I danced for you in the tender light of the broken moon, and you said you loved me more than any crown. But when the sun rose, you were gone. This is not fury I feel, nor hatred. I believed in our love, and you took that with you when you left. Thief. Monster. King. I see now how the night loved me more.
~ A letter to King Nikhalthe the Resplendent, signed in blood and later burned
WHEN HE WOKE ME with a whispered, “Good morning,” I groaned and buried my head.
He woke me up again a little later with a kiss. This time, there was a hint of gray light in the sky, and I managed to grunt.
The third time, he said, “I stole kavé from the king for you.”
I peered out from underneath our borrowed blanket. “Why didn’t you say so before?”
As he handed over the mug, he kissed me again. “Good morning.”
“Good morning.” I took a long glug. “Why is this so awful?”
“The kavé, you mean, or another day in exile with a irritable, disgruntled sovereign?” He tilted his head. “Both bitter, and leave grit in your teeth. At least we’re still alive.”
I took another drink. “You’ve been thinking about this.”
“Been listening to Mikhalthe rant since dawn. And he doesn’t even need the kavé to inspire him.”
“I suppose losing his palace is bitter enough.” I dressed as I drank, his lambent stare warming me more than my stale clothing, even with his borrowed cloak. Foolish of me to have stayed naked after taking our pleasure last night. If the demons had come, I’d be fighting with my ass in the wind.
But they still hadn’t come.
Speaking of which… I sucked down the last of the kavé as if it would steady me before asking, “Did Nenzo tell you about the dragon?”
Aric’s scarred gaze drifted from mine. “When the horde broke through the cracks in the tower, the obsidian shattered into knives. He heard her screaming as her lair collapsed.”
I swallowed against the bitter grit. “Dying?”
He lifted one shoulder. “Or calling to her brethren to free her.”
Demons didn’t die, not like other creatures, but I’d seen them burned and hacked to the point of destruction. If she was gone…
“Are you…?” I trailed off, because why even was I asking? Scars didn’t fade just because the pain was gone. He was still dreadmarked.
He didn’t move. “Does it change anything?”
I longed to ask him what he meant. Change him? Change…us? But somehow I felt the knife edge of an obsidian blade poised above us. “Am I only a thief while my hand is in your pocket?”
He grunted, not quite a laugh, but that brittle tension in him eased. “Is that the only reason you reach in there? You must be disappointed with your findings.”
“Hardly.” I crowded up close to him, not quite touching. “I’ve been quite pleased with everything I’ve got.” When his fingers twitched, I sidled away with a last cheeky smirk to check the knives in my boots. “No word back yet from the riders sent to the lightkeeps?”
“Nothing.” He raked a hand through his hair. Somehow, though he had to be as dirty as me with the exception of the well-digging, his dark locks still fell in silky waves around his face. Some auric trickery, perhaps. For sure too fine for my filthy fingers. “Your father and aunt were summoned to speak on their experiences of the roads recently. They told of stories about more horde attacks, how the lightkeeps are battening down as they never have before. At least not in our living memory.”
“Zik said Osiroon has been besieged,” I said. “Worse in some ways, the horde has ruined harvests and herds too, endangering everyone there beyond just the attacks.” The weapons in my footwear felt too small for what faced us. “Did Claeve start there, working his way toward the High Keep?”
“Mikhalthe claims Vreas never told him about the lightkeeps feeling forsaken.” Aric shook his head. “My brother might not’ve always listened to his advisors, but he would not have ignored such a warning. I think the marshal wanted to protect Mikah, maybe protect himself.” A deep sigh curved his shoulders. “Unhappiness is a threat as dire as demons and even trickier to battle. But blade to bone, I’ve been flying and fighting enough that the lightkeeps and everyone in the settlements should’ve known we were there for them.”
I reached a hand down to him. “Maybe you’ve been too high, too far away for them to see.”
After a heartbeat, he put his hand in mine, letting me lever him upright. “I suppose that’s not a problem now that I’m down here with you all.”
“Sludge-grubbing with the worst of us,” I said cheerfully, even though his comment stung a bit. It wasn’t like I could forget he was a prince, even without the dragon, not with that silky hair.
Maybe he sensed my pique, because as he stood, he wrapped his arms around me. “I am the worst of the worst.”
I sighed to myself as I leaned into the embrace. “We could be the worst together.” My voice wavered a bit, so it sounded more like a question.
