Chapter One
Shades of the Past
A WINGED SHADOW rippled over the undulating hills—a phantom of the past, a ghost of the future—sending a chill through Mara’s heart. She hadn’t expected to see it here or now. What could it mean?
She squinted up at the overbright sky where the buzzard circled. It was a dark shape against the cloudless blue of the heavens. Another joined it. Then another. All of them descending in ever-narrowing circles onto a jagged outcrop where the butt end of a spear had been driven into the earth with a human head rammed onto its point.
Great birds perched around the grisly trophy like old men squabbling over a feast. The heralds of the gods of war had come around again, and Mara wished she’d never seen them.
Settling onto her belly, she wriggled through the brown grass to the top of the rise for a better view. Dust swirled about her head, tasting of dried grass and smelling like newly cut straw. The Morcian sun beat down upon her with relentless fury. Sweat beaded on her brow as she parted the grass with the tip of her double-bladed spear to study the scene. Her brow furrowed. This isn’t what she had expected in the grasslands south of the city of Kirn. She and her small army were far from the border, where sporadic fighting between the Dashneri from the southern desert and the Morcians had continued since the Dashneri invasion a year before.
The grass swished behind her, and she glanced back to see her husband Jack crawling up beside her. His thick hair was damp with sweat, and his muscles bulged under the close-fitting tunic. She couldn’t decide if she preferred him bald, like he had been when she first met him at Kirn, or with a crop of wiry dark hair as he was now. It had been little more than a year since they wed.
“Why do I let you drag me into these things?” he mumbled.
“Because you enjoy it,” Mara said, nudging his shoulder. “Now, hush a minute.”
She listened to the sounds rising from the narrow ravine in front of them. Her training as an assassin in the Order of the Rook had taught her to trust her instincts and use all of her senses. A human voice floated over the battlefield, weak and fleeting like the fluttering of a butterfly. She paused to listen, but it did not come again.
Jack grinned at her and wiggled his ears in that odd way of his. Mara smiled. Jack may have been elevated to the position of steward of King Peyton’s household, but inside, he was still the jester who loved to poke fun and win smiles. He retained the strong physique of a tumbler, but the stiff way he moved showed that the back injury he received in the battle with Cormag continued to pain him.
Mara returned her attention to the outcrop on the other side of the ravine. Corpses lay scattered around its base. A crow flapped to the ground to join the others picking at the swollen bodies.
“Looks like a battle,” Jack said.
“A massacre,” Mara corrected. “They’re all Dashneri.” She could tell by the long, loose tunics they wore and the brightly colored cloths—or lithams—that wound around their heads to protect them from the sun. No people north of the Denlani Mountains wore such headgear.
“But what are they doing this far from their own lands?” Jack whispered. “And who attacked them? Peyton doesn’t have any scouts in this area, and I heard nothing of any skirmishes anywhere near here.”
Crows squawked and beat their wings. Buzzards flapped into the air.
“Someone’s still moving down there,” Mara said.
“Should I get the others?”
Mara frowned. This was supposed to be a training exercise in learning how to coordinate movements over long distances for her growing band of warriors. King Peyton of Morcia had allowed her to gather and train warriors to seek out and destroy any remnant of the assassins known as the Order of the Rook, to which she had belonged. As the wife of his new steward, she now enjoyed more power than she was accustomed to having. She hadn’t planned on investigating a massacre, but she may as well make the most of it.
“Yes. Send the red squad around the southern end, the green squad to the northern, and split the white squad so that half occupy this rise and half come up behind that outcrop.”
Jack nodded and scooted back from the crest. He used his signal flag to send the orders to the hundred and fifty men and women crouching in the wash at the base of the hill. Mara waited until the three squads had circled around the hill in either direction, and half of the white squad had crawled up to Jack. She surveyed them with pride. In less than a year, she and Jack had created a force of warriors dedicated to using power for good. She had employed her training in the now extinct Order of the Rook well.
