16

The Girl with No Name

Lightning and thunder filled the cloudy skies on the dark evening the Mycra Sentorious sank to the bottom of the cold Twilight Lakes. The waters rumbled back at the heavens in response with the spraying and crashing waves. The wind screamed too, adding to the angry chorus. The chaos was so great that not even the sky deities would have noticed a young girl with onyx-black hair treading water in the middle of the lake. The force of the sinking ship tried to suck her down with it, but she was far enough away that she could withstand the pull. She had begun her swim at dusk, after all.

The raging waters had shoved her under more than once bringing back memories of a time when she'd nearly drowned in a river, and a sweet, soft-spoken boy had leapt in to save her. That day, she'd decided she would learn to swim.

She stroked against the pressure now—it was her versus the lake.

Her spirit nearly gave up, and she wondered why she had even tried until a tiny light appeared in the distance. The girl shed a tear in relief as a small boat struggled to stay right-side-up against the waves. She waved to it.

"I'm here!" she called.

The boat picked up speed, rattling the metal lantern hanging out front. It reached her with seconds to spare—the girl was sure she would have drowned if the boat had taken any longer to reach her.

A silver-haired Shadow Fairy gazed down at her curiously from the boat. After a moment, he said, "I had convinced myself none of this was real. But you are real, aren't you?"

"Help me!" the girl called to him, reaching for the fairy with her last ounce of strength.

The Shadow Fairy smiled and shook his head in disbelief. He reached for the girl and tugged her from the lake in one great haul. The girl landed in the boat, coughing up water and weeds. When she caught her breath, she whispered, "Thank you for coming."

The Shadow Fairy nodded as he turned his boat around and began paddling back the way he had come. "I don't do favours for free," he said. "You tricked me into giving you control of my slumbers, Siren. "

The girl climbed to her knees and held the side of the boat as the ride grew turbulent. "I'm not a siren," she said.

"You have the power to deceive, and I found you floating in the dark waters. You convinced me to pull you into my boat. Sounds like a siren to me." He was making a jest, but the girl didn't have the will to laugh.

"I told you in your dream that I'd be here. I hardly think you can claim to have stumbled upon a siren in the water." She wrung out her hair, but it did little as the air grew heavy with mist. Rain began to soak them all over again.

"I wonder what your story is, that you had to trust a Shadow Fairy to help you escape? My species aren't known for keeping our promises. I could steal your memories, you know," the Shadow said.

The girl thought about that for a moment as her breathing finally began to settle. "I need to find someone." That was the only answer she gave him.

"That's unfortunate," the Shadow Fairy said as he stroked along with the waves. The current was moving with them now, rushing the boat toward the faraway shore. So, the fairy dropped the paddle into the boat and let the water do the work. He turned to the girl.

"Why is that unfortunate?" the girl asked.

The Shadow Fairy laughed. A crack of thunder blotted out the end of his chuckles, but he bit his lower lip over a grin. "Because you'll forget all about that person in no time."

The girl's face fell. Her gaze darted to the oar in the boat. She tried to grab it, to use it to save herself, but he got to it first and held the dull edge at her throat.

"Don't try to fight me, Siren. You and I are partners now. We're going to have a long, beautiful friendship. Because while you might control me through the night, I'll certainly control you through the day," he said. His free hand swung out and caught the side of her face. The girl stared at him with wide eyes as everything she knew slipped away in a heartbeat; all the names, all the places, all the thoughts and hopes, and the boy who had saved her from the river that day.

She blinked. Then she looked around, wondering where she was, why the sky was angry, and who this person standing in front of her was. A silver-haired fairy extended a hand with a smile and said, "Hello there, Siren. I'm Barnabus. Your friend."

For three and a half years the girl and Barnabus travelled across the Four Corners of Ever, performing crimes in the capitol cities and villages alike. They were nearly unstoppable, growing rich and evading every authority who tried to hunt them down to restore order. But on a chilly day after they returned to the North Corner of Ever, they picked the wrong fairy to rob, and they found themselves surrounded by a band of females with sharp weapons.

"Stand back, you faeborn females! My partner will haunt your dreams! She'll bring nightmares to your door—" Barnabus's words were cut off as he was stabbed. The girl gasped.

The remaining females surrounded the girl with fairsabers poised at her throat, and she lifted her hands in surrender.

As the girl watched her partner of over three years fade away, she felt her heart twist in her chest. It was the first thing she'd felt in a long time. Having lost all her memories, she'd found it difficult to feel anything at all most days. But perhaps losing Barnabus was something she wasn't ready for. She didn't know anyone else.

The silver-haired Shadow Fairy reached for her with his last bout of strength. He cast her a strange, unexpected smile, and as his breathing turned ragged, he whispered, "Thank you for such a fun ending to my existence. As a gift, I'll give back what I stole from you before I go, Siren."

She didn't know what he meant until he lifted a shaky hand and placed it against the side of her face.

