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The horses snuffled along a broad dirt road with the occasional soldier or cart clattering along it as they ambled by. Chipo wore a light brown cloak with the hood pulled up over her crown of braids, but no one seemed the least bit interested in the three of them as they went about their business. With the sun only just rising, a chill breeze ruffled through the never-ending fields outside of Austerden, and for a moment, Emara had the strange sensation of going backwards. As her horse plodded along, she glanced over her shoulder to get one last look at the rosy spires cutting into the bright blue sky.

Here, beneath the full sun amid the golden fields, it looked every inch a royal beacon of order and hope. Not the blood-soaked, crumbling city rotting under the fractured sun that she’d gazed upon with dread.

“You okay?” Jai asked from atop his bay gelding. Roughwave was nearly identical to the mares, Sweetshore and Beachdawn, she and Chipo rode.

“It just… looks different than the last time I saw it.” Emara tore her eyes away, and Chipo cocked her head, her dark eyes glinting. Beside her, Jai was also considering the walls of Austerden. “Will you miss it?” Emara asked

Jai tugged at the sleeves of the unassuming white shirt Chipo had procured for him. “Nah. Anisa and the others will be fine without me.” But concern still creased his brow as his gaze lingered on the wavegulls circling the regal towers.

Chipo craned her neck to meet his gaze. “Have you ever left Austerden?” she asked in her chipper singsong.

“Of course.” Jai frowned, finally turning away. “Just… not far.”

Chipo squealed. “That’s wonderful! You’re going to love it.” She stretched out her arms and dipped her head back to smile at the azure sky still streaked with the pinks and oranges of sunrise. “It feels incredible to be free of the walls, doesn’t it? They don’t really let me out of the palace very often either, so it’s nice to finally be able to stretch my wings.”

Emara drummed her fingers on Sweetshore’s saddle. Their escape had been miraculously smooth. Chipo and her lady’s maid had indeed made all the arrangements, and they’d managed to escape the city under the cover of darkness without turning a single head. But… still. “You don’t think they’ll send someone looking for you?”

Chipo straightened, and then frowned, as if considering this for the first time. “I suppose they will, but I don’t think they’d ever guess I’d be headed toward the Deadlands.”

Jai raised an eyebrow. “You mean, until they talk to Everard and realize that you left the day after two strangers were looking for Bellaphia?”

Chipo’s mouth twisted for a second, and then she shrugged, moving Beachdawn aside as a cart laden with hay rattled past toward the city. “Well, that’s why we must be quick. They’ll be a full two days behind before they realize I’ve left the palace, and if we hurry, we’ll be in Bellaphia’s oasis before the next full moon.”

“If nothing goes wrong,” Jai said.

“Like what?” Chipo asked, and Emara had to stare at her for a moment to see if she was joking.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Jai said, scratching at his smooth jaw. “Taking a wrong turn, bad weather, bandits, royal soldiers, ridgewolves… the undead Lost that wander the Deadlands.”

Chipo laughed with a musical chime. “You really don’t get out much. There aren’t any monsters waiting in the shadows to grab you.”

Chipo reached out to the road’s edge, letting the long golden stalks of wheat brush her fingertips. “That’s what the Heirs work so hard for.” She put a hand over her heart. “Keeping Okarria safe is our charge from Odriel.”

Emara tentatively put a hand over her own heart. If that were truly their charge from Odriel, then she’d sorely failed him. “Have you ever… met Odriel?”

“Not even a glimpse.” Chipo tilted her face to the sky again, this time as though looking for something. “Though I’m always looking for brown hawks.”

Emara’s brow wrinkled. “Why brown hawks?”

“That’s Odriel’s preferred form they say.”

Emara thought of the brown hawk that seemed to have followed her as a child. Surely that couldn’t have been…

“There are only a chosen few who have laid eyes on the spirit guide,” Chipo continued. “But I know as long as yanaa flows through my veins, he is with me, and I will be his hands to light the dark, protect the helpless, and heal the wounded.”

Wistful pride swelled in Emara. “You have a way with words.”

Chipo cocked her head again. “I suppose you haven’t heard of The Heir’s Way where you’re from then? They’re the stories of our ancestors passed down from one Heir to another.”

Emara looked away, her cheeks heating. “I’ve heard of it, but never got a chance to read it myself.”

Chipo’s gaze bored into her as if she were a puzzle she couldn’t piece together. “Interesting.”

