Sworn in Steel (48 page)

“The grounds aren’t the palace,” said Aribah, her gaze sweeping the lawn before us, her head cocking back and forth like a songbird’s as she listened to the night. Even
with the dye rubbed across her exposed skin, I found I could make out enough of her face to determine not only where she was, but what she was doing, but it took work. “There’s a
difference,” she said, “between gaining access to those who serve the prince and reaching the prince himself.”

“What kind of difference?”

The smudge in the night regarded me. “Do all Imperials talk this much when they work?”

“Only the good ones.”

“Then I look forward to your impending silence.”

It was my turn to snort. I looked out over the grounds. A small troop of guards were walking across the turf downslope from us, their cresset lantern sending up flame and smoke from the end of
its chain. They were far enough out that the light only caused me to tear up. I blinked and rubbed at my eyes. The patrol was crossing between our trees and a rise that I remembered being near
Heron’s lodge. We settled in to let them pass.

“So, who watches over the padishah besides them?” I said, pointing at the moving light.

“The Opal Guard, for one,” said Aribah.

“And they’re not the Opal Guard?”

“Hardly. If they were Opal, we’d be moving away, believe me.”

“That good?”

“That good.”

I shifted on the ground, moving a fallen limb out from under my thigh. “You said ‘for one,’ ” I said. “Who else stands Oak around her?”

“. . . stands Oak?”

“Watches. Guards. Keeps a lookout.”

Aribah muttered something under her breath about Imperials and insanity. Aloud, she said, “Sometimes the Lions of Arat. And djinn.”

“Djinn?”

She nodded. “Chained with silver shackles, forged and inscribed anew by magi every day so the spirits can be enslaved again every night. So my grandfather says.”

“He’s seen them?”

Aribah turned a dark, contemptuous gaze my way. “My grandsire is one of three assassins to have ever—
ever
—entered the despotic abode and returned to tell his tale. He
is a Black Cord: His word is not questioned.”

I looked back out at the guards, saw the lantern bob and dip. A small spot of fire took life on the ground. Someone had stumbled and spilled some of the burning pitch. Laughter and jeers drifted
up to us.

Even here, it seemed, Rags were Rags.

“Imperial?” she said to me after a moment.

“Yes?”

She paused to lick her lips. When she spoke, there was just the slightest bit of a tremor to her voice. “What’s it like?”

I didn’t need to ask, but I did anyhow. “You mean the night vision?”

“Yes.”

It wasn’t something I talked about much, but then, it wasn’t something most people knew about, either. Habit made me want to brush the question off, to play it down or simply lie.
But she’d told me about the glyphs and the dyes in her robes: The least I could do was tell her about the thing she was putting her life on the line for.

“I’ve had the night vision so long now,” I said, “I’m not sure how to describe it. In some ways, it’s just another part of the night for me, like the stars or
the moon or the stink of an alley. How do you describe what it feels like to walk or smell or taste? It’s like that, only different. But I suppose that’s an excuse, not an answer,
isn’t it?” I paused, staring out into the night as she sat beside me, silent. Waiting. “It’s red,” I said at last.

“Red?”

“Red.” I nodded. “Red and gold, and it sticks to everything I see. Everything is touched with hints of amber, almost as if it were dusted with light only I can pick out.”
I gestured out at the grounds. Aribah followed the motion, as if trying to see what I saw, as if will alone could give her the vision. “Have you ever seen an artist at work, when he’s
sketching out the lines for a painting? My . . . I know a baroness who patronizes one. I don’t know if they do it here, but in Ildrecca there’s a cadre—some say a cabal—of
painters who are moving away from the old iconic style of art. They sketch everything out in careful detail first, using charcoal and chalk: textures, distance, shadows. Then they paint it. And it
looks real; not real like you can tell it’s a man on a horse, but real in that it looks almost exactly like a specific man on a specific horse. You don’t have to guess—you’d
know him on the street after you saw the painting.

“Night vision is like the charcoal sketches they do, only instead of blacks and grays and whites, you have ambers and reds and golds. It’s hints and details and gaps, all in one: a
picture you see as much by what isn’t there as what is.”

