Latchkey Read online

  Book Two of the Archivist Wasp Saga

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Nicole Kornher-Stace

  More from Mythic Delirium Books

  Chapter One

  She clashed with Lissa, blade to blade, then grabbed the wrist of Lissa’s knife-hand and yanked. As Lissa’s knife slid free of Isabel’s, she stumbled forward and was promptly hauled down and in toward the elbow Isabel was firing at the hollow of her throat. Isabel pulled the strike a quarter inch shy of a crushed windpipe, paused in demonstration, then let go.

  “In a real fight you’d follow through.” Isabel aimed her voice back over one shoulder, toward the twenty-odd people gathered there. Regulars of her weekly training sessions, most of them. A few new faces. Several ex-upstarts of the Catchkeep-shrine, whose stares still made her skin crawl. A duel was a duel, after all, wooden knives or no. Three years of not having to watch her back against them was, apparently, not enough to quite erase the three years when she had. “So that’s Lissa done. But maybe she brought friends.”

  On cue, Bex took a swing at her. Isabel got the wooden knife in a backhand grip, dropped her weight to pivot down and under the punch, then tensed her good leg and shot upward, twisting at the hips, hissing pain through her teeth. Again she froze a split-second before she would’ve smashed the butt of the knife-handle into Bex’s temple. She could hear the gathered caught breath of the onlookers.

  So easy to imagine she was right back where she’d come from. Blood on the sand, the Catchkeep-priest on his high seat, Catchkeep’s up-self twinkling overhead. The smell of the ancient dogleather Archivist-coat, in which countless girls had died. The crowd surrounding, betting on the Archivist-choosing day’s outcome. Which girl would leave the lakeshore walking on her own two feet. Which one would leave in pieces. A skull for the shrine, some blood for the fields, meat for the shrine-dogs’ dinner. Not so much as a name left behind.

  They weren’t on the lakeshore now, and the stars weren’t out. It was a beautiful summer afternoon, and they were training on the reclaimed grounds of the Catchkeep-shrine after the death of the Catchkeep-priest, and the nightmare of the Archivist-choosing system—four centuries of slaughter—had died along with him.

  Yet the memory remained. If anything it intensified.

  She was an Archivist again and they were upstarts, they wanted her Archivist-coat and her harvesting-knife and her blood, and the Catchkeep-priest was peering down on her from his high seat, smiling pityingly, because he knew where an Archivist’s road dead-ended and he knew hers didn’t have far to go before it got there. The upstarts all smiled too, but their smile had no pity in it, only patience.

  Her hands had gone sweaty. No sure grip on the wooden knife. Her mouth went dry, her throat tightening. Pure flight instinct crackled down her spine, her legs, her knife-hand. To flee this place. To fight her way out if she had to. To—

  No.

  She had to anchor herself. Get a deathgrip on the here and now. Quickly, calmly, she started listing towns in her head. Her own village and others on its north-south trade route, places where people had managed to carve their footholds into the ashy emptiness of the Waste. Sweetwater. Sunrise. Grayfall. Refuge. Chooser’s Blindside. Last Chance. Lisbet’s Rest. Here.

  Sparkles dropped slowly through her field of vision like grains of sand through water, taking the nausea and dizziness with them. Then she realized she was still holding on to Bex and let go.

  Intellectually she knew better, but even now, years later, some part of her still occasionally got confused. It would hit her, maybe once or twice a month, for no particular reason she could discern. Heart slamming in her chest, hands shaking, breathing like she’d just outrun a bear. It felt like a waking nightmare, or a memory, but stronger than either. A souvenir of the ghost-place, she guessed, like a scar on her mind. Ghosts were made of memories. It made sense enough to her that she, having been part-ghost herself, could be so easily overpowered by her own.

  “Plenty of ways to do damage without drawing blood,” she said firmly, wiping her palms. Clearing her throat. Drawing a steadying breath. “Next.”

  This time Glory charged her. Isabel knocked Glory’s knife-hand aside, grabbed her arm, planted her good leg and tried to ignore the jolt of pain that shot up her bad one when she used it to sweep Glory’s feet out from under her. It hurt like hell, but Glory dropped hard, harder than intended. Distantly Isabel observed her own sudden petty spike of satisfaction. I could still hurt you if I want to.

  “In a real fight you’d kick out her knee,” she said. “Wouldn’t be much of a fight after that. But still.” She reached to help Glory up, slower than necessary, taking advantage of that moment to quietly catch her breath. “No blood. This is important.” She raked her gaze over the ex-upstarts, their steady eyes like candle-flames, their holy scars that all matched hers. “Tell me why.”

  “Ghosts,” several ex-upstarts said at once.

  “I know you know.” She scanned them until she located Onya, the brew-mistress’s daughter. Ten years old, and one of the training group’s newest additions. Isabel nodded to her. “You. Tell me why.”

  “Blood pulls ghosts,” Onya answered. “Salt too. But blood more.”

  “And can you put a ghost down?”

  “No.”

  “Do you want to have to try?”

  Wide-eyed, Onya shook her head. “Slag that.”

  “Any of you?”

  Silence.

  “Neither do I.”

