CHAPTER 33

Five years ago

The Gladepools looked smaller than they remembered. Of course they knew the whole area was vast and full of many hidden spots they’d never seen. It was a vibrant place, filled with the chatter of birds and woodland creatures, and everywhere around them an endless landscape of different greens. They’d even spotted a hunting party in Syngornian gear once, and immediately turned around to make their way deeper into the marshlands.

But the lakes and ponds near their home had always seemed endless too. And the closer they got to them, the more they realized they weren’t. The pond where they used to go hunting was not a tenth the size of Lake Ywnnlas. They would walk around it easily now, when before it had been a full day’s trek. The tree stumps and crawling roots had seemed gargantuan, like they had been part of a primeval place where tree branches had reached all the way up toward the stars, and their branches could encompass whole lakes and houses. Now they were no different from the trees and greenery in Syngorn. And they were entirely different all the same.

With every step they took, memories came flooding back to her. This was the same pond where she and Feena had once gone fishing. Feena was two years older than the twins, and she’d only wanted to talk about the boys in the village, while Vex had just wanted to go fish.

This was the clearing where they’d celebrated Duncan’s birthday, when his fathers had used the bakery to bake every type of pastry imaginable. They ate until their stomachs hurt, played hide-and-seek until Tym got stuck in a hollowed-out tree and had to be rescued by a few of the hunters of Byroden. That night, they’d slept under the summer sky and they’d counted all the stars they could find, making up constellations as they went along. If she tried, perhaps she could still find the Hayloft and Three Dogs Playing. And of course the best constellation of all: Mistress Fara, where a scattering of stars looked just like the healer did when she glowered at her patients.

Vex bit her lip and wondered if any of her old friends would recognize them now. If they still lived in Byroden, or if some of them had fallen prey to the curse of wandering feet. She could tell them now: the rest of the world didn’t beat a place to call home.

She spotted a gathering of gnarly tree roots digging through the earth like fingers, and nudged her brother. “Do you think anyone ever found that boggle?”

One corner of Vax’s mouth curled up in a crooked grin. “If they did, someone better have stories to tell. We spent days tracking the cursed thing.”

She shrugged, her expression carefully neutral. “Perhaps it didn’t exist at all. Perhaps you misheard Old Wenric when he muttered about it.”

“I did not—” Vax started to respond, and then immediately snapped his mouth shut. A sense of wonder crossed his face, in the recognition that so much had changed and yet so much hadn’t. This close to Byroden, they were no longer Syldor’s unwanted children. They weren’t those teenage half-elves dressed in the fineries of Syngorn, with the city’s habits and culture drilled into them but always looking out of place. They were the seamstress’s twins, who’d escaped their mother’s notice and who had spent the afternoon—or the past several years—finding their way in the wild. They had to be home by nightfall, in time for dinner.

Without saying a word of it out loud, they both picked up their pace, creating new tracks where the old ones had once been, their footsteps covering long-forgotten and long-overgrown prints.

Their hearts felt lighter, and their steps were lighter too. Weeks had passed and years had passed. When they’d started their trek here, the hundreds of miles had felt like an insurmountable challenge. And not because of the distance either: Vex had been terrified they wouldn’t be able to find their way home because it was no longer theirs to find.

She’d been wrong about that. She knew that now. She remembered every branch and every bit of bog like it had been seared into her mind. And she would never forget it again.

She reached for her brother’s hand, and pulled him toward the edge of the woods.

THEY WALKED OUT BETWEEN THE trees, a few hundred yards away from the village, and for a brief, heartaching moment, everything looked exactly as they remembered it. The farms at the edge of town. The familiar shadow of the mill that ground their grain stood proudly against the late-afternoon sky. The shrine near the cemetery. Byroden’s Bliss, raggedier than ever. The mining facilities on the far side of Byroden, near the strange and spooky chasm. It looked so like what Vax remembered that it hurt.

And then he saw the ruined buildings. He didn’t immediately know how to interpret the large scars and burns on the sides of the structures that still stood, barely any of them left unscathed. They looked like crawling shadows or twisted decorations. But when the twins stepped closer, other details became visible. The houses and farms and stores that were once proud homes, family heirlooms that were passed on alongside necklaces and legends, were gone. Rubble was all that was left of them.

