The Storyteller Read online

  ALSO BY TRACI CHEE

  The Reader

  The Speaker

  G. P. Putnam’s Sons

  an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, NY 10014

  Copyright © 2018 by Traci Chee.

  Title hand-lettering, map, and interior illustrations copyright © 2016 by Ian Schoenherr.

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  G. P. Putnam’s Sons is a registered trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  Ebook ISBN 9780698410640

  Photographic elements (or images) courtesy of Shutterstock.

  Jacket art © 2018 by Yohey Horishita; Photograph of girl © Nabi Tang; Cover design by Kristin Smith-Boyle

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  THIS IS A BOOK. THERE ARE HIDDEN ELEMENTS AND CODES WITHIN ITS DESIGN. LOOK CLOSER AND HAVE FUN.

  Version_1

  For Dad

  I hope you would have been proud of me

  Contents

  Also by Traci Chee

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Map

  Once

  CHAPTER 1: Fine as Gossamer, Hard as Iron

  CHAPTER 2: The Second Adventure of Haldon Lac

  CHAPTER 3: Close to the Heart

  CHAPTER 4: Not a King

  CHAPTER 5: Epigloss

  Twice Betrayed

  CHAPTER 6: The Shell Game

  CHAPTER 7: Powerless

  Laws of the Dead

  CHAPTER 8: Dangerous Wants

  CHAPTER 9: The Trove of the King

  CHAPTER 10: The Crystal Globe

  CHAPTER 11: The Thwarted Adventure of Haldon Lac

  CHAPTER 12: How We Fail

  Look Closer

  CHAPTER 13: Our Past Lives

  CHAPTER 14: The Breaking of Broken Crown

  CHAPTER 15: Chief of the Bloodletters

  CHAPTER 16: The Myth of the Black Beauty

  CHAPTER 17: The Real Villains

  A Threat to Roku

  CHAPTER 18: Enough

  CHAPTER 19: A Touch of Destiny

  CHAPTER 20: Red Hearts Can’t Be Broken

  CHAPTER 21: The Power of the Scribes

  End of the Rope

  CHAPTER 22: Her Father’s Daughter

  CHAPTER 23: Strange, Beautiful, and Deadly

  CHAPTER 24: Traps Within Traps

  CHAPTER 25: The Last Time

  Nothing and Everything

  CHAPTER 26: One True King

  CHAPTER 27: Not Today

  CHAPTER 28: The Third Adventure of Haldon Lac

  CHAPTER 29: The Promise Keeper

  CHAPTER 30: Close to the End

  CHAPTER 31: Past the Edges of the Stars

  CHAPTER 32: The Storyteller

  CHAPTER 33: Now Is All You Have

  CHAPTER 34: Those Who Will Die

  CHAPTER 35: Who Controls the Story?

  CHAPTER 36: Through the Storm

  CHAPTER 37: The Story of a Traitor

  CHAPTER 38: The Fourth Adventure of Haldon Lac

  CHAPTER 39: The Few or the Many

  CHAPTER 40: We Were Dead, but Now We Rise

  CHAPTER 41: The Fracturing of the World

  CHAPTER 42: Of Heroes and Kings

  CHAPTER 43: Captain Cannek Reed

  CHAPTER 44: Destiny

  CHAPTER 45: The Resurrection Amulet

  CHAPTER 46: Gone

  The End?

  All the Things He’d Never Get a Chance to Say

  The Survivor King

  You Miss a Man So Much

  Paths Alight with Gold

  One Day

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Once

  Once there was, but it would not always be. This is the ending of every story.

  Once there was a world called Kelanna, a wonderful and terrible world of water and ships and magic. The people of Kelanna were like you in many ways—they spoke and worked and loved and died—but they were different in one very important respect: they couldn’t read. They had never developed the written word, never inscribed the names of the dead in bronze or stone. They remembered the dead with their voices and bodies, repeating names and deeds and dizzying loves in the desperate hope that the dead would not disappear from the world altogether.

  For in Kelanna, when you died, when the rhythms of your heart and lungs stuttered and failed at last, you would be gone. They’d put your body on a floating barge. They’d place you on a pile of logs and blackrock, dry brush and kindling, and they’d send you burning onto the ocean.

  And that would be the end of you. In Kelanna, they didn’t believe in souls or ghosts or calming spirits that walked by your side after your friend or your sister or your father had died. They didn’t believe you got messages from the dead. The dead could not speak. The dead no longer existed.

  Except in story.

  Every life in Kelanna was a story—a tale to be lived and remembered and repeated.

  Some stories were modest in scale, existing in a single family or a small community of believers who whispered among themselves so their loved ones would not be forgotten.

  Others were so powerful they would transform the very fabric of the world.

  Once there was a reader. She would be the daughter of an assassin and the most powerful sorcerer the world had seen in years, and she’d grow up to surpass them both in greatness.

