“How are you feeling?” the old man asked. His voice was not as soft as it used to be, and his lanky frame was stiff.
She almost said fine. But there were precious few things she could tell the truth about, and this was one of them.
“Confused,” she answered. “Sore. Worried.” Guilty.
“Confusion leads to knowledge for those brave enough to seek it.”
“And if there are no answers to my questions? You’ve been doing this work for decades, and my problems are unfamiliar even to you.”
“And is that where you want to draw your line? When you give up? At things that are unfamiliar?”
“No. Of course not. But—”
“All things were unfamiliar once upon a time. If we all gave up when there were no answers to be found, there would not be hunters like us. Sometimes you must make answers when there are none.”
Her lip wobbled at the familiar saying. “How did you know I loved that book? Did you see it in my things?”
“What book?”
“The Tale of Lord Finneus Wolfram. Those were his last words to his uncle the king before he left on his doomed search for a new world. All my life I’ve dreamed of an adventure like that.”
“Ah. It’s a popular saying in our line of work. I did not know that was its origin.”
“Perhaps it wasn’t. But those words were my greatest hope when I was young. To find answers for the unanswerable, a path through the impossible.”
“Then lean on them now. But let us avoid ending up like Lord Wolfram, yes? No tragedies here, Roar. This world will make you a victim every chance it gets. Don’t let it.”
She nodded, feeling those words sear straight to her gut.
“I’m sorry I put you all in danger,” she whispered. “If you want me to leave, I would understand.”
“And what would you go home to if you did?”
She hesitated, but then decided to give him more of her truth. “My mother. And a life that is stifling on the best days, suffocating on the worst.”
He hummed low in his throat. “No one expects you to leave,” he finally said. “I do not know what lies ahead for you. Sometimes the paths of our lives wander far from what we expect; they twist and turn and branch into dead ends. I have lost count of the number of dead ends I’ve encountered in my long life. Each time, when I could see no future beyond a certain point, the future always came anyway. Yours will too, Roar. All you can do is be ready to meet it when it comes.”
Duke nodded his head and wandered back to the group. She considered following, wanted to, even. But then she saw Sly watching her with suspicion. Even Bait wasn’t his usual silly self around her. She did not blame them. They should be wary of her.
She tried to do some resting of her own and retired to her tent for a nap, but she could not turn her mind off. The hunters gathered round the campfire got more raucous as the day passed, celebrating their victory and survival. She had the feeling this was a ritual, a cleansing of sorts. Each laugh hit her with the force of a punch, bearing down on an already impossible weight that sat upon her chest. Soon she was crawling out of her shoddy tent and seeking out Locke’s. Maybe she would be able to sleep if she saw that he was well.
There was a faint blue glow behind the canvas of his tent, and when she opened the flap, she saw a lightning lantern in the corner, casting light on Locke’s sleeping form. His chest was still bare except for the bandage, and his blankets were pushed down around his waist.
His tent was large enough that she could fit with just a slight hunch of her head and shoulders. She had to practically crawl in and out of her own tent by comparison. She crossed toward Locke on tiptoe and knelt beside his sleeping pallet.
His body was a master study in strength—all hard muscles and scarred skin. The waves of his long hair were spread out on his pillow. He had lashes that rested on cheeks that looked as if they had been cut from stone. She wanted to trace the slightly crooked line of his nose, rasp the pads of her fingers over the thickening stubble along his jaw.
She was still angry over the way he had treated her in the river, and she did not know where to put that anger when what she had done was far worse.
The bandage at his shoulder was clean, so at least the wound seemed to have stopped bleeding. She was glad she had been unconscious when he was injured. Her stomach rolled just imagining what he must have looked like with a branch piercing his skin. So like what had happened to her brother.
The bruising on his chest had darkened, and even in the areas where his skin was undamaged, she could see the faint white lines and marks of dozens upon dozens of scars. Hesitantly, she reached out and lightly traced her finger over a raised mark near his lower ribs. His skin was warm, and the muscles firm beneath it. Her pale skin contrasted against his darker coloring, and she had the sudden urge to splay both hands over his chest, touching as much as she could with the spread of her fingers, but she settled for skimming that scar once more.
“Bandits,” he murmured, making her jerk backward. His eyes were still closed, and she wondered if she had imagined it, but then he kept speaking. “Not just storms and military that are a danger to us. We move a valuable commodity, and some people are not content to buy it in a market.”
“You were stabbed?” She wanted to touch the scar again, but she shoved her hand beneath her thigh to keep it away.
“Between the ribs. It was a close call.”
“That’s terrible.”
“Would have fit with the rest of my life. Survive hurricanes and firestorms, only to be brought down by a small blade.”
“I’m glad you weren’t,” she murmured, her eyes cast down toward her lap.
“Me too.”
Those words settled into the quiet between them, and her heart kicked up speed as she searched for the right words to say.
“I’m sorry I woke you.”
“I don’t mind. I’ve been sleeping all day.”
