Page 1 of Realm of Thieves

Prologue

They gave the girl anew name when they first brought her into the convent, discarding her old one like an oily rag that dirties more than it cleans. “Daughter of Pain,” the ancient woman had christened her with a quick sweep of cataracted eyes. “I see it deep within you, even the pain you haven’t yet faced.”

The girl didn’t give a damn what the woman saw. Pain? She felt only rage at that point, a living and breathing vessel of anger that had been simmering to toxic levels ever since her parents died. But that wasn’t what the Harbringer saw as the girl was brought into the Great Hall of Zoreth on the first day of her initiation. She saw the physical pain in the girl’s body. Not just the fury and the grief and frustration at a life being shattered to fragments—every Daughter of Silence was suffering, after all—but the pain that was deeper inside yet, waiting to come out when she became a woman. A pain that would debilitate the girl and lead her on a desperate quest for relief, a quest that would combine with vengeance.

But at that moment, as the girl was stripped of her old name and her clothes and put into the black cloak that covered every inch of herskin, her eyebrows and her head shaved, her lavender hair discarded in spools on the marble floor, the last proof of what she was, a girl born under the lavender moon, there was only that slithering, seething rage.

All the girl’s life her parents had fought against this very institution. They fought against the cruelty of the convent, the hypocrisy of the religion itself, the dictatorship that ruled over the Saints of Fire and those who followed it. Indeed the people of Esland had no choice but to follow it. They told the girl that she could not help being born in Esland but that they would spend every living minute trying to change it for the better.

Her parents did their best to change it. But their best was not enough.

They should have known this would happen to me, the girl thought as the old woman took her roughly by the elbow and led her out of the cleansing room and back into the quiet halls.They should have known that all their risks for a better tomorrow would land me here one day.

The towering obsidian walls and ceilings around her gleamed from frequent polishing, making it look like the girl was being led into the dark belly of a dragon, which was no accident. The convent wanted to instill fear into these girls. They were here to be punished, not to be pious. Punishment was always the point of the Daughters of Silence, no matter how their public façade spun it.

The girl shut her eyes as the image of her father’s last moments slammed into her head, as if that would prevent her from seeing it. Him standing on the gallows block. The defiant look in his emerald eyes, his long dark purple-streaked braid captured by the wind that held the decay of low tide that stretched outside the city walls of the capital. He was so proud even in those last moments, except for that very last moment when he looked to the girl and her mother, who had been captured by the Black Guard and forced to watch at the foot ofthe gallows. In that split second the girl didn’t see defiance or anger or even fear. Just sorrow. Like he was cloaked in the grief he knew would befall his two most beloved people after he took his last breath.

And she watched him take his last breath. Watched as the bottom dropped out from under his feet, as it dropped from beneath everything she held dear, and as that rope winched up and sliced into his throat and chin. Her father didn’t cry out, didn’t thrash, like he was willing his body to go as silently as possible. And while her mother wailed and buried her head in her hands, the girl kept watching, knowing that the twelve years she had with him in her life wouldn’t be enough and to take every last glimpse of him, no matter how gruesome, even if the image would be burned in her head for years to come.

“You should be afraid,” the Harbringer had whispered in her ear, her breath smelling foul, like the fermented herbs that the cloisters burned at all hours of the day. “You must fear the gods or you will live and die in vain.”

The girl opened her eyes at that, feeling just a thread of the defiance that her father wore so well. She saw the statues of the dragons before her, their so-called gods. There were two carved of the smaller varieties, the sycledrages that were known to be as smart as a dune fox, with sickle claws on their monstrous feet. The woman thought her eyes were closed because of them, but it couldn’t be further from the truth. The girl didn’t fear dragons, not in the ways the Saints of Fire followers did. Her fear was healthy; their fear was not. Their fear would ruin all Esland one day, if not the world.

