The Assassin's Curse Read Online Free PDF

planted her free hand on his chest. “Go,
I’ll be fine without you. Trust me, you’re the biggest threat to me
on this island.”
    “Understood.” He turned his back and strode
away, disappearing into the night.
    After a moment of consideration, Amaranthe
pulled her vial of poison from her ammo pouch and, by the light of
the burning wreckage, brushed some of the clear liquid onto
Sicarius’s blade. There was no way she would use it on him, but
maybe it would come in handy against the thieves.
    With his dagger in hand, she picked her way
back to the path, but she stopped there. There was no campfire to
check. She and Sicarius had smelled the wood burning in the
machines’ furnaces. The thieves could be anywhere on the island. Or —her head jerked up—maybe they’d used the machines to
distract her while they gathered their gear and prepared to leave the island. Maybe they were circling back to the boat
to escape.
    An owl hooted above Amaranthe’s head.
    She jumped, then rolled her eyes at herself.
This place had her on edge.
    “A good reason to finish up and get off it,”
she told herself.
    Amaranthe hustled back down the trail toward
the beach. This time, she worried more about speed and less about
stealth.
    As she was clambering over the fallen log,
the first human sound came to her ear. Voices.
    She could not understand what they were
saying, but their voices were underlaid by urgency.
    Amaranthe ran down the final fifty meters of
trail as quickly as she could without making too much noise. When
she reached the pebbles, she spotted the thieves. Too late.
    They had already launched the boat and were
paddling out so they could swing around the island’s contours and
head for the river. Both were rowing with a huge bulky pile between
them, its contents shrouded with a tarp.
    Amaranthe clenched her fist. If she hadn’t
broken her crossbow, she might have shot them. She could swim out
to them, but they’d see her coming and simply shoot her with those
prototype weapons. Even if she managed to hold her breath long
enough to swim under water to their position, what then? Would she
slither over the edge of the boat and try to cut their throats
before they noticed her? Sicarius could manage that, but she had no
idea as to the thieves’ degree of combat prowess. She was not sure
she could assassinate someone in cold blood anyway, even someone
stealing imperial secrets.
    She couldn’t give up yet though. Amaranthe
ran along the beach, hugging the shadows of the tree line for
camouflage. Pebbles shifted beneath her feet, and she hoped the
lapping waves hid the noise.
    An owl hooted from a nearby tree, not a
single call, but a string of insistent hoots. Amaranthe halted
midstep. The thieves lowered their voices and looked in her
direction. They shouldn’t be able to see her against the dark
backdrop of the trees, but having their eyes turned toward her made
her nervous. That owl couldn’t be calling attention to her on
purpose, could it?
    It hooted again from a closer perch.
Amaranthe grabbed a pebble from the beach and flung it toward the
noise. She didn’t expect to hit anything, but maybe the projectile
would startle the owl to silence. It worked, for the moment. The
thieves’ voices remained low, though, and they increased their
rowing speed.
    Amaranthe kept going too. Running was faster
than rowing, so she soon pulled ahead of the boat, but to what end,
she was not sure. Before long, she would run out of beach and
island, and the thieves would be free to float down the river.
    Sweat dribbled from her temples, courtesy of
the humid evening. Her shirt, still damp from the previous swim,
clung her to back, and her trousers chaffed her legs. Think, girl,
she told herself. She needed to come up with a plan, not worry
about the heat.
    Amaranthe still held Sicarius’s dagger. She
thought of him crunching through metal with it and glanced over her
shoulder toward the rowboat. Wood ought to be an easier barrier