Light spilled into the alcove what felt like mere moments after I’d shut my eyes.
I reached for my sword, which had tumbled away during the night. I blinked, trying to make out the figure.
Cion stood at the mouth of the cave with a torch in his hands. “Let’s go.”
I sat up and worked to focus my sleep-addled mind. My whole body ached. I just wanted to collapse back into the sand and pull the blanket over my head, but I didn’t.
I double-checked that my daggers were still strapped against my calves, and I slid my sword into its scabbard. “Where are we going?” I asked as I braided my hair in a poor copy of the style Latia usually gave me for training.
“The shifting hills.”
It wasn’t a location I knew, but I was beginning to realize there was a lot I didn’t know about the desert that had surrounded me my whole life.
Cion offered me a small cup of water and tossed me a spiked kana fruit as he led me out of the alcove. The water trickled down my throat, cooling as it went. It had never tasted so good.
And where did he even get spiked kana fruit? I took small bites off the soft red spines and tried not to show how hungry I was. Juice burst into my mouth with the first bite. I’d never recognized how much I relied on Latia for my meals.
I bet she was scared without me there. What would become of her? Maybe she’d go to work in the kitchens. I hoped Rodric hadn’t kicked her out or, worse, accused her of helping me. The bits of spiked kana settled uneasily in my stomach.
I added her name to the list of those I was here to protect, to fight for, as I followed Cion.
He led me out a different way than I’d come in the night before. We climbed through a small opening in the rocks and emerged above ground. I was surprised to see it was still dark outside.
“It’s a long hike to the shifting hills,” he said. “It’s best done when the sun is down.”
He started off across the endless dunes. I hesitated for a moment, surveying the landscape. There was still no discernible landmark, no way to be sure we were headed to the shifting hills and not back to the city. But at this point, I had no other option than to follow.
Sighing, I trudged after him. I could easily pull my sword if he tried anything.
The night chill clung to me, making me shiver and producing goose bumps down my body.
“You’ll warm soon enough,” Cion said, falling into step beside me.
I moved a few inches away. Anytime Rodric came that close, it was usually because he had some unpleasant surprise waiting. I didn’t trust Cion enough not to do the same or worse.
If Cion noticed my subtle movement away, he didn’t let on. He strode confidently over the hills such that even Tamlin would have been forced to admit the desert belonged to Cion. Where I had to trudge through the sand, it seemed to part for him.
I shook my head. There was no way that rumor was actually true. He was just more used to it than I was.
Still, I couldn’t help but eye him. Wind caught the ends of his loose, long hair. Dirt stained his skin. The last signs of youth had left his face and had been replaced by a hard jawline. His dark eyes hid what he was thinking. The corners of his mouth tugged upward, suggesting he laughed easily. I doubted I’d ever find out.
“Watch out for that yellow-spotted sand snake hole,” Cion said as he pointed to what looked like regular sand to me.
“That’s a yellow-spotted sand snake hole?” I asked, stopping to look.
“You can tell by the small depression in the sand,” he replied. “And if you want to get bitten, keep standing there.”
I jumped away from the hole, realizing for the first time how quickly I could’ve been killed out here on my own. My books and training had not prepared me for this. The drought had kept us all within the city walls—within close distance of the wells—for far too long. We’d lost our knowledge of the desert and its dangers.
“Keep an eye out for spiral cacti too,” he added, and kept walking.
I wanted to ask what a spiral cactus was, but I didn’t want to sound stupid.
But I couldn’t think of a single topic as we walked that would keep the conversation going, that would make us feel more like allies. Every subject we had in common would either be painful for me or painful for him.
Eventually I settled on the only safe topic I could think of. Training. “I thought we were going to train,” I said, “not go see the desert sights.”
“First we will condition. Your best bet is to tire Rodric out. He’s stronger with a blade, but you’ll be faster.”
I couldn’t argue with his logic, so either he was a good liar or he was actually going to train me.
“Who taught you?” I asked.
“Cintric. He was a wandering nomad. He knew every hideout, every danger, every route through the desert.”
“That’s how you get your caravans through?”
He turned toward me, an eyebrow raised. “If you’re trying to figure out our routes, I’ll never tell you.”
“I wasn’t,” I backtracked. “I’ve just always been curious how you found a route that is as safe as the royal caravan route.”
Cion looked away. “I never said our route was safe. But the people trying to get out of here are willing to face just about anything to get their freedom.”
His words struck me to my core. I’d never thought about the people who were forced to risk everything to escape Achra. Maybe it was because until Rodric had been announced as my last opponent, I’d never thought of leaving.
I’d been so focused on training to not only win the throne but to be strong enough to defeat the Desert Boys—to prove to the people they were to blame for everything and not me—that I hadn’t paid enough attention to the people suffering right before me.
