Trickery (Curse of the Gods Book 1)

  Trickery

  Jaymin Eve

  Jane Washington

  Contents

  Glossary

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Acknowledgments by Jane

  Acknowledgments by Jaymin

  Also By Jane Washington

  Also By Jaymin Eve

  Connect with Jane Washington

  Connect with Jaymin Eve

  Copyright 2017 Jaymin Eve and Jane Washington.

  All rights reserved.

  The authors have provided this ebook for your personal use only. It may not be re-sold or made publically available in any way.

  Copyright infringement is against the law.

  Thank you for respecting the hard work of these authors.

  Eve, Jaymin

  Washington, Jane

  Trickery

  www.janewashington.com

  www.jaymineve.com

  Edited by David Thomas

  www.firstreadeditorial.com

  ISBN-10: 0-9942795-7-4

  ISBN-13: 978-0-9942795-7-6

  For Jane: thanks for nothing, asshole.

  Also for Jaymin: go home, you’re drunk.

  Glossary

  click – second

  rotation – hour

  sun-cycle – day

  moon-cycle – month

  life-cycle – year

  minateur – soldier

  bullsen – beast

  sleeper – spider

  furline – caterpillar

  sol – dominant race

  dweller – serving race

  minatsol – world of the dwellers and sols

  topia – world of the gods

  luciu – floating city of the gods

  soldel – first city of the sols

  dvadel – second city of the sols

  tridel – third city of the gods

  One

  Some things in life were a given. It was a given that the sols were the bridge between the dwellers and the gods. It was a given that some of them would become gods, after they died—while the rest of us would only become ash. It was a given that they would always be more important, and that the dwellers would remain their slaves until there were no dwellers left, and the sols had taken over everything.

  It was also a given that I’d never be picked to go to Blesswood Academy, because I never got picked for anything. I was still going to go to the selection ceremony, though. To support Emmy. She would get picked. She was smart like that, and lucky like that, and people loved the hell out of her. They didn’t love the hell out of me; they ran the hell away from me. It wasn’t like I was a bad person or anything, I just … had a lot of accidents. I didn’t mean accidents like I ate glue and then peed myself on a regular basis. I just tripped more than usual, and accidently set things on fire more than what would be considered ‘normal’. I got kicked out of the village school only one moon-cycle before graduation for accidently making one of the teachers bald. How do you accidently make someone bald? That’s a good question. All you really need is a bucket of warm tar to accidently toss onto the back of their head. How do you get a bucket of warm tar? You don’t go looking for it or anything—or at least I didn’t. It was just sitting on the road outside the school and I thought I should carry it inside to ask what it was.

  None of us had any experience with tar. All of our roads were dirt, but the leader of our village was always trying to make us famous, and he had all these random engineering books to give him ideas. Books that he probably stole from somewhere. As if the gods gave a shit about whether our roads were gravel or dirt. We had no sols in our village, and we were so far out from the centre ring—the centre of our society. So the gods wouldn’t even notice if we painted our roads purple and started walking around naked.

  Anyway, back to the tar.

  Apparently, when your hair gets covered in tar, the only way to get rid of it is to shave your entire head, and that’s how I made my teacher bald. The whole ‘making a teacher bald’ incident was pretty much the reason that nobody was expecting me to go to the selection ceremony. I was the embarrassment of the village, the village fool, the cursed child that they all secretly wanted to be rid of. But they could all suck-it-the-hell-up, because Emmy was my best friend, and I needed to be there when they announced that she would be chosen. Mostly, I just wanted to see Casey’s face when she wasn’t chosen, but that wasn’t even halfway as noble a motivation as cheering on Emmy.

  Casey might still be chosen—each of the outlying villages were allowed to send two of their best dwellers to Blesswood, where they would serve the smartest, bravest, and most powerful sols in the world. Blesswood was Minatsol’s most holy city, housing the only academy dedicated to the gods. The gods even came down to Blesswood once a moon-cycle to survey the sols—to watch them fight it out in the arena, or outsmart each other in strategy games. Not every sol would get chosen to join the gods, but those that did were always chosen from Blesswood.

  None of us dwellers really understood how the process worked, but it wasn’t our business to understand. The majority of us would never step foot inside of Blesswood. Instead, we would remain in our outlying villages, studying to become teachers, or working in our family trades to keep ourselves afloat. But two insanely talented dwellers would always be chosen to lead a different life. To be different. To enter the world of the sols. Emmy was definitely one of those dwellers; there was no doubt in my mind about it. She was beautiful, intelligent, steadfast, and brave. She once re-built the woodsmith’s shop overnight, all on her own. There wasn’t a thing in the world that she couldn’t do.

  Well … except for becoming a sol, or a god.

  That was pretty much impossible.

  “Willa!” The girl in question had just skidded into the house, her eyes widening at the sight of me, a shriek in the form of my name leaving her mouth.

