I could feel my fingers again. My toes. And they didn’t burn. Was I dead, or had they given me more medicine for the pain? What did Montegue want to know now? I opened my eyes. I was in a tiny dark room I didn’t recognize. There were no windows. Had I been thrown into another cell? My head still swam, ached, but I felt my strength returning, my muscles becoming my own again. Dear gods, no. Did I confess something? Did they give me the antidote because I gave them information? I blinked, trying to flush the haze from my eyes. And then I heard footsteps. A rush of them. They were coming back. I closed my eyes, trying to think what to do.
One of them stepped closer and hovered over me. I felt his warmth as he leaned close.
“Kazi, can you hear me? It’s Jase. I’m here. Everything’s going to be all right.”
Montegue’s face loomed behind my eyes. His tricks. His manipulations.
You’re going to be all right, but I need your help. Lydia and Nash are dead.
Hope and terror knifed through me. My fingers curled around something cold and hard at my side. But the voice. It was—
I opened my eyes, and a frightening face loomed close to mine. The blurred glitter of a jewel was shining in his brow, and a menacing tattoo swirled over his face.
My knee jutted upward. If I was going to die, I was going to die fighting with whatever strength I had left. I heard a groan, an oomph as I pushed him to the floor and held the spoon in my hand to his throat. He writhed in pain beneath me.
“Kazi.”
I blinked again.
The eyes. Brown, the color of warm earth.
His voice.
“Kazi, it’s Jase,” he said again, the pained grimace finally fading from his face.
“You going to kill the Patrei with a spoon?” I turned my head. It was Wren, her hands planted on her hips. “Not that I don’t think you could.”
The room was crowded with people. Synové, Vairlyn, Titus, Priya, and more. Staring at me.
I looked back at the man beneath me. Jase.
Stay with me, Kazi.
It hadn’t been a dream.
The spoon tumbled from my hand, and I fell down onto his chest, holding him, my face pressed into his neck. His arms circled around me, holding me as tight as I held him.
I heard sobs. But they weren’t mine or Jase’s. It felt like I said his name a hundred times.
“Enough already,” Synové sniffled after a minute had passed. “We want some of that too.”
I got to my feet, and Wren and Synové swooped in, giving me long, smothering hugs. I looked at the stain on Synové’s face that matched Jase’s. “I’ll explain later,” she promised.
The weight that had hung inside of me for days lightened when I spotted Paxton. He made it. He stepped forward, his face puckered, and threw an arm around me, his other arm in a sling. “They’re safe,” he whispered in my ear, his voice breaking, and quickly stepped away. And then I faced Jase’s family, crowded in the doorway. I froze. I wasn’t sure what to do. I didn’t see Gunner among them, but the last time I had seen Priya and Mason, they were throwing me into a snare and leaving me behind to be captured.
Jase must have seen something in my eyes. He asked everyone to leave. “Give us a few minutes,” he said. Maybe he knew how I had ended up in the king’s custody. Maybe the way I’d attacked him just now had given him a small glimpse of what I’d been through. Thank the gods it was only a spoon in my hand.
The door shut on the room that was little more than a closet. It was dark except for a small candle burning in the corner. I was still unsteady on my feet, and Jase helped me sit back on the pallet.
“We’re in the vault?” I asked. He nodded.
I reached up and touched his stained face and the ring in his brow.
“A disguise,” he explained, then told me what had happened to him since the ambush, from his days recovering in the root cellar, to searching the town for news of me, to swooping down from the tembris to steal me away. Death’s angel, it was him.
I shared details of the past weeks with him too, from my first days as a prisoner in a dark cell. But mostly I concentrated on how brave Lydia and Nash had been, and how much they believed in him.
“The crypt? They weren’t afraid?”
“Not as much as they were afraid of Montegue. They knew what he was using them for. I’m sorry if hiding them in the crypt exposed your secret. It was the only way, Jase, the only way I could steal them and be sure Montegue wouldn’t find them. Does your family know?”
He nodded. “I’m afraid they know everything. Including—” “Us? You told them about us?”
“I blurted it out as I was choking Gunner. I know it wasn’t the way we planned.”
While choking his brother? Hardly. I sighed and rubbed my temple. My head still ached. “I suppose nothing’s gone quite the way we planned.” I lifted his hand to my lips and kissed his knuckles. I smiled against them. “But I guess that’s how good thieves keep all their fingers. They slip into the cracks. They find shadows. They make a new plan when the last one utterly fails.”
He stared at me like he was still absorbing everything, just as I was. How close we had both come to never seeing each other again. “Right now my only plan is to kiss my wife. And I am fairly certain not even the gods can derail that.” He leaned forward, and his hand slipped behind my head.
There was a sharp rap at the door, and a voice called through it. “Supper,
Patrei? Should I bring some bowls?”
Maybe the gods couldn’t stop it, but soup and a waiting family could. “We should join everyone,” I said.
