Daughter of No Worlds (The War of Lost Hearts, #1)

by Carissa Broadbent

Via looked thoroughly unsurprised to see me—so unsurprised that it was a little unnerving—and invited me in with casual nonchalance. She wore only a garish, silky robe tied loosely around her waist. As she led me back to her workshop, I earned a lazy wave from an equally half-dressed man lounging on a sofa. I was glad I didn’t arrive ten minutes earlier.

im glad you didnt too!

“And I have one for her, too.” I must have looked as startled as I felt, because she let out a laugh. “The world isn’t as unpredictable as you seem to think it is, Max. Besides, I heard she was going to go save the world or something, wasn’t she? I thought she’d need something one day, and I felt . . . ​inspired.” Sammerin, you gossip.

I LOVE SAMMERIN LOL

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” she said admiringly, and I had to nod. Beautiful and functional. Just like Tisaanah.

BEAUTIFUL AND FUNCTIONAL

named it,” Via said. “Il’Sahaj.” “Il’Sahaj?” “It’s Besrithian. It means, ‘blade of no worlds’ or ‘blade of all worlds.’ ” At my confused glance, she clarified, “In old-tongue Besrithian, ‘aj’ means both ‘none’ and ‘all.’ ” “That’s impractical.” “Impractical, sure. But certainly poetic.” “Seems a little far up its own ass.” “My art pieces are my children, Max. I name all of my children. Even yours.” “I don’t even want to know.” She smiled, shrugged. “Maybe one day I’ll tell you. But I figure, you can’t go around breaking chains and freeing civilizations with a boring weapon without a name.”

love via sm

I could hardly take my eyes off it. It was, I admitted, the perfect thing for breaking chains and freeing civilizations. And it fit—fit Tisaanah so perfectly that it was hard to believe that Via had only met her once. She wouldn’t know how to use it at first, of course, but what a thing to grow into. “It’s beautiful,” I said. “You’ve outdone yourself. How much do I owe you?” “Consider it moral reparations for all of those dirty, dirty weapons contracts I do,” she said.

god he loves her so much

And that name . . . ​Il’Sahaj. Blade of no worlds. Blade of all worlds. Just like me.

“We can begin now.” “Begin . . . ​training?” “Yes.” “Are you feeling⁠—” “I’m feeling like I cannot stay still for another minute.” I turned on my heel to face him. A wry smile tugged at one side of his mouth. The left, as always.

THE LEFT. AS. ALWAYS.

But you say you love him. And if he is dead, you will never have him. And I’ll tell you a hard truth, Reshaye—if you kill him, if you hurt him, you will never have me, either. {And why would I want you?} Because you wish to be loved, and I have loved many monsters. Max’s fingers tightened. One terrible second of silence, a wave of fury cresting, cresting . . . {Then you could love one more.}

Even with everything else going on, even considering that creature looming over me and the darkness and the magic and that fucking sword⁠— It was the snap of Tisaanah’s bones that filled my ears, drowning out everything else. That, and the crack of her head hitting the ground, so hard that I thought for one terrifying minute that she might not get up again. I paced the outskirts of Tisaanah’s room, like there was something I could keep from settling in my mind as long as I kept moving. Her eyes followed me. I knew it hurt like hell, to have your bones stitched back together, flesh forcibly repaired. But she didn’t react. She just looked at me, in that particular way of hers, like she was not just seeing but observing. Peeling back layers with her stare.

“Besides,” I added, “tomorrow we leave for Threll, and you’ll be glad you have one of the best fighters in Ara with you when we get there.” The echo of a smile twitched at the corners of her mouth. “Are you bragging?” “It’s not bragging if it’s true. And for once, I’m looking forward to watching those bastards burn.” I meant every damn word of it.

hes braaaaaagging

What were you? Before? {I do not remember. Now I am only pieces of many things. Incomplete.} Its pain rang out in my chest, a mournful, empty cry. I am, too. Fragments. Fragments of a Valtain, born of a country that no longer existed, bound to an Order that only partially accepted me. {I know. Perhaps we will make each other whole, Tisaanah, Daughter of No Worlds.} Perhaps. The lie took everything I had. {What a beautiful broken butterfly you are.}

Eslyn and Ariadnea. Eslyn, who was slight with sharp features and golden skin, seemed much friendlier than her taller, broader, fairer companion, but the two of them still were reserved and kept to themselves after greeting us.

description

A flush rose to his cheeks. He extended one hand and waited. When I stared at it, confused, he muttered, “Your hand, Tisaanah.” I laid my palm in his and tried not to laugh as he planted a clumsy brush of a kiss against my knuckles. “Good luck,” he said, then too quickly dropped my fingers as he gave the three of us one final, hurried wave and was ushered away with his new instructor. “Moth, breaker of flowers, spyglasses, pitchers, and hearts,” Max mused, shaking his head. “He is your apprentice after all, Sammerin.” “He’s a little smitten, I think. But I suppose it can’t be helped.” And I tried not to notice how Sammerin’s gaze slid to Max as he said, “When I saw that red dress, I knew we were all in trouble.”

