This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me by Ilona Andrews: Chapter 9

When Maggie wakes up cold, filthy, and naked in a gutter, it doesn’t take her long to recognize Kair Toren, a city she knows intimately from the pages of the famously unfinished dark fantasy series she’s been reading (and re-reading) obsessively…

Join us every Monday through March 30th for an extended preview of This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me by Ilona Andrews, the start of a blockbuster new epic fantasy series publishing March 31st with Tor Books. Find additional excerpts here.

When Maggie wakes up cold, filthy, and naked in a gutter, it doesn’t take her long to recognize Kair Toren, a city she knows intimately from the pages of the famously unfinished dark fantasy series she’s been obsessively reading and re-reading while waiting years for the final novel.

Her only tools for navigating this gritty world of rival warlords, magic, and mayhem? Her encyclopedic knowledge of the plot, the setting, and the characters’ ambitions and fates. But while she quickly discovers she cannot be killed (though many will try!), the same cannot be said for the living, breathing characters she’s coming to love—a motley band that includes a former lady’s maid, a deadly assassin, various outrageous magical creatures, and a dangerously appealing soldier. Soon, instead of trying to get home, she finds herself enmeshed in the schemes—and attentions—of dueling princes, dukes, and villains, all while trying to save them and the kingdom of Rellas from the way she knows their stories will end: in a cataclysmic war.

Chapter 9

I woke up to pain and the wailing of children.

The world was soft and fuzzy, out of focus. I blinked a couple of times and saw Reynald’s face. He was sitting by me, dark and scary, lost in thought.

It would be a great time to quip something witty, but everything hurt too much.

“Ow.”

Reynald’s gaze snapped to me. Relief shone in his eyes.

“Well,” he said. “‘Undying’ is a bit of a misnomer, isn’t it?”

“Yes, but ‘dying horribly and then waking up in a lot of pain’ is a bit of a mouthful.”

I raised my hand. He grasped it and pulled me into a sitting position. The little girl I had carried threw herself at me, sobbing. Double ow. I winced, hugged her, and petted her back.

Clover made a strangled noise. Her eyes were red, and tears stained her face. Her voice shook. “I thought you died, my lady.”

Aww.

Behind her, Kaiden stared at me, a desperate, vulnerable look in his eyes. He looked like a little kid who’d been pummeled by life so many times, he didn’t expect anything good to ever happen again, and my heart squeezed itself into a painful little ball.

“Hey,” I told him.

He spun around, hiding his face.

“I’m fine,” I told them. “It’s all good. Everything is good.”

Everything wasn’t good. Everything hurt like hell. The little girl hugging me felt like someone was stabbing needles into my body.

I looked at Reynald. “Is he dead?”

He nodded.

“Good.” The relief that flooded through me was indescribable. I had never been so happy in my entire life. “How long was I out?”

“About half an hour,” Reynald said.

Less than last time. Or at least I was guessing it was less, but then last time I had been stabbed several times, my throat was slit, and I’d drowned. There was a lot more damage to heal.

I suddenly realized that I was still in the hallway. They must’ve been afraid to move me.

“Do we need to go? I can try to get up.”

“Why would we need to go?” Reynald asked.

“To escape.”

“Everyone is dead,” he told me.

“But we need to leave. What if the guards come here and discover all the dead people?”

“Why would they come here? In all these years they’ve never bothered with this house.”

“What if Derog’s clients show up?”

“I hope they do.” Reynald smiled.

I shivered and instantly regretted it. Shivering hurt.

He was on my side. At least for now.

I met Reynald’s gaze. “My brain is a little slow right now.”

He nodded. “I can tell. We have five children in our custody. We must provide them with a safe place to stay until we can return them to their families or determine what to do next. We’re in a fortress of a house. We can hold it against a small army. In a little while, I will get a boat and dispose of the bodies in the bay, as is the time-honored Kair Toren tradition. We will clean the blood. We will sleep safely and eat well, and after you recover, we will go through Derog’s ledgers.”

