Ephyra sighed, leaning her head against the cave wall as she and Hector waited out the storm. Hours earlier, they’d tried and failed to start a fire, and now they sat huddled against the rock, watching the deluge outside.
“That’s the sixth time you’ve sighed in the past five minutes,” Hector informed her.
She turned to glare at him. “Like you’re not annoyed that we’re stuck here.”
It had been a slow trek through the Unspoken Mountains, their progress hindered by frequent rainstorms. At least twice a day Ephyra regretted parting ways with the others.
“It’s not like it makes a difference,” Hector grumbled, shifting beside her.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means we don’t have a plan, Ephyra,” Hector replied, turning to her. “And the god—it can go anywhere. Even if we manage to track it down, it could be gone the moment we get there.”
Ephyra leaned her head back against the rock. Hector was right—and that was exactly why she didn’t want to hear it. “You could feel it before, right? When it first … woke up, in Behezda. You’re still connected to Beru, so you’re still connected to the god, too. Can’t you use that to figure out where it’s going?”
“It’s not really that simple,” he replied, fidgeting and not meeting her eyes. “The connection is weaker over a distance. When she was here with us, sure, maybe I could figure it out. But she could be on the other side of the world, while we’re stuck here, getting more waterlogged by the day.”
She curled her arms around her knees, drawing them tight to her chest. “I would’ve been fine alone.”
“Really?” Hector asked. “Because the last time you went chasing after Beru by yourself, you killed me.”
Ephyra winced. Hector hadn’t shied away from bringing up the topic during their journey to the Unspoken Mountains, but once they’d split off from the others he hadn’t mentioned it. Until now.
In a softer voice, he said, “You know, I don’t remember that day. I don’t remember dying.”
“You don’t?” Ephyra could remember every second of it. How Hector had struggled and struggled and finally went limp.
He shook his head, his gaze catching on her face and tracing the long scar that split her cheek. “I gave you that, didn’t I?”
“Yes.” They’d both left marks on each other that day.
“I probably would have killed you, if you hadn’t…”
The silence hung between them for a long moment, and then finally Ephyra said, “No. You wouldn’t have.”
He looked at her in surprise.
“You might not remember it, but I do,” she said. “You had me pinned. You could have killed me. You lowered your sword. You were going to let me go. Even after what I did to your family, even with—You would’ve let me go.” She couldn’t bear to look at him anymore. “In that moment, I knew there was no going back. It wasn’t an accident. I didn’t lose control. It was a choice.”
She wanted to say that if she had to do it again, she’d choose differently. But she wasn’t sure it was the truth.
“I just—” She stopped. Didn’t know if she could get the words out. “I just want to say that I’m sorry. For your family … for you … I’m sorry.”
He didn’t say anything for a long moment, just watched her with coal-dark eyes.
“We can’t go back,” he said at last.
“I know.”
“I mean,” he said, kicking his legs out in front of him. “I can’t go back, either. I might’ve chosen differently—with the Guard, with Jude. That day in the crypt in Pallas Athos. If I had, I never even would have been in Medea. But it doesn’t matter. We made the choices we made, and now we’re here.”
She didn’t say anything.
“I know why you did it.”
She looked up at him in surprise. He didn’t sound angry.
“I don’t remember it, but I know why you did it,” he said. “Why you became the Pale Hand, too. As soon as Beru took me to Medea, I understood you in a way I never had before.”
Ephyra kept her gaze trained on him, certain that she didn’t want to hear what he had understood about her. Yet she had to know.
“I walked through the village of the dead,” he said. “I saw what you had to do to bring her back. My parents deaths’ … Marinos’s … all the people you killed as the Pale Hand. Every death just made it more and more impossible to stop. You couldn’t let her go, because if you did, all the sacrifice and pain you caused would’ve been for nothing.”
She didn’t move her gaze from his, even as she felt a warm, wet tear slip down her cheek.
“I used to think the same thing, in my own way,” Hector said roughly. “That because my family had died and I had lived, I had to make it worth it. I had to have a purpose. It was the only way I knew how to mourn them. And I guess I just realized that … even though Beru’s still alive, even though you kept her alive for seven years, you’ve been mourning her the whole time. Ever since she died the first time.”
His gaze went distant, his expression soft in a way Ephyra had never seen before. “When the Daughters of Mercy took me and Beru into the desert and left us to die, I knew, then, that we had it wrong. You and me and her. She was trying to make it right, to give back what you’d taken from me.” He ran a hand over his face. “But as we were standing in the middle of the desert, waiting for this storm to hit us, I had this realization. We can’t go back. We can only move forward. But just because we can’t change what we’ve done doesn’t mean we can’t choose different the next time. Doesn’t mean we can’t heal. Ourselves. Each other.”