Each warrior held a short recurve bow, an arming sword at their hip, a belt knife, and a thick, padded jacket. The women and men with long hair bound it at the base of their necks to keep it out of the way. Their leather skullcaps fit snug on their heads, with side flaps tied under their chins. They also wore loose-fitting, durable trousers, and supple leather boots. Each carried a satchel and a waterskin slung over one shoulder.
Mara needed her warriors mobile and flexible, so she made sure their clothing and equipment were designed for battle and scouting. She didn’t want them to resemble assassins, but she had no intention of forgetting the lessons she’d learned in the hard life on Nairn, where she’d grown up surrounded by men trained to kill.
Her small army had left Kirn at midnight and traveled all morning, practicing communications with lights and horns in the darkness. When daylight came, they switched to flags and signal mirrors. They had been moving in three columns, separated by several hundred yards, until Mara spotted the circling buzzards and decided to investigate. She had signaled for her army to converge on the wash, from which they had dispersed to follow her orders.
The warriors of the white squad crouched in the tall grass, peering up at her, somber-faced. She knew each of them by name. Knew their stories and what secret terrors or desperate aspirations that had driven them to her. Most were apprentices or journeymen of the Order of the Rook who had survived the butchery of Nairn when the masters had seized power so they could begin their war on the kings of Frei-Ock Mor and the Southlands. The rest were orphans who survived the war, which had come to a grisly end a year before, or outcasts who had adopted a life of crime. Mara and Jack had drawn them from the streets and given them something to live for, something to fight for. In that, she wasn’t so different from the Order of the Rook, but she was determined to ensure they used their weapons and skills for good.
Mara slipped away from the crest and knelt on the hillside to explain their next move. “I want you to spread out below the crest here without exposing yourselves,” she said. “Two arm’s-length distance between you. Have an arrow nocked and be ready for anything.” She paused to peer at their sweaty faces.
“This is not a drill,” she whispered. “We have a valley filled with bodies, and we’re going to investigate. Be careful.”
The twenty-five men and women with white bandanas tied around their left biceps exchanged curious glances.
“And what will you be doing?” Jack said. He wore that look that told her he had already read her mind.
“I’m going down there. Cover me.” She prepared to leave, but Jack grabbed her arm.
“I don’t think so,” he said.
Mara sighed. “Please Jack, do as I say. Peyton will want to know what happened here.”
“And I want you alive to tell him.”
“Just wait until I check it out.” Mara reached out to squeeze his free hand, and his hold slackened.
“I’ll be careful.”
Mara gripped her double-bladed spear in her right hand and crept to the top of the rise. She had her fighting sticks strapped across her back as usual, but after the battle with Ravana and Cormag, she embraced the use of the double-bladed spear that had saved her life.
She slid over the rise to the other side, taking care not to expose herself on the summit, and belly-crawled through the dry grass to a large boulder. Once behind it, she rose to a crouch and checked to make sure the red and green squads were in place on her right and left. She wouldn’t be able to see the other half of the white squad on the far side of the ravine. The sandy wash split around a pile of boulders with a stunted juniper growing out of the top. Corpses of horses and men were scattered about in small groups. The ghastly trophy on the spear loomed over the entire scene from the opposite hillside. Mara ghosted from boulder to boulder until she reached the first corpse at the bottom of the gravelly ravine.
The sickly-sweet smell turned her stomach and brought bile surging into her throat. She never got used to the stench of death. Forcing herself to ignore it, she bent over the Dashneri. An arrow, bearing four fletchings of vulture feathers in the fashion of the Dashneri, had penetrated his right side under the arm. Morcians and all the other peoples of the Frei-Ock Isles and the Southlands preferred goose feathers and three fletchings per arrow.
She furrowed her brow as she crept to the next body. He was also a Dashneri with a terrible sword wound to the neck. Slinking from body to body, she found that all were Dashneri with nut-brown skin and dark hair. Crows and buzzards hopped away from her, and she had to ignore the pecked-out eyes and oozing holes where they had been at work. Squadrons of flies danced like particles of blowing dust from one corpse to the next.