Before he could respond—although I wasn’t sure what response I was looking for—a flurry of noise came from beyond our protective wall. Someone called, “To the gate! A rider returns!”
Aric held me another moment. “Let’s hear what they have to say.”
But I gave him a nudge as I stepped back. “You go. You said the king has been ranting, and I’m no help there. Besides, I’ll hear soon enough.”
He nodded and I watched him stride off in the direction of the king’s makeshift audience chamber and war room. Then I went to find Dyania.
I knew she’d been hunkered down with some of the other High Keep nobility and remaining Chosen Ones in one of the more intact buildings off the main Velderrey square. But when I went to her place, all that was left was a screen of half-rotted timbers woven with dry grass—I recognized Zik’s delicate patterning—into a privacy screen.
“Nobody wanted the dreadmarked one here,” said a querulous voice behind me.
I glanced back. “You chased them off with forks, did you?”
The old woman snorted. “Not me! I thought to keep the Chosen close, in case the demons come a-feasting.” She grimaced. “The others feared contamination. As if just a bit of midnight muttering is a sign of demons.”
Considering she was a different kind of monster, I wasn’t going to argue with her. “Where did they go?”
She clutched her cloak around her; the heavy fur was looking more than a little bedraggled. “Took the muttering girl away. That’s all I know. Maybe wandering the dawn well with Ormonde’s ghost.”
According to the history of the Living Lands, in his waning years, Ormonde had passed the Radiant Throne to his eldest son—and the dragon to his youngest daughter. But where he’d gone after, even stories didn’t say. If he’d stayed to haunt his scions, surely he’d be very disappointed at us losing his High Keep.
I left the old woman there, with her matted fur and the likely hidden forks. So where would Lisel take them?
Making my way to the temporary stables, knowing Lisel and Zik would both be comfortable around the creatures, I worked in a spiral outward. In an empty granary, where not even the scent of straw lingered, just cold stone, I found them. Having heard my footsteps, Lisel was preemptively bristling, but she sagged when she saw it was me.
I gave her a sympathetic look. “Bad nights?”
She glanced at Ani. “We won’t last much longer out here.”
I didn’t think she meant just our little group.
When she stepped aside, Zik looked up at me with a furrowed brow. He and Nenzo were plaiting grasses and strips of rags—into what, I couldn’t yet tell—but his focus returned to the lady sitting awkwardly stiff on an old mounting block near a tiny hearth built up from scavenged cobblestones.
Although she was upright, eyes open, Lady Morowyn didn’t really look much better than when I’d first seen her barely breathing and crawling with scorpiders in the depths of the black spire. The threadbare blanket wrapped around had more substance, and while she stared at nothing, her stance was taut, what remained of her weakened muscles twitching faintly, as if she wanted to flee whatever nothingness she saw.
Dyania was seated at her feet, chaffing her sister’s limp hands, but she gave me a tired smile. “Good morning, Fei. Did you hear—?”
A moan stopped me in my tracks as I approached. Morowyn’s previously blank stare was fixed on me.
“Dragon,” she whispered in a voice as cracked as the obsidian tower.
My pulse skittered. “Not I—”
But Dyania boosted up on her knees, clutching her sister’s hands tighter. “Morowyn? It’s me, Dyania.” She tugged at the emaciated fingers, like a child’s bid for an elder’s attention. “Wyn…”
Zik sidled up next to me. “That’s the first word she’s said,” he murmured, for my ear only. “Maybe she’s truly waking.”
Or descending into deeper nightmare.
Nenzo shook his head and gestured.
Watching his hands, I frowned at him. “My…nose? I don’t look like a dragon,” I protested.
“Smell,” Zik corrected. “He said she senses the dragon on you.”
She scented Aric on me. A flush ripped through me. Not embarrassment exactly—I had never been ashamed of taking what pleasures I could any more than I’d apologize for the various other things I took—but I hadn’t meant to cause panic with my presence. “I’ll go.”
“Wait,” Ani urged. “At least she’s talking. Wyn…” Gently, she reached up to touch her sister’s chin, tilting Morowyn’s face toward her. “Peace, sister of my light. You are safe.” When Lisel made a choked sound, the lady stiffened but she amended, “I’m here. I’ll stay with you now. Stay with me…”
The plaintive note in her entreaty stabbed at me, and Lisel looked similarly stricken. We were none of us safe, and none of us could truly promise we’d stay, whatever we said, whatever we wanted.