She swallowed. “I only wanted to be sure you were well. I feel … I feel so terrible about…” She trailed off, and let her hand hover over a set of scratch marks on his arm. At the last moment, she thought better of it and pulled back, but Locke caught her hand before she could go too far, pressing it down over the damage she had done to him and holding her palm against it.
“It’s nothing, Roar. Doesn’t hurt at all.”
Her gaze traveled to the bandage on his shoulder.
“Don’t you dare take that on you. Things like this happen.”
“I distracted you. Delayed you. If you hadn’t had to deal with me, maybe this never would have happened.”
“If your goal is to not distract me, I regret to inform you that it’s a lost cause.”
She didn’t know what that meant, couldn’t tell if she was just reading into his words because of his deep, gravelly voice and his bare chest and the skyfire glow inside the tent that cast them both in shadows.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “About the river. I did not mean to—well, I did, but my intention was not to hurt you.”
“What was your intention?” she whispered.
“To teach you.”
She froze and tried to tug her hand free, but his reflexes were too fast and he closed his grip around her hand before she could.
“To teach me what? That I’m soft? Easy to manipulate? Someone already beat you to that lesson. Though I guess I did not learn it as well as I should. But I have now.”
“Roar. That wasn’t … I—”
She ripped her hand from his grip and stood, her head glancing off the canvas before she remembered to hunch.
“I should let you rest.”
She scrambled out of his tent and fled toward her own. She was almost there when Sly stepped out from the darkness to block her path. Roar jerked to a stop. “Sly, I didn’t see you.”
“Most people don’t.”
The female hunter had an eerie stillness to her … like a predator that could be on you before you even took a breath to
scream.
“I think I’m going to sleep. Long day.”
The girl let Roar pass, but before she made it to her tent, Sly called after her, “Just remember. When you don’t see me, it’s because I see you. I see the things that other people miss. The things that they don’t want to see. And I’ll be watching you.”
Roar threw herself into the shaky refuge of her tent, pulled a blanket over her head to block out the world, and tried not to think of all she was missing back home.
* * *
Nova held herself entirely still, trying to will her body calm. When she moved, heat surged in every joint like her bones were flint and steel, sparking as they shifted against each other. She had lost track of time in her cell, but she knew days had passed since Roar left. And with each hour, the room seemed smaller, her mattress thinner.
A tray of food sat by the door, but it had long since grown cold. She did not trust herself to move toward it. Stillness was the only friend she had right now.
It was the not knowing that plagued her most. They’d thrown her in this cell, and she had seen no one since except the array of arms that reached inside occasionally to drop a tray of food. Her mind, duplicitous as ever, provided an unending stream of dire possibilities for why she was being kept in here and what was happening outside these four walls.
Even now, she wondered if this had nothing to do with Aurora. If perhaps they had somehow learned her secret, and this room, this nothingness, was what she had always feared.
She’d been living on borrowed time since her magic manifested as a child. A Stormling amir, the Taraanese equivalent of an admiral, had visited the house for dinner. Nova had been young, and she accidentally knocked over her drink, sending the liquid into the man’s lap. He’d grabbed her wrist and snarled, and out of nowhere, the fancy tie about his neck had caught fire. The burns to the man’s neck, face, and hands had been extensive. And her family had left in the middle of the night with only what they could carry, using all the money they had saved up to pay for an escort from a hunter, like the ones Rora was with now.
At the memory, the fire climbed so high up her throat that she could swear she tasted soot on her tongue. She tried to push it down, to lock it behind that door deep inside, but it would not budge. She broke her stillness to tear a strip of fabric from the bottom of her skirts. She cupped it in her hands, and then let free just a little of the power churning inside her. The flame caught quickly, easing some of the pressure in her chest. The scent of smoke calmed her somehow, reminding her that she was not helpless.
The fabric burned down to ash too fast, leaving behind an aching hunger to do it again, to burn and burn until all the heat was outside instead of inside.
A loud clank sounded at the door, and her head jerked to the small barred window above her head. It was not yet time for another meal to be delivered. She barely had time to dump the ash from her hands before the heavy wooden door swung open, revealing the Prince of Locke on the other side.
She remembered the way he had looked at her when he wanted information about the markets. His eyes had been hooded, suggestive, alluring. She had not been deceived in the slightest, but she preferred those eyes to the flat black coals she faced now. He made eye contact with someone out of sight and nodded, then he strode into the cell and locked the door once more behind him.
He leaned against the stone wall, crossing his arms over his chest. With a clenched jaw, he breathed in slowly through his nose, and her stomach dropped, fearing he would smell the smoke.
He reached into his pocket and pulled out something that gleamed in the dim room. He rotated it between his fingers, and Nova finally placed what she was seeing.
A skyfire Stormheart. The one Rora had gifted her.
“Anyone with storm magic can use any Stormheart that matches their affinities,” he began. “We pass them down to our children and their children. But when you destroy a storm yourself, its heart is forever tied to you. It is a dangerous feat. There’s no skill to it that can be learned. No magic spell. It is simply your will to live versus the storm’s, and the strongest one wins. That kind of battle leaves a mark.” He tossed the Stormheart into the air, light reflecting off the pearlescent surface, then caught it once more in his fist. “Imagine my surprise when I found one of my Stormhearts, a heart marked by my soul, by my sacrifice and given to my betrothed … in the room of a servant.”
