Night of Masks and Knives (The Broken Kingdoms Book 4)

The bastard played me.

Between the slat houses, Hob kicked up mud as he dodged morning hawkers and dock men trudging to the fjord. He skirted around the corner of the last shanty, and I ran faster after him, boots sliding over the rain-soaked cobblestones.

I cupped my cheek where he sliced me with a damn shiv he called a knife, the smell of my blood had already wrinkled a few noses.

Blood had a tangy scent, but this was different. Mesmer, what some called mystics or magic, had a fetid aroma. And my blood reeked of it.

″Hob!” I shouted. He heard me because he let out one of his pitchy whimpers before he curled his scarecrow body through the broken window of an old cask shed.

I tore down a narrow alley but smashed into a tower of caged quail. Vials filled with ashy dust scattered free of my satchel. A curse escaped with my breath as I gathered each one, ignoring the quail merchant’s demands for payment for his broken cages.

Back on my feet, with my pack shouldered again, I hopped a small wooden fence and crouched in the space between the fishmonger and a fair-sized goat pen.

The slap of oversized shoes echoed on the stones. My fingers twitched at my sides. A wheeze from his herb-smoke lungs drew closer, and the moment his lanky body came into view, I lunged.

Hob might’ve been a head taller, a few turns older, but even scrawny as I was, he folded like a wet piece of parchment.

″Malin! There you are,” he said with a start. Hob used his shaky thumb to wipe away some of the blood on my cheek. “You ought to cover up the smell. The skydguard is on patrol, and hells, I’d hate for a young Alver to be found out here. Alone.”

I curled my fist around the collar of his jacket, dragging him behind the fishmonger’s shop. The trouble with being an Alver, a user of mesmer, was most of us ended up bartered and indentured to the Lord Magnate Ivar. A man who’d become a wretched connoisseur of Alvers, whose authority was the most feared and most revered in all four regions of the east.

Ivar ruled from the Black Palace a hundred lengths away, and I had no plans to be his shiny new ornament.

With Hob’s back to the wall, I held out my hand. “Give it to me.”

The hawker freed a nervous chuckle, reached for his leather coin purse, and pulled out a glass vial. “No harm, Malin. You know me, always looking for an opportunity. Buyers are out there, and since you had so many I thought, what’s one gone? Only one, that’s all.”

Once the vial was back in hand, I slapped him.

Hob curled over his knees and held a hand to the welt on his cheek. “Bleeding hells—”

I didn’t let him finish before the knife I kept tucked inside my boot was pressed to the sweat-soaked nape of his neck. Weak as he looked, Hob had a nasty streak. He trembled, but still smiled as though he thrived in danger and cutthroat deals.

″I’m hurt, Hob,” I said. “It’s one thing if you steal from me, but another when you try to get me picked by Ivar’s skydguard. I thought we had an understanding. You scavenge for me, and I keep your debts at the game hall managed.”

“We do,” he said hurriedly. “We have our understanding, it’s just I hock things. I could hardly help myself, but I would’ve split the cost with you. And the cut was an accident. Swear it on my wife’s life.”

″Ah, Hob, you mean it?” I tapped the point of my knife to his chin, sneering. “I’d be touched except you don’t have a wife.”

″If I did, I meant. If I did.”

What a rat. I withdrew my blade, and Hob slumped against the wall. He watched the vial return to my satchel. Those vials were my currency and infamy. They were my power. Dozens of desirable memories.

Each marked with a tell to remind me of whose memory I’d stolen. Woman with feathered wand. Dragonfly masked man. Captain with gold tooth. Hob had taken one called the ‘bloody affair’, for lack of a better description.

″You chose a good one,” I told him. “Quite brutal. The sort of thing a twisted mind would pay well to see.”

As Hob readied to sit on a compost box, I slapped him again.

″Three hells! What was that for?” He ripped off his knitted cap and held the threads to his blotchy face.

My fingers tangled into his greasy curls, wrenching his head back, so he looked straight at me. “Who did you plan to sell it to, Hob? To anyone but me these are only bone dust.”

Precisely, one little finger crushed into fine powder. All it took was a bit on my tongue and my mesmer unlocked the last breath, the final moments of the dead. I’d seen each memory inside my satchel and was more broken for it.

Hob shirked my hand from his hair, reached for an herb roll, cupping the end as he lit it. He dragged in a long breath, then puffed out a brown plume of smoke. “You can’t be the only one like you. Figured there’s got to be more.”

When he found an Alver like me, I’d love to know. I had questions.

The back door of the shop swung open, and the meaty fishmonger tossed a bucket filled with herring heads into the alley. He spared a glance our way. Doubtless we were an odd sight: a skinny woman with a knife, and a man at her feet. The fishmonger sniffed, brushed a bit of dust from his ratty beard, then slammed the door on us again.

Not such an unusual sight to see in the slums, after all.