That realization made me swallow against a knot in my throat.
As if in eerie echo, Morowyn swallowed too. Though Dyania had turned the woman’s gaunt face, her gaze stayed frozen on me. “Nothing…left,” she said in that shattered voice. “Why have you left me…only this?” She twisted one hand out of Dyania’s grasp to claw at her own belly.
“Wyn,” Dyania soothed. “This is Fei, a friend, not…not the one who hurt you.”
Nenzo caught the suffering Chosen’s other hand, still gesturing.
Zik nodded. “Lady Morowyn should drink and eat while she is…with us.”
So I had to stand there, inadvertently goading the poor woman to wakefulness when I had to wonder if she would’ve preferred to not be part of our likely doom, or at least not be conscious for it. When I moved to the far corner, she was able to focus enough on swallowing to take the small mouthfuls that her sister urged on her without staring at me.
“So sweet.” She gazed down at the mug Dyania steadied in front of her lips.
“The yombark elixir,” Zik told me.
Hovering near us, Lisel added, “It is not sweet.”
Neh, if the lady’s standards were so low, maybe being with us wasn’t that bad.
When she pushed away the broth, there was still half a bowl, but maybe her eyes seemed a little clearer. Unlike her younger sister’s light and dark gaze, Lady Morowyn had two dark eyes. Cloudiness lingered, like an echo of the Dragon Prince’s scarred stare, but she reached a tentative hand toward Dyania.
“Ani?” She whispered. “How are you here?” She twisted around, and at first I thought she might be about to fall back into somnolence. “How am I here? Where am I?” She pressed trembling fingertips to her lips. “What is that taste?”
“Oh, Wyn.” Dyania’s exhalation was half laugh, half sob.
Keeping very still as the sisters embraced so as not to disturb the ladies’ fragile joy, I nevertheless squirmed inside, watching their reunion. One would think I’d gone without long enough that jealousy could no longer catch ahold of me.
But no such luck.
While Lisel, Zik, and Nenzo bustled around their improvised little home, I lurked like the sad scrap of an auric specter. I didn’t catch all of what the sisters discussed, but I heard Dyania explaining what Morowyn had missed while she was…sleeping? Gone away? Drained to near oblivion?
When Nenzo brought another serving of the yombark tea, the elder Sevaare scion gave him a painstaking smile. “Thank you for your care of me all this time. To see my sister again is a gift.” She cupped the mug without drinking, gazing down into the steaming liquid. “I can’t remember much from…after I arrived in the High Keep, or that night at the Feast.” Her cloudy gaze snapped to me. “But you… You are not the dragon.”
I cleared my throat. “No, my lady. I have just become, ah, entangled with the prince, not unlike yourself.”
Lisel made a derisive sound. “Can you call it entanglement if you choose it?”
“Peace,” Dyania murmured under her breath.
But I inclined my head. Not chosen, but chooser.
I couldn’t and wouldn’t regret that either.
“Even with our eyes open, tangles happen, ya,” Zik said.
I tossed him a grin for his loyalty. “I think Aric must be tied in as many knots as the rest of us together.”
Dyania gave her sister’s blanched knuckles a nudge. “Drink,” she urged. “What the yombark elixir lacks in flavor it makes up in vigor.” While Morowyn sipped, Dyania settled back at her feet, one hand lingering on the knobby knee. Tears sparkled in her eyes, light and dark. “Oh, Wyn. Thank the light everlasting you’ve come back to us.”
“’Twas the demons.” Morowyn opened her eyes, the clouds heavier in her gaze. “As the verge cracked, I heard them whispering for him, summoning him to join them.” She took a clumsy gulp of the tea. “I wanted to rise, to go with them. The weight upon me, upon my heart, felt lessened when they called, as if the depths of their darkness lightened mine.” She shook her head, her short braids—Zik’s finest handiwork—shifting restlessly above her shoulders. “When he didn’t answer, their call was thunderous, as they sought him. Then they broke through the verge and swarmed the cavern.” Her lashes flew wide, her dark eyes ringed in white. “I remember that.”
I shivered. “They were looking for Claeve, the demon master.”
“No.” Lady Morowyn closed her eyes. “They called to the dreadmarked prince. But he did not answer.”
The rest of us exchanged uncertain glances.
She looked at Zik and Nenzo. “I remember you helped me up, tried to get the others.”