  “It’s nothing,” I managed, jumping away from her before she could grab me.

  “You’re bleeding, idiot!”

  “Since when does bleeding make a person an idiot? We all do it. It’s totally natural.”

  She rolled her pretty brown eyes, making another grab for me. I huffed, giving up my hand. I wasn’t actually bleeding, but the burn on my hand was all red and angry, so it had probably appeared that I was bleeding, at first. She dropped my hand and spun to the stove, tossing a pot of water over the licking flames that I had lit beneath the cooking cupboard. As steam filled the room, she started rummaging around in the drawers of my mother’s tiny kitchen. The first three drawers that she opened contained small medical packs made of cloth, but they had all been depleted.

  “Over there.” I decided to help her out, jerking my head in the direction of the bed in the corner of the room.

  It was the only proper bed in our cottage—my mother had bought it when Emmy’s parents had died, saying that she could live with us and that the two of us could share it, while she slept on the mattress on the floor. It didn’t take her long to kick both of us to the floor instead, to the thin stretch of foam that had always been my bed in the past. Emmy found the fourth medical pack tucked beneath the bed, and brought it over to me, making quick work of bandaging my hand.
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br />   “I told you not to use the stove anymore,” she chastised, a frown furrowing between her brows. “That’s why I cook enough to last for the week, if you keep it properly.”

  “I wasn’t cooking, I swear. I would never. Not even if you forced me.”

  “Why was the stove hot?”

  “There was something inside it. I thought if I made it hot, it would crawl out.”

  “With the door shut?”

  “Whoops.”

  She laughed, finishing up with my hand and spinning to face the stove. It was made of stone, a long and bulky structure reminiscent of a fireplace, with an area to light a fire below a stone cupboard with a cast-iron door, which filtered into a chimney. She wrapped her hand in a cloth and popped open the door. That was what I had done wrong—not wrapping my hand before trying to touch the hot metal.

  Emmy winced, and then closed the door again. “Guess we’re having rat for dinner.”

  I inspected my hand, totally impressed with her bandaging skills. “Can’t I keep you here, Emmy? You’re so handy. What am I going to do without you?”

  “I might not get picked,” she reminded me, her voice soft.

  She was afraid. I didn’t know why. Maybe she was afraid of leaving me alone, or maybe she was afraid that she would get picked. Blesswood was a whole other world to us outlying dwellers—a world that we had barely any knowledge of, and absolutely no experience in. A form stumbled in through the doorway, and we both turned to watch my mother slump down onto the twin bed with an incoherent mumble.

  “Mum,” I groused, walking over to the bed and shaking her leg. “The selection ceremony is this sun-cycle, remember?”

  “Just leave her.” Emmy grabbed my hand, pulling me away. “We’re going to be late.”

  I was pissed. I didn’t want my mum to stand Emmy up on her big day, but she’d obviously been at Cyan’s tavern all night. Again. I tried not to think about it in certain terms—they were her life choices after all—but I was pretty sure that she was having sex with travellers passing through the tavern to earn enough tokens to keep us all alive.

  Okay, those were pretty certain terms.

  That would have been bad enough, but I was also pretty sure that she was drinking away most of the tokens that she earned. She wasn’t a very responsible mother. She barely seemed to notice that we were around. Emmy kept her fed, and I sometimes pulled her shoes off when she stumbled into the house with the dawn. That was the extent of our relationship now. Maybe it would have been different, if Emmy hadn’t come to live with us. Maybe I would have needed her more, and that would have forced her to act like a mother.

  Emmy started to drag me out of the house, but we both stopped on our way to the door, looking down at the broken timepiece on the floor. Each of the village households were permitted a single timepiece to share, and I must have accidently dropped ours after I had burned my hand. The glass cover was shattered, and the two pointers were struggling to move. The longer, thinner pointer, which clicked quickly around the timepiece to measure clicks in time, was just twitching back and forth over the same number. The shorter, thicker pointer, which would rotate to the next number after sixty clicks—indicating a rotation in time—had broken off completely.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Emmy said. “We can deal with it later.”

  She finally succeeded in dragging me out of the house, and we took off down the road, our backpacks thumping against us with each step. Hers was probably full of books and practical things. Mine had practical things in it, too. But things that would only have been practical for me, specifically. Among those things were a fire blanket, a pocketknife, a general-poisons antidote that I’d basically traded my soul for at a travelling circus. And by my soul, I mean every token that I had ever saved up.

  Tokens were the currency of our people, and I’d managed to save up a total of three. Well … two and a half. Not sure where the other half of the last one was. It kind of looked like someone had taken a bite out of it, but that was both impossible and unhygienic. The tokens were made of bronze metal, and they were always pretty filthy. So, I had traded my precious two and a half tokens for what was most likely a scam-potion. I was almost positive that it wouldn’t work, but I’d never come across anything like it before, so it was far too easy for them to convince me that it was the rarest of potions, and worth much more than I was paying for it. I also had another medical kit in my backpack, and a banana. Just in case I got hungry.

