Excerpt...
There was a world outside Arketta, of course—but you never felt the full weight of that truth until you stood at its border your- self.
It looked no different to Aster on the other side. The same trees grew in Ferron, their spring green leaves shimmering in the wind, and the same road snaked between them like a wide, brown river. But here, in Arketta, there were dustblood debts, and raveners on hellhorses, and welcome houses full of children, and vengeants to cry out at the cruelty of it all.
And there, in Ferron: freedom.
Aster shifted in the delivery wagon’s driver’s seat, gripping the reins tightly in her sweat-slicked hands. Raven, always a girl of few words, was even quieter than usual, her face set in a carefully neutral expression as they approached the border checkpoint. This wasn’t the first time for either of them smug- gling a girl into Ferron for the Lady Ghosts, but it hadn’t gotten any easier with experience. Aster had never known the border agents to be lax in their duties.
The crates in the back jumped as Aster brought their wagon to a stop. There was one wagon ahead of them in the inspection line. Beyond it stood an armyman’s guard tower, one of dozens lining the border and standing high as the tree line. Aster could just make out a gray-uniformed Arkettan soldier standing atop the nearest tower, a voltric rifle in his hands, pointed down at the line of wagons below. That was the arrangement the two nations had struck to protect their border—Arketta provided the men, and Ferron provided the weapons.
One shot from that gun would arc through a man like lightning.
“Do me a favor and double-check the guarants are still in your bag, will you?” Aster mumbled under her breath.
“You know damn well I just checked for them a mile back,” Raven reminded her.
“Well, check again. I don’t need us getting up there and find- ing out we lost them between there and here.”
Raven’s lips twitched up in a smirk, but she complied, sifting through her satchel with slender fingers to make sure that the government documents were there. Raven had always been a striking girl—tall, lithe, with russet brown skin that was dap- pled with patches of white. Her long black hair was twisted into sisterlocks, and her favor, a cascade of raven feathers that shimmered in the light, was only partially obscured by the high collar of her dress. She and Aster were dressed as merchants’ fortunas, and the guarants were the official papers, signed in bewitched ink, that would prove their identity. It was illegal for a dustblood to cross the border into Ferron without one, and the Arkettan government usually only issued them to the few extraordinary dustbloods who had worked off their debt and earned their freedom. But there were rare exceptions to the rule, and one such was for Good Luck Girls who had been purchased outright by a brag as his personal consort—or fortuna—and who might need to cross the border with him.
Not that Aster belonged to anyone, not anymore. The guar-
ants had been given to her by the Lady Ghosts, secured for them by one of their anonymous allies in the government. The papers were impossible to forge and had been incredibly expensive for the ally to obtain. If they didn’t stand up to scrutiny, it wasn’t just Aster and Raven’s lives on the line—it was the whole net- work the Ladies had built.
“See? Right where we left them,” Raven murmured, showing Aster the documents. Aster felt her expression relax ever so slightly. “Nothing to worry about, boss.”
Boss. The word rang false in Aster’s ears. At nineteen, Raven was a year older than Aster, and she had been with the Ladies longer, too. But Aster had been put in charge of their missions given her experience on the road—as if herding her half-feral friends across the Scab was anything like trying to lead organized rebels. She took pride in the respect the other Ladies paid her, but the expectations that came with it could be overwhelming. She couldn’t afford to fail.
Copyright © 2021 by Charlotte Nicole Davis
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