More than three dozen men lay moldering around the base of the rock outcrop. A couple of horses—long-legged breeds of the Dashneri, famed for their speed and endurance—had also died in the battle.
Mara squinted up at the gruesome head baking in the sun on top of the outcrop. What was going on here? Dashneri feuds were nothing new, but one taking place hundreds of miles north of their border was unheard of. How had they penetrated so deeply into Morcian territory without being noticed? They were north of Windemere on the west side of the Wolf River. Had they been riding toward the city of Kirn and King Peyton? Her stomach tightened. Whatever they were doing, this did not bode well.
A crunching of gravel sounded, and Mara spun into a crouch with her spear clutched in both hands, ready for battle. Carrion birds squawked and took flight in a flapping of wings. A Dashneri man lay prostrate on his back with the birds flocking around him. He waved a hand at them and croaked out some words in the Dashneri tongue.
Like all assassins trained by the Order of the Rook, Mara spoke the languages of the Frei-Ock Isles and the Southlands, but this man’s speech was so slurred she could not understand him. Glancing around to be sure no other men were still alive, she crept to his side. His eyes were closed, his breathing shallow. He wore fine silk clothes, and his fingers glittered with jewels. This was no average Dashneri warrior. He might be a clan chief or tribal leader of the Dashneri—called a Tsarib.
Mara kicked the curved sword away from his body and checked him for any hidden knives. He groaned and swatted at her, but did not open his eyes. When she was certain he was unarmed, she knelt beside him and lifted his head into her lap. After yanking the stopper from her waterskin with her teeth, she dribbled some water onto his parched lips. He twitched, shuddered, and then lurched up to grab the waterskin, spilling much of its precious contents.
“Easy,” Mara said in the Dashneri tongue. She tugged the waterskin from his hands and shoved him back to the ground. She kept him there by pressing a knee into his chest. His eyes fluttered open, and Mara flinched in surprise.
Where she had expected to see the deep brown eyes common to the Dashneri, she found eyes covered with white scars from the smallpox. Thinking he might still be infected, she scrambled away before realizing his face and hands bore the unsightly pockmarks left from the disease but not the oozing pustules of the disease itself.
She raised her hand to signal that it was safe for the others to come in, and her warriors entered the ravine, cautiously like she had trained them. Soon, the purple banner of Morcia with the golden wildcat in its center snapped in the breeze over the rise, followed by her own black standard with the single white arrow stitched across it at an angle. Mara had removed the red rook to distance herself from the old Order of the Rook as much as possible.
While she waited for them, she knelt beside the Dashneri and waved a hand in front of his eyes. He did not respond. The man was blind. Mara gave him another sip from her waterskin.
“Who are you?” she asked in her best Dashneri accent.
His hands fumbled for hers. “Daughter?” The speech of the Dashneri had a pleasant, lilting quality.
Mara let him take her hand. “What happened here? Why are you so far inside Morcia?”
“The Scorpion.” His face grew tight with fear. “He strikes.”
Mara glanced at the ground, thinking the man had been stung by a scorpion, but she saw none of the creatures about.
“What do you mean, Grandfather?” she said, using the formal term for an elder among the Dashneri as a sign of respect.
He slipped a gold ring from his finger. It was set with a single, deep purple amethyst. He pressed it into her hand. “He will come for this, Daughter. You must keep it from him.”
“Who?” she asked. She tucked the ring into her pocket. The man was clearly delirious. Did he even know where he was? Mara glanced at his blood-soaked kameez. How was he still alive?
“Grandfather, tell me what you are doing here.”
He rolled his sightless eyes toward the sound of her voice and opened his mouth. “He is coming for—”
The thrum of a bowstring sounded, and out of instinct, Mara threw herself flat against the ground. The arrow buzzed past her head.
Thwack!
The old man gasped. Mara raised her head to see a feathered shaft buried up to the fletching in the side of the old man’s chest. The arrow bore four fletchings.
Mara rolled away and came to her feet to find a Dashneri, wearing a long kameez and a blue litham, bounding up the hillside with a bow in one hand, angling to avoid Mara’s warriors.
