The Orphan Queen (The Orphan Queen #1)(46)

It took two flares before I spotted light shimmering off the rain-dulled metal. Scooting with my hands and feet tied was incredibly awkward, but eventually I began to make progress. The distance to the nearest dagger grew shorter, even as the rain grew harder. Water soaked my clothes and plastered my hair against my head. My teeth chattered as I stretched my fingers and brushed the hilt of my dagger.

“Trying to cut your way free?” A dark shape detached from the rest of the shadows, and Black Knife knelt in front of me again. One toe of his knee-high boots pinned the blade to the ground, and my fingers scraped off the wooden hilt. “The police are coming, so answer me quickly.”

I stared at him, my jaw tense as I forced myself motionless.

“What did you do to that man?”

Silence had always been my favorite response, but if I kept quiet, he’d leave. I’d be arrested for magic.

“I hurt him.” Rain clattered all around us, steady and unceasing. A chill-wrought shudder in my chest echoed. “I tried to kill him.”

This, not even an hour after insisting to Patrick that Ospreys weren’t murderers.

“I saw what you did, saving that girl.” He shifted his weight and braced one knee on the muddy ground; he kept my dagger pinned, and out of my reach. “You are an intriguing puzzle. A thief. A sister. A warrior. More than that.” He paused and cocked his head, as though to study me from a slightly different angle. “Now you rescue a girl and maim her attacker with magic. I don’t know what to do with you, nameless girl.”

“Let me go.” In spite of my best efforts, my voice shook with cold. My hands and feet ached as blood circulation slowed. I clenched and unclenched my fists, struggling to maintain feeling in my fingers.

“Are you going to use your magic again?” His voice deepened, and his words were almost lost beneath the cacophony of rain and thunder. “Do you like burning things? Because this didn’t look like a last resort.”

“I have as many reasons as you to want the wraith stopped.” Maybe that was true. I didn’t know his reasons, after all. But mine were strong. I had an entire kingdom to protect.

“Perhaps so.” He touched my bonds, a pale contact I could barely feel through the cold and wet. It took all my will not to jerk back, away from him. “I’m going to free you,” he said almost gently, “but I want something in exchange.”

“I’m not telling you my name unless you tell me yours.” A shiver racked through me.

A note of weary humor touched his voice. “Fortunately, I wasn’t going to ask your name. No, I want something else. I saw the way you rushed to help that girl. You were fast getting there—faster than I was. And she’ll live because of what you did.”

Quinn wouldn’t live, though. Neither would Ezra. They were my people, and they were dead.

The rain slammed harder and I fought off another violent shiver. Black Knife shivered, too.

“That girl will live, and she doesn’t have to be the only one.” Black Knife leaned closer, lifting his voice to be heard over the pounding of rain. “Come with me. Help me tonight. Help me save others.”

I had saved that girl. It had been selfish, driving pain that had compelled me down from the rooftops. Knowing she would live to fix her fiddle and play again because of my intervention—I liked that. Not enough to want to accompany Black Knife, but if it was the vigilante—who didn’t seem to want me arrested—or the police, I’d choose the enemy I knew.

“You won’t turn me in for what I did?”

He hesitated. The percussion of rain made the seconds linger on, but at last he shook his head. “Not this time. I think you deserve a second chance.”

I nodded toward my hands and feet, still caught up in the silk. “Untie me.”

There was something in his tone, like relief. “I hoped you’d say that.” He got to work quickly.

A few moments later, I stood, stretching my arms and legs. Sharp sensation assaulted my hands and feet.

Rain obscured the man fused to the wall, still unconscious, thankfully.

I’d almost killed him.

I’d almost killed him.

“The police will get him out.” Black Knife grabbed my daggers, flipped them, and caught the flats of the blades. He offered the hilts to me, like he believed I wouldn’t attack him. “You should, perhaps, wear a mask.”

I took my daggers and slid them into their sheaths at my hips. “I don’t have one.”

“I have an extra.” Black Knife felt around his belt and pulled free a damp slip of pitch cloth. He pressed it into my hands, this thin, delicate thing; it was a hood that went over the whole of one’s head, not just the face. “I keep a spare in case I lose mine.”

When I slid the silk over my head, it smelled faintly of boy and musk. It was light enough to breathe through, even when waterlogged, and kept the bite of chill off my face and throat. I adjusted my hair under the hood. “Thank you.” The words were strange and soft under the rumble and racket of the storm, but he must have heard anyway, because he nodded.

“Let’s go find someone who needs our help,” he said. “Before the police arrive.”

I looked at him, both of us in black masks, and struggled to reclaim the usual hostility that bound us together. “Sure. But if you try to talk to me or ask me anything, I’ll stab you.”