The Rebel Assassin

Chapter 9: A Fresh Start

By the time Therese Verivain arrived in Maenar, Nemia had spent three days feverishly working on the dream lists, only being dragged out of her rooms by Lisbetha for meals. Liz was good at getting Nemia out of her room — she had Morie's snarky attitude and refusal to take no for an answer. But where Morie had mastered an armory of little tricks to half-con Nemia into coming outside, Liz would simply scoop Nemia up and carry her if necessary. It was Nemia's first real experience being treated like a little sibling, so she was too surprised the first time it happened to even fight back.

"Some assassin you are," Liz remarked, dumping Nemia back on her feet outside in the cool autumn air.

"I'm the Thief," Nemia pointed out, but her words sounded like a question even to herself.

Liz frowned and stuffed her hands in her pockets. "Yeah, I guess. I'm just so used to thinking of Morane as the Thief."

"Everyone is," Nemia said, hollowly. She still didn't know how to feel about it, how to even begin to deal with it. Knowing she wasn't the Assassin had given her a lightness she hadn't had in years, but claiming the title that had been Morie's made her feel guilty, vaguely dirty — as if she was stealing something that did not belong to her. And unlike Morane, Nemia had no experience with thieves' guilt. She had no experience with stealing at all.

Liz rumpled her hair. "Stop that. Stop looking all mopey. Evvie is coming to dinner tonight."

"And I can't look mopey in front of Evvie?"

"You absolutely cannot. Come on!"

And Liz was right, dinner with both of them kept Nemia's mind from endlessly whirling around the dream lists or sulking. The two girls were affectionate together, cracking inside jokes as they held hands or stole each other's food, yet they included her effortlessly. "The joke is—" became Liz's favorite catchphrase as she enthusiastically caught Nemia up on a year's worth of inside jokes she and Evvie had with their other friends.

It was... strange. A good, wonderful strange, but Nemia kept expecting something to ruin the illusion that you could make friends with someone so easily. How could Evvie and Liz make her feel like she was wanted, entirely welcome even though she'd been forced on them by circumstances, when she'd felt slightly separated even from Sam and Nick and Cara all these years? Was this what it meant to be someone other than the Assassin? Was this what it was like to be someone people didn't have to fear?

Nemia could feel herself changing the longer she was in Maenar. Something inside her was waking up, unfurling itself, stretching out tentative tendrils, tasting this new sunlight. Where before she imagined herself as ice, she felt thawing. She couldn't say if it was finally being away from the pressure of the palace and never having to face Xalva's terrifying demands that did it, or the knowledge that she had never been meant to be a killer, or the way seeing two girls publically in love in front of her made her heart fill almost to bursting, but she knew this was better. She knew that the way she fell asleep thinking of Morie's laughter made her feel good the way Irina's insistent gaze never had.

All these years she had held onto feelings for Morie, both of them feeling the bond between them but never reaching for it. At the time it had felt like wisdom, keeping the bond safe by never speaking of it, keeping her heart safe by not letting it wish that Morie would never choose someone like Luca Laycreek over her. Now she wondered if that silence had only been another form of fear.

When Morie came back, she wanted to speak it out loud. Ask if the way she'd looked at Nemia after rescuing her meant what she thought it did. She wanted to hold Morie's hand walking down Maenar's main street the way Liz and Evvie did.

That's how she passed three days. Analyzing their Guardian Dreams and her own dreams, finding herself encircled by Liz and Evvie's warmth. And then Therese Verivain arrived bearing bad news.