And there would be a lot of ledgers. Years of them. Lasa kept meticulous records.

Reynald was right. Derog was a slaver. If he had paid off any guardsmen, they wouldn’t stick their necks out to get revenge for him. His only living relative was his sister who lived in another province, and we would be able to handle her if she showed up. The Kair Toren underworld would note that we had killed Derog and his crew and leave us alone because they were creatures who ate their weak and avoided their strong. By their logic, Derog was strong, and because we took the house away from him, we were stronger. Nobody knew anything about us, and nobody would want to test us. Why would we go anywhere when we could just stay here?

“Are things a little clearer?” the blademaster asked.

“Yes.”

“Good. Come on, little one.” He reached for the little girl holding on to me like a baby lemur. “Let Maggie get a breath.”

Planter 8

I stretched my legs and leaned back in my new office chair. It used to be Derog’s chair and office, but he didn’t need them anymore. In fact, I now had an entire suite to myself: a luxurious bedroom, a palatial bathroom with running water, and this personal office with a desk and a lovely window.

I had offered the suite to Reynald. He gave me a short laugh and settled into a slightly less luxurious set of rooms previously occupied by Lasa. We put Clover into one of the other suites, the little girls in the room next to her, and Kaiden on the other side.

Twenty-four hours had passed since the massacre. It had been justice, but it was still a massacre. Shortly after I resurrected, we bathed the small kids in the huge bathroom downstairs and put them to bed. Then the four of us wrapped the bodies of Derog, Lasa, and some other guy Reynald had killed upstairs in canvas we found in storage and carried them down to the basement. It was backbreaking work, and I was deeply grateful most of Derog’s employees had helpfully run to confront Reynald in the pen. Now we had a row of anonymous bodies swathed in cloth and trussed up with rope. Reynald had been scarily efficient at wrapping them up and I was too chicken to ask where he had acquired that particular skill.

Once the corpses were handled, we took long baths, scrubbed ourselves clean, and fell asleep, or in my case passed out into a black dreamless hole.

In the morning, we fed everyone and cleaned up most of the blood. Some traces of it were still there, too faint to see. Removing the blood completely was almost impossible, but Clover had found some kind of powder that was probably a quicklime variant, so we made do with that. She also insisted on stripping all the linens off the beds and boiling them with detergent in this massive pot we found in the laundry area in the courtyard. Apparently, this was a common thing, because the pot came with three-foot-long wooden tongs for stirring the boiling laundry.

While she boiled linens, Reynald and I took stock of Derog’s blood money. Most of Derog’s cash was with a banker and out of our reach. The small safe in his room yielded us two hundred nomas, the equivalent of two gold grests, probably the purchasing capital, household budget, and payroll. Reynald had used some of it to buy a lovely boat, which was now parked at our dock. Tonight, he would make the corpse run.

I had settled in the office to look through Lasa’s ledgers. I’d cried after the first one, then I went numb, and now I was angry. It was a cold, crystallized kind of anger and it grew out of me like an iceberg. At some point Clover asked me if I wanted dinner. I thanked her and told her no. I couldn’t stomach any.

The bells of the North Tower tolled, distant. It was ten pm. Outside the window, night had fallen.

The ledgers lay in neat stacks on the desk. The worst of Kair Toren documented with annotations in Lasa’s fluid, perfectly legible handwriting.

In my senior year of high school, we had to write a book report on a favorite novel or series. I did mine on The Rise of Kair Toren. After I submitted my outline, my teacher asked me why I picked that book series and not some other, so I told her all about the characters, their conversations, their funny moments, the plots they brewed, and the tragedies they lived through. The magic, the beauty, the horror. Everything. I told her I had reread them three times, because everything was falling apart in Rellas, and wading into that darkness again and again kept my anticipation of justice fresh. The reckoning was coming, and I would relish it. I couldn’t wait to see the bad guys fall and my favorite characters—the few who had survived—get their happy ending.

