I shqa returned many hours later. He landed and was still for such a long moment, gaze to the ground. Immediately, my stomach was in knots.
I stood. “What did you see?”
He was silent, his hands curled at his sides. Unusually, he didn’t magic away his wings immediately, leaving the shimming golden feathers out and trembling beneath the sunrise breeze.
“What did you see, Ishqa?”
He turned, and I was so taken aback by the fire in his eyes that I stepped backwards.
“This war will destroy all of us. My people. Yours. Yours.” He gestured broadly to everyone here—Fey, Threllian, Aran, and people who were none of those things.
I had never seen Ishqa like this. Max, Sammerin, and I glanced at each other uneasily. Dread coiled in my stomach.
“What did you see?”
I was really asking, Are all my people dead?
The sadness etched into his face told me too much. He shook his head. “Malakahn fell. Nothing remains.”
Everything went numb.
Gods, we had fought and bled and wept for those cities. Months of strategizing, of operating in the shadows, of taking over from the inside. My friends had died for this.
Gone.
“Serel,” I choked out.
“I could not see individual bodies. He may have escaped.”
I rubbed my temples.
I needed to believe that Serel had gotten out alive, just as I had needed to believe it a year ago, when I was desperate to return to Threll to save him. I needed to believe that he had escaped with the rest of our leadership
—that they had made it to Orasiev, and that Orasiev had held. The alternative was to believe that in a single strike, the movement that hundreds of thousands of people had fought and bled for had been killed.
I could not allow myself to believe that.
“There is more,” Ishqa said, gravely. “Aefe was there.”
My brows contorted in confusion. “What do you mean, she was there?” Aefe was dead. Aefe had become Reshaye. We knew that Caduan had
Reshaye in his possession—but Reshaye was a very different being than the Fey woman it used to be.
“I mean what I say,” Ishqa said. “Aefe was there. Aefe, just as she looked five hundred years ago.”
“In a… body?”
“Not just a body. Her body.”
“That’s impossible,” Sammerin said. “No one can be brought back from the dead.”
“She was never truly dead,” Ishqa said. “A part of her lived as Reshaye.”
Perhaps more of her was in Reshaye than I ever realized.
I relived those terrible moments again—the moments when my mind, Max’s, and the Fey king’s were interlocked. I had felt Reshaye inside of me then, being dragged back into this world. I knew it was possible he had taken it successfully. Ishqa and I had discussed this at length. But I had never considered the possibility that the Fey king would want it for something more than to be a weapon in his own mind, as it had been a weapon in mine.
“Still. It’s still impossible.” Sammerin shook his head, looking offended that something so outlandish had even been brought up. “Do you have any idea how much a human—or Fey—body consists of? The sheer intricacy of tissues and bones and nerves? No one can create a living thing from nothing, let alone one that complex.”
“But he has been creating things from nothing,” Max said. “He’s created those monsters, hasn’t he? The ones he keeps hurling at Ara.”
“He can’t be creating those from nothing, either.”
“And they are very different from… a body,” I added. “A normal body.” “There is nothing normal about her,” Ishqa said, harshly. “I have never been so certain of anything as I am of that. If he created a body for her, then that body is capable of monstrous things. And the fact that he was able to do such a thing at all means that we’re in greater danger than we realized. The fact that he hasn’t moved yet, at least not with all the power at his disposal, means nothing. Today I saw what he is capable of with only a fraction of the power at his fingertips. And now a city no longer exists.”
Ishqa turned to me, his eyes fire. “We cannot waste time. We need to follow the wayfinder immediately and claim the Lejara it leads us to now.”
A chill ran up my spine. I looked down at my palm and the light still emanating from it. I could feel it tugging me northeast, like a song sung in a frequency no human ears could hear, calling to my deepest soul.
My heart ached to go to my people—fight with them if not mourn with them. If Serel was indeed dead, and, gods forbid, if Filias and Riasha had met the same fate in Orasiev, then the rebellion had no leadership.
They needed me.
But I would be no use to them unless I had enough power to help them. “I know,” I said.
“You have another problem.” Brayan’s deep voice rang out from the back of the group. He winced as he rose to his feet, pressing a cloth to his abdomen. “In the time we were in Zagos, the price on all our heads has been rising by the hour. No doubt that trend continued. We may be thousands of miles away from Ara, but when someone is willing to pay that much for someone, news travels fast and far.”
“We have been wanted this entire time,” I said.
“Not like this. Nura must be getting more… motivated.”
“Then it was unwise of her to use us as bait,” Max muttered, which was very true.
“It’s probably not much of an exaggeration to say that every bounty hunter or mercenary on four continents is now looking for you.”
I cringed and muttered a curse. Inconvenient.
“It makes things considerably more difficult for you. But Max and I are going to Besrith anyway, and that’s a hub of mercenary operations. At the very least, it’s where the Roseteeth are based, and I don’t doubt that many of the most skilled people coming after you are Roseteeth affiliated in some
way. Max and I can draw their attention east. Maybe I still have enough pull these days to broker some sort of deal with them.”
Max and I are going to Besrith.
That sentence made my heart lurch.
“I’m not going to Besrith,” Max said, without missing a beat. Brayan looked like this was news to him. “What? Why?” “Because… I have other things to do.”