“Like dark fighting,” she said. “You listen for the silences and fill them in, using the sounds as limits as much as guide-posts.” She shook her head. “A-ya, but if
I had your gift—the blood-red path I would cut. The Lions would weep for their losses, and my grandfather . . .”

“Your grandfather would what?” I said.

Her hand reached up and pulled gently at the cloth covering the lower part of her face, drawing it tighter. I caught hints of her sharp nose, her straight jaw clenched tight against words that
wanted to come out.

I stayed silent, holding my words close. If Nosing had taught me anything, it was that most people wanted to talk, even when they thought they didn’t. A good Nose—and maybe even a
good Gray Prince—left the silence there for others to fill.

Aribah stared out over the grounds, her eyes focused not on the darkness without, but rather the shadows within.

“My grandfather,” she said at last, the words heavy and solemn as granite, “might finally see me as myself, and not my mother’s pale shadow. See me as
neyajin
,
and not as a disappointment.” She sniffed, staring out into the night. I watched as her thumb played with the battered silver ring on her finger.

“She was astonishing,” said Aribah. “The best assassin our school has produced in generations. A natural, both as a killer and a leader. Grandfather says she could walk up to a
Sentinel on a moonlit night, count the hairs in his beard at her leisure, and then cut a line across his throat, all without him knowing she was there. Salihah Shiham: Salihah the Arrow. She made
her first kill at thirteen years, became
kalat
at seventeen, and took over as
amma
of our school at twenty-six.”

“What happened to her?” I said.

“She died.”

I let the silence stretch, watched her worry the ring some more, but this time she didn’t respond.

“On a dodge?” I said, then caught myself at her look. “A job,” I amended.

“And this is your business how?”

“It isn’t,” I admitted. “I just . . .” I shrugged.

Aribah turned back to the night. “She went to slay the Imam General of the Sentinels.”

“And did she?”

“Yes, but not, it turns out, the demon he rode. The djinni was able to escape the saddle and slay my mother. I know because of this.” She held up her hand, showing me the ring.
“Three months to the day after she left, I heard a knocking at our door during a dust storm. It was my mother’s special knock, but when I threw the door wide, all I found was her ring
hanging on a braided cord of hair and . . . other things, spiked to the door.”

I looked away. Thoughts jostled up against one another in my head, demanding attention: of my own mother wasting away in bed, of Sebastian being cut down before my eyes in front of our cabin, of
my trying to provide for Christiana and failing on the streets of the Barren. I pushed them away, back down into the darkness of the past.

All of a sudden, I wanted a ring of my own to worry.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“There’s nothing for you to be sorry for.”

“Still, I can sympathize.”

Dark eyes turned my way. “Yes, I believe you can.” A pause. “Why are you here?”

“You mean why am I breaking into the padishah’s grounds?”

“You can start there, yes.”

“For a friend,” I said. “I broke my word, and now I’m trying to . . . well, I’m hoping to make amends in some small way.”

“And will what you do here be enough to mend what you broke?”

“I doubt it,” I said. “But that’s not the point: The point is that I need to try. Even if this isn’t enough, at least it’s something—it’s an
effort. And that’s all I can give him right now.”

Aribah stared off into the night. “It won’t be enough,” she said softly. “Once something is broken—be it your word, your friendship, your family—you can never
do enough to repair it. A broken thing mended is still weaker than when it was whole. No matter how hard you work at it, no matter how much you bleed, no matter how much you cry, the flaw will
always be there, beneath the surface.”

“Maybe,” I said, “but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try.”

“One should always try,” said Aribah. “But trying isn’t the same as succeeding.” She gave the ring one last rub, and then looked down the hill. “The
patrol’s gone. Go.”

“You’re not coming with?”

Her eyes smiled. “Your amends are yours to make. Who am I to tell you how to repair your word?”

I smiled back, but instead of rising to leave, I looked over at her hand.

“Tell me something,” I said. “When you found your mother’s ring, you said the cord that held it had been spiked to the door.”

“Yes.”

“What did the djinn use as a spike?”

A long, long pause. Then, softly, “Her dagger.”