I remember she smiled and asked what would happen if the third book never came out. And I, high on my teenage horse, told her that it had to come out. Things had to be fair. Karma was a bitch, she was sharpening her scythe, and there would be a harvest.

I graduated, went to college, grew up, and learned that life wasn’t always fair. Sometimes there was no third book. No resolution no matter how many times you reread or how hard you wished for it. It gnawed at me. I just couldn’t let it go.

In fact, thinking back on it, those books had shaped my path through life. Somewhere between those rereads, I must’ve subconsciously decided that I would make sure the nightmare unfolding in Rellas wouldn’t repeat itself in our world. That’s why I’d started out in criminal justice. Except that I overdosed on reality in my first year by reading too much about the terrible things human beings did to each other. I realized that it was smothering me, so I chickened out and switched to political science. Teenage me thought Rellas was as dark as things could get. Post-criminal-justice me knew better.

Lasa’s ledgers were as bad as the worst of my real-world crime reading. They were made of human suffering. Pages and pages filled with matter-of-fact stories about children abused, sold, and butchered in secret.

But if Derog was still alive and I had somehow stolen those ledgers, I could have taken them to the Justice Chamber, and the royal prosecutors would have ripped the slavers apart. Derog knew this. He paid his bribes and hid his dirty dealings by writing in code, pretending to be a legitimate businessman, and paying his taxes on time. He didn’t do flashy spending. He didn’t draw attention to himself. He didn’t parade around in black, red, and gold with a sour pout on his face because people didn’t jump to do his bidding fast enough.

No, for all the heinous shit Derog had done, when compared to Ulmar Hreban, he was definitely small-time.

Someone rapped their knuckles on the doorframe. I turned in my chair. Reynald stood in the open doorway.

“Come in.”

He came in and sat in a chair, throwing one leg over the other. He looked fresher somehow. Like a man who, after enduring restless nights for weeks, had finally slept till morning.

“Rough reading.” He nodded at Lasa’s ledgers stacked on my desk.

“Like swimming through a sewer.”

“Is there anything in there about Matheo?”

I passed him a ledger with a knife in it. I’d needed a bookmark and that was the only thing handy.

He took the knife out, looked at it for a moment, set it on my desk, and read the entry. It was very short. One puppy, fourteen weeks, mother didn’t survive. Shipped to a southern buyer. Code for “We stole a fourteen-year-old boy. We killed his mother. We shipped him south.”

Reynald raised his gaze. “Puppy?”

“Derog paid taxes. He pretended to be a livestock trader. Dogs and cattle.”

“What does this mean?” He pointed to a small star by the entry.

“Special request. He didn’t grab your son at random. Someone paid him to do it. There is another thing. If you look at the other entries, the buyers are identified by initials or code names. ‘Southern buyer’ doesn’t appear again anywhere. Why southern buyer? Why so generic?”

“Someone targeted Matheo,” Reynald said.

“Do you have any enemies I don’t know about? Can you think of anyone?”

He shook his head. “All of my enemies are dead. No, it has to be Silveren.”

Silveren was the Lord Commander of the Redeemer Knights. The books didn’t spend much time on him. He was fanatically devoted to the Order of the Redeemer and would do just about anything to help it thrive. When Hreban rose to power, Silveren put the military might of the Redeemer Knights behind him, hitching his wagon to the only horse willing to help him draw ahead.

The entire Order of the Redeemer consisted of people who had done something so screwed up that they were willing to risk their lives to atone for it. They were capable of terrible things, and for some of them it didn’t take much to cross that threshold a second time. Their leader was a ruthless, stone-cold killer. Hreban waved the banner, but Silveren carried the sword.

“You think Silveren was Derog’s southern buyer?”

Reynald nodded. “My son has the gift of farseeing. Any knightage would want him.”

He wasn’t wrong. In the 1970s, both the CIA and the USSR became obsessed with psychics and actively recruited people who claimed to be capable of remote viewing—perceiving distant objects and locations in real time with their minds. Matheo was the real thing. He didn’t see the past or the future, he saw the present, and his visions were brief but clear. It made him the perfect scout. He could catch glimpses of the enemy commander’s map in their tent from miles away or spy on a conversation that happened in a secure room in another end of the city. The Redeemers would hold on to him with every tooth and claw.