HAHUA

I lowered myself next to him, lying down on the floor. “I think it is more—wobbly down here.” It took me a moment to choose the word. As fluent as I was by now, my mind was muddy lately. “Wobbly, huh?” “Yes. Right word?” I watched the corner of his mouth curl into a smile. “Excellent word.”

wobbly!

“It’s unpredictable. Possessive. Vindictive. And it’s willing to crush whatever defies it.” Possess or destroy. I shuddered. “Inhuman,” he muttered. “Inhuman?” I shook my head. “Very human. The ugliest parts of humanity.”

this

My words tangled. What ones could I possibly choose that would express everything that had been roiling in me for the last two days? How could I explain what it would do to me if I hurt him—more than I already had? How could I tell him how much it meant to me that he came back and yet how quickly I would trade that for the promise of his safety? Words were nothing, compared to that. It would be like trying to move the sea with a spoon.

I didn’t deserve him. Gods, I didn’t. And yet, traitorously, the deepest recesses of my soul were so happy he was here. The faintest beginnings of tears stung my eyes. “It turned out that we were a decent team,” I whispered. A little smile warmed his voice as he replied, “Yes. We were.”

WERE??? WERE?!?!?!

Poised at my throat before I could finish disarming her. “I think that’s your yield,” she said into my ear. “Ah, I see.” I tried to pass off my breathless panting as an exasperated sigh, with only partial success. “Magic was off-limits but hidden blades are fair game. So little has changed, Nura.” “That was always our problem, Max.” She released me and stepped back. “You always thought I was more honorable than I am.”

i hate her so baaad.

Tisaanah looked so normal when she slept. Well, maybe not normal, exactly—nothing about her was average, after all. But when I went back below deck and peered through the open gap in her curtain to see her face smooshed against the pillow, I let out an involuntary breath. No one would ever guess what was going on in that head. The beautiful machinations or the monster that consumed them.

shes a cutie

I was, after all, a well-practiced, world-renowned expert in denial. I was good at magic, good at fighting, good at gardening. But I was excellent at avoiding inconvenient truths.

LMAO LOVE MAX

Tisaanah drew the curtain closed without looking away from me. “It smells very bad, too,” she observed. Despite myself, a smile twitched at my mouth. Tactful as always. Sometimes I wondered if I should be insulted that I never got any of that saccharine charm that she produced for everyone else, but I’d come to realize that this was really the greater compliment. No counting her dancing steps with me.

nada!

“Mother of bleeding fucking hells!” It was a solid ten seconds before I could even draw a breath, let alone open my eyes. “Sorry. It’s better without warning.” When I did, Sammerin was gazing at his hands, rubbing his fingers together. “I needed to feel it.” “Creative cursing.” Zeryth had pushed aside the fabric and was leaning against a wooden pillar, watching me with lazy curiosity. “You have a way with words, Maxantarius.” “Fuck you.” I was in too much pain to even wish that I could come up with something more inventive. “And delivered with such enthusiasm.”

LMDAOO

There had been many, many times over the years when I very vividly imagined how good it would feel to rip out Zeryth’s throat, but this may have been the first time that I actively had to stop myself from doing it.

naw do it

Zeryth Aldris, the man who “befriended” a teenaged Tisaanah in slavery and proceeded to leave her there, not once, not twice, but four damned times. And then had worn that lazy little smile as he tried to force her to her knees in front of everyone that she so desperately wanted to impress, just because he could. And who now, after all of that, looked at her like she was a slab of meat ready to be quartered for his own purposes. Oh, I knew exactly who I was speaking to.

DRAG HIS ASS

“Men want power because it makes them feel good. Women want power because it lets us do things.

My blade was out, the edge as sharp as the terror of the girl I was and the rage of the woman I became.

GO RESHAYE GO

There was nothing graceful about what I was doing. If he was a dancer, driven by years of training and lethal precision, I was an animal drunk on hunger and instinct. But he protected me, covering up the sloppy mistakes of my rage, responding to every silent request of my movements.

best team

The slaver’s arms shielded his face—already marred with rotted handprint wounds from my touch—mouth flapping in gummy pleas. “Please, please, don’t—Please⁠—” My people had begged, too. I stood over him, feet on either side of his hips, Il’Sahaj in my hands. “Do you remember me?” “Please, please . . .” His face lolled, pressing against the floor, eyes squeezing shut.