Nenzo’s bearded chin dropped to his chest in a discordant clatter of beads. He glanced away, his gestures slow and stiff.
I frowned as I deciphered the signs. “You couldn’t have done more. Just the two of you, squeezing through the cracks in the tower, wouldn’t have had a chance if there’d been more sleepers, even if you could’ve roused the others enough.”
The lady abandoned her yombark tea to hold a hand out to both Nenzo and Zik, and in the graceful gesture I had a glimpse of where Dyania had learned her dignity. “You saved me. I wish I had been for there for you.”
Nenzo’s hands flashed and Zik translated, “You are here now.”
Was it just me who heard that as a curse? The three of them bowed their heads together, not in any blessing I knew, just the burden of what they’d shared.
I shuddered to think of their terror, scrambling through the dark, hearing the whispers coming from all around. I frowned. “You said the demons came through a verge?” My voice cracked, like the first warning flaw in a piece of failing crockery. “A verge where? Beneath the towers?”
“That can’t be,” Lisel protested. “Someone would’ve stumbled onto a hellhole in the High Keep. Besides, we saw the horde come over the walls, and we know they’ve been haunting these mountains since they attacked the trading caravan.”
Lady Morowyn sucked in her sunken cheeks. “Maybe I’m wrong,” she said in a fading voice. “How could I even know, truly, when I was lost in that darkness.”
Bad enough that the kingdom’s heart had been overrun. But to discover it was also now a font of never-ending darkness?
“We have to tell Aric,” I said. “The king can’t wait for the lightkeeps to send fighters. If there is a verge beneath, and the horde reclaims the dragon and the luminarci…”
“With that auric power, Claeve could crack a verge all the way to the Lost Lands. Never mind a pathway, the Living Lands would fall into darkness.” Dyania came to her feet in a rush. “Fei, I will go with you to speak to the king.” She grimaced. “He wanted a change in the way this war has been waged, but I think this is not what he meant.”
“I’ll go too,” Lisel stated. “From what I’ve heard, the king has not yet chosen a successor for my father, but I can at least offer his captains help with the logistics for a return to the High Keep.”
I grimaced. So much for running away. Now we were running right back.
Dyania gazed at Lisel. “Perhaps you should offer your services to the king. You’ve more than earned a chance.”
Spots of color heated the hartier’s cheeks, and Zik and I exchanged amused sidelong glances as she sputtered. “Not I,” she said, echoing my words—unconsciously, I was sure. “My father always intended my brother to take his place. I’d never make that move when he refused to acknowledge me before.”
Nenzo gestured, and I translated, with a look to Zik to be sure of my words. “We may all have to sacrifice who we might have been to save the Living Lands.”
No one replied, but I suspected we were all considering how much we’d already lost—and wondering if there were enough threads remaining to weave a way to what might come next.
“I will go in your stead, Ani,” Lady Morowyn said. “Being Chosen was always supposed to be my duty to our kingdom, for our people.”
But Dyania shook her head. “You stay here to rest and regain your strength. If the king needs to hear the words from your mouth, he can do so after you’ve had a chance at more than a cup of yombark tea.” She gave her sister a kiss on the forehead.
When Zik settled the lady back on the bare pallet, Morowyn stared up at the rotted timbers of the granary roof. “They were so hungry. I fear such emptiness can never be satisfied.” She rotated her head, no pillow to soften the bed. For all her freedom from the black spire, this place might be crueler and more perilous than the Feast she had only partly survived. As when she had first awakened, her cloudy gaze locked on me. “Matching hunger for hunger, loneliness for loneliness, is no path to salvation.”
I inclined my head. “While I’m sure a lor could tell us the street value of salvation, I always found it a luxury even before this current exile. Perhaps the numinlor could’ve even ascribed coin to it. But she too is gone.”
Old pain and the fear in her eyes like scars thickened. “You cannot appease the Dragon Prince,” she warned. “No Chosen One could, not even all of us together.”
“Just as well I never offered.” I glanced at the other two. “I’ll meet you at the king’s hall.” I pivoted on my heel, awkwardly enough that the animdao blade prodded me in the ankle, though I refused to wince.
As I stalked out of the granary, my righteously aggrieved stomp was further marred by an unavoidable hop over a pile of yaxen dung, too fresh to be fuel for the fires.
There was probably a lesson in that.
