Over and over again as I had walked through the valley I thought to myself, Our weapons were not meant for this. Never for this. I stared at Sarva, remembering when he tried to take the launcher from me, remembering all their promises, We’ll have the cure soon. They had shown my father the ledgers of the Ancients, the magic of cures in formulas we couldn’t understand, but they promised that the scholars were deciphering them and we bought it. The months were peppered with false breakthroughs and progress whenever our patience wore thin.
Sarva and Beaufort both looked far too cocky, as if there was still a chance of escape. Twenty Morrighese troops were escorting us back to Venda—not to mention the fellow named Griz, who was three men in one. There was bad blood between him and the Vendans, and he would never let them out of his sight. There’d be no slipping away, though it was still on my mind. I had to get home. Whatever league was trying to displace us, it wouldn’t be long before they regrouped and came after us again. Had Beaufort been conspiring with one of them? It seemed unlikely. He’d been holed up at Tor’s Watch for almost a year with no outside contact. Except for Zane. He was Beaufort’s lone contact with the outside world.
Somewhere deep down, I had known they couldn’t be trusted. My father knew. That’s why he had sent a letter to the king’s magistrate. Yet in spite of the vague reply, he still let them into Tor’s Watch.
I’m sorry. There never was a fever cure. He knew what would make you listen.
How? How did an on-the-run fugitive know about my sister and brother? Sylvey and Micah died four years ago, years before Beaufort arrived at Tor’s Watch. It wasn’t news anymore. Somehow he’d done his research. He found the chink in our armor—the one thing that would open the door to Tor’s Watch and the Ballenger purse, a wound that still wept.
I had been first among my father’s sons to agree to it. The guilt of Sylvey had stayed with me, including the things I did after she died. I’d been haunted by her pleas, her fear of being trapped in a cold dark tomb, the simple promise I wouldn’t give her in her last moments. Two days after her funeral, I stole her body. I did the unthinkable and desecrated her tomb in the middle of the night. No one ever knew. Everyone thought I had disappeared from grief, but I had taken her wrapped body high into the Moro mountains and buried it in the most beautiful place I could find, the kind of place she would love, at the base of Breda’s Tears, just below the seventh waterfall where ferns and flowers bloomed, where the sun shone in the day and the moon glowed at night. I marked it with a single stone and the tears that wet it were not Breda’s but my own.
Beaufort’s false promise had hit its mark with resounding accuracy. It sickened me how well he had strung us along, how perfectly he explained one delay after another, how the others had backed him up. How humble and earnest they had all been—until the end. When they were close to getting what they wanted, their arrogance started showing.
I looked over at them, sitting together, eating their dinner. The rage in me rose. We were forced to eat with our hands shackled—a trencher of bread and meat only—no plates, no utensils, nothing that might be used as a weapon against one another. Our keepers didn’t want any more prisoners dying en route.
What had they all been trying to keep Phineas from saying? The few words he said were only babble. Stars? The tembris showing him? He’d been shaken by the staggering death and destruction in the valley. I had been too. But something else ate at him. It was just a spring picnic compared to what they had planned.
What was it they had planned? Kazi had mentioned domination of the kingdoms. What had seemed ludicrous when she first told me didn’t seem
implausible now. I’m guessing they planned to kill your whole family once you gave them everything they needed.
I eyed Sarva, shoving the last of his dinner into his mouth. You can’t take that. He had tried to stop me from taking the launcher because he didn’t want me to be armed. Why? Because I might be able to stop him from killing my family? After seeing a whole valley swollen with dead, I knew one family was nothing to him. He licked his fingers and looked up at me. A smirk crossed his lip, fool, and that was all it took.
I flew across the expanse, grabbed him with both shackled hands and threw him across the clearing. He tumbled over the dirt, jumped to his feet, and I came at him again, both chained hands swinging into his gut, doubling him over. I heard the yelling, someone saying, Let them fight. I doubted anyone could have stopped us. He returned my blows, his shackles not diminishing the impact of his fists as they slammed into my stomach. Another powerful strike to my shoulder knocked me to the ground, but it was the words he hissed between blows when our grips strained against each other—mocking my father, my family, the things he would do to them
—that blinded me with fury. I couldn’t believe we’d let this monster into our home.
I jammed my elbow into his side, my forearm into his face, and when he stumbled to the side I swooped my chained hands over his head, pulling the chain tight against his neck. He choked and gasped, his fingers struggling to pull it away. “Now, let me tell you what I’m going to do to you, Sarva—”
I felt a sword at my back. “That’s enough, Patrei. He’ll die by Vendan justice, not yours.” Eben ordered me to let him go. I hesitated, and he pushed the sword harder. “Now.” I loosened my hold, slipping the chain free, and Sarva dropped to the ground, gasping for air.
I looked over at Beaufort with a clear message, You’re next, before a guard hauled me away.
* * *
The Lost Horses streaked across the sky in their endless quest to find their mistress. Usually, spotting them made me think of loyalty and determination, but now they only filled me with a sense of futility, a quest that would never be realized. It made me think of my father and his
deathbed wish, Make her come. I should appreciate the irony—I was going to meet the queen, but not in the way he had envisioned.