“Look at me!” I thrust Il’Sahaj’s blade in his face and used it to turn his cheek. The flesh of his face withered into decay where the metal touched it. I relished his squeal of pain. His fear pulsed through me like a hideous, intoxicating drug. “Don’t kill me,” he wept. Bastard. Bastard. There was no recognition in his eyes—nothing but that cowardly panic. He took everything from me. Killed my family members in their beds. Sold a child to a terrible fate. Me, and so many others. And he didn’t remember. {It is not enough,} Reshaye hissed. “Remember me,” I snarled. A command, not a question, as I opened my palms to release streams and streams of butterflies—crimson, putrid wings spewing into the air as violently as the spurt of blood and the smoke of funeral pyres.

KILL HIS PATHETIC ASS

I was no longer looking at a woman. I was looking at a fucking goddess. A goddess of death and vengeance and utter, indiscriminate destruction. She could be nothing else—standing there in her white jacket so spattered with blood that it soaked crimson, sword raised, those scarlet butterflies forming a cape around her shoulders. “Ascended above,” I rasped to Sammerin. “Did I look like that?” “Yes,” he said. “You did.”

shes beautiful

He settled beside me. I heard rustling and glanced at him to see him pinching dead blossoms from the wildflowers, then crumbling them to ash in little bursts of fire within his palms. Just as he had in his garden—just as he had the first time we sat together at night in the aftermath of a too-close brush with death. “Sorry.” He folded his hands in his lap when he noticed my gaze. “Habit.” “No, I—” I love it. “It is probably good for them.” He squinted down at the flowers, cerulean blue with white-tipped petals. “I wonder if I could get these to grow at home.” “The weather is very different.” “Nothing the right spell couldn’t fix.”

she loves it omg

“But what really did me in was when I was looking at this one enormous painting. A real labor of love. And the date written on it . . .” He cleared his throat, a small, strangled noise. “It was the same day as Sarlazai. While I was off in the mountains, doing . . . ​well, that . . . ​somewhere, miles away, this man was just sitting in his garden, painting his plain wife with the reverence fitting a fucking goddess. And that just . . . ​hit me. It hit me so hard that I wept like a heartbroken fourteen-year-old girl. Because I had forgotten.” “Forgotten?” I whispered. “I had forgotten that people could be that way. I had forgotten that someone, somewhere, was painting terrible pictures of their wife in a garden. I was so far gone that I didn’t even remember that that kind of mundane contentment actually existed, least of all in the same moments as such terrible things.”

whats the word for this

I closed my eyes as my fingers found the necklace around my throat, my thumb pressing against the third Stratagram at the back. The one that would take me back there. “It was a very nice garden.” “The best damn garden in Ara.” Gods, I hadn’t known how much I would miss it.

There was a long silence. And then Max’s voice was more solemn, almost hesitant, as he said, “You gave me that same feeling, Tisaanah.” My breath stilled. “Not right away,” he went on. “Though, I will admit, It says snp, snp was fairly charming from the beginning. But a couple of weeks later, when you told me why you had come to Ara and what you planned to do . . . ​I’d just forgotten that people could be that way. That there were people who just wanted to do something good for the world.”

snp snp mention!

“But you are so much more than that, too, Tisaanah,” he said softly. “I think you forget that. You pushed as hard as I did and saw everything worth seeing and regaled me with your, frankly, terrible jokes, and . . . ​you became my friend. Your goals made me respect you, yes. But it was everything else that made me⁠—” He shut his mouth, cleared his throat, looked away. Then back. “I told you that together we would find a way to do this, and I meant it. But I stand with you until the end. You, Tisaanah. If you wanted to run, I swear we’d find a way out. And if it all goes up in flames, I’ll burn right beside you and it will still be the best thing I⁠—” I didn’t realize I was crying until I tasted salt.

love a hozier coded man

What do you want? I had asked Max, so many months ago. And I had never quite managed to answer that question, not completely. But now I understood. I understood why he believed in me so much. Because more than anything, Max wanted to believe that one person was capable of making something change. Because⁠— If you can do it, I can do it.