  She would be young, only five when her mother died and nine when her father was murdered, and her childhood would be steeped in violence. She’d grow up to be a formidable force in a formidable world, and one day she would be responsible for turning the tide in the deadliest war Kelanna had ever seen. She would demolish her enemies with a wave of her hand. She would watch men burn on the sea.

  And she would lose everything.

  Her parents. Her friends. Her allies.

  The boy she loved.

  Once there was a boy with a scar like a collar. He would lead an army so great they would mow down every foe they came across. He and his forces would be unstoppable, and they would conquer all Five Islands in a bloody altercation known as the Red War.

  He’d be young when he did it, and he’d die soon after his last campaign . . . alone.

  Once there was a storyteller, a chipped-toothed outlaw, who said he’d do anything to be part of a tale with such greatness and scope. But after the Red War, he’d regret every word.

  CHAPTER 1


  Fine as Gossamer, Hard as Iron

  Sefia sat up in the shadows of the sick bay, startled out of some half-remembered dream.

  The ship rocked and plunged beneath her, making the jars of ointment and bottles of tonic rattle on their shelves. Outside, rain spattered the portholes, blurring her view of the waves, high as rolling hills.

  A storm. They must have come upon it in the night.

  Sefia shivered, hugging her knees to her chest. In the four days since she’d returned to the Current with Archer, she’d had the same dream again and again. She was back in the house on the hill, and ink was seeping—no, flooding—from the secret room in the basement where her parents had kept the Book, the dark waves reaching across the floor to grasp them by the ankles and crawl up their calves. In the dream, Lon and Mareah scooped her up. In the dream, they shoved her out the door. But they were always too slow to save themselves, always too slow to escape the growing pool of ink that drew them, screaming, into its black depths.

  Destiny. Her parents had been destined to die young, their futures recorded in the Book with everything that had ever been or would ever be, from the flicker of a mayfly’s wings to the life spans of the stars overhead.

  Somewhere in the Book was the passage where her mother got sick.

  Somewhere were the paragraphs that described her father being tortured.

  It had been written, so it had come to pass.

  But they’d fought it. They’d betrayed the Guard, the secret society of readers to which they’d sworn their undying allegiance. They’d stolen the Book, the Guard’s most powerful weapon, to protect their daughter from her own future. They’d run.

  They’d lost, in the end, but oh, how they’d fought.

  As Sefia had to fight now. Fight and win, or she’d lose Archer to destiny too.

  Beside her, he lay curled beneath the blankets, hair tousled, fingers twitching in his sleep. He always slept so little, his dreams haunted by memories of the people he’d killed.

  He felt fractured, he’d told her. At all times, he was the same small-town boy he’d been before the Guard’s impressors took him, and yet, at all times, he was an animal, he was a victim, he was a killer, he was loud as thunder, he was the boy from the legends, with a bloodlust that could not be slaked.

  Lightning forked in the distance, pulsing like veins in the restless sky.

  As if in response, Archer’s body spasmed. He let out a wordless gasp.

  Sefia shifted out of his way. “Archer. It’s okay. You’re safe.”

  His eyes opened. For a moment, he seemed to have trouble emerging from his dreams, seemed to have trouble recognizing where he was, who he was.

  But the moment would pass. It always did. And then—

  The smile. It spread across his face like dawn racing over water—his lips, his cheeks, his golden eyes. Every time, it was like he was seeing her for the first time, his expression full of such hope that she longed to see it again and again for the rest of her days.

  For a second, the storm abated. For a second, the ship was still. For a second, Sefia’s whole world was light and soft and warm.

  “Sefia,” he whispered, tucking her hair behind her ear.

  She bent closer, drawn to him as a hummingbird is drawn to a flower, her mouth gently landing on his.

  He leaned into her kiss, responding to her lips and wandering hands as if her very touch was magic, making him moan and arch and yearn for more.

  He laced his fingers in her hair, like he needed to be closer to her, like he couldn’t get enough of her, but as he tried to sit up, he let out a sudden hiss of pain and reached for his injured side.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “Don’t be.” Propping himself up on his elbows, he grinned. “I’m not.”

  Her cheeks warmed as she pulled aside the blanket to examine his bandages. Doc had stitched and dressed the wound twice now: first when he’d arrived, half-conscious, with the gash below his ribs black and nauseatingly deep, and a second time when Archer had torn his sutures trying to help Cooky dump a pot of potato peels overboard. Sefia would never hear the end of it if Doc had to redo the stitches again.

  “I’m fine.” Archer tried batting her away.

  “You almost died.”

  “Only almost.” He shrugged. He’d told her about the fight with Serakeen. There had been the smell of cordite and blood. A gust of magic that had swept Archer’s lieutenants, Frey and Aljan, into the wall of the alley before dropping them, unconscious, onto the cobbles. The resistance of bone as Archer severed Serakeen’s hand at the wrist.

  “I should’ve been there,” Sefia said, not for the first time. If she’d been there, she could have protected him. She had the same magic as Serakeen—a magic the Guard called Illumination— she might have even matched him in a fight. After all, she thought bitterly, I’m the daughter of an assassin and the most powerful sorcerer the world has seen in years.