  Even now, a couple of the youngest glanced up at this, surprised. Isabel couldn’t blame them. All they knew of Archivist-work was stories. Hunting ghosts for clues about the old dead world Before probably looked like a fun game from a distance, and in hindsight, with somebody else’s neck on the line.

  “You don’t remember before the ghostgrass barricades,” she told Onya, as gently as she knew how. “When the Catchkeep-priest was alive. When I was Archivist.”

  Onya eyed her skeptically. “The barricades were there when I was little,” she said. “I used to get in trouble for going up close to see.”

  “You were little yesterday,” Sairy said, poking Onya in the ribs.

  “Used to be,” Isabel explained, “only the Archivist got ghostgrass. Just enough to hang a bundle by the door of the Archivist-house, and burn some to draw a protective ring on the ground outside.”

  Which made her remember the last ghost she’d caught, and the only one to ever have walked into that house on its own power. Hastily she shoved that thought away.

  Keep moving forward, she warned herself. Like a stone skipping across water. You keep moving or you sink.

  “Well, if I had ghostgrass,” Onya announced, “I’d share it.”

  “And that’s what we do now,” Isabel said. “We cultivate it and make sure everyone has a share. Because now we don’t have any Catchkeep-priest making sure that you can’t protect yourselves, that you need an Archivi
st to do it for you.”

  “Screw that,” Onya said, and a number of the others nodded agreement.

  “Exactly,” Isabel said. “We’ve put this in place and now it’s our job to make sure it works. The problem is it’s been working so well that some of you are forgetting what happens when it stops. You think: I’m safe here, this is just practice, we’re in the middle of town, what will happen. But what about when you’re on perimeter? What about when the ghostgrass barricades fail? You think: they’re strong, we planted them well, they keep the ghosts out and they’ve never been breached, which stays true for exactly as long as we take steps to maintain them. We only stay safe if we stay smart. Vigilant. Lucky.”

  Several of them gestured automatically to the One Who Got Away, whose plaything luck was.

  Isabel nodded to Glory. It was a thank-you and a dismissal. Glory nodded back and joined the others. “I’ve seen a number of you come back from training these past few months with cuts, scrapes, bloody noses,” Isabel told them. “That’s a problem. Bruises, sprains, broken fingers, fine. Annoying, and you’ll need to call in favors on your chore rotations for a while, but you’ll survive. No blood. Whatever issues you think you have in a fight, they are going to seem very small very quickly if you bring a pissed-off hungry ghost down on you. Believe me when I say you do not want to learn that the hard way.”

  A few of the ex-upstarts, Sairy and Kath and Bex, were nodding grimly. Others like Onya, who’d never had to stare down the barrel of that work, didn’t know well enough to be afraid. With luck—and a lot of effort—they never would.

  “Pair up,” Isabel told them. “Practice. Blocks and counters. Get creative. You never know what’s going to happen until you’re up to the eyes in it. So what do you do?”

  “Be ready for anything,” they recited.

  “When?”

  “At any time.”

  “What else?”

  “Work together,” Onya said.

  “Trust each other,” Glory added. “Until the end.”

  “It’s worth risking two to save one,” Bex finished.

  “That’s right,” Isabel said. “Hold on to that. There’s a reason why we go over it so much. Keep it in the front of your minds when you practice. And remember: these tactics are what you use on people. Don’t try this on a ghost. You’re in a fight, you’re breaking up a fight, someone starts up with you, you’re standing perimeter and something goes bad. Okay? Now work until I say stop.”

  They paired off and went to it. Isabel circulated among them for a while, making suggestions, giving advice. Here and there she reached in to fix someone’s attacking or blocking angle, or told someone to go harder or lighten up a little. Refusing to be envious of the ease and grace of their movement.

  Back from the dead, she thought for the millionth time. Of course I walk like a ghost.

  When her leg started complaining too loudly she sat on a rock and watched them in silence until Squirrel padded out from the back door of the Catchkeep-shine and sat at her feet. He’d been a tiny puppy when he’d lost the job he would’ve grown into, but somehow the idea of trailing her around was coded into his brain from generations of breeding toward that very purpose. Or maybe he just liked her. It was probably a good thing then that he didn’t know she’d had to kill his parents.

  Sairy had named him Squirrel. She’d thought that after four hundred years of upstarts and Archivists being chased down and terrorized by the monstrous shrine-dogs that were his ancestors, it’d be funny.

  “Look at them,” Isabel murmured, giving Squirrel a scratch behind the ears before setting to work massaging the knots of scar tissue in her bad leg. The ex-upstarts never ceased to amaze her. In the three years since the Catchkeep-priest’s death, they’d been like plants moved into the gardens after too long spent in too-small pots. They’d stretched and grown and thrived. It was amazing how well and how smoothly they worked together when nobody was strategically, systemically setting them at each other’s throats.

  Do the work, the Catchkeep-priest used to tell her. You were entrusted with the tools to do the work, and you will do the work.

