The Empire of Dreams Read online

  He doubles over in pain, cradling his fist. I take the opportunity to grab the back of his head and smash his face against my swiftly rising knee. He shrieks as his nose shatters.

  I lift my heel, shove it into his broken face, and send him reeling backward into the arms of his friends.

  “Who’s next?” I say, advancing. I am fire. I am a thunderstorm. The remaining two shadows start to back away.

  Someone grabs me from behind, squeezes my neck, pins my arms to my sides—a fourth person I didn’t notice before. The other two shadows see their opportunity and attack, fists flying.

  Pain explodes in my abdomen. In my cheekbone. Everything freezes. The bunk room disappears. Instead, I see blue-stained fingers and iron ladles.

  A glass heron sitting on a fireplace mantel, poised to take flight.

  Distantly, I know I’m being pummeled. I should defend myself; someone taught me exactly what to do. But I’m helpless, because the blue-stained fingers are coming closer. They hold a vicious-looking quill; no, it’s a needle. I’m about to get a tattoo.

  “Please,” I whisper. “Not again.”

  Someone screams. Not me. The pressure against my throat lessens.

  “Red!” someone yells.

  The pain in my cheekbone sharpens to a brutal here and now because I am Red. I am Red Sparkle Stone of Joya d’Arena and a Royal Guard recruit, and someone is attacking me.

  I raise my leg and slam my heel into my attacker’s instep, crunching bones. I whirl on him before he can recover. He reaches feebly for my neck, but I’m faster. I send the heel of my palm up into his chin. His head snaps back and his teeth crunch. He staggers, disoriented, and I fell him with a swift kick to the groin.

  I don’t bother to watch him writhe on the floor. I turn to discover that the two remaining shadows are grappling with someone else. I reach for the one on the left, grab a handful of hair, and yank backward with all my strength. Hair rips from its roots as his neck kinks backward. I sweep the back of his leg with my foot. He topples; I step aside and let him fall, his head cracking against the edge of the cot.

  When I look up, the final shadow is subdued. He sits huddled on the ground, cradling a broken arm. Above him looms my ally, tall with gangly shoulders, but somehow as steady and large as a mountain. It’s Iván.

  He turns to me. “I think that’s all of them.”

  The maelstrom is slowing. As my heartbeat approaches normal, the pains in my rib and my cheekbone intensify, making it hurt to breathe. My stomach roils, threatening to toss up my cornmeal sludge. Everyone is awake now, their shadowed bodies sitting up in their cots, watching us.

  My limbs are shaking. They always shake after the maelstrom leaves.

  I say the first thing that comes to mind. “I didn’t need your help, Iván.”

  Iván has a split lip and disheveled hair, but he doesn’t seem bad off. As usual, he’s frowning at me. “I didn’t want to help you.”

  “You didn’t? I mean, good. I don’t need saving.” Blood drips wet and warm from my nose to my upper lip. I wipe it with my sleeve before remembering that I’ll have to wash the blood out of my shirt before morning.

  “I know you don’t,” Iván says.

  I give him a perplexed look. “Then why—”

  “Red, I don’t even like you. But what they were doing was wrong. It wasn’t about saving you. It was about stopping them.”

  “Oh.” It’s the kind of thing Rosario would say. Bad men need stopping.

  “What’s going on here?” It’s Guardsman Bruno, standing in the doorway with a torch. Several other Guards are right behind him.

  I let my gaze fall to my recent attackers. All four are on the floor. I recognize Sancho in spite of his smashed face; his breathing makes an odd whistling noise. Beto is collapsed against the wall cradling a broken arm; the torch flame casts light on his hands. His cuticles are stained black. He’s the one who spilled my hair dye.

  Two of the other ducklings are curled up like babies in the cradle—one is still protecting his crotch, the other is blinking oddly while blood seeps from his head wound.

  Aldo sits up in his bunk, looking down at me, eyes wide. “I’m sorry I didn’t help, Red,” he whispers. “I panicked, and . . . I was afraid . . .”

  “I was just about to jump in,” Pedrón says, trying to look gallant. “I really was. In fact, these boys are lucky I was slow to wake up, or I would have—”

  “Shut up, Pedrón,” I snap.