I’d known they didn’t have water, but I hadn’t realized the wells were so crowded that sometimes people waited so long that the number of buckets they were allowed dropped while they were in line. Or that the guards were not only killing people who’d demanded the original amount of water they’d been promised, they were also collecting women for Rodric.
I’d thought eradicating the Desert Boys would be upholding my promise to my mother. But there was so much more I should have been doing. So much more I hadn’t seen while locked away training in the palace.
I didn’t know how long this all had been going on, but I had my suspicions that things had only gotten worse under Rodric, that he was bending the entire city to his will just like he was doing to my father.
And I had to find a way to put a stop to it.
“Unless you know that feeling—of being willing to face anything to win your freedom,” Cion continued, “you’ll never beat Rodric, because you’ll never have the intensity that will push you to keep going, knowing it’s your only chance.”
“I’ll do anything to beat Rodric,” I said. Even more so now. Because even if my father didn’t know how bad things had gotten around the wells, Rodric did. And he was the one standing between me and my mother’s crown—my mother’s legacy. And nothing would stop me from that, from finally leading these people how she would’ve wanted me to.
“We’ll see.”
We fell into silence again. Wind picked up around us, filling the void.
Something flapped against my wrist as it brushed past my belt. It was the map I’d torn from Tamlin’s book. Part of me shouted to keep it hidden, but the other part whispered that this could be the first peace offering between Cion and me, the first sign that we could eventually learn to trust each other.
I cleared my throat and held the crumbled paper out to Cion. “Maybe this would help your caravans.”
Cion took the paper, smoothing it out so he could study it.
“It’s a map of the desert drawn by Tamlin himself,” I supplied. I pointed toward the wandering line. “That’s the route he used.”
He eyed me. “Is this how you were planning on finding us?”
I couldn’t admit that’s how I’d been planning to run away, so I merely nodded.
“Many men and women have lost their lives following replicas of this map.” He folded it and handed it back to me. “As you’ll see in the shifting hills, nothing in this desert stays the same for long. It’s a living, breathing creature that alters and moves. Maps are no good out here.”
“Oh,” I said, sliding the map back into my belt.
Couldn’t I see the wind reshaping and blowing the dunes even from my window? It didn’t occur to me that the whole desert didn’t stay the same.
“But thank you,” Cion said.
And even though we fell back into silence, the iciness of it had been broken.
We continued hiking up the dune in front of us, but just as we crested the top, Cion vaulted toward me. “Get down.”
We rolled down the side of the dune, spraying sand around us.
Cion landed on top of me, his hand clamped on my mouth. He held one finger to his lips, urging me to be silent.
“If she’s out here, she’s probably dead,” a voice said from somewhere not too far away. “And if she’s dead, the vultures and blood beetles have already picked her apart. We’re not going to find anything.”
“Soldiers,” Cion mouthed at me.
I swallowed, though my mouth had gone suddenly dry. I didn’t know how many were looking for me.
Sand ground into my exposed skin, but I didn’t dare move.
“At least we’d get promoted if we found her,” another voice said. “Rodric might even give us extra water rations.”
The first voice laughed. “That’s the only reason I agreed to come out here.”
As they moved farther away, I couldn’t help but be struck by how much these soldiers must really need the extra water if they were willing to come out here to look for me.
Cion waited until we couldn’t hear anything else before slowly easing off me and pulling me to my feet. He smelled like warm smoke. Maybe from all the torches he carried around.
“I haven’t seen guards in the desert in a long time and never this far out before,” he said. “Normally, they won’t chase us past the city gates.”
“Why didn’t you kill them?”
“We don’t kill just because we can,” he said.
“What about at the wells?” I countered.
“We only fight when we have to, when it’s a matter of survival. The water we get isn’t just for us. It’s for the survival of all the people who desperately need it.”
I eyed him. There was so much about the Desert Boys I didn’t understand, or that I was starting to admit I’d possibly been wrong about.
As the sun rose higher, we trudged onward, pausing to look for soldiers.
My stomach rumbled. One spiked kana fruit as a meal wasn’t enough, especially after barely eating anything since my fight in the arena.
I studied Cion’s movements again to distract from the hunger pains ripping through my stomach. He swayed with the sand the way other people swayed while riding a camel. It was a natural movement that anticipated the ebb and flow of the ground beneath his feet. He barely left a trail where he walked, like he was a snake skimming the surface. He was taller than I was by about a hand’s height, and his long legs allowed him to take one step for every two of mine.
I must have been staring too hard because I tripped in the sand. Cion’s arm shot out to steady me.
“We’re here,” he said. He pulled me to the top of a sand dune.
