To call them nightmares would be like calling a typhoon a “light drizzle.”
I spent hours tangled within the worst of my memories, all mashed together, all attacking me and strangling me at once. They were reality, but worse — my mother saying goodbye to me as her flesh withered and eyeballs fell from her sockets, Esmaris raising his whip as his skin turned to shadow and flames. And no matter how I clawed and fought, I couldn’t get out. They dragged me back every time.
By the time I awoke, it was past sunset. I was in a makeshift bed in a tent, Max at my side before I was even aware enough to recognize him. An encampment, apparently, had been set up relatively quickly. Zeryth, Nura, and Max explained to me what had happened. I listened, numb.
“You were spectacular,” Zeryth said, smiling.
I didn’t feel spectacular. I had been shut out of my own mind.
I looked at Zeryth, but didn’t reply to him. Instead I turned to Max and stood, ignoring the way the ground shook and slid beneath my feet. “Show me.”
He obeyed. Together we walked up to the top of the hill where the Nyzrenese building had stood. Had stood. Now, it crumbled. Half of it remained upright, barely, while the other side toppled into chunks of stone and wood. One of the remaining columns stood precariously off-kilter. Patches of red crawled over some of the stones, stark and aggressive even beneath the moonlight.
I looked down the other side of the hill, to plumes of black smoke in the distance.
“Bodies,” Max stated, following my gaze. “Slavers?”
“Yes. Every last one of the bastards.”
I thought I might feel more. “And the slaves?”
“We have more than one hundred and fifty people in that camp.” He pointed back towards the encampment — tents and campfires dotting the hillside.
“Was that all of them?”
I hated his ensuing silence. A lump rose in my throat. “All of them?” I pressed.
“One was hit by falling stone when the building came down. Sammerin did his best, but he died.”
He died. I appreciated the straightforwardness of that statement. No “he didn’t make it.” No “we couldn’t save him.”
He died. He died because of my lack of control. And the only reason why more didn’t was because Max had stopped me, and Sammerin had forced me down.
My numbness cracked, but didn’t shatter.
“I want to see them,” I said, gesturing to the camps, and Max nodded.
He led me through the clusters of people. There weren’t enough tents for everyone, but the clear and mild night had many setting up around small fires. They weren’t all Nyzrenese. The Threllians had conquered and enslaved nearly half a dozen countries, and I could hear the variety of accents in the air—almost all were represented here. Though they came from different lands, they might as well have shared blood now. They huddled together in weary peace, at least comfortable. Max explained as we walked that they’d managed to salvage a good number of supplies from the slaver hub, which accounted for the tents, food, and sleeping arrangements.
I paused when I heard wails punctuating the quiet conversations. My head turned toward a group gathered near the edge of the camp.
A warm hand pressed against my shoulder. “That won’t help anything,” Max murmured. “Trust me, I know.” But I pulled away regardless, and he didn’t stop me.
The body was wrapped in tattered white fabric—a makeshift Nyzrenese shroud. Small and slender, likely a teenager. A selfish part of me was relieved I couldn’t see his face.
A middle-aged woman wept over him, flinging herself onto his body, her frizzy brown hair shaking with each sob.
My numbness shattered, and her grief hit me like a tidal wave, overwhelming me.
I opened my mouth, but nothing came out. What could I say? That I was sorry? That I offered my condolences, my prayers, my respect? What good would that be to her—prayers from the woman who had caused her son’s death, blessings from the gods who had let him die?
My throat tightened. I turned away before their eyes could find me, but I was just a bit too slow. I heard the whispers begin as I took my first steps away from the fire, and I felt the weight of recognition rise from the camp like steam as eyes, one by one, turned toward me.
I kept my gaze fixed ahead as Max and I walked back to my tent. But I didn’t need to see them to feel it, and I didn’t need to hear them to know what they were saying.
They were afraid of me. Witch, their shuddering thoughts said. Monster.
 |
THE RIPPLING GRASSLANDS were just as beautiful beneath the moonlight as they were under the amber glow of the sun. I let my back sag against smooth tree-trunk bark and watched it flow.
I had stared at the roof of my tent until the hum of activity outside lapsed to silence. Then I rose and tread with bare feet through the camp, all the way out into the plains. There, I settled by a tree and several wildflower bushes to look out over the rolling lands and think.
I was not surprised when, not long after, I heard quiet footsteps approach. I didn’t have to look to see who it was. There was, after all, only one person who ever joined me for my midnight thoughts.
