CHAPTER 31

They had nowhere to go.

They followed the narrow passageway as it went on forever, with the echoes of the fight behind them, the rumbling of falling stone, and dark emptiness ahead.

They walked for the better part of an hour. Longer. The air they breathed tasted of mud and cold stone. The passageways were pitch dark, and undulated through the hills. They passed intersections, twice. A place where the main path forked into two and then, farther down, into three. They both scanned for tracks and found hardly anything, and all they could do was keep walking. Vex let her instincts guide the way. She wasn’t sure why, but she understood the logic of these underground passages, like she understood following the hidden trails of a forest or of the hills around them. She was certain she could figure out the best way out of these caves.

At an intersection, she didn’t hesitate to choose the narrower of two paths.

The steeper tunnel at another intersection.

She wasn’t sure how long it would take to escape this maze, but she kept walking.

A turn left, instead of right.

Another left, and then a right.

The stone around them brightened. The world gradually grew from nothing to shades of darkest gray, then even that became lighter. When the first glimmers of true sunlight reflected on the walls around them, her shoulders dropped and relief coursed through her. Vax stopped and breathed in deeply. Then he reached out and slammed a fist into the wall. “Fuck.”

She immediately reached forward and grabbed his arm, to prevent him from breaking his hand on the rock. His shout echoed through the passages behind them. Louder. Quieter. Distant.

Trinket growled low at the sound and crawled closer to her. She scratched his snout but kept her eyes on her brother. Every part of him was wound so tense, she could’ve used him as a bowstring.

Slowly, he got his breathing back under control. “I don’t know what exactly it is we’re doing most days. I don’t know exactly what we’re looking for. But I thought maybe I’d found it—maybe I’d found part of it—inside those mines.”

She bit her lip. “Are we looking for anything?”

He smiled sadly. “I can’t walk away from this, Vex’ahlia.” After a second, he added a quieter, “And maybe I don’t want to.”

Vex shook her head and pulled him toward the exit. “I know that, you idiot.”

She knew what he meant too. She would have expected no less, because he had always been the more sentimental of the two of them.

Vex knew they only needed each other. Her brother was all the home and all the family she’d ever want, and he had been since the moment they started traveling together. She didn’t have to let anyone else come too close. She wouldn’t. It was far safer not to be too vulnerable. If they spent the rest of their lives traveling around together, that would be all she needed and that would be enough.

Even so, these last few days, they both got a taste of different lives. Wick had helped her when she wouldn’t let him. Aswin had wormed her way past her defenses. The people in Jorenn could’ve sent her on her way with a map and some provisions, which would’ve been the sensible thing to do—aside maybe from ignoring her completely and simply saying, Oops, we lost your brother? Our bad, good luck. But they hadn’t. They’d invited her in like it had been the only reasonable option, like it hadn’t been hard to carve out a space for her. A space where someone besides her brother cared that she found her way back safely, even if she didn’t find what she was looking for.

It was a taste of a life that may not be in the cards for them, but she couldn’t turn her back on the people who had helped her. Just like her brother couldn’t.

She didn’t want to walk away either.

THE AIR AROUND THEM NOTICEABLY changed. It was thin and heavy, and they pushed through the last quarter mile of the tunnel as it morphed into a pass, with light filtering in from above. Until it at last opened up to a small shadegrass meadow on the side of a hill, between a cliff drop on one side, and a thin stream that ran down to the valley.

What daylight still lingered around them retreated quickly, and the hills that loomed in front of them were painted in dusk colors of reds and purples and oranges. There were no tracks of guards or others here, and Vex was certain she wouldn’t miss them. She only found a handful of animal tracks, and in a different time when the hills weren’t covered in ash and dead plants, this might have been a perfect place for a goatherd.

Now, it was empty. The mine they escaped had been exhausted. And Jorenn Village loomed on the northwestern horizon.

She found a place in the grass and sagged down. Vax sat next to her and picked at a blade of grass, tearing it into tiny little pieces with his nails. Trinket lay down, eyes still on guard, while the sky around them darkened and the winds picked up, letting the ash dance across the grass.

She lazily kicked his foot to the side.

He pushed hers in return. “You are all the home and family I’ll ever need. But I don’t know where we belong, Vex. And I do miss that. If we do what we do just to survive, then that’s fine by me. Maybe there is no way to change it. But …” His voice trailed off. He shrugged helplessly.

She frowned and asked, “If you had the chance to do what Thorn wants to do—find a way to reclaim a home—would you do it? Would you want to go back to Byroden?”

“I want to go back to the home we left when we were ten. I don’t want to go back to a place full of ghosts and memories of things I should have done different.” He ran his hand through the brittle stalks of shadegrass, and it left a dusting of gray on his fingers, like all of it was grime and if they scrubbed hard enough, it would show the green underneath.

He brushed his hands on the cloak that had been like new a week ago and now looked like it had been dragged through hell and back, with rips and blood spatters everywhere. She ran a finger over one of the holes and the loose threads that peeked out, and when she snapped off one of the threads, the wind picked it up and blew it away.

“It seems like everything we could do only creates more trouble.”

“So we either walk away from this or fix it, and I believe we decided we’re not going anywhere yet.” Vex straightened, as if she could stare down the very hills themselves and wrest control back from what was happening inside the mines. “So which problem do we want to solve? Aiding the survivors, keeping the town safe, or protecting ourselves?”

“All of them,” Vax said without hesitation. Some of the restlessness inside him stilled at the thought of a plan. Or creating a plan, at least.

“They’re not all our fights.”

“But they all matter.”

She nodded. “So we need to find a solution that fits them all, one way or another.”

“Bows and blades?” The corner of his mouth pulled up.

“Yes, the two of us, against a whole town.” She smiled as well. When Trinket grumbled, she reached out to him and scratched his chin. “The three of us. Against a whole town. And mines full of ash walkers. And a criminal organization. We’ll be fine.”