At first, it didn’t look any different from any other part of the desert we’d passed. Then, every hill in front of us shifted as a blast of wind tore through the area. Sand rolled and tossed. Buried cacti were exposed before being thrown back into a cyclone of sand. The hills would stabilize for a moment before once again spilling across each other and rearranging themselves as another gust of wind smashed into them.
Cion was right. The desert was a living, breathing creature. And it was vicious.
“Are you crazy?” I shouted at Cion over the rush of the wind. “We’ll be killed if we go down there. That’s worse than a sandstorm.”
“You’ll be killed if you go in the arena and face Rodric without proper training.”
“That’s not training.” The sand dunes heaved upward and rained back down. That was suicidal.
“It teaches you to watch for unforeseen opponents, to expect an attack from every direction. Watch,” Cion said. He took out a mask with two eyeholes and tied it across his ears so that his eyes were mostly covered and a flap fell around his nose.
Then he pulled out his sword and rushed into the fray.
“Stop.” I reached out to hold him back. If he wanted to die, he could do so on his own time, because there was no way I’d find my way back without him. He brushed past my arm into the spray.
Walls of sand pounded against his body. He pushed through them. The sand shifted again, dragging him forward. A cactus appeared through the draining sand. Cion sliced through the top of the plant before its spikes could impale him.
He’d mastered how to flow with the sand. His instincts were mesmerizing to watch. His sword swung forward before I even noticed the hint of a cactus peeking out.
Eventually, he somersaulted and used the waves to push him back to where I stood. He climbed up the dune and ripped his mask off.
The sky had only just begun to lighten but sweat dotted his brow. “If you can master that,” he said, smiling, “you can master anything.”
I forced my mouth closed, unaware it had dropped open. “I can’t do that,” I said.
“Learn to use the sand and wind to your advantage.”
“That’s easy for you to say,” I scoffed. “You spend every day walking these dunes. You’re used to how the sand flows.”
“Don’t think of it as sand. Think of it as your opponent. You can’t predict where an attack will come from. These hills will hone your reflexes faster than any sword training exercise.” His dark eyes turned toward me. They had small flecks of gold hidden beneath the swaths of brown, almost as though sand had embedded itself there. Or as if he were slowly becoming one with the desert.
I pulled my gaze back toward the hills and squared my shoulders. This was a test. He was seeing how much I could handle.
Up until Rodric had entered my life, I liked challenges—liked showing my father what I could do. But Rodric’s idea of a challenge was to see how long I could hold my breath in one of the fountains or to see how many times he could kick me while I fought to get sand out of my eyes.
I hadn’t decided if Cion was doing the same thing, but I sensed he hadn’t brought me out here for humiliation. No, Cion didn’t seem like the type to waste time or energy on something so frivolous. He genuinely wanted to know if I had the reflexes of a fighter. There was only so much you could teach someone. And my fight with Rodric was in one month. That wasn’t much time to train.
Cion held out his mask to me.
It smelled like sweat and leather. It squashed my nose flat, but the flap hanging down would hopefully keep out enough sand that I could breathe. I gripped my sword in my hand and stared out over the tossing hills for a moment.
“Wait until you see an opening,” Cion said.
I nodded. I licked my parched lips, but my tongue was too dry to do anything.
I plunged downward after a wall of sand had tossed its mane to the side. Tendrils of sand poured down on me, trying to drag me down into the swirling mass.
Puddles of sand swallowed my legs instantly. I fought to free them but only sank lower. A wave of sand cascaded over me. I tumbled with it, losing sight of the sky. Sand pushed upward and downward before pulling me to the side. A cactus brushed along my back. I couldn’t cry out because grains would have poured into my mouth and choked me as the mask flipped to the side.
The hills stabilized for a moment. I clawed in what I hoped was an upward direction. I broke through the sand and pulled myself out just as the ground shifted again. I tried moving with the tide, running in the direction it pulled. But everything tossed into the air, including me. I fought to keep my grip on my sword.
Dunes swirled around me so thickly they obscured the sunlight piercing the desert. I landed on a mass of sand and was immediately swallowed. A whirlwind sucked me downward, the weight of it crushing against my body. My heart pounded so loudly it seemed to echo through the sand, giving it life as it slowly drowned me.
I tumbled over and over again. I jerked right and then rolled left. I collided with something solid and glanced off. The waves continued to toss. Another burst coated me in intense heat. Sunlight disappeared.
My lungs tightened as more sand crashed on top of me. I was slowly being buried layer by layer until I’d eventually be pushed down to the center of the earth.
I clawed at the sand, but my arms were packed against me. The sheets pressed down on my chest, threatening to collapse it. I tried to breathe. Sand rushed in to fill the space when I exhaled, pressing harder and harder until I thought it would break through my skin and fill me up.
The honey glaze before my eyes disappeared. Darkness overtook me.
I hit something hard as the sands shifted again.