“The Redeemers are desperate for talented recruits,” Reynald continued. “I think Silveren approached Derog and paid him to steal Matheo. Then Derog sent my son, escorted by a couple of his less valuable lowlifes, to a prearranged spot, where the Redeemer Knights ambushed them, killed the witnesses, and ‘rescued’ Matheo. If any questions arise, the only thing the Redeemer Knights are guilty of is saving a child from some slavers.”

“If you’re right, Silveren must view Matheo as a double-edged sword. Matheo claims that he lost his memory, but there is no way to verify that. For all Silveren knows, Matheo remembers everything. If he is allowed to escape the Redeemer Tower and this matter is investigated, he might link Derog and Silveren, and Silveren wouldn’t want that.”

Reynald’s face was grim. “Yes. We must be certain that we can pry him free. If we show our hand too soon, Silveren might kill Matheo rather than let him go. I don’t want my son to suddenly suffer a fatal fall from a horse or have a ‘regrettable training accident.’”

He fell silent. We sat quietly for a while.

The books didn’t do Reynald justice. He wasn’t a stunningly handsome man like Solentine or the guy in the Garden, but there was something about him, something compelling and forceful that dragged your attention to him. If you put him in a room full of men, I’d instantly zero in on him, and I wouldn’t be the only one.

Right now, he sat completely relaxed. He was in a house he had taken away from a gang of slavers, with eleven corpses in the basement, in the middle of a very dangerous city, in the company of a woman who had mysteriously come back from the dead, and absolutely none of it bothered him.

He hadn’t looked like this back in the basement. He’d looked like a demon, and he had kept cutting grown men down like it was their first day with a sword.

Reynald could turn on me at any second, and the demon would return and cut me down. But right now, it didn’t feel like he would, so instead of being scared, I felt… safe. Probably for the first time since I crawled out of that muddy ditch. It was almost addicting.

Reynald stirred. “I owe you protection for your meeting.”

And had I known we would get a fortress of a house at the end of this adventure, I wouldn’t have gone to the Shears in the first place. But then I wouldn’t have contacted Reynald or saved the kids either.

“Thank you. I will need it.”

“What are you planning to do with the children?” he asked.

I picked up Lasa’s latest ledger and tossed it to him.

“The three younger girls were ‘quietly obtained,’ meaning kidnapped from the neighboring villages and towns. The locations of the ‘breeders’ are listed. We can take them home and their parents will be overjoyed to get them back.”

Reynald would be overjoyed to get his son back. I wished so badly there was something I could do to spring Matheo out of the Tower.

“I will help you with this,” he said.

“Thank you.”

“What about the other two?”

“Kaiden has nowhere to go.” I flipped through the right ledger and passed it to him.

“One puppy, twelve weeks, local breeder, breeders no longer available, sold by the trainer, requires a course in obedience.” Reynald frowned.

“A twelve-year-old orphan from Kair Toren sold by whoever he was apprenticed to.”

Reynald’s gaze darkened.

“My plan is to keep him with me until I figure out something better,” I said.

He would be a handful, but he was my handful now. I was responsible for him. I wouldn’t toss him out in the street or pawn him off on someone else.

“What about Clover?”

I sighed. “It’s on the next page.”

Clover’s entry was short. It said, “Puppy, seventeen weeks, trained as LM by KR, not intact, damaged, extremely poor condition, recommend disposal.”

Reynald looked at me.

“Someone dumped Clover on Derog’s doorstep half dead. Her condition was so bad that Lasa actually argued for letting her die. For some reason Derog kept her alive.”

Only Derog could overrule Lasa.

“She’s been here for almost two months. You can still see the bruises on her face.”

“What about LM and KR?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know. She doesn’t seem like a noble or a merchant’s daughter. I think she might have been employed by a wealthy family.”