“Uh-huh.” I reached down into my boot and drew out Aribah’s, once Salihah Shiham’s, shadow-edged dagger and placed it beside her on the turf. “In that case, I
apologize. I never should have taken this from you in the first place. And your grandfather should never have made you give it back.”

“You had no way of knowing—”

“No, but he did.”

I watched as she reached out and took up the blade. A soft hiccup of a laugh, a gentle stroke along the handle. She lowered her scarf and gently kissed the weapon, then slipped it into the
darkness of her robes.

“Don’t take this the wrong way,” I said, “but your grandfather’s an asshole.”

A soft sigh. She kept the scarf down. “A truth is a truth: as such, it can never be taken wrong.”

“Is that your grandfather talking?”

“The holy books.”

“Oh.” I looked back out over the grass. I should be up and going; should be cracking Heron’s ken before it got too late. I didn’t move. “What do those books say
about changing a truth?”

“What do you mean? Lies?”

“No, not lies. The opposite of a truth doesn’t have to be a lie.”

Aribah narrowed her eyes, curious and dubious at once. “But then . . . what?”

“Another truth,” I said. “A different one. One that you make for yourself.” Instead of, I thought, letting your grandfather do it.

“I don’t . . .” She shook her head. “How does one ‘make truth’? Something is either true or it isn’t.”

“Not when it comes to you. When it comes to you, you can decide on the truth about yourself.” I glanced out into the night, considered my circumstances and what had brought me here.
“Well, up to a point, anyhow.”

Aribah stared at me for a long moment. “You mean my grandfather, don’t you?” she said, her voice turning brittle, along with the rest of her. “You mean I should tell him
I’m not my mother. He knows that, believe me. I’m reminded of the fact every day.”

“No,” I said. “I mean you should tell him to go to hell and walk away.”

“What?”
She had the presence of mind to keep the outburst to a whisper—barely—but still, I flinched. “Leave him? Leave my school? He’s my blood, my
clan
. I’m
neyajin
—we don’t walk away.”

“Then maybe you should start.”

She was on her feet in an instant, a dark smudge against the night. “You know nothing about what it means to be
neyajin
, nothing about what it means to serve your people, to be
part of something larger than—”

“Than what?” I said. “You said yourself he’s the last of your blood. You belong to a clan of two, Aribah, and half of that clan treats you like dirt.” I sat up on
the grass. “You think I don’t know what it’s like to belong to something bigger than yourself? I
am
something bigger than myself: I have people cheating and lying and
dying for me right now, hundreds of miles away—coves I don’t even know. Coves I don’t want to have under me. But they all look to me for direction and answers anyhow, because
their
truths say I have those answers. Well, here’s the answer: I don’t have one. And neither do you. And neither does your grandfather. We’re all just making our truths
up as we go.”

“No.” She shook her head. “No. It’s not that simple for me. Maybe for you, maybe in your Empire, bonds are broken and truths are molded to your liking, but not here. Not
in Djan. Here, you are nothing without your clan, without your family. And yes, he may be the only blood I have, but there is also the school. They are mine and I am theirs.”

“But they aren’t your blood,” I said. “They aren’t your clan, right?”

“They . . .” She sighed and sat down and looked at the ring on her hand. “No, they’re not clan—not my clan. They come from other tribes, other traditions.
They’re here because of Grandfather, because of his Black Cord.”

“And when he’s gone?”

Aribah shook her head. “The school will become mine, but . . . will they stay? I don’t know.”

“You know,” I said.

“It’s complicated.”

“No, it’s not. It’s as simple as you want it to be.”

She stayed silent.

“You want to know a truth?” I said. “Here’s mine: I’m a street-level sneak trying to pass himself off as some sort of criminal genius. I didn’t choose that
truth, but it’s the one I’m stuck with. But before that, I made my own truth: I worked the streets and sifted secrets and carved out my own path. It wasn’t until I stepped away
from the truth I’d made that someone else started to define it for me.”

“And now? What is your truth now?”

“It’s . . . complicated.”

She smiled. “Only if you let it be.”

I smiled back. “Maybe so, but we’re not talking about me.”