These Rebel Waves Page 11

  Lu swallowed. No more tears; please, no more tears. “Yes, Mother.”

  Kari jerked away, as though to linger would break her resolve. Tom took her place, pressing a kiss to Lu’s forehead while Kari gathered her notes for the meeting.

  “I know it may be tempting, with your knowledge of magic, to seek easy salves for grief. . . .” Tom paused. “You’re stronger than any magic you think you need, Lulu-bean.”

  She stiffened. “You’ve called me that more this week than you have in years.”

  Why stir up the memories that nickname brought? Memories of Kari weeping while she thought Lu slept, telling Tom how she hated that life had forced them to use their child as a spy. Memories of Tom teaching Lu how to defend herself with a blade. Memories of him waiting for her after missions, holding her while she trembled in his arms.

  “Lulu-bean,” he’d said. “I’m so sorry. . . . I’m so proud of you, Lulu-bean. . . .”

  She snapped her head to the side as though to dislodge the memories. That time was finished. The things she had done, the acts she had committed, had brought about peace. And they had been Tom’s doing, as he had told her. She was not at fault—the fault was with him.

  How many times had she repeated that to herself?

  Now Tom smiled. “Do you remember the dog you used to play with after the war?”

  He waited until she nodded.

  “We would go to the market,” he said. “It would jump all over you. It made you so . . . happy.” He paused, eyes tearing. “That is how I wish you to be. My happy Lulu-bean.”

  Lu’s eyes dampened. “Father—”

  But he cut her off with another kiss on her forehead, and her parents left.

  Again, the urge to crumple under grief nearly undid her. Her parents were always able to drag her true emotions out regardless of how well she pushed them down.

  It was the final urging she needed to slip back into her room, where Teo slept.

  Lu’s parents had their own people looking into possible conspiracies, but Argrid had likely expected such retaliation and accounted for it. But no one expected Lu. And no one would expect her to enlist the help of the most notorious stream raider on Grace Loray to find Milo Ibarra.

  Her parents were the leaders, coordinating and strategizing. But Lu was the soldier.

  The thought of being that person again, coupled with Tom calling her Lulu-bean still so raw on the air, shot horror through her. She looked at her hands as she had done during the war—sometimes, they were covered in blood. But most of the time, they were clean.

  No. Lu knew the truth. It baffled her that her hands could ever look clean. Even in a midnight alley, when it had been self-defense against a drunken man who had followed her from a tavern where Tom had sent her to spy, and the night had been so black that all color was gone in the nothingness—she could still feel it, in the crevices between her fingers.

  Blood.

  Was the current upheaval punishment for Lu thinking she could have peace? To tease her with getting so close to a place where she could while away her days making magic concoctions, only to rip it away as a cruel reminder that she had done nothing to deserve such a life.

  Annalisa was dead. Grace Loray was being threatened. Lu may not have been deserving of peace, but others were, and she would do what she had done during the war: fight for them.

  First, a change of clothes—no stays, not even a shift, and her loosest jacket and petticoat.

  Next, vials and vials of plants. Combinations she had made over the years, everything from explosives to healing balms, as many as she could fit in her satchel. Then, a note.

  The repercussions of my actions should fall on me alone. I act without the provocation of my parents or Mr. Bell.

  Writing it unraveled the facade she had worn since the war had ended. It could destroy her parents’ positions, despite stating that they were not involved. The Council would see that a Senior’s daughter had freed the criminal at the center of this mess.

  Lu crumpled the paper and started again.

  In the wake of Annalisa’s death, I realize the brevity of life—and I must follow my heart with Devereux. Mother, Father, forgive my defiance. This is what I have to do.

  She nearly retched writing the lie. But the result would be less troublesome—the soldiers would corroborate her earlier visit with Vex, and the conclusion would be that she had absconded with a raider to escape her despair over Annalisa’s passing.

  No politics. Nothing but sympathy for her parents or anger that they had been lax with their daughter.