My hesitation gave Lisel a chance to catch up to me with her longer stride. “The lady meant no insult. I think it’s just hard—neh, let me say rather impossible—for anyone else to see the prince as you do.”
If that distinction was meant to mollify me, it did not. “I don’t see him any sort of way,” I said through gritted teeth. “Except for what he is: someone who has done terrible things and made horrible mistakes, only some of which were his own, by choice or by failing. And yet that convicts him forever in everyone’s eyes.”
She looked me up and down once, taking more time about it than my street-scrawny shape actually required. “Like yourself, you mean?”
I snorted, my humor abruptly restored. “Blade to bone, if I could lay claim to a quarter of the prince’s misdeeds I wouldn’t mind my own condemnation half as much.”
Lisel made me wait while Dyania caught up with us. Somehow, in that scant time, the lady had freshened up so that her skirts were brushed out and her braids bound back. At some point, she must’ve found a place to swap her Chosen white for a more practical beige, and the warm hue in place of the bleached blankness made the spectrum threads woven around her seem even brighter by comparison.
Lady Morowyn only spoke the truth when she said a prince would have no entanglement with someone like me.
I squelched the mournful jealousy. As if that mattered when we bore the terrible news that the High Keep was likely to fall into the maw of the demons’ realm.
Together, we hastened to the king’s hall. Aric had grumbled to me about the presumptuous label for a building that had clearly once been nothing more than a decent-sized tavern. But where the ancient battles that destroyed Velderrey seemed particularly concentrated in the finer districts, this stone edifice had stood mostly untouched, though scavenged by time and any travelers brave enough to risk passing through the forsaken lightkeep. Palace staff had obviously done what they could to make the place presentable, and they kept the lamps trimmed low enough that the meager lighting didn’t call undue attention to any places they missed.
Anyway, with the king ranting as he was doing now, no one would be looking anywhere but him.
Any liege in a rage was cause for concern, of course, but considering that the riders who’d arrived earlier should’ve been bringing good news…
“They owe this duty to me,” Mikhalthe was roaring. “To the kingdom. They think they can just say no?”
“They have said no,” no’Maru said in an unamused tone. “The question before us now is what we say next.”
Mikhalthe growled. “We will start by killing the messengers.”
“Ah, Your Illuminance,” stammered the captain of the guard, Elaf, who I’d met briefly when we’d gone after the attack on the trading caravan. “They too are your subjects still.”
“Blade to bone, man, I’m not serious,” the king snapped. “The marshal would’ve known that.”
“But Vreas is dead,” no’Maru said. “Speaking of which, you need to name a new marshal of your army.”
Aric growled under his breath. “We don’t have time for these diversions.”
“Even less time now,” I piped up. Why did I always feel the need to interrupt my betters? But it wasn’t really my fault that I was always the bearer of worse news.
Every eye swiveled toward me; obviously none of them had even noted our arrival.
Aric strode toward me. “Feinan.”
Dyania stepped forward, drawing Lisel and me into her wake. “Your Illuminance, my lords, bad tidings, I fear. We’ve reason to believe there may be a verge beneath the High Keep.”
That she managed to silence even a king once again reminded me of her power.
But Mikhalthe rallied quickly enough. “Of course there is,” he snarled. “Because what I need right now is more enemies.” He cast a scathing but unfocused look in all directions.
With the way his eyes were rolling in annoyance, I suspected he wasn’t actually seeing anyone else’s response. Aric’s anger, but maybe no surprise there. The captain’s uncertainty, which would not improve his performance in battle. No’Maru’s lip-twist of… I wasn’t quite sure. Maybe just irritation but perhaps disgust.
Not that I blamed him, considering I too was outraged at my king’s selfish assessment of who was victim here—and I was one who took other people’s things for my own.
Aric frowned. “How do you know this?” His gaze shifted to me. “We’ve heard no such rumor.” Was that a note of hurt in his voice? Did he think my friends and I had withheld this crucial news from him?
“My sister has roused,” Dyania explained. “While in her swoon, she said she heard the demons, and from that she took word of a threatening verge.”
No’Maru frowned. “Your sister? The Lady Morowyn? But she went to the Feast.” He swung an accusing glance to Aric.
Who returned the look impassively before focusing his attention on Dyania. “You said she heard their whispers?” His jaw cranked hard to one side. “Then we must give that all consideration.”
Captain Elaf blanched. “Dreadmarked,” he whispered.
