  Earlier that afternoon, just as the air began to cool for the evening, Kylee and Grazim, Üku’s only other student, had been learning to command colorful tulip hawks to fly between their fists, trading places.

  The fact that she and Grazim hated each other made the exercise more interesting, and a few kyrgs and their valets had gathered to watch.

  “Toktott,” Üku had snapped just as the birds crossed in midair, and suddenly, the tulip hawks adjusted their flight paths, slammed their bodies into each other, and then bounced backward. After one or two more attempts to pass, they each gave up and returned to the girls’ respective fists.

  “Toktott means to block or to stop,” Üku said. “If you are to overpower the command I have given them, you will have to mean your own command with greater force of will than I have with mine. The Hollow Tongue demands the perfect marriage of word, truth, and intent. To use it, you will have to truly want your bird to do as you wish. Find your truth and speak it.”

  “How can we speak our truth for someone’s else’s purpose?” Kylee asked.

  “That,” Üku replied, “is the fundamental question of your studies. The Hollow Tongue demands your full self: your history, your beliefs, your knowledge, your feelings, and your desires. Either you control those things, or they control you.”

  “Those are all the things that make you you,” Kylee noted.

  “Exactly,” Üku agreed. “No one ever attained power over a bird of prey without first attaining power over themselves. Tame yourself and you can tame the world. So … what words might you use here, to tame this tulip hawk to the purpose? How might you make what you must do match what you want to do?”

  “Sif-sif,” Kylee suggested, the word for trade or switch that they had already been using.

  “And yet that is not strong enough.” Üku dismissed her guess. “What does khostoon mean?”

  “Partner,” Grazim said, puffed with pride at her vast vocabulary.

  Üku nodded at the other girl, even smiled. “Very good. Your birds already know your relationships to them, but not to each other. You must tell them. A partner or an ally is a mighty thing, but the two of you must believe you are partners to overcome those who would get in your way.”