  “I’ll ask one more time,” Guardsman Bruno says, his gaze sweeping over the injured boys. “What happened? Who started this?”

  I’m not sure what to say. If I blame the ducklings, everyone might hate me even more. If I don’t, maybe other boys will think they can get away with the same thing.

  In the distance, the latrine cricket chirps and chirps.

  “Fine,” says Bruno. “Tomorrow morning all of you will run—”

  “These recruits started it,” Aldo says, gesturing toward Beto. “They attacked Recruit Red while she slept, all four of them at once. They said something about her being Empress Elisa’s favorite and then started pummeling her. They attacked a defenseless recruit, Guardsman. It was awful.”

  I blink up at him. I don’t remember that part about being Elisa’s favorite. Maybe he’s altering the story on purpose, reminding everyone that I was sponsored by the empress herself.

  “And you stepped in to help?” Bruno asks, indicating Iván and his busted lip.

  Iván remains silent, but Aldo says, “Yes, but she didn’t need Iván’s help. She took care of them on her own. In fact, they’re lucky they didn’t get themselves killed. Frankly, anyone who attacks Red is an idiot.”

  And now Aldo is warning all the other recruits not to come after me.

  “Is this true, Recruit Red? Recruit Iván?”

  “It’s true,” I say. “Just like Aldo said. Except that Iván . . .” I hate to admit this, but I’m going to anyway. “Iván handled Beto so I could take care of the others. He really did help.”

  “I slept through the beginning,” says the boy named Itzal. “But the rest was exactly as they said.”

  A few other boys jump in with “Red is telling the truth” and “In the mess hall, I heard Beto trying to convince the others to attack her” and “Red was just defending herself.” I gape at them all. Never, ever did I expect a show of support.

  Bruno presses his lips together, considering. “All right, Red and Iván, go get cleaned up. Red, if you feel like you need to get your wounds tended, I’ll give you leave.”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  To the Guards accompanying him, Bruno says, “Get this trash out of here; these boys are going home.”

  “So much for Ciénega del Sur,” Aldo mutters.

  As Iván and I stumble to the laundry dungeon to clean up, I do a quick count in my head. We’ve lost ten recruits in two days.

  The laundry contains three empty basins with paddles for stirring, four smaller buckets with washboards, and two stone benches, all arrayed around a rusty drain in the floor. A wooden shelf displays buckets of lye, rope soap, coral for scraping, and several neatly folded rags in various shades of faded gray. A spigot beside the shelf drip drip drips with water.

  “Let me know when you’ve covered yourself back up,” Iván says, turning his back to me.

  Quickly, I strip off my vest and shirt, then re-don the vest.

  “I’m decent,” I say, studying the shirt. A large drop of blood already browns on the collar. A lighter spray patters the right sleeve, and a smear mars the left from when I wiped my nose. My stomach roils as I stare. Aside from the smear, I’m not entirely sure whose blood I’m looking at. “I really hurt those boys,” I whisper. With the skills I’m teaching you comes responsibility, Hector told me. You must use them wisely.

  Iván says, “They had it coming.”

  “But . . . Sancho’s face . . .” I can’t stop seeing the bloody mess, or hearing the whistle sound of his breathin
g.

  What would Hector think of what I did?

  Iván whips off his own vest; blood from his split lip has dribbled down his chest, and the vest will need a thorough soaking. “It was a brutal takedown,” he acknowledges, and somehow I know it’s a simple observation, not a judgment. “Efficient and deadly. Prince Hector taught you to fight like a street brawler.”

  I grab a bucket and turn the spigot. Water pours out, unpleasantly cold on my hands, filling the air with a hint of brine. I’m glad to have a task right now, a sensation. Anything to distract me from my still-racing heart and needle pinpricks of firing nerves. It might be a while before I can sleep tonight.

  “What works best on blood?” Iván asks. “Lye?”

  “Just soak it in cold water. Do it fast before the stain sets.”

  “Sounds easy enough.”

  Favoring my injured rib, I sit on a bench and dip my shirt into the bucket, letting it soak for several seconds. Iván follows my lead. “Have you never done laundry before?” I ask him.