Aric gave him an arch stare. “No more so than I.”
I struggled to hold back a nervous giggle, considering that wasn’t the reassurance he seemed to think it was.
To my surprise, the king gave a nonchalant wave of his hand. “Another step removed, actually,” he said in airy dismissal. “The demons touched the dragon. The dragon touches you. You touch the lady. Hardly matters by that point.”
My inappropriate amusement faded at that cruel recitation of sacrifices barely acknowledged. For the thud of one heartbeat, I almost didn’t blame the demons.
“So we’re just going to believe the babblings from the leftovers of a Feast?” No’Maru lifted one eyebrow. “As strategies go, that seems injudicious.”
“We’ve charged in with less consideration,” Mikhalthe said. “At least we know now how they were able to overcome us.” He slammed one clenched fist into his open palm. “Claeve wants a war. We shall give it to him.”
I clamped my teeth thoughtfully on the inner corner of my lower lip. Had we not been doing that already?
For once, I kept the not helpful thought to myself. The king thrust to his feet, boots braced, wide hands on his hips, taking up a lot of room in the old tavern. “As my grim brother notes, no one is coming to save us. So, where does that leave us?”
When we all looked at each other, he laughed, a big, kingly guffaw that took up even more room. “By the amaranthine light, things have never been so dire, true, but it is in the darkness that we shine. It is such times when heroes are made.”
And corpses.
But I kept that graceless observation also to myself since everyone here had lost someone, some more than others, and they didn’t need me to make light—or dark—of that truth.
Maybe I was learning some discretion after all.
The king dispatched one of his servants to fetch Lor Berindo—”Unless he’s gone too,” Mikhalthe said bitterly—and called for another chair for Lady Dyania. Nothing for Lisel and me, not that I expected it, so the two of us loitered in the dusty dimness off to one side while the rest of them discussed this unsettling turn for the worse.
The old lor’s arrival, as far as I could tell, merely added another cantankerous voice to an already complicated discussion. I understood now why Aric returned to our crumbled guard shack even more exhausted than I was from hard manual labor. I stood with one shoulder canted into Lisel, and it wasn’t long before she was leaning into me with equal weariness, which, considering she was an offspring of military line, told me just how tiresome this was.
A lengthy dissertation from Lor Berindo about the history of the demonic verges. A much shorter but to me equally stultifying recap from Captain Elaf on current resources in regards to the kingdom’s offensive capabilities. A worried and worrisome update from the palace steward about the increasingly desperate situation in our refugee camp. The briefer but at least more potentially productive intermission while the king called for a small repast—which, sadly, passed by Lisel and me too quickly to even grab a cup of kavé—and then returned to his tirade about the lightkeeps not sending fighters.
I wondered if he even realized he was back where he started. Even a thief knew better than that.
When it became clear that the steward would not pass the tray around to the murky corners—and there wouldn’t be anything left even if he did—I nudged Lisel. “I can add nothing to this conversation but unsolicited commentary. So I’m going to go…anywhere else.”
She gave me half a smile that I thought was almost approving. “I’ll stay with our lady and let her know where you’ve gone.” Her smile faded. “The prince too, I suppose. Fei…you should be more careful.”
“That’s why I’m leaving,” I told her.
“That’s not what I mean, and you know it.”
I did, and my gaze shifted without my conscious will to Aric. With all the heartache we’d endured so far and all the dangers ahead of us, for her to believe that I could still find more trouble… I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or sigh.
I settled for a shrug. “I’ll have you know, I still haven’t taken anything from him.” I hesitated. “Except a cup of kavé. And he took that from the king, so it wasn’t even his.” But I’d also taken that bubbling bath in his tower. And that kiss…many kisses actually.
I grumbled. “Why is a gift considered cursed if it’s everything I wanted?”
She answered with a laugh and a sigh. “If I harbored any delusions of understanding the vagaries of the weavings of fate, perhaps I would’ve pledged myself to the haloric hall as any good second child would have. Instead…” She waved one hand at our current circumstances.
“Neh, Imbril ended up right here too,” I pointed out. “Maybe the weave of the fates is more deliberate than we know.”
“It would be nice if someone had a plan,” she said. “Come find me later and I’ll let you know what, if anything, is decided.”
I nodded and started to walk away, then paused. “I know this isn’t the place for me. But now that I’m here it feels wrong to just walk away.” I pursed my lips. “I mean, not walk away right now. I mean walk away from…” I echoed her hand wave all around. “But I’ll try not to make anything worse.”