Vex spotted the ruins not a heartbeat after Vax, and he heard how her breath caught. Her voice cracked. “What happened?”

“I …” He didn’t have an answer to that. Whatever they saw in front of them, it wasn’t real. It had to be an illusion. It couldn’t be real.

He’d thought about leaving Syngorn a hundred times, and every time he’d imagined how the escape would go, how this trek back would go, and especially, what their homecoming would look like, one thing had always remained the same: the house where they lived would still be there. It would still smell of fabric and chalk and the candles their mother burned to be able to sew late at night. And she would be there, in the door opening, waiting for them.

He was running before he fully realized he was running, and Vex was right by his side. His head spun and his chest constricted and the closer they got to town, the more distant the dream seemed.

Because Tym’s barn, where the children of town used to play during chilly winter days, was flattened. The mill that stood so proudly was surrounded with heavy wooden beams to keep the roof from collapsing. The only part left of Byroden’s Bliss was the original façade, though a new, temporary structure had been erected around it. The courtyard where they had once danced had been mostly cleared of rubble and stones and turned into another grave site. And beyond that …

Beyond that there was nothing. No homes. No buildings. No farmlands. Nothing but scorched earth.

A void where their home used to be.

“No,” Vex whispered. “No, no, no, no.”

Ash where fabric and chalk and memories used to be.

There was nothing left.

The world turned and twisted and Vax’s vision swam. Next to him, Vex retched. Vax doubled over, his hands on his knees. He tried desperately to breathe. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t. He wanted to reach out to his sister—to cling to her—but the moment he tried, a hand clamped around his arm.

“Halt! Who goes there?”

Vax reacted without thinking. He brought his arm up to slap the hand away, while in the same fluid motion reaching for one of his daggers. He was going to be sick, he was probably going to be knifed himself, but what did it matter? There was nothing left.

He blindly stabbed at the figure trying to hold him, to create a space between them. His body remembered the endless drills, even while his mind was screaming with grief.

The blade of the dagger met with steel and a gruff exclamation of surprise, as his assailant blocked and jumped to the side. “Hey! What’s wrong with you? Don’t—” The other figure closed his eyes abruptly. Something clattered to the ground. The same steady grasp wrapped around the wrist of the hand in which Vax held his dagger, pulling his arm down. “Vax?”

Vax stilled, tense against the iron grip, and the tall halfling in front of him laughed without mirth. “I’ll let you go if you stop trying to stab me.”

He looked to be about sixteen or seventeen. Taller than most halflings, his shoulders had filled out and his arms looked like those of a blacksmith, not a baker. A long, wide scar led from his hairline to his jaw, clouding one eye and pulling the corner of his mouth up in a grimace.

“Duncan?” Vax swayed, and the halfling still held on to him.

“Been a while, hasn’t it?” Duncan glanced over to Vex, who’d straightened and pushed her hair out of her face, staring at the halfling with bloodshot eyes. “Good to see you too, Vex.”

“You …” Vax didn’t know what he’d wanted to say. Everything inside him was in an uproar. He could only stare at his childhood friend.

Duncan gently let go of his wrist and waited for Vax to put the dagger away. He picked up the sword that lay by his feet and sheathed it with a nonchalance as if he’d always had a weapon in his hand. “I try to tell those few passersby we have that I tangled with the dragon himself, but the truth is it was nothing quite so heroic. I got stuck when the bakery collapsed. But I do what I can. We all take turns protecting our home.”

Vex’s voice was painfully bland when she repeated, “The dragon?”

“Big, red, scaly wyrm.” He blanched when neither of the twins responded. “You didn’t know? I thought Old Wenric sent word to that fancy city of yours.”

“Duncan.” Vax fought to keep his voice even. Instead it sounded pointed and cold, because it was the only way to protect himself from this pain. “What the fuck happened here?”

Duncan winced. He gestured helplessly at the town around him, but those few others who walked the streets kept their eyes on the road. A young halfling girl, no older than six, held the hand of an older half-elf woman. They both wore dark flowers braided around their arms, and the girl skipped. A human farmhand, a handful of years older than the twins, used a cane to propel himself forward. He missed the lower half of one leg.