Only once the door was bolted did I turn to Hob again. “It’s a good thing you have what I want,” I whispered. “Or I’d be rather keen to play the stunned damsel, and you the vicious thief.”

For the first time something like fear flickered through Hob’s eyes. “You’re gonna get yourself killed.”

″Oh, Hob. Don’t pretend you care about anyone but yourself.”

″Fine then. What’ll you give me for it?”

″Seeing how you stole from me I’d say that you’re still breathing is payment enough.” He didn’t know my mesmer couldn’t kill him, but the way Hob skirted around me like I’d burst into flames sometimes was only to my benefit.

To survive here, thieves and crooks needed to be clever. Vicious, even. I’d simply made myself cleverer. I’d become more vicious.

True, I lived on the hill. True, my stepfather had more penge than he knew how to spend, but what did it mean when I was nothing but a forgotten, unwed, unwanted burden of the man who’d taken on a woman with her infant daughter?

The woman died before I could walk.

I was left with a man who resented me, and two older stepbrothers. One who’d like to slit my throat for the sport of it. The other who loved me well, but had been locked in a Howl sea prison for two turns after a business deal went wrong in a distant kingdom.

I narrowed my glare. “Are we going to have any more trouble, Hob?”

″Not in the slightest.” Hob opened his arms and grinned villainously. “As you please, then. Have your way with me.”

I rolled my eyes. “It better be good.”

Before he could retort, I smashed my lips to his.

A kiss, strange as it seemed, was the swiftest way to take breath.

The same as final moments were scoured from the bone of a corpse, a living memory could only be taken through living breath.

Hob tasted like his sour herbs and sweat, and like always, enjoyed himself as I inhaled the memory. I jabbed my elbow into his ribs when he tried to slip his tongue in my mouth.

He laughed until I could draw no more and pulled back.

Familiar smoke came to my mind. I focused on it, ignoring the way Hob sneered as though he’d gotten the better half of the deal. Colors of white and ash and black twisted into bulbous shapes, sharp lines, and narrow points. Shapes transformed into movements, into voices from moments already gone.

Hob’s memory took me to the shore, crouched behind a thick oak tree. Blue moonlight shimmered on the glass of the Howl Sea. A longship docked at a port not fifteen lengths from here. On one side of the ship was a golden emblem of ribbon coiled around a haunting, smiling mask.

My stomach lurched.

″Seeing it now?” Hob asked, his voice muffled like he spoke to me underwater.

Crewmen from the longship carved through the smoke as they unloaded crates and totes. Even packed away, I could smell the spices, the sugars to be blown into thin candies, the sweet cherry liqueurs.

Through the haze a man appeared. Over his shoulders he wore a blue cloak so dark it looked black.

Wisps of smoke spun in ashy threads around his head, shaping the smooth gold face of his mask, the limp velvet strips of emerald fabric, down to the silver bells on each pointed end. A fool’s mask. A trickster.

He was the treasurer of the Masque av Aska.

A fine enough memory to take, but it was the second man who bore a familiar hardened scowl I knew too well.

″By the gods,” I muttered.

Hob’s eyes gleamed as he lit another herb roll. “Told you it’d be worth it. I know how to scavenge for secrets, girl.”

″My stepfather is . . .” Words turned to nothing but breath.

″Guarding the coffers for the bleeding masquerade.” Hob chuckled and slapped his bony leg. “Look at your connections. Tell me, Malin. What’s it like living in the hog piss while your daj holds enough clout to be trusted with the coffers for this turn’s festival?

″You hired me to find anything about the Masque av Aska.” Hob jabbed the herb roll at my face. “You start picking the pockets of a man like the treasurer, a man like Jens Strom—” Hob dragged in a long puff, holding his breath until he blew out the smoke with his words, ”—might as well slit your own throat.”

All gods. My stepfather was involved heavily in the masque this turn and it was no small feat.

The festival was the most anticipated event held at the Black Palace. Folk from all the regions surrounding the Howl came to see fortune tellers and Black Palace Alvers perform. They came to drink and eat, to watch tricks and illusions. To play the game of queens where wretched folk would try to don a boring glass ring.

Everyone loved to try on the ring that never fit quite right.

Held under heavy guard, they’d play, bending and twisting their fingers, desperate to make it fit. Then when it didn’t, they’d go about their drunken ways, telling fanciful tales of the lost heir to the throne. They’d praise our little plot of land for having the strength to thrive without a king or queen.

Because the one who fit the glass ring would wear the crown.

In truth, Ivar would never allow it. No doubt, he’d slit the throat of anyone who came close. The game was a ruse. A way to take more penge coin from drunken folk and keep them drowning in the revelry of the Masque av Aska.

But buried in the revelry was something more sinister.

Folk entered the masquerade, and some never came back out.