“Luckily, I think it will be bad enough that our worst will mean less than a shadow in the void.”
I wrinkled my nose at her idea of luck. “Lady Ani would say something inspiring right now.”
She inclined her head in agreement. “But people like you and me know sometimes we must soldier on without it.”
As I made my way through the ruins of what had once been the kingdom’s finest lightkeep—a harsh preview of the High Keep’s fate—the camp felt like a gray sludge of all the emotions I’d passed: the king’s bluster, Aric’s anger, no’Maru’s cynicism, Dyania’s bruised optimism, Lisel’s resignation. How could such disparate threads ever come together? And would we even have the chance before they were all severed?
I had meant to find myself something to eat—that one purloined cup of kavé not enough to hold me—but instead my steps bent toward the old market square and the small ring of wagons. My aunt caught me loitering on the outskirts. Coming from the direction of the well I’d helped dig out, she had two large flagons of water yoked over her shoulders and a third in her arms. Wordlessly, I fell in beside her, taking the heavy flask from her hold.
“Thank you, Feinan,” she said, adding a lilting cadence to my name that I dimly remembered. “I wasn’t sure we’d see you again.”
“I wasn’t sure you’d still be here.” As soon as the words left my mouth, I winced. The retort was unkinder and more revelatory than I wanted.
But she didn’t flinch, and in her steady gaze, I glimpsed a reflection of the struggles she’d endured on the road—her sister lost, children left behind, a familiar ease with the heavy, unwieldy flagons that spoke more eloquently than any lor or high lord about the strength she’d needed to survive—all burdens that my family had freed me from.
Though I hadn’t asked for that freedom, I reminded myself, fastidiously fanning my resentment.
She paused before we crossed into the circle of wagons. “Your father didn’t want to leave, not when he’s just found you.” She slanted a glance at me and I thought she was going to parry any angry comment I made about them “finding” what they’d so purposefully left behind. But she added, “Also, King Mikhalthe requisitioned our yaxen.”
I made a sound of sympathy. At least she’d been honest about their reason. And I found that I didn’t like the idea of them being stuck here. “I have friends. I’ll see what I can do about the yaxen. Maybe can’t get all of them, but enough.”
She gazed at me, and though I’d never spent much time studying my own face, I caught a glimpse of myself there, not just in the facets of her features but in the lines left by her life—threads of a path I hadn’t taken but that had somehow caught me still. “Do you want to see the backside of our last wagon so badly?” she murmured.
Since she’d been honest with me about the yaxen, I shook my head. “I don’t remember you well enough to really miss you anymore.” For once I put no particular bitterness in the words; it was only the truth. “But I do remember…the happiness of being together on the road, and I don’t want that taken from you.” I let the flagon of water sag in my arms, because it was very heavy. “Also, I think you’d be safer if you weren’t here.” It was saying something that the open road with no one to call for was a better choice. I realized she was smiling at me. “What?”
“That’s why your father left you in Sevaare,” she said. “Because he wanted you to be out of harm’s way.”
I tried to summon up the indignation to walk away again, or at least scowl at her, but… Why? “I would give the same warning to any who might have a chance of saving themselves.”
She looked at me. “Save ourselves for how long? We are all woven on the same loom. If the warp is cut…”
I swallowed against the lump in my throat. “I remember Mama showing me how to darn a hole, to keep going only with what we had. Just because I’m being fancy and making bad choices doesn’t mean anyone else should.”
“A choice made from love is a thread of gold, even in an unraveling sock.” She swung the yoke down and rolled her shoulders. “As I told you, the reason we never came around to Sevaare again is that we weren’t sure your father would be able to let you go a second time. It was so hard for him—harder than you probably want to believe, harder than he’ll ever let you know. I still hear him cry your mother’s name in his sleep, and it took most of what remained of his heart to leave you in the innkeeper’s care, but he would not risk you to the road.”
I let out a slow breath. “Since the risk is everywhere now, even the High Keep, I suppose the rest of it doesn’t matter anymore.” It was the closest I could come to forgiving them, at least for now.
Although this might be the only chance I had.
So when my aunt jerked her chin at the heart of the circle of wagons, I followed her in.
Maybe I’d get that breakfast I’d missed—and perhaps a taste of the love that had left me behind.