  “My brother always did the laundry,” he said. “We couldn’t afford staff for a while after . . . everything. So we divvied up the chores. I was the countship’s stable boy for several years.”

  “Your brother did the laundry?” I say, gaping. “Lord-Conde Juan-Carlos was a laundry boy?”

  “No, not him. My other brother. The one who died.”

  “Oh.” The blood is already lifting from my sleeve, whirling up in tiny eddies. Or maybe it’s the torchlight playing tricks on my eyes.

  “He was only twelve.”

  I have a guess about what happened to Iván’s brother: “An Invierno killed him.”

  “A sniper with a longbow. During the first big battle I remember.”

  “Is that why you hate Inviernos so much?”

  “Among other reasons.”

  Iván’s bucket is trapped between his knees, and he rubs his thumb against his soaking vest, but he seems hardly aware of the action. After a long moment he says, “What about you? Why do you love Inviernos so much?”

  “I hate them as much as you do. Maybe more. Well, except for a few. They’re not all bad, I guess.”

  “Does that mean you hate yourself?”

  I open my mouth to protest, but the words just aren’t there. For once, I have nothing to say.

  “Fine,” he says. “Why do you hate some Inviernos so much?”

  Maybe this is too personal, too raw, to talk about with someone I don’t like or trust, but I’ve never been good at keeping my thoughts to myself, and the words bubble up before I can stop them. “The first one I met was an animagus. He killed my mother.”

  “That’s . . . how old were you?”

  “Six or seven, maybe.”

  “How did you get away?”

  “I killed him right back.”

  He jerks in his seat, and water sloshes over the side of the bucket. He says, “You killed an animagus.”

  “Yes.”

  “When you were a little girl.”

  “Yes.”

  “How?”

  I’ve told this only to Hector and Rosario. Why am I telling Iván? “I’m not sure how. I dream about it. Sometimes in the dream, I kill him by pushing him into the fireplace. He falls and hits his head on the mantel. But most of the time, I stab him with a skinning knife. That’s how I think it must have happened. The stabbing, I mean. Because that’s the memory that makes me . . . I can still smell his blood.”

  Gently Iván asks, “Was it during a battle too?”

  “No. He was looking for something. Something of my father’s, I think.”

  A partial truth. Filtered through the sieve of life and retrospection, my memories tell me the animagus was looking for a Godstone. Like the one hidden in my drawer in the bunk room.

  “And before you ask . . .” I hold up a hand to forestall the question forming on his lips. “No, I don’t know who my father is, and no, I’ve never met him, and no, I don’t care to.”

  Iván’s lips quirk. “Fair enough. But you’ve met some Inviernos since then that you didn’t hate?”

  “Not at first. The next one I met made me her slave and beat me on the regular. Several other Inviernos came to the village I lived in. Sometimes animagi. My next master always needed money; he often sold my blood to them so they could work their magic. I was a good bleeder, he always said.”

  “That’s disgusting.”

  “Yes.”

  He holds up his vest; water drips back into the bucket. “Almost clean.”

  “Iván, don’t move.”

  “What?”

  I grab a clean rag from the shelf. “Your lip is dripping blood. Be still, or you’ll have to launder your shirt too.”

  I hold the rag beneath the spigot just enough to dampen it, then gently press it against his mouth.

  “Is it as swollen as it feels?” Iván mumbles into the rag.

  “You look like a puffer fish.”

  His grin becomes a wince before it can truly bloom on his face. “It really hurts to smile,” he says.

  “I’ll do you a favor and be perfectly dull. Actually, you should stop talking entirely and let me keep up the pressure, or this will never stop bleeding. Beto got you good.”

  “I got him better.”

  “Yes. Now shut up.”

  “Distract me.”

  “Huh?”

  “Tell me a story to keep me from talking. Like, how you got that white streak in your hair.”

  I yank the rag away and prime my shoulder to punch him in the nose, but I stop myself. He’s not mocking me. He’s asking for true. Out of curiosity.

  “Fine,” I say, reapplying the rag. “But after I tell you, you must truthfully answer a question of mine.”

  “Deal.”

  I take a deep breath. “It was Elisa.”

  “The empress gave you that mark?”