The way she’d been standing when Derog asked her about Kaiden was practiced and demure.

I could tell by Reynald’s expression that he understood what was left unsaid. Whoever had employed Clover had punished her and then sold her to Derog. This went beyond simple theft, incompetence, or household politics. This was rage.

“I will help her in any way I can,” I said.

These two children had gone through more suffering in their short lives than some people endured during their entire lifetime. And the worst part of it was, I knew it was real.

I’d read those books cover to cover, and there was no mention of Clover or Kaiden, yet here they were. They existed just like the other random people I had met: the bakers, the inn clerks, the landlords, the Garden attendants… Each of them had a life, a past, and hopes for the future. They weren’t abbreviated characters; they were actual human beings. The amount of detail in the city itself, the people I met, the lives they led, it seemed impossible to have come from one person’s mind. It was too much.

Technically, yes, I could’ve just fallen through some dimensional hole into a pocket world imagined by the author in greater detail than he was able to record. Maybe he was a supergenius and knew the location of every rock and the story of every one of the three hundred thousand residents of Kair Toren.

Except that it didn’t feel like a fictional world. It felt real. I had been sure of it ever since I looked into Reynald’s eyes on the roof terrace. The books might have described and recorded the events that happened here, but this was its own separate reality. It existed independently of the fictional series, and it was headed for a cliff at breakneck speed.

Several months from now, Hreban would manufacture suffering on a mass scale. He would do it out in the open, without fear of retribution. There would be no Justice Chamber to stop him because he would be running it. Nobody would escape unscathed.

Thinking about it made my stomach churn. What would happen to Reynald and the kids? True, I’d helped them for now, but it wouldn’t last. Their lives would turn into nightmares, and I was the only one who knew about it. I hadn’t saved them. I’d just postponed the torment. I’d given them hope, and then Hreban would set their world on fire.

What was the point of being thrown into this world and watching it all burn?

“Will you try to get Matheo out of the Tower?” I asked.

Reynald stirred. “Yes. He is my son. I promised my wife…”

“At her grave. I know.”

He looked at me and shook his head. “What will you do after we return the children?”

“I’m going to destroy Ulmar Hreban.”

The moment my mouth shaped the words, something changed. It felt right, as if I had blundered out of the woods onto a path. Almost like a bell tolled somewhere.

Reynald raised his dark eyebrows. “You’re going to destroy the richest man in Rellas? The head of a Great Family?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because I will not let Rellas burn.”

Reynald and Matheo, Clover and Kaiden, Galiene and her daughter, Solentine, the bakers, the nameless handpie seller, I would give them all a different future.

Just wait, Ulmar. You thought you could murder people left and right as if they didn’t matter. I will fix you right up. Fucking watch me.

Reynald pondered me. “How are you planning to go about it?”

“I don’t know yet. I have six months to figure it out.”

“Not a lot of time.”

“You’re right. Unfortunately, your timeline to rescue your son is even shorter…”

Reynald was a careful man. Cautious, even. But he was also a grief-stricken father desperate to find his son. He’d been trying for months and gotten nowhere, and he was at the end of his patience. I saw a hint of that when he was on that roof, thinking about storming the Redeemer Tower.

There was an excellent chance that if I told him exactly what would happen, he would lose his shit and go on a killing spree, which would likely end with his head separated from his body. The fictional Rellas had killed him, and I didn’t want to take a chance that the real Rellas would want to do the same. I had to keep things vague.

“You have about five months at most. Less than that actually. More like four and a half, before the end of the High Court Session. You have to pry Matheo out of the Tower before the first assassination, because after that it will be very difficult.”

Impossible. It would be impossible.

“And Reynald, if you fail, you must leave the city before the Winter Hunt. I don’t care how angry you are. If you value your life at all, you must leave. Once the second murder happens, that entire mess of Hreban and the Redeemers spins out of control and sets Kair Toren on fire…”

Reynald rose from his chair and stared at me.

“What?”

“Maggie,” he said, his voice quiet. “Can you see the future?”

Buy the Book