  This, she thought, is what the work is now. Trading for apple-grafts and altar-candles. Chopping vegetables. Sweeping floors. Teaching people how to protect themselves. It was satisfying, honest, exhausting work, and in some ways it fulfilled a sense of purpose of which her Archivist-work had only ever skimmed the surface. The things she lived in fear of now were bad harvests, drought, running out of basic medicines, trade agreements with neighboring towns falling through. What others feared in her now was no worse than her displeasure if they shirked their chores. Nothing that would end up with somebody’s blood on the lakeshore, somebody’s skull on the shrine-wall, a dozen survivors wondering which one of them was next.

  She enjoyed the work. She enjoyed the routine. She enjoyed the soreness in her muscles at the end of the day, not from dueling and murdering the living, or hunting and exploiting the dead, but from gardening, hauling water, making paper, harvesting ghostgrass, chopping firewood, drying herbs, pounding grain. Sometimes it felt like there was a hole in her and she was filling it, chore by chore, project by project, day by day. Sometimes it felt like it was working.

  She sat and watched the ex-upstarts spar with townspeople and with each other, repurposing their combat skills for self-defense and the defense of their town, a small green place carved into the vast and ashen Waste under the heel of nobody. That had to count for something.

  By now the sun had risen fully, the day’s heat a damp weight on her head. On the edges of the field, younger children had gathered to watch the training. Periodically they were shooed away, only to scatter and regroup like crows. More than a few of them were busily whacking each other with sticks in imitation.

  Isabel took off the Archivist-coat and folded it over one arm. Ran a finger idly over the stitched holes in the dogleather of it. Even years later, no trouble at all to remember which holes she’d put there, which holes she’d scrubbed the blood from and sewn shut. But there were countless more. In some places—over the heart, between the shoulderblades—the coat was more thread than leather, more mended than whole. How many Archivists must have died in it? It was less a coat than a graveyard. Despite or because of this, she hadn’t yet been able to bring herself to throw it away.

  “That’s enough,” she called, and the sparring pairs broke off, stuck their wooden knives into their belts and wiped their sweaty faces on their sleeves, awaiting further instruction. Under the awkward burden of all those expectant stares, she paused. Going from mortal enemy to mentor was a weirdness that would probably never have the edge completely ground off it. “That all looked good,” she told them. “Any questions?”

  “So what happens,” Onya asked after a moment, “if we do pull ghosts?”

  Isabel blinked. “You know, you’re right. We don’t really ever go over that.” We don’t really ever need to, she could have said. Because I—

  “That’s my mistake,” she said instead. “We’ll go over that next week.”

  “What if I see one today?”

  “Grab some ghostgrass. Run like hell. Come find me and I’ll deal with it.”

  “With that?” Onya pointed at the harvesting-knife in its sheath at Isabel’s hip.

  “Not if I can help it,” Isabel said.

  “Then how do you know if it still works?”

  Isabel paused. Then, in a sudden access of honesty: “I don’t.”

  “Then why do you still have—”

  “Next week, okay?” Cutting her off fast because it was either that or ignore her. Answering that question—genuinely answering it—wasn’t an option. Isabel struggled to soften her tone. “I promise.”

  “Here,” Sairy said. “I got this.” She reached in and tied a long braid of ghostgrass blades around Onya’s ponytail. “See? Nothing touching you like that. I could throw a ghost at you right now and it’d bounce off.”

  Onya lit up like a warn-fi
re. “Can you?”

  Sairy swatted her. “No.”

  “Can I see the knife then?”

  “Fine,” Isabel said, relenting. “Stand back.” The harvesting-knife had a blade the length of Isabel’s forearm, more of a hilt than a handle, and a guard like a sword. Because it used to be a sword, she knew now, and long ago it had been broken, tapering the remaining blade unevenly.

  “What’s this?” Onya asked, poking at the shiny blue-black synthetic wrapping of the grip.

  “Before-stuff,” Sairy said.

  “It’s so smooth.” She ran her finger back and forth, then withdrew.

  Isabel glanced over the others. “Nothing else? Okay. Dismissed.”

  They broke and wandered off in ones and twos, and when they all were gone Isabel stood and made her way across the grounds toward the shrine, Squirrel padding along beside her.

  Halfway there, she slung the Archivist-coat down on the sunbleached grass and stopped to tie up her hair. She hadn’t cut it in a while and it was just long enough to be gathered in a string and kept off her neck. There’d been a few years when she’d almost forgotten what color her own hair was, it was so interbraided with the shorn-off hair of every upstart she’d killed, and the Archivist she’d defeated even before that—and besides, it wasn’t like she’d had a mirror on her wall to see herself in. She’d cut off her braids down in the ghost-place and never missed them once. Her own hair had come in thick and brown. It could’ve been piss-yellow and glowing for all she cared. She hadn’t seen her reflection in ages.

  She picked the coat back up and kicked her way through a late patch of suns-and-moons overgrowing the path. Too close to autumn for suns, but the moons went up in an explosion of silver-white fluff, almost the exact color of a weakened ghost. Ignoring the spike of pain in her leg, she kicked them toward the grassy side of the path. More fluff meant more seeds, more seeds landing on viable ground meant more edible leaves next spring. They say people used to wish on these things, she thought, and kicked harder, sudden anger driving off the pain. They should’ve known better.