“Truly fascinating,” Jai drawled sarcastically. “But the real question is, when the Lost attack, what are we going to do?”

“Oh, stop being an old fussbucket. You have a sword, a bow, a quiver of arrows on your saddle and two Time Heirs riding beside you,” Chipo said. “We wouldn’t let you die even if you wanted to.”

Emara glanced at Jai, but his gaze was scanning the flat golden fields ahead, lines still wrinkling his brow, and it dawned on her that he’d probably neither seen nor fought one of the Lost. Here, they were little more than a childhood nightmare used to scare the young into behaving. How strange.

“We’ll outrun what we can, and fight what we cannot,” Emara said, placing a hand on the knife at her belt. “If we have fire, we can use that to burn the bodies. If not, their heads must be separated from their shoulders. An arrow to the eye also does the trick, but your aim will have to be exceptional.” Her mind flew back to memory after memory flooded with the keening monstrosities. “Never forget that these are not mindless monsters, but rather the most evil part of people trapped in their bodies and clawing for destruction.” She turned to Chipo, who was openly staring at her, mouth ajar. “They will be drawn to our yanaa, and the more we use it, the more we will draw. I’d say, if the two of you are decent with blade or bow, we can probably take a group of thirty. More than that, and we’ll want to run and try to string them out so we don’t get surrounded.”

Emara tapped her lip, trying to think of anything else, but the dead here probably wouldn’t be as powerful without Idriel and his commanders to control and fuel them, and the monsters of Carceroc were still trapped in their cursed wood.

She looked up to see Chipo and Jai exchanging a glance she couldn’t quite interpret.

“What? Did I forget something?”

“I’ve only seen four or five Lost at a time, and even then, no one’s seen them outside the Deadlands.” Chipo cleared her throat, her polished fingernails caressing the braided reins in her hand. “Where in Odriel’s name would thirty have come from?”

For a moment, Emara was silent. Three or four? That was it? The Deadlands were a place of nightmares haunted by… groups of three or four Lost? The thought made her want to laugh and cry at the same time.

“Somehow, I’m betting it wasn’t from The Heir’s Way, was it?” Jai asked.

Emara shook her head. “My world is a dark place.”

Chipo pulled her mare close, her voice low. “I’m sorry you have to carry those things.”

Emara nodded and tried a shaky smile. Chipo was young. Jai had been right. But it was in a wonderful, innocent way. Something that no longer existed in her world of death and war, and she wanted more than anything to see it again one day. “I’m glad you don’t have to.”

For a moment, the three horses rode down the lane, their hooves thumping rhythmically on the packed soil.

Finally, Jai broke the silence. “On the bright side, at least one of us knows what they’re doing.” He flashed a half grin at Emara. “I’m actually feeling a lot better now.”

She reached out and kicked his boot with hers, but strangely…

She felt better too.

The days passed quickly as they cut across the land. Though they traveled through quaint towns and villages, they spent most nights around a fire on the side of the road or behind an occasional barn so as not to attract attention. Jai entertained them with endless illusions of coins, cards, and handkerchiefs, his tricks always bringing equal parts laughter and confusion.

Chipo filled the silences with tales of the drama of court life and the antics of the other Heirs. She spoke often of her stern grandmother, the queen’s advisor, her generous father away in the west, and her bustling mother, forever busy with her two younger siblings.

Jai offered stories of his friends and their ongoing feud with Pran’s gang, the pranks they played, and their close calls. He told of their latest escapade, in which they’d snuck into Pran’s bar, found the Queen’s missing armlet, and then hidden it under a loose floorboard only a pace from where’d they discovered it. A moon later, Pran still hadn’t found the armlet. Emara and Chipo laughed until tears ran down their cheeks. Though Jai’s stories were a little rougher than Chipo’s, his love for his cobbled family shone bright on his face.

Then they would turn to Emara, waiting for her to share her own tale to help them laugh the time away, but she could only look at her hands, the acid memories drying up any smile on her lips. What could she tell them about? Her father dying before she could save him? Her mother’s fear as she slapped Emara’s hand away for trying to heal a wounded dog? Her mother leading the Lost away from them and never coming back? The weight of the world crushing her grandmother to nothing? Running from town to town, knowing she trailed death behind her?

Or those final memories, of the Dragon and Shadow Heir falling into a pool of blood. Of Shad’s—no Jai’s—small feline body whipping against the floor, and the magus taking his own life while a demon drooled for hers.

She didn’t want to bring those memories to life around the campfire, to erase the laughter and smiles and let the grief weigh on them too. Those things didn’t belong in their world.