“Are you sure? If you don’t want to go out there, I understand. I know what happened, Kazi. You don’t have to—”
“I have to face them sooner or later.”
Jase had his arm around me as he escorted me out. I was still shaky. On top of being poisoned, I hadn’t eaten in days, at least not that I could remember. When we walked into the kitchen, the room grew quiet and heads turned. Some set their spoons aside. A few stood as if uncertain what to do. The room was full, not just with Jase’s family, but with others who had taken refuge in the vault too, employees I recognized from the houses and tunnel. It was more overwhelming than I expected. I wasn’t playing a role anymore, or here among them under a pretense. I felt naked. I didn’t know who to be.
“Keep eating,” Jase told them, guiding me toward a table. A man stepped in front of us, one of the stable hands. He knelt on one knee and kissed my hand, but then seemed too flustered to say anything and scurried away. Another took his place, a woman who placed a rough woven amulet in my hand. “Hear you got that devil in the chops nice and good.” She vigorously nodded her approval before someone else stepped forward.
“You saved the Patrei and the little ones. We are in your debt.” Similar sentiments rose from the others who moved into our path. Jase nodded and thanked each one. I was too stunned to say anything. I was Ten, the girl who stayed in the shadows. It felt dangerous to be openly acknowledged this way. Before we reached our seats, Vairlyn stood and intercepted us. She pulled me into her arms. Her grip was fierce, and I noted the bulge in her belly for the first time. A baby? Jase forgot to tell me that part of the story.
She pulled back and cupped my face in her hands, her sapphire eyes glistening. “My daughter.”
The word snatched away my thoughts and I couldn’t speak.
Vairlyn seemed to understand. “I was not always a Ballenger,” she whispered. “Trust me, it will get easier.”
The healer embraced me next, but not before she wagged her finger at me. “No more dogs for you, understand? Twice is my limit.”
I nodded. “My limit too,” I answered. “Thank you.”
Jase pulled out a chair for me at last and I sat. Wren and Synové seemed to be studying me. Was it worry, or were they as uncomfortable as I was, and waiting to follow my lead? The last time we had all been gathered around a table with the Ballengers, we had slipped birchwings into their food to knock them out.
I stared at the bowl of soup set at my place. Did revenge lurk there? But they had saved my life. All of them. Jase had told me so. It was still sinking in. I would take a chance on the soup. I didn’t see Gunner in the room, but Priya and Mason sat at the end of the table. I couldn’t bring my eyes to meet theirs. The soup was my savior. Soup I knew what to do with, and luckily it didn’t send sideways glances at me. I was suddenly ravenous. I tried not to eat too quickly, and Rhea cautioned me to take it slowly. I sipped the broth a slow spoonful at a time. There was a long, difficult silence, everyone absorbed with their dinner, but then suddenly conversation erupted in a rush.
“Venison and wild leek soup. It’s pretty much all we eat these days,” Titus said.
“Breakfast, lunch, and dinner,” Aram added.
“Gods’ glory, what I wouldn’t give for one small potato,” Priya moaned. “If only the forest had potatoes—and maybe some parsnips too,” Samuel
agreed.
“We bake flatbread every few days,” Vairlyn reminded them. “And have you forgotten about the dates? We have a lot of those.”
Mason sighed. “No one can forget about the dates.” “I like them,” Synové said.
Mason ignored her.
Judith banged her spoon against the large pot on the hearth like it was a bell. “That all you got to talk about? Soup?”
Silence returned to the kitchen. The heavy undercurrent that had been circling below the surface was now thick between us. Priya stood, hesitating, her chin tucked and her lashes lowered, then finally she lifted her
eyes to meet mine. “The truth is some of us don’t know what to say. Thank you is not enough. Apologies are not enough. Until the day I die, I will live with the shame of what I did to you. When you told me that you loved Jase
—” Her voice wobbled and she closed her eyes. She nodded as if she was trying to encourage herself to keep going, then opened her eyes and continued. “When you said you loved him, I knew. I knew you were telling the truth. I should have at least listened, but I didn’t want to hear it. I wanted to watch you suffer, the way we had, like that would somehow solve everything. I was wrong.”
I didn’t want hear her apologies or her thanks. I just wanted her to stop. “If I thought someone had killed Jase, I would do the same,” I said.
She shook her head. “No. You wouldn’t, and you didn’t. I know the whole story. When Paxton told you Jase was dead, you could have killed the king and run, but you stayed. Because of Lydia and Nash. Because you had made a vow to Jase to protect his family. Saving them was more important to you than the momentary satisfaction of revenge. When I helped throw you into that net, that’s all I wanted, revenge, not the truth you were trying to share with us.”
Mason’s head hung low, staring down at his soup. He nodded. “Me too,” he said. He exhaled a long, slow breath and looked up at me. “I’m sorry, Kazi. I know it’s not enough, but I’m sorry. I just lost one sister because of all this madness, and now I nearly lost another by my own hand. A sister who is a true Ballenger.”
