CHAPTER 24

After

Tears filmed Sefia’s eyes, blurring the final word of the passage.

Home.

For months, she’d been asking Archer where he’d come from. For months, he’d refused to answer. But now she knew.

Home was a seaside village in Oxscini.

Home was a family awaiting his return.

Home was a girl named Annabel—his past and his future.

“Well?” Archer leaned forward. “What did it say?”

In the lamplight, his gold eyes were so bright he looked almost feverish. She’d thought she knew him. The set of his shoulders. The curves his body made in battle. The jolt of delight and guilt that went through him when he made a kill. She knew the freckles that tipped his ears. She knew the texture of his hair between her fingers. She knew the whisper of his breath against her neck.

But she didn’t know him at all, did she? Didn’t know his friends or his parents, his childhood aspirations, his phobias, or his greatest loves.

She hadn’t even known his name.

Calvin.

She should have been relieved that his life wouldn’t be shortened by war. In part, she was. Whoever he was, Calvin wasn’t the boy from the legends. Calvin wasn’t the one the Guard wanted.

Calvin got to go home. Calvin got to live.

But he did it without her.

Marking the page, Sefia closed the Book. What would he do if she told him? Would he go running back to Annabel, now that he knew she’d take him back? Would he promise Sefia he’d never leave her, and hurt her worse when he did?

Or would he use this as an excuse to keep hunting, keep fighting, until he’d gone so far down the path to being the boy with the scar he couldn’t come back?

“It isn’t you,” she said.

For a second he continued to stare at her, as if waiting for lightning to strike.

“It isn’t?” A smile touched the corners of his mouth, but his voice was laced with disappointment.

She took his hand, while it was still hers to take. “You’re going to be happy,” she said, as if she could convince them both this was what they wanted. “You’re going to leave all this behind.”

You’re going to leave me behind.

His lips parted. His canines flashed. “Then you’ll help me find the last crew of impressors?”

He wanted her. He needed her. And yet she’d never felt farther from him.

Suddenly, Sefia shoved the Book aside. Whatever the future held, they were here, now, together. Grabbing him by the neck, she kissed him, rough, teeth knocking, lips bruising. He responded eagerly as she pulled him down beside her, hands climbing under her shirt, up her back. “I’ll help you,” she murmured, her words melting on his lips like snow.

But then what? she wondered even as he kissed her. How will I lose you?

•   •   •

Once the roads finally cleared, Sefia announced to the bloodletters that she’d found their next target.

There was a flooded ocean-side quarry on the west side of Ken, an old pit of slate tiers and blue-green salt water, and in less than a month, the last Delienean impressors would be there, camped in the few stone buildings that remained.

While she spoke, Kaito sat against the back wall, tapping out uneven rhythms on the bench beside him. His right eye and the bridge of his nose were swollen, and there was a gash on his cheek where Archer’s knuckles had cut him.

“What about after?” he demanded when Sefia had finished speaking.

Archer frowned. “After?”

The Gormani boy stood. Boys shuffled out of his way as he stalked forward. “Yeah. After we finish off the last of the impressors in Deliene. Are we done? Do we all go back to our homes and wait for Serakeen to retaliate?” He glanced at Sefia out of his good eye. “Or do we keep going, until we’ve rid all of Kelanna of those bonesuckers?”

Sefia and Archer exchanged glances.

She knew what he’d do—who he’d go home to—even if he didn’t know it himself yet. She just didn’t know why. Or where she’d be when it happened.

Archer turned back to Kaito. “I think that’s something we’ll each have to choose for ourselves.”

The Gormani boy took a hesitant step forward, like he was testing the ice to see if it’d hold. “But you’re with us. Until the mission is over.”

“I’ve always been with you.” Archer extended his hand.

Kaito pulled him into a hug so quickly the sound of their hands on each other’s backs was like a clap of thunder. Sefia hadn’t even realized how incomplete they’d looked without each other. Now they were like two broken halves, chipped and raw at the edges, made smooth and strong and whole again. The Gormani boy murmured something into Archer’s shoulder.

They held each other for so long Versil jumped up and thrust them apart with a laugh. “Take it easy, boys, or the sorcerer’s going to get jealous.”

Sefia tried to laugh, but inwardly she knew Kaito wasn’t the person she was jealous of.

Encumbered by poor weather and plunging temperatures, they began the journey south. The ground thawed. Hail became rain.

It almost seemed as if things had gone back to normal. For the next three weeks, the bloodletters drilled and skirmished; Sefia searched the Book for descriptions of the coming battle; and Archer and Kaito spent long hours planning for their assault on the quarry and the twenty-one impressors within.

Aljan continued his lessons from Sefia in the tent she shared with Frey, who sat on her cot watching while they made words from movement and ink.

“What are you going to do when the mission’s over?” Frey asked Aljan once, watching the mapmaker practice his Ős and Ps.

“I thought I might go home. Become a mapmaker again.”

“In Alissar?” She sounded disappointed.

Aljan added a stroke on the Ä he was painting.

In the awkward silence, Versil caught Sefia’s eye and mouthed, Wait for it.

The mapmaker glanced at Frey shyly. “Would you come with me?”

Laughing, she elbowed him, smudging the ink on an S. “Only if you come to Shinjai first. I bet my brothers would love to put the screws to you for a bit.”

“Sounds appealing.”

“Not me. I’m not going home,” Versil said, crossing his hands behind his head as he lounged on Sefia’s cot. “The world’s too big to go back to someplace you’ve already been.”

“Where would you go, then?” she asked.

“I’d hop a ship out of Jahara. Maybe to see the palaces of Umlaan, and the abandoned gem mines of Shaovinh. I hear Everica’s nice, when they’re not warmongering. And maybe I could check out Zhuelin Bay. I bet the ruins are something, if you don’t mind the rain . . .”

He rambled on and on, sometimes losing his train of thought only to pick it up again minutes later, about searching for dragons in Roku and visiting the Sister Islands in southern Oxscini, climbing the Cloud Pillars and bathing in incense at the top, and while the others dreamed about their futures beyond fighting impressors, Sefia kept wondering about Archer and his hometown, Archer and Annabel, Archer without her.

What would happen to her after they’d defeated the last crew of impressors in Deliene?

Where would she go?

Why would Archer leave her?

She glanced at her pack, which held the Book, and a thought sparked inside her: I could ask.

I could know for sure.

Later, when they’d burned their practice letters and the twins had retired to their tent, Frey blew out her lamp and curled up under her blankets. Sefia remained awake with the Book in her lap, tracing the while she waited for Frey’s breathing to even out. When she was sure the girl was asleep, she ran her fingers nervously along the edges of the cover.

Licking her lips, she whispered, “Why aren’t I in Archer’s future?”