Prologue Genevieve
Genevieve was not dead.
Thanks to the Emperor, she was alive. She was aware of her body, which lay on the sand, aware of the sun that cracked her skin. But she could not open her eyes.
Time had gone in all directions, and Genevieve did not know where in its vast landscape she had fallen. Sometimes she was at her mother’s dinner table. Then she was back aboard the Dove. She had heard the
whumph of a submerged explosion breaking the surface of the sea. The Lady Ayer called to her and bade she braid her hair. A boy her age held out his hand, his name lost in the blare of cannons and pistols firing.
The wind carried a name: Thistle.
She had not heard it aloud in years. She tried to move her chapped lips around the sound, but all that arose was a hiss. She coughed, her throat dry and aching.
She was alive.
Her survival was not the only impossible thing that had happened. The Imperials had lost. The Emperor’s ships capsized and crushed. The Pirate Supreme had escaped the Emperor once again. The Lady Ayer was dead.
The Lady Ayer was dead.
Genevieve had watched it happen, had seen her lady fall. It was the slowest and fastest thing she had ever witnessed: the sudden and terrible explosion of blood at her lady’s neck, the inexorable crumple of her body. The great Lady Ayer. The Emperor’s greatest spy. She watched it happen again and again, but she could never stop it from happening. Her mentor’s blood hung in the air, a fine mist.
Genevieve pushed her fingers into the wet sand. She made a fist. She could hear the Lady’s voice in her mind, willing her to move. To open her eyes. She blinked against the blazing sun.
Sit up, said the Lady.
Genevieve obeyed her orders, just as she always had. It did not matter if she was dead or alive, real or only in her mind; the Lady Ayer would always be her master, her mentor. Her voice was a comfort and a compass, and Genevieve dearly needed both. Her body screamed in dissent as she sat up, but Genevieve did not listen to it, not even as the world spun around her.
You need water. All the seawater you swallowed is making you sick. You need fresh water or else you’ll die. At this, Genevieve let out a mirthless laugh. There was no fresh water here. There was only the stinging seawater and the burning red sand. The laugh turned into another round of racking coughs.
Where is your pistol? Genevieve felt down her leg. Still in its holster about her ankle.
Where is your dagger? She felt her thigh and found the handle of her dagger.
The effort of sitting up, of moving, of coughing had been too much. She lay back down.
Get up, said the Lady’s voice, but Genevieve could not. Tears did not fall, but she was crying all the same, ashamed of her disobedience. Lady Ayer had taught her better than that.
She saw Rake’s face, the face of her countryman, the face of her captor, saw it alight with triumph after he pulled the trigger on the gun that would kill her lady. She could feel her hate like something corporeal, something literally in her belly, heavy and pointed and hot.
Distantly, she could hear laughter, high--pitched and echoing over the dunes. It was Rake, she knew, the Pirate Supreme’s man. Rake laughing at the demise of the Emperor’s men. Rake laughing at her pain.
“Hey,” said a voice. He did not speak the Common Tongue, but Genevieve understood him even if she could not recall which language he spoke. “Hello?”
That accursed laughing, the giggling was closer now, so close she could feel hot gusts of breath against her burning skin. All around her was the stench of blood, of meat gone to rot. She flinched away from the reek of that breath, tried to blink open her eyes once more.
Your pistol. She was in danger. The Lady had taught her to defend herself, and her voice was insistent now, urging her to grab her weapon. Genevieve was no damsel in distress. She had been molded by the Lady Ayer; she was her right hand.
She could see the man only as a shadow that loomed enormous over her, backlit by the cruel sun, which added to her confusion.
There was a man there, but his voice was absent, and the Lady’s voice was there, but she was absent. The world had become nothing but a flurry of noises and shapes and pain, and Genevieve could hardly parse it.
The figure nudged her with his foot, not hard but enough to bring what little remained of her last meal—eaten when? days ago maybe—in Genevieve’s belly up and burning through her throat. She retched, and she was distantly aware of his sounds of consternation and disgust. It was, if uncomfortable, also a perfect cover. She curled into herself on one side and let her hand drift to her ankle.
She saw the animal before she saw the man, its great square head too close to her own, sniffing at her with interest. It let out a high giggle, chittering and chilling. She startled away from it, and the animal startled away from her, but not far enough. It bared its teeth at her, and she knew at once where the stench of blood had come from.
Hyena. The familiars of Wariuta warriors, the keepers of the Red Shore.
Genevieve remembered. She had seen etchings and paintings of the hyenas: vicious, horrible animals with blood dripping from their maws, their gnashing teeth that could take off a man’s leg. When the warriors came of age, they found their familiar, and from then on, the two would be inseparable, and deadly. The warriors of the Red Shore had killed many Imperial men, even if their means were crude. But they did not have pistols. Genevieve’s pistol was there, on her ankle. She let her fingers wrap around it.
It’s him or you. If this man was a warrior, then he would kill her.
“Are you OK?” he asked. He was easily twice as big as she was. If it came to hand--to--hand, she would lose unless she was extraordinarily lucky or he was extraordinarily stupid. She could not take that chance.
Shoot. With what little strength she had, she turned on the man and pointed her pistol at him. He held his hands up. Genevieve squeezed the trigger.
Copyright © 2023 by Maggie Tokuda-Hall. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