  Lu left the note on her desk, checking over her shoulder to make sure Teo slept.

  At the back of her armoire, buried beneath shifts and petticoats and silken things she had armored herself with for the past five years, sat a bag Lu had tried to forget. She eased it out, the weapons within clanking, and Teo groaned in his sleep. Half of her hoped he would awaken and ask the questions that would stop her.

  “Lu, what are you doing? What’s in the bag? Are you leaving me too?”

  Lu swallowed her regret, told the servant cleaning up the breakfast spread to watch over Teo, and slipped out of her family’s suite.

  There were two explanations for Milo’s disappearance: either he had staged it, or he had been abducted—unlikely, given that the outcome had aligned in Argrid’s favor, and no other parties had made demands or claimed to have him. Regardless of the cause, the Council would blame the raiders, and war would come. What, then, could undermine Argrid’s attempts at painting the raiders as villains that the Council should eradicate?

  If a raider brought Milo back to court, not as a captor but as a heroic savior.

  If Lu got Devereux Bell to seek out Milo Ibarra, find him, and drag him back to the Council, the Argridians would have to admit gratitude—or their conspiracy would be revealed. The raiders would also have to be grateful, for saving them from another brutal war and proving their innocence. It could lead to the raiders swearing fealty to Grace Loray’s Council, after the proof of the benefits the Council could offer that syndicates could not.

  Argrid may have expected people like Kari or Tom to send spies in search of the truth—but they would not expect a girl to ally with a raider and use his channels to seek out places an Argridian might be hiding on this island.

  Devereux knew Grace Loray better than anyone—and Lu would make him find Milo Ibarra.

  She hurried through the castle, not letting herself think on what this meant. That she was willingly searching out Milo. Did Argrid want revenge for the revolution? Were they seeking to reclaim Grace Loray? No matter. Lu would find Milo. The treaty would dissolve, and Argrid would at long last leave Grace Loray alone—possibly in a peace stronger than it had yet seen, if the raiders complied and unified with them.

  This would be good. This had to be good.

  Two guards stood at attention in the soldiers’ alcove, the same two who had been on duty when last she had visited.

  “Back again, Miss Andreu?” one jeered. They knew her now.

  “It was Adeluna!” they would tell her parents. “Your daughter attacked us. . . .”

  Lu adjusted her satchel. The looseness of her clothes hid her fist in the folds of her petticoat—and the long, thin reed she had clasped in her palm. “Would it be too much trouble to see Mr. Bell? I hear he is to be on trial, and— I mean, I’m sure he has gotten little support—”

  The soldier chuckled, his hand going to the ring on his belt. He fingered one key in particular—black, longer than the others. It was all she needed.

  The proper lady was gone. She needed to be a soldier now.

  She lifted the reed to her lips and blew. The contraption’s end opened, releasing some of the Drooping Fern smoke trapped within. A cloud of gray haze fanned around the first soldier’s face, then the second as Lu shifted the reed to him.

  They didn’t have time to gape at her—they inhaled, and went down.

  Lu covered her nose and mouth, the Droopi
ng Fern hovering in the air, and grabbed the key ring from the soldier’s belt.

  With each day that passed without a member of Vex’s crew appearing, he doubted his plan to avoid Argrid in jail. Well, he’d doubted his plan the moment he’d been recognized in the communal cell, but he really began to doubt it when three days had passed and he hadn’t gotten even a coded message about an imminent rescue. He, Nayeli, and Edda had managed to save each other from every raider syndicate on the island, as well as other Council prisons—this one should’ve been no different.

  When the door opened again, Vex was sitting on the bench, elbows on his knees as he rolled possible escape routes through his mind. And came up with a grand total of zero plans.

  He hung his head on a long groan.

  “Miss, we can’t allow you in here today.”

  Vex whipped his head up. The girl was standing in front of his cell, pouting at the guards.

  “Oh, the other men said it would be all right.” Her voice was more feminine than when she’d talked to Vex—Nayeli did that whenever she wanted to sway men to do her bidding.

