CHAPTER 2

Runners

Sefia stared at the pages, stunned. She’d been so sure she’d killed Tanin—the look of surprise, the rush of blood—so sure she’d avenged her family.

She’d been wrong. She’d been wrong about a lot of things.

“The impressors were your father’s idea?” Archer asked. His gaze was hard and broken, like a shard of glass. Inadvertently, her gaze fell to the scar at his throat, the ridges and puckered edges.

Archer’s kidnapping. His scar. His nightmares.

Her parents’ doing.

All the brandings, the torture, the fights. All those dead boys.

Her parents. The parents she’d loved and admired. How could they be capable of this?

For a second she wished Archer would take her in his arms, hold her tight and not let go until the world made sense again. But she couldn’t ask that, not anymore. “I—I’m sorry. I didn’t know,” she whispered.

A muscle twitched in Archer’s jaw. The tendons in his scarred neck pulled taut. “You couldn’t have known,” he said at last. He didn’t tell her it was okay, she noticed. Maybe nothing between them would ever be okay again.

“They didn’t tell me. No one did.” Folding down the corner of the page, Sefia closed the Book. The symbol on the cover seemed to taunt her. Two curves for her parents. A curve for Nin. The straight line for herself. Answers. Redemption. Revenge.

She’d been so naive. She wanted to rip the cover from its spine, wanted to tear something to shreds. Tanin, for killing Nin. Her parents, for keeping so much from her. The Guard, for causing all of this.

But there was only one thing she could do. Only one thing she’d been trained for. Running. Wrapping the Book in its leather casing, Sefia shoved it deep into her pack and brushed a lock of hair from her eyes. “Are you still with me?”

Archer stared at her so long she could almost see his exhaustion forming bruises beneath his eyes. Did he blame her for what her parents had done? Did he want to leave her, after everything they’d been through?

No, please not that.

Finally, he nodded, but he would no longer look her in the eyes.

“Let’s go, then.”

Briefly, Archer touched his temple and pointed toward Cascarra. Dawn was nearly upon them, and the streets were beginning to stir with life.

“No, we can’t get out of Deliene that way anymore. We’ll have to go north.”

As they packed their things, she described the Szythian Mountains, poised on the northwestern shores of Deliene. The sharp peaks were home to the occasional shepherd and her flock in the summer, but with fall approaching, soon they would all be gone. No one braved the highlands in the cold months, when food and firewood were scarce and the temperatures plunged below freezing.

“Szythia’s not my first choice,” she said. “But what other choice do we have?”

There was an uncomfortable silence as they shouldered their packs. Before Archer could speak, she’d spent days in his silence. His silence used to feel comfortable, familiar. She used to wrap herself in it like a cloak.

Now his silence was warped by the truth about her parents, the past he could not share with her, the memory of a kiss.

She thought of what Tanin had said about Lon and Mareah, felt the same sting of their secrets . . . and Archer’s. If you loved me, you would trust me.

Sefia’s hands curled around her pack straps. “Come on,” she said.

With swift movements, they replaced the mulch where they’d disturbed it and slipped away as dawn crested the peaks and the daylight chased them through the pointed tips of the pines.

•   •   •

To reach the Szythian Mountains, however, they first had to cross the sprawling Delienean Heartland—rolling hills like waves, an ocean of gold dotted by cattle and rippled by wind—open, exposed, dangerous.

On the last crest of the Ridgeline, Archer raised a hand to his eyes, peering across the stretch of land at the center of the Northern Kingdom.

“Have you seen the Heartland before?” Sefia asked, capping her water canteen.

“I’ve never left Oxscini before.”

She glanced up at him, studying the crooked profile of his nose. So he was originally from the Forest Kingdom, where she’d found him over a month ago in a crate marked with the . She wondered if he was from a family of shipbuilders, or loggers from the interior. Maybe they’d been members of the Royal Navy. He could have even been an orphan, his parents killed five years ago when Everica, the Stone Kingdom to the east, declared war on Oxscini.

Was that part of my father’s plans too?

Swallowing, she fastened the canteen to her pack again. “We’ll have to stay off the roads if we want to make it to Szythia unnoticed.”

Wearily, Archer rubbed his eyes, like he was struggling to tell the difference between asleep and awake. “And then?”

She started northward again. “Hopefully we survive the winter.”

“And after that?” he asked. “What will we do?”

“I don’t know. Keep running.”

But somehow, that didn’t seem like enough anymore.

As they meandered through the parched hills, they began following a set of cattle tracks, away from the main roads and prying eyes. But soon it became clear they weren’t the only ones hoping to avoid being seen.

There were wheel tracks, divots of horseshoes, and dozens of bootprints among the cracked earth and chips of manure. A group that large was one she didn’t want to cross.

Blinking, Sefia summoned the Sight, and flickering streams of gold swam across her vision. She used to get dizzy and overwhelmed by the sheer amount of information in the Illuminated world. An ocean of history, ready to sweep her consciousness away from her body, leaving her an empty shell. But since she’d been training, all she needed to focus her Sight was a mark—a scratch, a dent, a scar—something to anchor her awareness.

Focusing on the dusty footprints, she saw that twenty people—some on foot, some on horseback, some on carts—had passed this way only a few hours earlier.

She inhaled sharply. On the backs of the carts were wooden crates, each branded with the , the symbol from the Book, the same symbol she’d seen six weeks before, when she rescued Archer from a crate just like these.

She blinked again, and her vision cleared.

Archer touched his fingertips to his forehead, his old way of asking a question. What is it?

She could have lied. She could have kept this from him. But she would not let this come between them too.

“Impressors,” she whispered.