They had chained me over on the far side of camp, away from Sarva and the others, this time with my leg to the trunk of a fallen tree to make sure I didn’t go anywhere. Natiya had come by and bandaged a cut on my arm where Sarva’s shackles had slashed it. I sat on the trunk, picking at the frayed edges of the bandage, looking up at the heavens, wondering if the gods were looking back.
It began with the stars. Phineas’s words were the same ones Greyson Ballenger had written in our histories. Everything began with the stars. Even—
I tried to get it out of my head, but I couldn’t. Kazi and I began with the stars.
On a ledge in the middle of nowhere, we counted the stars together and then we kissed. We became part of something as endless as a night sky, and I had believed it could be just as lasting. Even when I discovered her betrayal, some small part of me still held hope. She had loved me, I was certain, even if she wouldn’t say it. I wanted to believe there was an explanation, that what we had could somehow be salvaged. I still wasn’t ready to let go.
But our end was as clear as our beginning—the moment she saw Zane. It was the final blow. When she had looked from Zane to me, the look in her eyes—it wasn’t hatred—I watched something in her die. Us.
I gave the ring back to you when it mattered.
She would never believe another word I said. Truth that came too late was as useful as a meal to a dead man.
“Looks like I can’t step away for one minute. Getting into more trouble, I hear?”
I startled at her voice but kept my eyes fixed on the horizon. Kazi stood somewhere close behind me. I didn’t answer, hoping her curiosity was satisfied and she’d go away. I couldn’t trust myself around her.
My silence didn’t sway her. “I was in the king’s tent,” she explained. “I was having dinner with him so I didn’t hear the ruckus.”
“Dinner with the king? You’re moving up in the world. To think, just a few nights ago you were having dinner with the likes of me.”
I heard the bitter implication that I cared and immediately regretted it. “I’m sorry. I’m angry about a lot of things but not that you had dinner with the king.”
She stepped over the log and stood in front of me so I had to look at her. Emotions battled inside me—anger, resentment, guilt, and surprisingly,
desire. I fought an impulse to pull her into my arms, to press my lips to hers, whisper in her ear, to make the last few days disappear, to explain things that should have been explained long ago, to tell her about Zane when I knew it would only make her hate me more, because after everything she had been through it was a truth she deserved, but those same thoughts spun with others and anger pounded in my temples that I was here at all, that she had whittled her way into my life and Tor’s Watch under false pretenses. That she had strung me along on a grand scale.
Her gaze was as warm as frost. “What are you angry about?” she asked.
I laughed. “Really? It’s not obvious?” I rattled the chain on my leg. “I’ve been deceived by just about everyone I trusted or counted on—right down to the cook I hired.” I stood so I was looking down at her now. “The cook I hired for you.” The words were meant to stab her, but instead they stabbed me. She never promised me tomorrows, and now I knew why.
She blinked at last, the frost splintering. Emotion rushed through me again that I couldn’t trust. “You should go.”
She didn’t move. “What’s the fever cure?” she asked.
“Another thing that never existed. Please, Kazi, I need you to leave.”
“I heard Phineas say ‘He knew it would make you listen.’ What did he mean?”
I sighed and sat back on the log. “My brother and sister that I told you about, Micah and Sylvey—” I cleared my throat. “They died from a fever. Beaufort figured it out. He found a weak spot in my family and used it to wheedle his way into our good graces. He claimed he had a cure. That was all he needed to say to make my mother invite him in. And my father.” I looked at her sharply. “Yes, we wanted the weapons too. Yes, we gave him the supplies. Yes, we looked the other way to get what we wanted. Is that what you wanted to hear? We knew he was trouble, even if we didn’t know exactly what kind.” I raked my hands through my hair, still wishing she’d leave. Instead she sat down beside me.
“No, that’s not what I wanted to hear,” she said quietly.
I leaned forward and shook my head. “Why didn’t you just tell me about Beaufort when you first came?”
“We didn’t know for sure if he was even there, and if he was there it was obvious it was with the Ballenger welcome. If I had told you, what would you have done, Jase? Be honest. Alerted him? Questioned him so he could disappear again? Denied it? Isn’t that exactly what you did when I spotted him outside Darkcottage? You claimed he was a groundsman. You lied to me and hid who he was. You saw the devastation today, and now you know their crimes even beyond that valley. These men deserve to be held accountable. I made a vow to the queen and to the gods that I would bring the captain back. I couldn’t risk losing him by telling you.”
“We were not going to use our weapons for that,” I said, motioning in the direction of the valley. “If you ever knew me at all, you know that much.”
She nodded. “It’s in the hands of the queen now.”
* * *
It was late. The camp was asleep, except for the soldiers on watch—and Kazi. I had seen her pacing, watching the other prisoners as if she entrusted their care to no one else. I made a vow to the queen and to the gods. We may have grown up differently, but there were many ways that Kazi and I were alike.
She finally rested, propping herself up against a thin, leafless tree, but still staring into the darkness.
You asked me why an open world frightens me, Jase? Because it gives me nowhere to hide.
I thought of all the stories I had told her when we were chained together in the wilderness, the stories I could tell her now to help her fall asleep. I thought of the riddle I had promised her, the one that still circled through my head. The one I could never tell her now. I rolled over so I wouldn’t have to look at her and tried to remember that I wasn’t supposed to care.