“After him!” She sprang to follow. But he was too far ahead of her. By the time she reached the top of the hill, he had found a horse and was galloping south over the sweeping prairie. She would never catch him on foot. Where had the man been hiding? Or had he sneaked back to make sure the job was done?
“Ayara,” she shouted. The leader of the red squad jogged up to her. She was a big woman with a round face and a strong jaw. “How did he get past you?” she demanded.
“No one passed us,” Ayara said. Her eyes narrowed at the rebuke, but she made no other reply.
Mara gestured to the dead Dashneri with the arrow protruding from his chest. “How do you explain this then?” she snapped.
“He must have been hiding, hoping we would go away.” Ayara was a complicated woman with a frightening past, but she was also careful and calculating.
Mara heaved a sigh. She had been too hasty in her assessment of the situation and should not have taken it out on her warriors. “Spread out to scour this hillside. I don’t want any more surprises.”
Ayara saluted and trotted away.
“Mara,” Jack called. He stood on top of the outcrop beside the impaled head. “You’ll want to see this.”
“I very much doubt that.” She scrambled over the broken stone and up to the top of the outcrop.
Jack used the blade of his belt knife to push the long, dark hair away from the Dashneri’s right ear.
“What is it?” Mara leaned in close, covering her nose against the stench. Underneath a spatter of dried blood was a tiny red tattoo of a scorpion.
Mara straightened and scowled at Jack. “What does it mean?” She fished the amethyst ring out of her pocket to stare at it. The blind man had said the name “Scorpion.”
“Search me,” Jack said, “but how many people get tattoos like that behind their ears?”
“Could be a clan symbol,” Mara guessed.
“I’ve never heard of a Scorpion clan,” Jack said.
Mara stepped away from the macabre display and its awful stink. “That assassin was Dashneri, and he was riding a Dashneri horse.”
Jack glanced at the man who had given Mara the ring. “What did you get off of him?”
Mara opened her mouth to speak, when a high-pitched whistle rang out. She spun around as the signal arrow arced over the battlefield to stab into the earth at the base of the outcrop. Flags waved on the opposite hill, where half of the white company waited.
“Rider approaching,” Jack said, and together, they scurried down the hillside in a cascade of loose stone. A rider bearing the king’s standard paused on the ridge and then, seeing them, kicked his horse down the hillside.
When he reached them, he leaped from the saddle and saluted. “My Lord Steward,” he breathed, “and Lady Mara, the king demands that you return immediately.”
“Demands?” Jack said, raising an eyebrow.
“A messenger has arrived from Eliff.”
Mara gave Jack a questioning glance, but he shrugged.
“We’re on foot,” Jack said, “but you can ride back and tell him we’ll be there by nightfall.”
“Yes, my lord.” The messenger remounted and galloped back out of the valley.
“Life never gets dull with you around,” Jack said.
“I didn’t do anything,” Mara protested.
“You didn’t have to,” Jack wiggled his ears. “Trouble is drawn to you like flies to a garderobe.”
Mara smirked. “You certainly have a way with words.” She swatted at a blowfly buzzing around her face.
“Thank you, my dear.”
She couldn’t help but smile. Jack was impossible. She turned away from him to survey the battlefield. The land was pocked with corpses, like a diseased organism. A harvest of blood had been reaped, and only the chaff remained. Shades of the past reached for her from the dark shadows of Nairn and the life she so desperately wanted to leave behind. The specter of a future she could neither control nor predict loomed large before her.
Raising the amethyst ring so it caught the light of the rising sun, she glanced at Jack.
“It’s a pretty thing,” she said.
“Did you rob that old man?” Jack sniffed.
“Hardly,” Mara said. “He gave it to me. He said someone wanted it and to not let him get it.”
“Great. A pretty bauble that could bring the entire Dashneri nation down on our heads.”
“Or bring us allies in a tight place.”
Jack studied her. “Always thinking like an assassin.”
She gazed at the amethyst and nodded. “No point in denying what I am.”
“You mean what you were.”
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