For the first time since she had been tossed in this cell, Nova went cold. Bumps rose along her skin, and the air felt charged with fury and magic. She reached for her fire, found it flickering low inside her, but could not call it out. The air was too thick, too smothered with the prince’s power.
“Explain to me, Novaya”—he dragged out the syllables of her name as if they belonged to him—“how this came to be in your room.”
She hesitated, heart thundering in her ears, fire sparking inside her, trying and failing to catch. “The princess gave it to me.”
He flew across the room, and caught her by the throat. “You lie.” The touch of his hand spread a shock wave of residual storm magic over her skin. Her own magic leaped up to meet it, pushing at the barrier of her skin. She leaned back, splaying her hands on the mattress, and he loomed over her.
The fire made her brave, made her stupid, and she hissed back, “She loathed you.”
He sneered, “Because of the knife wound? She’s not so weak as to be bothered by that. I apologized, and she accepted.”
Nova smiled, past caring about the consequences. Maybe he would kill her. Maybe she would burst into flame and kill them both. At least then, she would never waste another second worrying herself into misery. She choked out the words, “She knew. Knew you were … using her. Just … wanted throne.”
All at once his constricting grip was gone, and he stood back glaring at her. His chest jerked with the rise and fall of his breath, and he spun back toward the door without a word. He rapped hard against the heavy wood until the guard outside answered. When the door clanged shut once more, locking out the world, Nova lifted her hands to find she had left behind a charred imprint of two hands on her mattress. She laughed, a high desperate sound, because she did not know what else to do.
She knew this was not over. He would be back. But she was just as capable of inflicting damage as he.
Perhaps death is all that waits for me across the great waters, but better to know death than to choose fear of the unknown.
—The Tale of Lord Finneus Wolfram
14
Locke’s whole upper body was stiff when he woke, as if the branch had stayed inside him and grew around him while he slept. He pulled a shirt on, and his muscles burned when he lifted his injured arm to shove it through the sleeve. Sweat clung to his forehead, and he decided he was too tired to bother with buttons. He lugged himself to his feet, ungainly and awkward, two things he rarely was. He shoved out of his tent to face the gradually lightening sky, and was shocked to see Roar seated by last night’s campfire, a bow and arrow at her feet and two rabbits roasting over a newly stoked flame.
His stomach twisted at the sight of her, and he wrote it off as hunger.
“What are you doing?”
She startled at the interruption, a heavy book sliding from her lap to land in the dirt.
“I was not sure if we were still to train this morning. When you did not come, I decided to be useful.” She gestured toward the rabbits.
“You killed them?”
Her lips thinned. “No. They fell from the sky and landed above the flames on their own. Some strange new type of storm, I guess.”
He snorted. “Calm your skies. I meant nothing by it.”
She lifted her chin. “What might seem a careless phrase for one can cut deep as a blade for another.”
“Now you sound like Duke.”
He bent gingerly to pick up the book that had fallen. The Tale of Lord Finneus Wolfram. He’d known this tale as a boy, though only from stories whispered on cold nights among homeles
s children looking to think about anything else but their actual lives.
He returned the book and sat down on a log, leaving one between them. “Have I done that to you?” he asked, already knowing and dreading the answer. “Cut you with my careless words?” Somehow what began as the intent to protect and teach had become a way to scorch any connection between them, like burning back an encroaching forest before the roots could dig too deep.
Before she answered, a yawning Jinx plopped down on the log between them, stretching dramatically in an attempt to wake up.
“Don’t tell me you two are arguing again,” she said. “Even I’m exhausted by it, and I’ve just been watching. Often. It’s hard to look away really. What am I saying? Don’t stop. You are my only entertainment besides Ran’s terrible jokes.”
“I have the best jokes,” Ransom said gruffly, stopping by the fire to examine the rabbits, and nodding approvingly.
Jinx clucked consolingly. “Ran, if you have to sing your own praises, you probably don’t deserve them.”
The morning continued with the rest of the crew ambling their way out of their tents, fatigued and groggy from the celebrations the night before.
Bit by bit, Locke was putting together the puzzle of Roar. She was so fiercely stubborn because somewhere along the way, someone had used her, had made her feel inferior, and now she protected the border of herself at all costs. What he did not understand was how a girl with all her skills and her drive could question her worth.
“Roar,” he said after they had divided up the meat between them along with bread from their stores. “You have questions.” She looked bewildered by the turn in conversation. “We’ve got plenty of time on our hands. Now is the time to ask them.”
She picked at a piece of bread and said, “I’m not sure where to begin.”
“Come now. I am sure there are a thousand things you want to know. Open your mouth and ask.”
She bristled at the command, regaining some of that fire that blazed so brightly when they argued. “Fine. I want to know about you.” Locke stiffened. “All of you. How did you come to be here? Where are you from? How did you all meet?”