Ephyra remembered Hector standing in her cell in Pallas Athos the morning that everything started to fall apart. Fate has decided my purpose for me, he’d said.
Looking at Hector then, as she was backed in a corner in her cell, his heart howling with loss and a grief too huge to endure, part of her had believed it. Had believed it was his destiny to put an end to the Pale Hand and avenge the deaths of the innocent lives she had taken. Part of her had believed it up until she’d taken his life.
And then he’d saved hers.
He’d made a different a choice, in Behezda. He’d chosen to be more than the loss he’d endured. More than his broken oaths.
“After I resurrected her, after what I did to your family, it was just the two of us,” Ephyra said, her voice shaking. “I told myself that the life we’d carved out together was enough. I had to believe it. But—the past month, with Jude and Khepri and Anton and Hassan. Even Illya. I saw how different things could have been.”
He was watching her carefully.
“You gave her that, too, you know,” she said haltingly.
“What?” he asked warily.
“I’m saying she loves you,” Ephyra replied. “Anyone can see that.”
“Right,” he replied gruffly. He cleared his throat.
But he never got the chance to awkwardly navigate a reply because at that moment there was a flash of bright light illuminating the darkness of the cave and a crack that seemed to split the air.
When the light dimmed, Beru was standing right in front of them.
Neither Hector nor Ephyra moved.
Lazaros hovered beside Beru, but Ephyra didn’t dare take her eyes off her sister.
“Is that … really you?” Ephyra lunged toward her, but Hector held her back.
She knew, on some level, that he was protecting her. It was most likely the god in control and not Beru. But there was a large part of her that didn’t care. Her sister had appeared in front of her like she’d heard Ephyra calling for her.
“Ephyra?” Beru said.
And then nothing could stop Ephyra from flinging herself across the space between them. “Beru, we went after you, we were searching for you—”
“Ephyra, please,” Beru was saying. “Please, you have to—”
She cut off abruptly, her expression blank, her posture stiffening.
“YOUR SISTER IS VERY PERSISTENT,” the god said.
Ephyra froze, the god’s voice ringing through the cave like a discordant note.
“SHE DESPERATELY WANTS TO SPEAK TO YOU. BOTH OF YOU.”
Its gaze found Hector again, who was staring at Beru in horror.
“PERHAPS I WILL LET HER,” the god said. “IF, OF COURSE, YOU HELP ME.”
Ephyra stared at her, swallowing roughly. “What do you want us to do?”
“I BELIEVE IT IS THE SAME THING YOU WANT,” the god replied. “TO EXTRICATE MYSELF FROM YOUR SISTER’S BODY.”
Ephyra didn’t know how to respond, so it was Hector who spoke.
“You want to let her go? Why?”
The god tilted Beru’s head. “SUFFICE IT TO SAY, I WILL BE BETTER OFF WHEN I DON’T HAVE TO TAKE THIS FORM. AND AS YOU WERE THE ONE WHO PUT ME INTO THIS BODY…”
“You figured she could get you out,” Hector finished.
“I’ll do it,” Ephyra said at once.
Hector snapped his gaze to her sharply.
“I THOUGHT YOU MIGHT AGREE,” the god said, contorting Beru’s features into something like satisfaction.
It made Ephyra almost dizzy, staring into the face that she knew so well and having it look so little like her sister. Her vibrant expressions were flattened, the light in her eyes extinguished.
“When I brought you back,” Ephyra said. “I had something. A Chalice. It made me stronger.”
“YOU NEED THIS CHALICE TO SET ME FREE.”
“I think so,” Ephyra replied.
The god cocked Beru’s head, the gesture strangely alien. “VERY WELL. WE WILL GET THIS CHALICE.”
“I don’t know where it is.”
“Holy One, I know the location of the Chalice,” Lazaros said. “Pallas kept it, along with three other desecrations of your original holy form.”
“IN PALLAS ATHOS?”
“Yes,” Lazaros replied. “And may I humbly suggest that we leave this one behind?”
He gestured to Hector.
Hector’s eyes burned with fury, and Ephyra felt like she was glimpsing that murderous boy she’d met in Pallas Athos. “Don’t think I didn’t see your creepy little obsession with her when we saw you in the valley. If you think—”
“Hector,” Ephyra said warningly. She straightened her shoulders and looked at the god. “I have to disagree with your friend. Hector stays with us.”
Hector shot her a grateful look, doused in surprise.
“WHY?”
“Because they’re connected,” Ephyra replied, thinking quickly. “Their esha. It might help me to … separate out your esha from hers.”
The god appeared to contemplate this, although it was hard to tell.
“IF IT WILL HELP YOU,” the god replied at last. “WE WILL ALL GO, THEN.”
Before Ephyra could think about what they had just agreed to, the god transported them in a flash of bright light.