  No. She didn’t want to believe in that future. She wouldn’t become a weapon in some war for control of the Five Kingdoms. She wouldn’t lose Archer, the boy she loved.

  “You’re here now. That’s what matters,” Archer said quietly. “Without you, we wouldn’t be able to rescue Frey and Aljan.”

  His bloodletters, his friends, had followed him into the fight with Serakeen, and Serakeen still had them. The Guard’s Apprentice Soldier, known to Sefia’s parents as Rajar, had once been Lon and Mareah’s friend and collaborator. Together, they’d orchestrated the war that was supposed to claim Archer’s life.

  How many of her parents’ mistakes would Sefia have to fix? She’d loved them, but they’d made so many.

  “Frey and Aljan will be all right,” Sefia said.

  “You really think so?”

  She trailed her fingers down his arm, over the fifteen burns that marked his kills in the impressors’ fighting rings, and took his hand. “Yes,” she said.

  The plan was to return to the bloodletters, organize a rescue, and meet up with the Current of Faith again at Haven, an island in the unexplored reaches of the Central Sea—one of those places you could get to only if you were told how to get there. Reed had set it up months ago to take in outlaws on the run from the widening scope of the war. If Sefia and Archer got there with the bloodletters, they would all have a place to wait while the fighting—and destiny—passed them by. If they got to Haven, Archer would live.

  But first, they needed the Book. Sefia couldn’t teleport to the bloodletters without a clear image of where they were, and only the Book, with its infinite pages of history, could provide that.

  She’d hidden it in the safest place she could think of: the Jaharan messengers’ post. The messengers’ guild dealt in all kinds of secrets—delicate packages, incriminating information— and they never broke their trust. They were respected and powerful, and while it was with them, no one could touch the Book.

  Not even the Guard. She hoped.

  The Current of Faith was on its way to Jahara now; they were only a few days away. A few days, and she’d have the Book back. A few days, and she’d be able to find the bloodletters and mount a rescue. A few days. Frey and Aljan just had to hold on a few more days.

  Archer lifted Sefia’s hand to his lips. “What would I do without you?”

  “You’ll never have to find out.” She kissed him again, and the kiss was a promise. A promise of high winds and open waters, of lying, legs tangled, on a white beach with nothing but the firmament for a coverlet, of succulent days and hot breath and damp skin and years rich as wine and endless as the sea.

  When she drew back, she had the satisfaction of seeing his gold eyes darken with want, with yes—he licked his lips—with forever. He reached for her again.

  “You’ll be sorry if you tear your stitches.”

  “If I tear them doing what I want to do to you, it’ll be worth it.�
�� He pulled her, grinning, onto the bunk beside him, smothering her laughter with kisses until she was delirious with them.

  Then the alarm began to sound.

  Archer grumbled and rolled onto his side, pinning Sefia between him and the wall.

  “That’s the bell for all hands!” she protested.

  He nipped at her collarbone. “I’m injured, remember?”

  “I’m not!”

  Before he could reply, the door opened, and Sefia let out a yelp as Marmalade, the new chanty leader of the larboard watch, stuck her head into the sick bay. She was in her rain gear, hood pulled over her honey-colored hair.

  “Ugh!” she cried as Sefia peered around Archer’s naked shoulder. “Do your canoodlin’ on your own time!”

  “I’m trying!” Sefia gestured to Archer, who grinned unapologetically.

  Marmalade rolled her eyes. They’d all become friends playing Ship of Fools with Horse and Meeks, and the girl had consistently fleeced all of them but Archer, who at least broke even. “Yeah, you’re tryin’ real hard. Just get out of bed before the mate comes to fetch you, or you’ll be scourin’ pots till we reach Jahara.”

  “Fine, fine. I’m getting up.”

  “Oh, and Archer?” The chanty leader’s gaze roved along his body, from his chest to his waist, where his pajamas hung low on his hips. “Nice.”

  Sefia hurled a pillow across the room as Marmalade ducked back into the corridor and slammed the door, laughing.

  As Sefia scrambled from beneath the blankets, scooping up her clothes, Archer followed.

  “You’re injured, remember?” she said with a touch of sarcasm.

  “I’m not.” He stuffed his feet through the legs of his trousers, wincing as the abrupt movement pained him. “At least, I’m not too injured to help.”

  “Yeah, right.” Blinking, Sefia summoned her magic, and in an instant, Archer’s body, the bunk beneath him, the well-worn walls of the sick bay, even the portholes and the rough water outside were overlaid with spiraling golden torrents.

  The Illuminated world.

  If the Book was a written compendium of past, present, and future, the Illuminated world was the living embodiment of it—an ocean of light in constant motion beneath the world of touch and smell and taste. With enough time and training, Illuminators like Sefia could sift through the shimmering specks to see the events of the past or move objects through the air.