“You too?” I asked, and Max let out a scuff of a laugh. “Me too.”
He settled beside me. I heard rustling and glanced at him to see him pinching dead blossoms from the wildflowers, then crumbling them to ash in little bursts of fire within his palms. Just as he had in his garden — just as he had the first time we sat together at night in the aftermath of a too-close brush with death.
“Sorry.” He folded his hands in his lap when he noticed my gaze. “Habit.”
“No, I—” I love it. “It is probably good for them.”
He squinted down at the flowers, cerulean blue with white-tipped petals. “I wonder if I could get these to grow at home.”
“The weather is very different.”
“Nothing the right spell couldn’t fix.”
My eyes slid down the hill, falling on the distant tents and sleeping figures sprawled around smoldering fires. One hundred and fifty people with no homes. Some had asked to return to their own townsteads, or what was left of them. But many had chosen to travel back to Ara under the official protection of the Orders. Ara, a country where they could be free — but a country that was so wildly different from their homes, where they had no property, no friends, no money, and no language.
If only it would be as easy to help them take root. “Wherever they go will be better than where they would
be right now, if you had not helped them,” Max said, following my gaze.
I thought of that shrouded body and his mother’s wails.
Not all of them.
“The last thing I remember,” I said, softly, “is my hand on the door, and your face. Nothing else. Only…pictures here and there.” Flashes of blood, rot, red butterflies. Frames of my fight with Max. My eyes fell to Max’s side and ran up, reliving a memory I barely grasped of my sword snaking along his ribs. “I know you’re hurt, even though you did not tell me.”
He looked away. “I’m fine.”
“But what if you weren’t? What if they weren’t? What if
—” I shut my eyes and in that moment of darkness, I relived Reshaye’s frenzied, all-consuming hunger. “It was like it was drunk. It felt every death, and it…”
“It thrives on it,” Max finished.
“It would not have stopped.” My throat tightened. “And I had no control. I was so far from control that I don’t even remember. What if that happens again?”
“We won’t let it.” Was that enough?
The things that I could have done… the thought of it strangled me with petrifying fear. My eyes burned, blurred. And then I said something that I had never, ever said aloud
before. “I don’t think I can do this. I don’t think I’m strong enough.”
Silence. I traced the abstracted shapes of the grass and gravel, mostly because it seemed like a much more manageable alternative to looking at Max’s face.
“I want to tell you a story,” he said, at last. “After the war ended, after… everything… I was a mess for a long time. Years full of cheap alcohol and Seveseed dens and aimless wandering and not much else. And one night, I started a typical miserable fight and a typical miserable pub and got my typical miserable ass kicked out on the cobblestones. It was a frigid winter that year, so I was wandering around the streets of the Capital shivering like a drowned rat.”
I’d drawn my legs up to my chest, rested my cheek on my knees to look at him. His gaze slid to me, and I was a little startled by that fact that he looked almost shy, embarrassed. “And, as we all know, I’m not made for that.”
I chuckled.
“So,” he went on, “I stumbled into the next open door I could find. It was this— this little bakery that had been set up for the night to show off these paintings…”
His gaze drifted farther away, sliding into the memory. I wondered if he knew how much his expression reflected his thoughts when he spoke. Or how much I loved that about him. “They were nothing special, to be honest. The artist mostly painted his wife lounging around in a garden, and let’s just say it was easy to tell that he was an amateur painter. But there was just something so genuine about them. I could just picture him slaving over every little blobby line.” He gave an awkward chuckle. “I was very drunk.”
I let my eyes close, and I was there with him.
“But what really did me in was when I was looking at this one enormous painting. A real labor of love. And the date written on it….” He cleared his throat, a little,
strangled noise. “It was the same day as Sarlazai. While I was off in the mountains, doing… well, that… Somewhere, miles away, this man was just sitting in his garden, painting his plain wife with the reverence fitting a fucking goddess. And that just… hit me. It hit me so hard that I wept like a heartbroken fourteen-year-old girl. Because I had forgotten.”
“Forgotten?” I whispered.
“I had forgotten that people could be that way. I had forgotten that someone, somewhere, was painting terrible pictures of their wife in a garden. I was so far gone that I didn’t even remember that that kind of mundane contentment actually existed, least of all in the same moments as such terrible things.”
My heart clenched. I nodded.