“Things like providing double the attack surface to this group of people and centralizing all of Nura’s targets in one place?” Brayan retorted, irritated.
“That is a risk,” Ishqa said. “If we remain together and get captured, then we have just handed the Aran queen—or the Fey king—every option we have. Perhaps he is right. It might be safer to separate.”
No. I wanted to scream. No, no, no. I just got him back. You can’t ask me to give him up again.
And that was why I even surprised myself when the words slipped from my lips.
Max said. “I’m staying with you,” at the same moment that I said, “You should go to Besrith.”
His eyebrows lurched. The hurt that split across his face gutted me. “I— what?”
“What?” Sammerin repeated.
“Ishqa was right,” I said, carefully. “It is dangerous for us to stay together. Not only does it mean that we are a single target, it also means that if we were to get captured, Nura would have too much at her disposal. She will have a greater reach in Threll than in Besrith. It will be safer for you. And you, as Brayan said, can help deal with the mercenaries.”
All of these very logical reasons tasted like ash on my tongue. He shook his head. “No.”
“Tisaanah…” Sammerin murmured.
“There is no arguing with it,” I snapped. “It’s the right thing to do.” Max looked stunned, then angry. “What if I refuse?”
“That would be foolish,” Ishqa said.
“It would be foolish to run away,” Max shot back. “I’m not running away.”
“No, you aren’t,” I said. “We need you there.” “I—”
“Don’t sacrifice yourself for me. You don’t even know who I am.” I spoke more harshly than I had intended. The words felt like razors coming up my throat.
They stopped Max in his tracks. He opened his mouth, then closed it.
The expression on his face reminded me of a memory that I held, and he did not—the memory of the day I stood on the steps of the Towers and told him I would not leave with him. The same hurt. The same shock.
It killed me. Gods, it killed me. “I do,” he said. “I know you.”
My chest ached. I shook my head. “When the road splits, we need to separate.”
Muffled voices rang out far, far in the distance. We all shut up and looked back towards Zagos. Dawn was still hours away. Brayan’s warning took on a new urgency.
A muscle twitched in Brayan’s eyebrow, as if to say, See? Didn’t I tell you?
“We’re going to have two dozen hunters on us in an hour,” he said. “We need to move.”
 |
SAMMERIN PULLED me aside the moment he had the chance. “Why did you do that?” He didn’t raise his voice, but I could hear the hidden undercurrent in it—a shrouded tone that said, What the hell is wrong with you?
I wouldn’t look at him. “It’s the best thing for him.” “That’s not for you to decide. Tisaanah—stop walking.”
He grabbed my wrist, gently but hard enough to turn me to face him. I expected to see anger and frustration in his stare, but it held only sadness.
I couldn’t have this conversation. This was too difficult.
“I know you by now,” he said, quietly. “I know exactly why you’re doing this. You told me once that Max told you he wanted to spend his life with you, and you didn’t give him an answer. Why?”
I squeezed my eyes shut and looked away.
“Because it is easier for you,” he said. “You’re willing to sacrifice everything you have for your people. But fighting for their future won’t be any easier for you if you don’t give yourself a future to fight for.”
The words struck me like an arrow sliding between plates of steel armor. I hadn’t realized how much Sammerin saw. And yet, in this, he was still wrong. He wasn’t wrong about what he saw in me, but he was wrong about the conclusion.
“In all likelihood, I’ll die doing this,” I said. “This war will kill me.” “That’s isn’t—”
“It is true.”
I had come so close to death, so many times. I wasn’t stupid. I knew a high probability when I saw one. “I can only escape it for so long. And then Max will have another person to mourn.”
Sammerin looked pained. “That’s a sad way to approach relationships, Tisaanah.”
“Think about it. What are his choices? Come with us, remember a horrible past, fight a terrible war? Lose more people he loves? You talk about my future, but think about his. If we let him go, we are giving him an actual future, Sammerin. He has a chance at”—I choked on my words—“at a clean slate. Isn’t that kinder than remembering all the things he spent decades trying to forget?” Tears stung my eyes. “Don’t accuse me of not loving him.”
I didn’t even mean to say the last part aloud. But the idea of it, the idea that maybe someone might view my actions as indifference and not love… the thought devastated me.
Sammerin’s gaze softened. “I would never think that.”
“He has a chance most people never get. He spent so long trying to escape his past.”
“His past is all over him, Tisaanah. Memories or not.”
“Perhaps traces of it. But don’t tell me this isn’t the only reason he survived Ilyzath. It could not torment him with a past he didn’t remember. You were there during the worst days of his life. Would you really want him to live through that again?”
Sammerin was silent. I saw it in his face the moment he realized I was right.
I had spent every single day for the last six months obsessed with Max’s freedom. I’d been willing to sacrifice my body, my soul, my life. I didn’t realize then it would be so much harder to sacrifice my heart.
Sammerin looked at me with such sadness. I was lucky to have a friend who looked at me that way—who saw so much more than I ever gave him
credit for. But there was inherent weakness in leaning on someone else, and if I allowed even a wisp of that weakness to slip through my armor, I would collapse. I couldn’t afford to do that. Not now.
I pulled away and kept walking.