HE WANTS HOPEEEE

“I don’t believe you.” I placed my palms on either side of his cheeks, resting my forehead against his. He still smelled like ash and lilacs, like he had carried the remnants of his garden all the way across the sea. “You are the best of men, Maxantarius Farlione, no matter how much you try to convince the world otherwise. Promise me that you’ll keep fighting your battles even if I lose mine.” “You won’t⁠—” “Promise.” His fingers found my face, tracing a warm trail down my cheek. And then, as if a thread had snapped, he pulled me into a sudden, fierce embrace. I sank against it so smoothly, my arms sliding over his shoulders, my knees adjusting so that I curled around him. “I promise,” he murmured into my hair.

too intimate get a room

I brushed my lips against his throat. His fingers tightened at my back, and that touch seared up my spine, heartbeat rising to the surface of my skin. And in that moment, a truth solidified in my heart, my soul, my blood—a piece of me that wanted nothing more than to seize this chance. Because I wanted him. I wanted him in so many ways. As a friend, as a kindred soul, as a fierce teammate. As skin and lips and teeth. As a hitched breathless moan in the darkness or a lazy embrace in the sunrise. I wanted that. I wanted it all.

SHE WANTS HIM

Then I trailed my hands over the lean muscle of his abdomen, across the ridges of his ribs. He let out a hissing exhale that may have started in arousal but ended somewhere closer to a hitched chuckle. “I can’t remain appropriately seductive if you’re going to tickle me. It’s going to ruin my image.”

LMAOOO ur image is already way ruined

I dragged my fingernails down his arm, shifting my hips lower. And then I finally hooked my legs around him—finally felt him settle at my entrance. I pulled away from him enough to meet his gaze. “I win,” I whispered. “My ego will never recover.”

it truly never will

Together, we burned.

butterfly and the serpent

I was caught in quite a predicament. On one hand, I had a beautiful, nude woman draped over me, her face nestled against my neck and slow breaths tickling my skin, and I felt truly content for the first time in weeks—hell, years. It would be so easy to curl up with her and fall into an enticing rest, clinging to the wonderful notion that she would be there when I opened my eyes again.

the dream!

I wanted to memorize every sound she made, every expression, every freckle or mole, like I was a cartographer tattooing a map of her onto my soul. Still so many paths to chart.

a man that yearns is a man that earns

Tisaanah’s circles drifted, turning to lazy S shapes over my stomach. I bit back a twitching laugh. Not well enough. “What a beautiful giggle,” she teased. “Letting you find out that I’m ticklish will be the biggest mistake I’ve ever made.”

max being ticklish too cute

Ascended, that smile. Maybe I knew from the beginning that it would be my undoing.

it is!

I raised my eyebrows, as if to say, Really? Again? “Too tired?” She lifted her head, letting tendrils of black-and-silver hair dangle over my face. “You would rather sleep?” My hand ran down her side, following the warmth of her skin and the curve where her waist met her hip. What a predicament, indeed. I pulled her face to mine, resigned to my noble sacrifice. “If you can do it, I can do it.”

their motto!

I was careful not to wake anyone as I opened the flap⁠— “You smell like debauchery.” I jumped so high that I had to bite back a curse, whipping around to see Sammerin seated cross-legged beside the path, in front of his shelter. With his dark clothing and his typical quiet demeanor, he practically melted into the dusk. “Shit, Sammerin, don’t do that to me.” I stepped toward him, examining his face while trying not to let him know I was doing it. “Don’t you have more productive things to do? Like sleep, for example. Perhaps that would be a better use of your time.”

DEBAUCHERY LMAO

“Max, what’s this?” He pointed to his tent. I knew this was not going anywhere in my favor. “I’d love to play this game, but I have all kinds of important things to do.” “This is a tent. A shelter constructed of fabric. Fabric is a material not known for its sound-dampening qualities.” He said all of this in that perpetually smooth, calm voice, but his tired eyes glittered with laughter. “You’re lucky that I’m the only one close enough to hear.” The thought of Zeryth—or Nura⁠— I cringed and tried not to show it. “Firstly, I am a gentleman and therefore, again, I have no idea what you’re talking about. But secondly, if I did—theoretically—I’d find it highly, highly suspect that you listened to that.” “Be assured that I tried very hard not to. But at least we got the inevitable out of the way.”

POOR SAM LOL

“I’ll be more ready after another hour of sleep,” I grumbled, shoving my anxiety down my throat. Sammerin stared at me with that searching concern for a couple of seconds longer, then shrugged. “At least if you die, you’ll die happy.” “Fuck you.” “I don’t need anyone’s leftovers.” I stifled a chuckle as I went into my tent.

ti literally ravenged him whole

Serel. Scarred, tired-looking, thinner than I had left him. But alive. And here. Even through all of these people, even from across the room, I felt his emotion hit me and meld with my own. Shock drowned out by relief drowned out by profound, unwavering love. He was alive.

ALIVEALIVEALIVEEEEE