Page 22 of Dark Bringer (Lord of Everfell #1)

Kal

T he riverboat bumped against the wooden pilings of Pota Pras’s quay, sending a shudder through the deck. Kal tugged her watch cap lower, tucking in stray wisps of her springy brown hair. There was no sign of the cypher she’d spotted earlier, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t being hunted.

She shuffled forward with the line of disembarking passengers as a train whistle pierced the morning air. The Zamir Hills Express, preparing for its journey into the heart of mining country. Once, that sound had represented opportunity. Now it was just another grim reminder of all her mistakes.

Four witches patrolled the wharf, their rings and bracelets winking in the late afternoon sun. A pair of caracals stalked beside them, fur rippling over muscled shoulders. The beasts stood waist-high to their handlers, alert and deadly.

There were always witches at the quay since a Sinn attack had burned two dockside warehouses to the ground last year. They watched the skies, not the passengers, but Kal’s skin still prickled as she walked past them.

In her mind’s eye, she kept seeing Durian hit the river and not come up.

If they knew his name, they’d know her name, too, and where she came from.

But she couldn’t run far without identity papers.

She also needed her savings, the stash she’d been hoarding since she was ten and sold her first find, a Sinn tooth that was bone-white and as long as her hand.

Thank Travian she’d had the sense to buy round-trip tickets when they left Pota Pras. Otherwise, she would have been walking for days to get home.

Home . Her heart lurched. How could it be home without her best friend? Her fellow oddball and dreamer, who insisted that anything was possible. Part of her refused to accept that he was gone. It was another boy they’d found. Kota Gelangi was a huge city.

The crowds thinned, dispersing into the dusty streets. Kal blended with a group of miners. Three steps later, a shoulder collided with hers, hard enough to make her stumble.

“I beg your pardon,” said a deep voice with a crisp Kirithi accent.

Kal looked up into a pair of golden eyes ringed with green. The man was tall and darkly handsome, with broad shoulders and coal-black hair. His clothes were fine, so he must be one of the agents who worked for the mining conglomerates.

The cypher from the riverboat stood behind him. Kal nearly shit a brick.

She muttered an apology and tried to move past, but he gripped her sleeve, the pressure light but inescapable. “I’m a stranger to Pota Pras,” he said. “Perhaps you could assist me?”

One of the witches had turned to watch them. Kal desperately wanted to get away.

“Sure,” she said with false cheer, “where to?”

“I’m looking for Elisabetta Street.”

Kal didn’t react through sheer force of will. “You a scribbler?” she asked, eyeing his hands. No ink stains.

He shook his head. “A friend of the Padulski family. Maybe you know them?”

Durian’s mother had no friends besides the other cleaning women she worked with, and a few from the Cult of the Bard. Certainly none who dressed like this man.

“Sorry, I don’t,” Kal said. “But I can give you directions to Elisabetta Street.” She pointed in the opposite direction from Durian’s house. “Five blocks that way. Turn left past the concrete air attack shelter, then right at the school. About a mile or so. It’s near the tannery.”

Let him smell that poxy stench while he figured out the right way.

“I’m most obliged.” His wolfish eyes lingered on her face. There was an intensity to him, a sense of hidden power that made her teeth ache.

“Happy to help,” she chirped brightly, and slipped into the crowd.

Kal counted to twenty before glancing over her shoulder.

The man and the cypher were actually following her directions, and the witches with their caracals had moved on.

Relief made her giddy. She walked fast, turning at the first corner.

When she was alone, she squeezed her pocket, feeling the hard lump of the kaldurite stones.

In and out. Go home, grab her savings, and disappear again—this time for good.

* * *

The houses grew shabbier the farther she got from the downtown landing, but it was a familiar route.

Kal knew the places where wild columbine poked through cracks in the sidewalk, where she and Durian would pick cherries in summer.

The buckled asphalt where she’d tripped and skinned her knee when she was nine.

A gang of kids stood in a weedy lot, arguing over the rules of some game. Kal nodded at three men lounging in folding chairs outside the tobacconist’s shop. They were smoking and talking about the special election. Whether the Miners’ Union would finally get a majority in the Assembly.

People in Pota Pras hated the witches, but they hated Casolaba’s Freedom League even more.

When she got close to Elisabetta Street, Kal cut through backyards. She knew the dogs and they didn’t bark. Five more blocks and she was home, a single-story cinderblock box with a basement bunker in case of Sinn attacks.