“I didn’t exactly have a wife I could ask to flop around on benches for me, and I can’t paint for shit. But after I cried myself to depletion and sobered up, I thought to myself…” His shoulders rose in a tiny shrug as his gaze slipped back to me. “I thought, ‘Well. I can make a garden.’”
Planted every flower. It was obsessive, Sammerin had told me, once. An understanding clicked into place. I closed my eyes as my fingers found the necklace around my throat, my thumb pressing against the third Stratagram at the back. The one that would take me back there. “It was a very nice garden.”
“The best damn garden in Ara.”
Gods, I hadn’t known how much I would miss it.
There was a long silence. And then Max’s voice was more solemn, most hesitant, as he said, “You gave me that same feeling, Tisaanah.”
My breath stilled.
“Not right away,” he went on. “Though, I will admit, ‘It says snp snp’ was fairly charming from the beginning. But a couple of weeks later, when you told me why you had
come to Ara and what you planned to do…I’d just forgotten that people could be that way. That there were people who just wanted to do something good for the world.”
My eyes burned. I had wanted that — desperately, I wanted it, even though now that goal felt so far out of reach. My mother and Serel had sacrificed for me because they believed in the greater things I could become. But with the echoes of that woman’s sobs scarring my ears, I felt nothing but shame.
I glanced at Max, at his solemn stare, and there was something about the way he looked at me that pierced through all of that — all those doubts, all those insecurities. “But you are so much more than that, too, Tisaanah,” he said, softly. “I think you forget that. You pushed as hard as I did and saw everything worth seeing and regaled me with your, frankly, terrible jokes, and… you became my friend.
Your goals made me respect you, yes. But it was everything else that made me—”
He shut his mouth, cleared his throat, looked away. Then back. “I told you that together we would find a way to do this, and I meant it. But I stand with you until the end. You, Tisaanah. If you wanted to run, I swear we’d find a way out. And if it all goes up in flames, I’ll burn right beside you and it will still be the best thing I—”
I didn’t realize I was crying until I tasted salt. “Stop.”
Suddenly, it made sense.
What do you want? I had asked Max, so many months ago. And I had never quite managed to answer that question, not completely. But now I understood. I understood why he believed in me so much. Because more than anything, Max wanted to believe that one person was capable of making something change. Because—
If you can do it, I can do it.
I choked out, “You can do it even if I can’t.” A wrinkle formed between his eyebrows.
“It’s easy to die for someone,” I said, “but it is so much more valuable to live. I do not give you permission to fail if I fail. Do you understand me?” When he didn’t answer, I pressed, “Do you understand?”
“Yes,” he whispered.
“I don’t believe you.” I placed my palms on either side of his cheeks, resting my forehead against his. He still smelled like ash and lilacs, like he had carried the remnants of his garden all the way across the sea. “You are the best of men, Maxantarius Farlione, no matter how much you try to convince the world otherwise. Promise me that you’ll keeping fighting your battles even if I lose mine.”
“You won’t—” “Promise.”
His fingers found my face, tracing a warm trail down my cheek. And then, as if a thread had snapped, he pulled me into a sudden, fierce embrace. I sank against it so smoothly, my arms sliding over his shoulders, my knees adjusting so that I curled around him.
“I promise,” he murmured into my hair.
I hoped he wouldn’t expect me to let go, because I wouldn’t. I wanted to drown here, in the way his chest and heartbeat and breath felt against mine. A desperately needed reminder: We are still alive, and we are still together.
I turned my head, just slightly, so that my face was pressed to the smooth skin of his neck, so that I could breathe him in and hold his smell in my lungs.
I brushed my lips against his throat.
His fingers tightened at my back, and that touch seared up my spine, heartbeat rising to the surface of my skin. And in that moment, a truth solidified in my heart, my soul, my blood — a piece of me that wanted nothing more than to seize this chance.
Because I wanted him.
I wanted him in so many ways. As a friend, as a kindred soul, as a fierce teammate. As skin and lips and teeth. As a hitched breathless moan in the darkness or a lazy embrace in the sunrise. I wanted that. I wanted it all.
I grazed my mouth over his skin again, relishing the sensation of the silent groan that dragged through his breath. I followed it higher, to the corner of his jawbone, skimming my lips over the angle of it, over the raised texture of the little scar there.
A silent question. He shuddered.
Shuddered and jerked away from me, just far enough so that his eerie, bright eyes bore into my own—
As he blurted out, “This isn’t what I want.”