  “Maybe they’ll choose you to go with me,” Emmy joked, peeking at me sideways.

  “Pfft,” I huffed, a little out of breath, because she was so much faster than me. “They wouldn’t even let me graduate.”

  “They did, though.”

  “Yeah but only because I broke into the records office and made myself a star pupil.”

  “I still can’t believe you did that.” She chuckled. “You graduated above everyone else. Almost above me, even, and they couldn’t do anything about it.”

  “Nope.” I let my lips smack together in satisfaction as I said the word. “Those documents are official. Binding.”

  “They just didn’t want to admit to Leader Graham that you managed to break into their records office and tamper with everything. He would have fired all of them.”

  “Okay yeah, that’s probably a more likely explanation.”

  We reached the school—which was a collection of stone houses, connected by dirt pathways—and wove through the people toward the back field, where everyone was gathering. There was a stage set up, and Leader Graham himself was standing there, a bunch of papers in his hands. I snorted, pointing at him, and Emmy glanced in the direction that I indicated, a smile breaking out across her face. Leader Graham was always trying to look important. He had easily ten pages of notes in front of him, but he only needed to learn two names. He had a whole team of village advisers behind him, but he would only announce two names.

  “Good evening, dwellers,” he began, just as we took seats toward the back, peering around the heads in front of us to try and get a better glimpse of him. “As you all know, we’ve reached the end of another life-cycle, and will be sending off two of our best to attend to the sols of Blesswood.” He paused, allowing the front row of dwellers to jump out of their seats, cheering excitedly. I recognised most of them as our classmates.

  “Emmy.” I poked her. “I think we’re supposed to be sitting up the front.”

  She nudged me back and I slid out of the seat, creeping up the middle aisle with her right behind me as Leader Graham started talking again.

  “As you all know, Blesswood was the original birth-place of the first sol family, many hundreds of thousands of life-cycles ago. The original family did not work to strengthen themselves for the gods, so they were not chosen to ascend to Topia to be with the gods. The sols of this age know better, and throughout Minatsol, they are even now gathering the best amongst their own people to send to Blesswood, to train for that very purpose. To impress the gods. Just as we are striving to serve the sols, the sols are striving to serve the gods. And we must always keep in mind that some of those sols may be chosen to join the gods, which means that our chosen dwellers will be attending to not only the most respected sols of our world, but also the future gods of our world. There is no more noble profession for a dweller in all of Minatsol.”

  “Except maybe just staying put and probably accidently burning the village down,” I muttered to Emmy over my shoulder. “I think my future profession is super noble.”

  She snickered, but hit my shoulder kind of hard, which wasn’t surprising. She didn’t like it when I said stuff like that. The boy whose chair I was currently crouched next to shot me a glare, and I shut up, turning my attention back to Leader Graham.

  “So,” he shook out his top sheet of paper, clearing his throat, “without further ado, the selected dwellers both graduated with perfect marks in all classes, and are even siblings of the same household. May they bring honour to their family, and to t
his village. Emmanuelle and Willa Knight … please come up to the stage.”

  I froze, the breath rushing out of my chest in a groan.

  Shit.

  Shit!

  I didn’t think they would use those records to decide on who to send to Blesswood.

  “Willa?” Emmy muttered from behind me, her voice a squeak. “You altered my forms too?”

  “Just your last name.” I was on autopilot, my mind spinning too fast for logical thought. “You’re my sister. You needed my last name.”

  “Oh, Willa … what have you done?”

  I didn’t get a chance to answer, because she was standing, grabbing my arm and pulling me up with her. I tried to crouch down again, but she wouldn’t let me and holy gods, she was strong. She dragged me all the way up to the stage and planted me directly beside Leader Graham, who shook my hand, and then her hand, before presenting us to the village people. They weren’t even clapping. They were sitting there, mouths hanging open, while metaphorical crickets chirped in the background.

  Leader Graham frowned, having no idea what was going on, because he really didn’t get involved with the people he was supposed to be leading, unless it was to force us to do something he wanted. Or on the rare occasion that the Minateurs—the governing body of the sols—inspected our village.

  He grabbed my shoulders and forced me forward a step. “Would you like to say something?” he asked me, in a way that didn’t really make it a question. “Thank your teachers, maybe?”

  “Thanks, er, teachers,” I managed, my voice strangled.

  His frown deepened, and he turned to Emmy, who stepped up beside me, clearing her throat confidently.

  “We will not let this village down,” she promised, her strong voice carrying over everyone’s shock, and stirring them back into motion. “We will work harder than any other chosen dwellers, and we will return to this village with the blessings of the gods. That is a promise.”