Chapter One

ARMINA

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The Rabbit’s Day festivities haven’t wound down an inch despite the fact it’s hotter than a cook pan under the desert sun. Noisy children rush past where Valaina and I parked the semi half up on the curb, and I jam a finger in the ear not pressed against the pay phone’s receiver so I can hear the voice on the other end.

“I ain’t entering Wallton for shit,” the man says. He has a squawk like an old fox, the kind that got half its voice box ripped out in a game of chicken with a coyote. “The artifact’s not worth the traffic.”

I flip my messy ponytail over my shoulder and scowl despite the fact that the man can’t see it. I hope he feels it as I respond, “So you’d rather us brave the traffic and drive . . . where, exactly? Last I checked, the Blackblood was doing you a favor.”

“I’m less than fifty miles from the city, outside the Wrendrop Community. There’s a rest station with a tavern called The Skeletal Mare. Can’t miss it—’s got a horse skull dangling out front.”

I run a hand over my face, wiping away my irritation along with the noontime sweat. “Fine. Today, evening, Skeletal Mare outside of Wrendrop.”

The man hangs up without a goodbye.

As I return the phone to its cradle, something warm slaps into my free hand. A greasy square of waxed paper full of twisted cinnamon bread heats my palm almost unbearably, and I wince as molten sugar drips onto the base of my thumb.

Valaina stands above me, her own hunk of bread hanging out her mouth, her sunglasses shielding her brown eyes from the sun. She looks pretty today, with her sugar-stained mouth and the wind tugging at her curly black hair. If the sight of her didn’t make me want to start a fight for no reason, I might even feel inclined to kiss her. Rabbit’s Day is for romance, after all, and we used to be—

“Any luck?” She leans against our semitruck’s scrubbed-metal side. My truck. The Blackblood.

Averard’s truck.

“Depends on what you define as luck.” I rip a chunk out of the bread. It hurts my teeth how sweet it is, but I haven’t eaten since yesterday morning, so any food’s a welcome comfort. “Do we have an offer? Yes. Do I know if it’s of any merit?” I shrug and crumple the waxed paper between my fingers. “The man seemed ready enough to be rid of his artifact, so I think we’ll get a good price.”

Valaina raises her eyebrows and tilts her head so I can see her eyes beneath her sunglasses. Can’t say I blame her for any skepticism. The pair of us’ve been an awful mess since Averard died. He was the captain of our little three-man brigade, our “pirate ship without an ocean”, as he’d call it. When he went and got himself murdered, he left us with nothing more than the truck, a battered pistol, and an old black coat. Valaina kept the pistol, and I kept the coat, and neither of us talk about how we picked them off his corpse before we ran.

Keepsakes of a dead man are not instructions, and they’re certainly not a business plan. They won’t put food in our stomachs or keep the Huntsmen away. Smuggling magical artifacts is dangerous enough if you know what you’re doing, but despite me turning nineteen at the beginning of this year and Valaina being two years older, Averard always insisted we were too young to help him yet with the more particular aspects of the job. Val and I know the trade; we know how to sell. But acquisitions? Not under our purview.

I tug open the Blackblood’s door, reaching high up its frame to pull myself inside. Valaina watches me struggle before stepping around the truck’s low-bellied trailer and throwing open the passenger-side door. She hops inside and wipes her sticky hands on her pants, then lifts her long legs and tucks them between the dashboard and the windshield. “Guess your seller’s not meeting us in Wallton,” she says.

I snort in response and start the engine. It rumbles to life beneath us—not anything that’d be mistaken for a purr like some of those fancy new flatbeds, or even the hum of a family’s personal car. The Blackblood sounds like a call to adventure. Like the rush of power through veins.

“I get it, to be honest,” Valaina continues as I ease off the curb with a faint thu-thump. Families scatter as the Blackblood mounts the street. “Don’t know how anyone can stand to live this close to the Tidal Wall.”

I peer out my side mirrors at the object in question. I wouldn’t say that Wallton’s built close to the Wall, but the black stone expanse rises hazy like a mountain across the whole horizon. It’s a barricade of sorts, one that divides our Arachnida Federation from the country of Tempestor. Far as I know, it was erected not twenty years back, when the Huntsmen attempted a hostile takeover of Tempestor. When their coup failed, Tempestor built that wall to keep the rest of us out.

The Huntsmen trying to take Tempestor was peak foolishness, even though it must’ve made sense to their blood-addled minds. Tempestor’s a country of mages. Run by ’em. Can’t imagine any Huntsman’d stand to see such a place exist unopposed.

The Arachnida Federation doesn’t have anything like a central government—too many little towns with too much space between them, connected by nothing but sand and sky—so the Huntsmen Order’s the closest thing we’ve got to an authority. Ostensibly, they uphold any laws agreed upon between settlements and keep the desert roads safe. But the truth is, the Huntsmen exist primarily to hunt what few free mages are left.

Your average person tends to get shot if they approach too close to the Tidal Wall. Huntsmen tend to disappear without more than a bloodstain on the desert sand.

Val and I came out to Wallton after Averard died, hoping it might prove a good place to lie low a while, take stock of what artifacts we’ve got in the trailer, and figure out a gameplan to keep business moving. But we can’t stay here forever. There’s too big a risk of getting comfortable.

I cleave my attention to the road, trying not to get stray kids or dogs stuck under my front wheels. Red and pink streamers twist from the telephone wires above, and the clickity-clack of rabbit skulls sounds from strings on every brightly colored food stall. I stop for a parade of pedestrians tied together with a golden streamer around their waists, but as I rest my hand on my chin, my eyes meet those of a man across the crowd.

Black eyes. Pitch black.

He watches me with bored disdain, and I try not to sink in my seat. Huntsmen aren’t supposed to show their faces all the way out in Wallton. Have they forgotten how to fear the Tidal Wall? Or are they preparing for something?

Valaina doesn’t notice him. Instead, she rummages in the space between her seat and her door, extracting a beat-up, dog-eared romance novel. She draws Averard’s pistol from her belt and deposits it on the seat between us, a more solid barrier than the Tidal Wall ever was. Been a month since Averard died, and near as long since Valaina and I’ve talked about anything other than business. I’m trying to navigate what it means to be captain of an enterprise I was never taught to lead, what it means to have lost the only parental figure I’ve ever known. I don’t have time to figure out what it means to be someone’s ex-girlfriend.

“Huntsmen must be bored.” I nod toward the man as he slips past our window. “Not enough free mages left for them to hunt.”

Valaina returns to her book with little more than a glance at the Huntsman. Her shoulders shift as she tugs her long-sleeve shirt a little closer at the throat. “Dunno,” she says. “Still plenty out there.”

We overcome the pedestrian traffic and drive through the city’s gates into the desert proper. The sun reflects off my truck’s hood and makes the world shine, and a breeze scatters sand across my windshield. But even as I concentrate on the long drive ahead of us, an unease rises in my chest.

I’ve known Valaina more than half my life, and I’ve known her different than everyone else. She’s not empathetic or gentle, and she has an angry streak wider than the Federation itself. I’ve heard her called a liar and a snake, and I’ve seen her act like both, but she’s always willing to speak her truths if you know how to listen.

Still plenty out there, she says, but I hear what she really means.

Still too many for me.