Andomaka had never worked the weaving of the thread before Prince Ausai’s death. There had never been a reason to. She had studied the rite, as she had studied all the rites, certain that she would be ready when the time came. Neither she nor Prince Ausai had anticipated a hidden enemy within the palace. But as her uncle’s health began to fail, the rot in the city began to show. The knife had gone missing. By its nature, it could not leave the city without raising an alarm, but sometime in the decades between Prince Ausai’s ascension and his final sick bed, it had been taken from its sacred resting place. In his last weeks, Ausai had overseen the forging of a new blade. And, more urgently, the collection of a secret of his own: a child of his blood from Bronze Coast.
Before the old prince could put the rest of his wards and protections in place, death had come. The world had reached another of those moments of thinness, and Andomaka had taken the new blade, a vial of Byrn a Sal’s blood, and the deathname of Prince Ausai.
The continuity of the city, its hidden heart, had rested in her hands. In her hands, it had broken. The new blade had shattered. The next morning, Byrn a Sal stood his coronation with his own spirit, the first to do so in centuries. The conspiracy against Kithamar had won, if only for a moment. Now, at the turning of the year, she could take the first real steps to understanding why. It began by giving Kithamar its voice, if not yet its throne.
The carriage pulled through the gates to the inner courtyard of the Daris Brotherhood, rose through the long pathway, and came to a stop by the temple’s gate. Footmen were waiting for her in the colors of her house and the brotherhood’s. Tregarro didn’t wait for the steps to be placed, dropping from the carriage door to the gravel and striding forth to make certain everything was in place before she came to it. Andomaka let him go. It was his role to worry and fret, and hers to make reality bend to her will and the city’s. It was as important that she let servants like Tregarro and the footmen serve as that they respect her power. Everyone in their place, everyone playing their role.
When she entered the private temple, the candles were lit. A minor priest sat on a stool by the altar, playing a bowed harp in a complex drone. She felt her body relaxing by long habit. She stretched out her hands, reaching her will past the tips of her fingers to caress the air, the world, the spaces between the spaces. Reality felt soft. Fragile. Easy to remake. Tregarro looked at her, his expression a question. She smiled her answer. Yes.
“Bring the boy,” he said. “It’s time.”
Andomaka walked to the altar. The knife was already there, the way it should have been on the night of her uncle’s burning. His deathmark was written on a small, yellowed scroll beside a black cup filled with water from the Khahon. She didn’t need the scroll, but she was pleased that it was there. If all it did was give her a degree more confidence, that was enough.
The boy came in. He looked healthier than when he’d first come from the slavers’ camp. There was more strength in his gaze. The shape of his face wasn’t right, nor the cast of his skin, but she could see the echo of Prince Ausai in his lips and eyebrows.
“Be welcome,” she said in his own tongue. Hope flared in his expression, and then, seeing her more closely, snuffed out.
“You’re going to kill me now?” he asked, still in the words of Bronze Coast. He had a good voice. Musical, and deeper than his frame suggested.
“What is death?” she asked. And when he didn’t answer, “Give me your hand.”
The boy stood unmoving. She hadn’t expected more from him, though she had hoped. At her gesture, two temple guards stepped out of the shadows. The drone of the harp became richer, the overtones complicating in the fragrant air. A shiver of anticipation washed through her. Just anticipation, she told herself. Not fear. The guards forced the boy to his knees.
“You are my blood,” the boy said. “You are my cousin.”
“Yes,” Andomaka said, taking up the blade.
“You don’t have to do this. We could escape together. You could be free.”
She drew the blade across his shoulder. He barely winced, but a thin line of blood welled up where she had touched him. The fabric of the world shifted around them, and Andomaka shuddered with something like pleasure. She turned back to the altar. Blood called blood. But the rite had failed before…
Gently as a calligrapher, she drew out Prince Ausai’s deathmark on the stone. As soon as the last line was complete, the blood darkened and began to smoke. Relief poured through her body. The true blade had returned, the blood carried the thread, and the bridge between the living and the dead had been made. The air thickened with the attention of things without form. Old things. Ancient. The candles seemed to dim as something like cold smoke filled the space. She felt the energy and hunger as if they were her own. Her body felt loose and warm, like she’d drunk half a bottle of wine.
“You could get away,” the boy said. “We could both get away. Please.”
She wiped the blood from the knife with a square of cloth that had never been touched by sunlight, then dipped the knifepoint in water. She knew the boy’s name because Prince Ausai had taught it to her. She wrote it—Timu—across the deathmark, blackened blood and pale water flowing into each other. Like the wake of a huge fish disturbing the surface of a still pond, something moved the smoke. The boy’s eyes widened in pain and alarm, but only because he had never been prepared. He cried out, and when he drew in his next breath, he wasn’t the one breathing.
“Andomaka,” Ausai, dead prince of Kithamar, said in the boy’s lovely voice. “You’ve done well.”
“Thank you, my prince,” Andomaka said.
The guards released the thin frame, and Ausai walked through the temple slowly, becoming accustomed to his new skin. The harpist put away his bow, and Ausai’s footsteps were the only sound. She would have known him by the way he moved, no matter what body he wore. The flood of love she felt for him had been something she’d trained herself to since she’d been a child. That it was constructed and practiced made it no less real.
“All of you, get out,” Ausai said, and his gaze locked on her. “You stay.”
Within a dozen heartbeats, the temple stood empty except for Andomaka, the spirit that had ruled Kithamar for centuries, and the candles still burning in their places.
“It took time finding the original knife,” Andomaka said. “The new blade shattered. I don’t know what we did wrong when we consecrated it, but—”
“It wasn’t the blade.”
Andomaka shifted. “Master?”
“The knife didn’t fail, though I suspect we were intended to think it had. The theft of the sacred blade was theater. It gave us something to blame so that our enemy could hide the true cause of the catastrophe.” He shook his head, a smile that was equal parts anger and disgust on his unfamiliar lips. “If I hadn’t thought to put a secret line of my own into the world where we could use it, you’d have been left to blame the knife and spend your time and effort searching for it or trying to remake it, and failing again. Or the rite, looking for some error in the ceremony. Or yourself, your confidence shaken. Eventually, the ceremony would be abandoned.”
“The brotherhood would never let that—”