Unbidden, a boy’s frightened screams and ghostly images of the crowds barring me from him came to mind. Then, those screams faded until they were gone entirely. Like always, when I thought of the day I lost Kase, I coiled a few strands of my sunset red hair around my fingers until the unease settled in my stomach.

″Uh, Malin.” Hob swatted at my arm, drawing me out of the endless thoughts I could not escape. “If you wanted to dig into the masque, more than the treasurer that is, here come the folk you want.”

I followed his gaze to the haggard town square. A vise curled around my chest as folk gathered in tight lines at the approaching beat of rawhide drums. Perhaps the fates favored me after all.

Around the bend a Black Palace caravan rolled into view. Brightly colored ribbons and sashes marked the cabs and charges. Painted masks in silver and gold gleamed across the doors of each coach.

I clambered up a toppled cask, used one of Hob’s shoulders as a prop without his permission, then leveraged my legs over the sod rooftop of the fishmonger’s. With careful motions, I crept up the slope on my belly and peered into the square.

Ten heartbeats later, Hob’s breathless gasps settled beside me as he maneuvered his lanky body onto the rooftop. “What are we watching for now?”

″I’m watching there.” I gestured at the polished black coach pulling up to the towering rune post. The post was there to name our mangy township of Mörplatts as one officially protected by the gods.

If it made folk feel as if we mattered at all, let them have the runes.

My heart stilled in my chest when a man stepped out of the coach. Much like the Masque av Aska treasurer he wore a fool’s mask with black velvet folds bursting from the top. This mask, though, was made of pearl porcelain. Stamps of silver and bronze checkered across the brow.

By the skies—the Master of Ceremonies. The villain behind the wretchedness of the Masque av Aska. He was responsible for every corner, every drop of entertainment, everyone who was lost at the masquerade.

″Hells, this’ll be good,” Hob said with a twisted smirk. “Maybe your daj has connections to the master too.”

I’d puzzle through what connection Jens Strom had to the masquerade later, but now, I needed to listen.

The master stepped to the rune post, flanked by two Black Palace Alvers in shimmering silver cloaks. The color of Rifter mesmer. Wicked magic with the power of breaking bodies. Made a bit of sense such a powerful man would be surrounded by their Kind.

″Good people,” the Master shouted. His voice was deep, a low growl, no doubt altered by some type of mesmer from a Hypnotik—the illusionists of the kingdom. “Today begins the gathering for the Masque av Aska.”

A few weak hands clapped together. I rolled my eyes. Not like any pathetic folk in Mörplatts would have enough penge to attend the masquerade. Attending for someone like me wasn’t always so simple. The reason I used Hob to find any whiff of masquerade folk to give me clues on what happened to Kase all those turns ago.

The Master turned to the rune post and one of his Rifters pounded a spike through the top of an elegant piece of vellum.

″You might wonder why I’ve come to announce this turn’s masque.” Murmurs filtered through the crowd giving enough proof that folk were wondering why such a man would descend to the slums. The Master held up his gloved hands, bringing the crowd to a quiet again. “Lord Magnate Ivar is pleased to announce some alterations to the Masque av Aska. The first son of the Black Palace, our Heir Magnate Niall, seeks a bride.”

A hum of excitement replaced the murmurs. Why would any woman want such a man? If Ivar was vicious, Heir Magnate Niall was from the hells.

The Master allowed the chatter to go on for a few more breaths before he silenced the people. “The bride of the heir is a proud tradition of our region, and is open to all folk, common and noble alike.”

Now the hum grew to a few shrill shrieks as girls clung to their maj’s, as spinsters smiled for the first time in turns. All thrilled for the chance to spin and prance in front of the cruelest of fools at the Masque av Aska.

″Ah, this excites you dännisk Strom,” Hob said. “Such is the dream of most women folk, I suppose, to steal the hand of the Heir Magnate. Personally, I don’t know what the fuss is about.”

I hadn’t realized I’d been grinning along with every stupid girl in the streets below.

″If the Heir Magnate were bleeding out on the road, I would walk past without stopping, Hob.” I smacked his shoulder, causing him to wince, then slid back down the slope of the roof. Once my feet were planted on the ground, I waited for Hob to slide down the same. “Don’t you get it? I can walk through the gates of the Masque av Aska unhindered. I’ll get back to where it all began.”

Hob arched a brow. “Where what began?”

I waved the thought away. How would I begin to explain the depth of this obsession to a man like him?

″Why do you do this? Why not just leave the masquerade alone?” Hob asked with a bit of exasperation. “It is nothing but a death sentence for Alvers like you.”

I returned the hood from my jacket to my head, then tossed a copper penge coin at his feet. “There are secrets at the Masque av Aska like there are in memories, Hob. And a girl must have her secrets.”

I abandoned him with an extra copper coin and disappeared into the bustle of the morning.

At long last, I’d step back into the masquerade without skydguard searching for the common folk who did not belong.

I’d find Kase again.

And, no mistake, my first kill would be the one who took him.