  The girl had something planned.

  Her hands were behind her back. When a soldier stepped forward to intercept her, she lifted a reed and blew a cloud in his face.

  The soldier dropped. The girl spun around him and blew the last of the smoke in the final soldier’s face. He fell, joining his comrade in what would be a long nap.

  By this time, Vex was standing, hands out, his brain making a long, high-pitched shrieking noise.

  The girl held up a key ring. “General Ibarra is missing,” she said to him. “The Argridians used his abduction to pass a bill to eradicate raiders on Grace Loray—and your death will be one of the first. You can either stay and die, or you can come with me.”

  Vex rubbed his eye. “I’m hallucinating. You drugged me too.”

  “If I drugged you, you wouldn’t be aware until the effects had already taken hold.”

  In the time Vex had known her, this girl had been a common market patron, a levelheaded politician’s daughter, an expert in botanical magic, and now . . . an assassin, by the looks of it. The guards weren’t dead, but she didn’t seem at all moved by what she’d done.

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “To prevent war, I want you to help me find General Ibarra—and learn the truth of what happened to him.”

  “Wait—you want me to help you rescue one of the politicians who want me dead?”

  “If a raider saves him, it will be harder to garner public support against them,” she said. “And you know Grace Loray better than anyone. You know parts of this island I don’t, where a missing man might be. And you have access to, shall we say, unsavory fellows who might hear news that would not reach respectable society. Regardless of my reasons, I’m offering you a chance at freedom. Why are you hesitating?”

  Vex smiled, but the expression was cold. “I’m trying to figure out what would possess one of Grace Loray’s prim daughters to make such a deal. You know what they say about me, right? Or did my unfettered charm and dashing good looks make you forget that I’m a criminal? What’s to stop me from leaving you once we get out of this castle?”

  The girl held up the empty reed. “I’ll give you any botanical magic concoction you desire. Concoctions that other raiders haven’t yet dreamed of.”

  Vex gave a disinterested shrug. “Drooping Fern is so common in my profession that you’d have to give me boatloads of those reeds to make it worth even a hundred galles.”

  Her nostrils flared. “That balm I gave you,” she said. “You used it?”

  Vex straightened. Obviously he had—his face was healed, the bruises and cuts gone.

  “You know it was not Digestive Death.” She rummaged through her satchel to come up with another jar. “This, however, is a poison. Sweet Peat. Consumption dissolves anyone’s internal organs, but what many don’t know is that its effects can be used on . . . other things.”

  She tossed the key ring away before tipping the jar’s contents onto the lock. The poison started to eat the metal; in seconds, the lock was a foaming blob on the floor.

  Vex let out a whistle. He’d come across Sweet Peat before, and he’d always destroyed it. The poison was so powerful, with no plant to neutralize it, that he didn’t trust it to be resold—things like Sweet Peat almost made him understand why the Church had condemned magic.

  But he had never heard of it being used like this. Escaping cells, breaking into safes—a single jar of stuff with that potential would go for a couple hundred galles to the right raider.

  He could almost hear Nayeli’s excited squeal. Forget retiring in a mansion somewhere—concoctions like this could let them buy a whole goddamn port.

  “With this kind of magic, you could be extremely wealthy yourself,” he said.

  The girl slid the jar back into her bag. “I deal honorably. Unless the situation calls for it.”

  He beamed at her. “Wicked princesa.”

  “Politician.”

  “I don’t know why you keep bragging about that.”

  “Your answer?” she pressed.

  It was a way out. If he got enough magic to let him and his crew retire somewhere nice and fancy on top of it, he’d be a fool to pass it up.

  But damn it if this girl didn’t poke at his feelings of guilt and responsibility. Her plan sounded sane enough: find this Ibarra fellow, return him to the Council.

  Vex almost told her the whole truth—but he doubted she’d work with him if she found out he did have Argridian connections. He was being blackmailed by them, but still.