  “Stop talking! As I’m sure you’ve heard, she bought me while passing through the free villages toward Invierne. Hector had been taken hostage by an enemy, and she was desperate to get him back. We were in horrible danger the whole time; I know this now. But . . . I was just happy. I’d been bought by a fine lady, you see, and I was given warm clothes and kind words and the same food as everyone else. I thought I was the luckiest girl in the world.”

  He raises an eyebrow as if to say, “Go on.”

  “A few days later, we caught up to Elisa’s enemy, and we attacked his camp, freed Hector. It all went mostly well. But after the battle, just as we were realizing that one of them had gotten away, he launched from the trees and attacked Elisa. I remember it so clearly . . . she couldn’t breathe. There were all these dried leaves in her hair. Her arm was stretched out on the ground, limp, dirt in her nails . . . it made me think of my mother. The last thing I ever saw of her was her hand, sticking out from beneath a pile of rubble, and I . . . Elisa had been so kind to me. . . . It’s like I went to another place in my head, and I wasn’t me anymore but this monster. . . .”

  I pause a moment, swallow hard, take a breath. The spigot drip drip drips. Iván’s eyes are intent on me, but again there’s no judgment there. He’s just listening.

  “I launched at him. Pounded him with my fists until he let go of Elisa’s throat. But I was just a little girl, and he was a fully grown Invierno assassin, so of course he had me flipped over and pinned in seconds. He hit me so hard my sternum caved in.”

  Iván’s brows knit, as he puzzles something out.

  “The next thing I knew,” I continue, “I was alive and awake on the cold ground, Elisa collapsed on top of me. Turns out, Hector had killed the assassin, then Elisa used the power of her Godstone to heal me. There was a lot of blood on the ground by then, and Elisa was newly come into her power, so the healing was . . . intense.”

  I dash off the words as if they’re no big deal, and I gently peel up a corner of the rag to check Iván’s lip. “The bleeding has lessened,” I say.

  The laundry dungeon is cooler than the
barracks, and the chill dimples my arms. It’s easy to imagine myself back in the mountains, the air brittle with approaching winter. I don’t remember a lot of what happened to me before I met Elisa, but my flesh remembers being cold.

  Iván points toward my hairline, to remind me that I haven’t quite finished my story.

  “The truth is, we don’t know for sure how it got there,” I tell him. “Mara was the one who noticed it, a little while after Elisa healed me. Just a little blotch above my forehead that gradually grew out with my hair. Father Nicandro is sure it was Elisa’s magic, though. Did you know that an animagus’s hair grows lighter and lighter with magic use? That’s why so many of them have white hair. Anyway, I’ve always been close to the magic of the earth. I can sense Godstones being used, just like a priest can, or like Elisa’s sister Alodia. I mean, I’m no sorcerer, but Father Nicandro thinks that my affinity, combined with an enormous dose of healing power, caused a bit of my hair to turn white.”

  He doesn’t respond for so long that I’m sure I must have offended him somehow. He just stares off into the distance, his dark eyes churning. I pull the rag away and inspect his lip. “The bleeding has stopped. You might want to take a rag to bed with you, though.”

  He catches my wrist as I’m drawing away. “This assassin. The one who almost killed you. It was Franco, wasn’t it?” His grip is a little painful.

  I blink. “Yes. Though his Invierno name, his real name, was Listen to the Falling Water, for Her Secrets Carve Canyons into Hearts of Stone.”

  When Iván doesn’t respond, I add, “And yes, I realize he’s the man who conspired with your father to start a civil war.”

  “No wonder you hate me.”

  “I don’t ha— I mean, Rosario has ordered us to get along, so I will if you will.”

  He releases my wrist so fast that I lurch backward. Any semblance of peace between us seems to be gone; his brow is furrowed, his dark eyes churn. “By telling me all that,” he says, soft and low, “were you trying to make me feel sorry for you? Do you want me to know how much you’ve suffered?” His tone is contemptuous, mocking.

  “No.”

  He raises an eyebrow.

  “Iván, I was just answering your questions. No one has to feel sorry for me. Since becoming ward of the empress, I’ve had such comfort and ease. I had a rough start, sure, and being half Invierno doesn’t exactly win me friends, but I’m still the luckiest girl in the world. All those things can be true at once, you know.”