“We must stop them,” her father had once said to her as they sat side by side on the edge of the docks, cleaning the kelp crabs he’d caught for dinner. He kept his voice low, knowing that there were few allies, even among the impoverished fishermen such as himself. “If we don’t, I fear it will be the end of the world as we know it.”

The girl remembered pondering that as her legs dangled above the clear blue water, her fingers green with the crabs’ blood. To her there was no other world than Esland. She’d barely seen the land beyond the capital. Once, her father had taken her on the boat along the south coast to check out new fishing grounds, and she was able to take in as much of Esland as she ever could. It was dry, desolate, and inhospitable, but the girl found something so imaginative and dramatic about the sandstone cliffs above the bright blue water, the rolling hills that huddled behind the convent that she would later be imprisoned in and the sparse desert beneath, the far-off peak of the dormant volcano that pierced the cloudless sky, a symbol of the Banished Land to the south. The fact that there was a world beyond this one was hard to comprehend, especially when Eslanders weren’t allowed to leave their continent to visit any of the other three realms, and outsiders were rarely let in.

“What will happen to the world?” the girl had asked. She’d often heard her parents talking about the end, but so did the followers. They were obsessed with it. The devout called it the Reckoning of Flames, and they believed that one day Zoreth would return to their world and release the dragons that were confined inside the magicked wards that surrounded the Midlands island in the center of the ocean. They believed that the centuries that they had been feeding the dragons with their supply of rockdeer (and the lowly human sacrifices) would mean the dragons would spare them but incinerate the rest of humanity, ensuring that the Saints of Fire would be the rulers of the world with dragons at their side.

But her father, and those in the rebellion, had a more horrifying vision of the future.

He had looked around at the other fishermen on the docks, wincing at the unrelenting sun, and once satisfied they weren’t listening, he leaned in close to her. “The wards will collapse in my lifetime, ifnot yours,” he whispered, never one to hold back the truth. “Not because of Zoreth. He’s dead. He’s not coming back. They’ll collapse because this government will have enough magic to destroy those wards. But the people of Esland will not be spared like they think. Dragons aren’t sentimental.”

Strangely the girl didn’t feel terrified then about the end, and she didn’t feel terrified now, even as she was led toward her chambers in the depths of the convent. If anything she welcomed the dragons’ return. Anything was better than living a life of silence, under rules she’d been taught to break, while both her parents were dead.

The old woman brought the girl to a stop outside a big black door and knocked on it with her bony hands, hard as stone. She waited a beat and then opened it.

Inside was a row of twelve beds, each one sparsely covered with a thin pillow and rough bedspread. At the foot of each bed was a preteen girl on the cusp of womanhood, each scalp shaved, body cloaked in black, head bowed and attention on the floor.

“Daughters of the Sixth Ward,” the woman said. “I want you to meet the Daughter of Pain. She will be joining us for eternity.”

The girl wouldn’t have spoken even if she had been allowed to; still, she found it disconcertingly eerie how silent the room was. How unnatural all of this was. The Daughters didn’t even take a vow of silence; it was an order thrust upon them. They weren’t allowed to whisper to each other when alone, let alone cry, and the girl suddenly felt so stifled by it all that she longed to scream.

The old woman poked a long sharp nail into her side, anticipating this. “Behave yourself and you’ll endure your pain with dignity. Rebel and the rest of your life will be a living damnation.”

You don’t know who my parents are, the girl thought bitterly, though the irony was that of course she did. That was why she was here. Butthe Harbringer didn’t know how deep their rebellion lived in her veins.

So the girl would be silent for now. She would bite her tongue and plot and wait and find the perfect time to let it all loose. She would find one moment to gain her freedom or she would die trying.

That much she knew.

Chapter 1

Brynla

“This is as far asI’ll take you,” the man says. His voice is as gnarled and rough as his hands that grip the oars.

I stare at his pockmarked face for a moment, my stomach pinching with unease at the thought of this mission going even remotely wrong.

---