Warmth bled through her mind.

All at once, an entire childhood of memories flashed inward, burning into her understanding like a flame. She saw a sinking ship, she saw the moment she met Barnabus for the first time, how he'd tricked her. She saw her months on the Mycra Sentorious, how her captain had mistreated her and forced her to bring nightmares and terrors upon his enemies. She saw the village where she grew up. How the crew of the Mycra Sentorious had approached and pressured her mother to sell her when the poor woman couldn't speak up to object.

The girl lifted a hand over her trembling lips as she recalled.

Barnabus choked, struggling for air. The girl watched him take his final breath, his eyelids sliding closed forever. But she felt an entirely different set of feelings about his passing now. Tears filled her eyes—the first time in over three years that had happened—and she sat there, stunned, until one of the females around her spoke.

"Is it true you have a gift?" the female asked.

The girl couldn't speak. Her throat was thick. Her mouth was dry.

"I'll give you a choice then. I can kill you alongside your friend—"

"He was not my friend," the girl rasped, realizing it far too late.

"Ah. I see. Then perhaps you'd like to take the second option. Join us, and I'll help you develop your gift. I can make you truly lethal so no Shadow Fairy can ever control you like that again," the female promised.

The girl looked up with stinging red eyes, beholding a fierce-looking fairy with black hair like hers, wild green eyes, and fair skin. It was like looking at an older version of herself.

"Not all dreamslippers look the same," the female said, "but, queensbane , clearly a few of us do." She put away her fairsaber and extended a hand. "You're not alone anymore, fairy. Train with us. Give me five years, and I'll turn you into a deadly and powerful thing no one will be able to stop. You'll never have to work for another soul in your faeborn life. "

The girl eyed the female's hand. "Who are you?" she asked.

"We're the remnant of the Sisterhood of Assassins of the North."

"A remnant?" The girl blinked her tears away.

The female huffed a bitter laugh. "We were disbanded and mostly slaughtered by our Brotherhood counterpart. But pockets of us survived. We're attempting to rise again and wage war on the Queene."

Strength returned to the girl's legs, and she stood. "I have someone to f…" she began, but she stopped.

Once, she'd had someone to find. Someone who had promised to come back and find her. But it seemed Dranian had never tracked her down like he said he would. Not in the months she'd been on the ship, and not in the three years she'd been at Barnabus's side. If Dranian Evelry had been searching for her, he could have followed the rumours of the dreamslipper. Barnabus's tactics weren't subtle.

Did she still have someone to find? If she hunted Dranian down now, would he still want to see her? Much time had passed. Perhaps he'd forgotten about the promise he'd made. And besides… she'd promised him she would protect him. She swore to become his fairy guard. And she'd watched him get beaten with rocks and sold.

The girl swallowed and looked back at the fierce female. A dreamslipper who embodied a vision of power. Someone who could teach her to be powerful, too. Someone who could stop her from getting taken advantage of.

"My unhidden name is Rosa. What's your name?" the female asked, seeming to notice the girl's resolve change.

The girl thought about it. Barnabus had only ever called her ‘Siren', but she wasn't a siren.

So, after some thought, she said, "Mycra Sentorious."

A sunken ship would never return to reclaim its name. And even though it was unlikely at this point, the girl wanted to give Dranian a way to track her down if he ever chose to. If the one name he knew was the name of the ship she'd left on, perhaps someday he would follow the name to her.

The secret training base was hidden away in an abandoned castle off the cusp of a great cliff, surrounded by thick trees and hardly visible to anyone on the outside. The Sisterhood of Assassins swung weapons at each other in various chambers, supplies lined rickety shelves, and sunlight glided in through gaping holes in the ceiling. The girl passed several small knitting groups on her way in.

"It's good for the mind," she was told when she was caught staring. "And there are tricks in yarn, you see. Ways to weave enchantments into your clothing. "

The girl entered the training at a disadvantage. She had assumed she would be joining the secret Sisterhood as the only new recruit, but that was not the case. Thirty other young females, all of whom were bigger and stronger than her, began training on the same day, some clothed in expensive-looking armour. For that reason alone, the girl should have been eliminated in the first test of strength. She should have backed out willingly before she began taking hits and losing blood. But the girl had survived many masters, and for that, she decided to turn her fears into a will of iron and forge it into a blade.

She worked twice as hard as the other assassin recruits. One by one, she beat out other females in the fighting boundaries, growing her speed and especially her strength. Rosa gave her particular attention, working with her through the nights to sharpen her dreamslipping talents. Before two and a half years had passed, the Sisterhood had crafted the girl with a new name into the most dangerous, effective weapon they had. The girl was trained in body and mind. She was washed of fear and emotion. She was, in every respect, unstoppable.

She was Mycra Sentorious, the dreamslipper of the secret Sisterhood of Assassins of the North. She was the one thing the Sisterhood believed would bring down the Queene.