  He nodded. The girl didn’t waste a beat and started up the hall, pulling her black curls into a knot. Vex strode out of the cell. The melted lock hissed on the stones. Damn.

  When he got into the soldiers’ alcove, his mix of shock and awe only increased. The two other guards were unconscious—and the girl was stripping off her dress.

  Enough reasoning broke through for him to note that there was another outfit under her gown: breeches, boots, a black shirt and vest, and holsters for all manner of weapons strapped across her torso. But everything in Vex’s body went rigid.

  “You took off your dress,” he stated. He should’ve been more concerned by the goddamn arsenal on her chest, but his brain wouldn’t let the other fact go.

  She frowned. “I didn’t take you for someone who cared about decorum.”

  Footsteps slapped the staircase. Vex jerked toward the sound, but the girl moved first.

  A soldier entered the alcove. The girl fell to her hands, swung her leg out, and caught the guard’s ankles. He flopped to his backside and the girl stood to bring her heel onto his neck with enough pressure to render him unconscious like the others.

  “I wasn’t sure I’d remember how to do that,” the girl admitted.

  Vex choked, laughed, choked again. “Who are you?”

  She took a moment to steady herself, but when she looked up at Vex, she smiled.

  It was the smile Nayeli gave when she was about to suggest blowing someone up.

  “I’m Adeluna—Lu,” the girl told him. “Former soldier of the revolution.”

  Rhodofume

  Availability: fairly common

  Location: clay deposits in riverbeds

  Appearance: bushy flowers that contain brown pods

  Method: pod is thrown and strikes a hard surface

  Use: smoke screen

  11

  “SOLDIER,” THE RAIDER repeated. “During the revolution. You were a soldier during the revolution.”

  Lu clenched her jaw, already regretting divulging that information, and took the stairs leading out of the dungeon’s alcove. Vex followed.

  “How?” he asked, not bothering to lower his voice until she shushed him. “You were a kid during the revolution. There’s no way you could’ve been a soldier.”

  Lu stopped in the middle of the staircase and spun around. Vex didn’t recoil, even now that he kn
ew what kind of person he stared up at.

  “Should we talk or escape?” she said. “At this point, I almost do not care.”

  Vex waved her on. “Fine, Princesa. You won’t hear another word from me.”

  “I doubt that.”

  “Ah, see? We know each other so well already.”

  Lu resumed walking—stomping—up the stairs. They reached the landing, a long hall that ran parallel to the Council’s courtroom. Four doors lined the walls: two led into the courtroom, one led to the castle’s entryway, and one to servants’ halls.

  Only two of the doors would provide escape. The entryway, though, was almost as risky as hauling Vex through the courtroom itself.

  The servants’ halls. Out the kitchen. Or a window—yes, a window.

  Plan formed, Lu launched herself out of the stairwell, sprinting for the door on the right. Vex followed, and despite his senseless chatter before, he moved silently now—she had to glance back to assure herself that he hadn’t run off.

  If he does? What will you do?

  Lie was her instant response. Claim our elopement went sour. And figure out some other way to save Grace Loray.

  Lu opened the servants’ door. An empty hall branched out before her, lit by a line of first-floor windows that offered a jarring drop to the kitchen gardens. Beyond them, Lu could see the wall that surrounded the castle grounds, the blue sky bright above.

  She raced ahead and yanked on the first window. It slid easily—too easily. The glass slammed into the casement above with a bang that echoed down the hall.

  Lu held her breath as Vex leaned beside her. His seriousness surprised her, so she didn’t immediately notice that he was looking not out the window, but back down the hall.

  Lu whirled, willing herself not to reach for her weapons.

  But when she saw who it was, she wheezed. “Teo?”

  He stood on the threshold of the servants’ hall. “Lu. Where are you going?”

  Teo’s eyes went to Vex. For a moment, the joy on his face was such a welcome reprieve from his grief that Lu didn’t care what had caused it. Let him be happy.

  “Lu!” Teo squealed. “Devereux Bell! What are you doing? I want to come!”