The neighborhood, which everyone called the East Side, had been built as worker housing by the Carvajal mining company.

A witch family, of course. Witches owned everything in Pota Pras.

The Carvajals had twelve daughters and named the streets after them.

All the houses looked alike except for the little touches added by the people who lived there.

Kal’s house had green shutters framing the windows and a birdhouse she’d made herself and mounted on a pole that doubled as one side of the laundry line. There were usually clothes flapping from it in the steady, dry sirocco winds, but today it was bare. Not a good sign.

She watched from cover for a while, trying to figure out if it was safe to go inside.

She didn’t want to wait too long because the rich man and his pet cypher would be figuring out she’d bamboozled them right about now and heading back this way.

Plus, the last riverboat left at dusk, and she couldn’t risk being stuck here overnight.

It was much easier to hide among the surging throngs of the city.

At last, she slunk to the back door, opened it a quarter of the way, just before the hinge creaked, and slipped inside. The moment she closed and latched the door, a floorboard groaned just outside the kitchen. She grabbed a cast-iron pan from the stovetop.

Kal held her breath, edging toward the doorway. A shadow moved across the wall. She raised the pan, pulse thundering, and stepped around the corner?—

“Whoa!” A familiar figure stumbled back, hands raised. “Take it easy, sis!”

Kal lowered the pan. “Bastian? You scared the shit out of me!”

Her elder brother stood before her, dark braided locks spilling down his back, horn-rimmed glasses slightly askew. He should have been in Kirith poring over astronomy charts, not facing her with fear and relief battling in his eyes.

“What are you—” she began, then felt her breath whoosh out as he pulled her into a crushing hug.

“You’re alive,” he whispered. “After what happened to Durian, I thought . . . I was so worried!”

Kal inhaled the familiar scent of floral soap they all teased Bastian about, her throat closing with grief. “So he really is . . . I’d hoped . . .”

The tears she’d held back for two days burst, and she wept on her brother’s shoulder. He held her just as he had when they were kids and shewas upset about something, stroking her back and planting kisses on the side of her head.

“Why aren’t you at Faraday?” she sniffled when the worst of it had blown over. “Term’s not done yet.”

Bastian was the smartest of the Machena brood. He’d won a full scholarship to study abroad in Arioch.

“Festival of Caelum the Wanderer,” he explained. “It’s a big deal. All the schools close except for Merry Sharpe. We get a month off.” He pulled back, expression darkening. “But that doesn’t matter. What happened, Kal? The cyphers brought Durian’s body back yesterday.”

Her shoulders tensed. “Where is everyone? Mom and Dad? Jett and Jinx?” Those were her twin brothers, both younger by three years.

“On a two-week surveying gig. They left before . . . before everything happened. I haven’t been able to reach them.” Bastian pushed his glasses to his forehead. “Witches came looking for you, Kal. They asked questions all over the East Side.”

“Witches?” Her pulse ticked up a notch. “When?”

“A few days ago.”

“How many days exactly? It’s important, Baz.”

He frowned, calculating. “Six. I’d just gotten home.”

Kal’s mind raced. That was before Durian’s body was pulled from the river.

“What did they look like?”

“Well, they weren’t regular witches. In Arioch, people call them Jennies. White Foxes. One had these, like, metal teeth. Freaked me out.”

Kal swore. “The jeweler,” she said. “D’Amato. They must have tracked us through him.” She slumped. “Everyone knows the witches have eyes in the gem district. We were so stupid, Baz. We thought we’d found something valuable.”

“What was it?” Bastian asked, leaning forward.

Kal reached into her pocket and showed him one of the stones, its facets gliding from blue to violet to deep red as it caught the light from the window. He gave a low whistle.

“Serpent’s eye?” he asked.

“That’s what I thought, too, but there are subtle differences. We named it kaldurite. But when we took the stones to Kota, all the brokers said they were empty of ley. Worthless except as pretty baubles.”

Her brother frowned. “That’s weird.”

“We needed money so we sold a few to a jeweler named D’Amato.

Durian let slip that there was more. D’Amato must have told the witches.

They found us the next day.” She swallowed a hot lump.

“Durian handed his stones over. They had no reason to hurt him, except they did anyway. When we tried to run, they used a spell. He went flying into the river . . .”