“Duncan, please,” Vex said softly.

Duncan sighed. “Come then, we’ll have a drink and I’ll tell you about the day the dragon came. It’s not a story I want to tell out in the open, because it’s not one most of us want to hear. I’ll ask Iselle to take the rest of my watch.”

“Even when it’s still daylight?” Vax asked.

Duncan set his jaw, and he looked older and sadder than his years when he answered, “Turns out, daylight doesn’t stop dragons.” He turned his face westward for an instant, a habit he probably wasn’t even aware of. And Vax imagined what it must have felt like to be here, to see this vision of death bear down on them, his fiery breath burning everything to ash, for the air around them to be filled with nothing but smoke and screams.

He didn’t want to ask the question he knew he had to ask. He reached out to his sister and gathered her close, and he could feel her trembling uncontrollably. “Before you tell us anything else,” he started softly, “what about Elaina? What about our mother?”

Duncan’s eyes flicked westward again, and his shoulders dropped. “I’m sorry.”

VAX ROSE BEFORE THE SUN did, his head and heart aching. His sister still lay curled up inside the blankets in the loft near the smithy, where Duncan worked. She’d cried herself to sleep, and her face was blotched. She twisted and turned, sobbing in her sleep. He couldn’t blame her. The story Duncan had told, of a large red dragon that tore through the countryside, had been harrowing. Not one of them had seen the danger coming, and no one had escaped unscathed. Houses had been destroyed. An entire harvest burned. Everyone had lost someone. Duncan’s fathers were gone. Mistress Fara. Feena. Even that old grumpy farmer Padric, who’d died standing in front of his farm, holding up a pitchfork against a dragon.

The ones who were left tried to rebuild as best they could, but they found it was hard to rebuild on the same ground that held loved ones.

Vax knelt next to Vex and ran his hands through her hair until she calmed. They could stay and help—Duncan had made that much clear. They were still of Byroden and they were welcome here. But Vax knew they weren’t and they wouldn’t stay. The pain was too much, too all-encompassing. It was everywhere they turned.

And everywhere he turned was the reminder that if he had been there, he could’ve done something. Could’ve tried something. He would’ve made sure their mother hadn’t died alone.

He bent down and pressed a kiss to his sister’s hair and sneaked out of the loft, careful not to jostle the ladder. In the soft light of predawn, he crossed through the village to the new cemetery where all the casualties of the dragon attack had been buried. The graves were marked only with small wooden plaques. A few stone slabs still remained to remind him of the courtyard that once was, but they were cracked, and small green plants pushed through. A small wreath braided from grass was placed on top of one of the stones.

Some of the graves were decorated too, with flowers and small tokens. Vax walked amidst the familiar names until he found the wooden plaque with Elaina’s name on it. She was placed next to Mistress Fara, and he smiled at that. He couldn’t remember the two of them ever not getting into an argument.

Vax sat down next to his mother’s name and dug his fingers into the solid earth. “I’m sorry.” He’d so longed to tell her they’d come home. They’d come back to stay and be happy. But the words wouldn’t come. No other words, either. There was only coldness and grief and regret.

He sat until the sunrise colored the sky and turned the blues around him into soft oranges and reds. He sat until another shadow crossed his, and Vex knelt down on the ground next to him. She wrapped his cloak around his shoulders and curled up next to him, her warmth spreading through him. “I keep waiting for her to walk up and tell us we’re late for dinner or something.”

“Me too.”

“I just want to see her smile at us. I thought we had all the time in the world,” she said. “I thought we could always go home.”

He nodded.

“The people of Byroden rarely ever leave their town.” She looked from grave to grave and took a deep shuddering breath. “Where do we go now?”

“I’ll go wherever you go, Stubby,” he said. There was an unspoken promise in his words: they only had each other now, and he wouldn’t let anything happen to her.

She bit her lip and nodded. “Then we’ll keep going,” she said. “We’ll keep walking. Away from here.”

He let her drag him to his feet, and when he saw her determination, he knew there was an unspoken promise in her words too: to keep walking until they could leave this place—this pain—behind. Even if it took them until the ends of the world and beyond.