So instead, Emara pulled her knees to her chest, and said only, “I don’t remember much worth telling.”

They would stare only a moment before Jai would burn the meat or Chipo would scold him for not collecting the right kind of kindling. Then they would move on.

Chipo would sing a song in her beautiful alto from a seemingly endless repertoire or Jai would try to scare them with the laughably horrendous tall tales the street kids passed along—like the old grandma that ate her children little by little, the small boy on Green Road that ate sweets until his belly button popped wide open and a sugar slug crawled out, or the king that refused to wear clothes and was only ever seen in the summer.

Eventually, the chatter would fade away, and two of them would fall into the deep sleep of weary travelers while one kept a watchful eye on the quiet, winking stars.

But as they traveled on, Emara was relieved to find that Chipo had been right. The roads were safe, and every night they laughed and smiled around their fire. And when Chipo slung her arms around her, crying mirth from her own incomprehensible joke, or when Jai chased her about the campfire, swearing the toad in his hands only needed a kiss to become a prince, the heaviness lifted from her shoulders, and she wished their journey would never end.

“Tomorrow, we’ll be in the Deadlands,” Chipo whispered.

Emara took in a deep breath, the comforting wood smoke scent of their fire swirling through her, as if to bolster her for this next step. On the other side of their small camp, Jai turned in his sleep with a soft snore, a blanket roll stuffed under his head on the warm night. She leaned against the wall of the roofless, crumbling barn at her back and gazed at the tall rows of the vineyard surrounding them, a distant herd of sonorous llamow lowing contentedly beneath the star-laced sky.

“How is that possible? The fields here are still green, still peaceful.”

Chipo nodded. “The Deadlands aren’t a true desert. It rains as much there as it does here. They say any land Nifras touched ceased to ever grow life again.”

Emara’s throat tightened at this. Was Idriel’s touch the reason Okarria was dying in her time? Or was that simply because the Lost ruled their lands? Surely they could coax life back to it once more if they killed the Dead King.

Chipo crossed her legs underneath her and turned to Emara, the firelight flickering across her face. “You do that a lot, you know.”

“Do what?” Emara threw another rotten plank from the barn onto the fire in a shower of sparks.

“Thinking of all the things you don’t want to tell me.”

Emara stilled. Was she that obvious?

“Secrets weigh lighter when spoken aloud.”

“Then they wouldn’t be secrets.” Emara offered a weak smile. “Besides, my secrets are only more questions I don’t know the answers to.”

“You are certainly a mystery.” Chipo’s gaze fell to her hands, and she turned back to the fire. “Do you ever wonder why they call us Time Heirs?”

Emara craned her neck to consider the stars again, her skin beginning to crawl. Of course, she’d thought about this, but instead, she went with the accepted truth. “Because time is the only healer, right? Besides us?”

“That’s what everyone says. Fire was borrowed from the dragon, invisibility from the shadow, and healing from time. And yet… there’s tales of more. Of actual dragons being called to battle, of the Shadow speaking with the dead, and… then there’s you. You say you’re from a different land, but you seem to know a lot about this one.”

Emara started to sweat, the damp collecting along her hairline. “Chipo, that’s the truth I—”

“You know, my great-grandfather passed away ten years ago. They said he lost his mind at the end, but he would tell me tales of journeying through memories to heal minds. That it was almost like traveling through time.”

Emara’s mouth went dry as she met Chipo’s shrewd gaze, looking for any sign of fear or disgust or worse… hungry ambition. But there was only a quiet, knowing curiosity.

“So Emara, are you a grandmother of mine or a granddaughter?”

Emara darted a panicked glance to Jai, but he was still snoring quietly. She crept close to Chipo until their knees were touching, her voice barely above a whisper. “Chipo, I wasn’t lying when I said I didn’t know what happened to me. I have theories but nothing more, and I’m scared of what my presence here, in a place I don’t belong, may change.”

A victorious smile spread across Chipo’s face. “A granddaughter then. I knew it.” She leaned forward and squeezed Emara’s hands, her expression growing earnest. “I know you’re scared, Mari, but you’re already here. You can no better predict what will happen next than we can. But if you tell me, I can share this burden with you. Let me help you.”

For a moment, Emara hesitated. But Chipo had already guessed so much, what use was it to hide any longer? Emara heaved out a sigh and lay back on the dirt. “Well, to start with, I think you may be my thrice-great grandmother…”