I wanted to melt beneath the table. Was this what families did? Bared their souls in front of an entire room of people? Their confessions left me raw. These were the kind of conversations I didn’t know how to have. I had only just learned to share everything with Jase, and now I had to do it with all of them?
Jase’s hand slid to my thigh beneath the table and gave me a reassuring squeeze.
“When you discovered your mistake, you risked everything to right it,” I replied. “I suppose that’s all any of us can ever do. Try to make it right.”
I stared at Mason, and then Priya, the last few days of terror and pain still too fresh in my mind. They had risked their lives to save me. I was
grateful. But I was angry too. I was too many things I still didn’t understand, and it seemed everyone was waiting for me to say something that would solve everything. Tell me, tell me, tell me now. Montegue’s demands still circled in my head, his taunts, his hands searching me, the heavy weight of a chain around my neck. I had only just woken from my nightmares. I searched for some way to turn the conversation. Pivot. My specialty, but it eluded me. A breath trembled through my chest.
Paxton suddenly raised his finger, poking it into the air in his annoying classic way. “So, Jase, what is this about you having three wives? Tell us about that.”
All the attention turned away from me and toward Jase, and air swept back into my lungs.
A new conversation caught fire around the table, and Paxton shot me a sly wink.
It was what I needed, a moment to gather myself, to breathe, to remember who I was, and what I still needed to do.
I walked down the vault tunnel that led to the entrance. When I had asked where Gunner was, Jase said he’d taken his dinner to the niche by the door. Gunner thought I might be more comfortable if he wasn’t there. I couldn’t disagree, but I needed to talk to him.
He sat against the massive door that closed us off from Tor’s Watch and watched me as I walked toward him. A deep scarlet votive flickered in his lap, and his mouth hung half open. If I hadn’t known better, I would have thought he was drunk. When I stopped in front of him, he set the votive aside and stood. His eyes narrowed. “You going to kill me?” he asked.
“Funny, that’s exactly what Jase asked me when I told him I needed to talk to you alone.”
“Jase nearly did kill me when he found out what I’d done.” He cleared his throat, then eyed me squarely. “I wouldn’t blame you if you did.”
“Believe me, I’ve thought about killing you many times, Gunner, but not for the reason you think.”
“I suppose any reason would be good enough.”
“But it is a reason you need to hear. Of all the things you ever did to me, the worst happened months ago. There are some things in my life I haven’t gotten over. Things I may never get over. For a Rahtan who has worked hard to become strong and smart and overcome everything through intense training, that weakness eats at me. You knew that weakness.”
I took a step closer to him. “You could have shot me with an arrow. You could have done a hundred things, but instead you dangled Zane in front of me, knowing what he had done. In an instant, you brought back the horror of a night to a small child. That’s what I became. A terrified child looking for her mother. For that, I should kill you. I was six years old, Gunner. Six.”
“I didn’t—”
“Don’t. Don’t tell me you didn’t know. You were as precise as a surgeon cutting out a heart. You knew exactly what you were doing to me.”
He grimaced and nodded.
“And then you let him loose to terrorize me more. You didn’t care—”
“I didn’t let him loose. That part was an accident. In the chaos of that night, he escaped. We were all rushing to follow you, and he wasn’t locked up securely. He broke out of the warehouse and disappeared. I’m not saying that as an excuse—I know there’s nothing I can say or do to earn your forgiveness—”
“You’re wrong. There is one thing. I will try my best to find a way to put this behind us, to forgive you and move forward, for Jase’s sake, if you give me a truthful answer to one question.”
“I’ll tell you the truth about anything, whether you forgive me or not.” “The papers. The ones that were in Phineas’s quarters. Where are they?” “Papers? There were no papers.”
Gunner explained how they went through the ashes of the workshop, hoping to recover something, and then went on to the scholars’ quarters and found nothing.
“Who helped you search?”
“Priya, Titus, and Samuel…” He rubbed the back of his neck. “Tiago, Mason. I think that was it.”
“Could one of them—”
“No. Nobody took anything.”
Someone did. Papers didn’t walk off on their own, and I knew I had seen a stack of them the night we took Phineas. The king had known they existed too. “All right,” I said. “But you won’t mind if I check with the others.”
“Check,” he answered.
We looked at each other, and I guessed the same question lurked in both of us: Could we really move forward?
And maybe the same answer: We were family now. What choice did we have?
We walked back to the kitchen together.
Me are forty-four now. Our family continues to grow. Yesterday we added three more children. We found them scrounging through the ruins. They were afraid but Greyson offered them food, just as Aaron Ballenger had to me when he found me wandering alone.
I am not that frightened girl anymore. I have changed. So has Greyson.
I see him looking at me differently now. I look at him differently too, and I wonder about all the feelings inside me that I don’t understand.
I have so many questions and no one to ask. Everyone older than me is gone.
—Miandre, 22
