The Second Death of Locke — Chapter no 12

twelve

REY WAS TWENTY THE first and only time Kier used too much of her.G They were in the east, fighting both Eprain and Luthar in equal measure. The Eprainish were a particularly nasty lot: they trained mages for as much internal damage as possible, so walking into the battlefield was an open invitation for one’s organs to be eviscerated. Kier was heavily in demand because of his aptitude, a feral dog on a leash that their captain insisted on pushing harder and harder.

They commanded a squad of twelve others, six mages and six Hands, constantly changing as they couldn’t keep them from getting injured. She’d never seen Kier angrier than in those days, spending long hours on the field holding their ground, then ages in middle-command meetings as captains and masters who hadn’t set foot on the battlefield in years yelled about strategy. It was in that time that they stopped caring about tears, and at night she did not comment if his eyes were damp when they sparred after day after day of death surrounding them.

“How many can you take? Quickly?” the captain, a rugged and scarred man with a propensity for drink, asked them at the end of every meeting.

“With magic or force?”

“Magic. Don’t fuck with me, Seward.”

“Four,” Kier said, voice sturdy, always. “Five at a push.”

“Not good enough,” the captain growled, even though the answer never changed. “If you can’t take eight, you shouldn’t be a lieutenant.”

They practiced, when they had time: Kier drew from her until the pain of emptiness brought tears to her eyes, until the power could come from her in great ropey lengths. They made it through battles where Kier destroyed

six hearts at a time, then seven. She felt each one of them like a quiet supernova within her, wrenching her insides apart.

It happened after he’d used too much of her, after he’d destroyed too many hearts and nearly torn apart her own. They’d been on a bluff, their backs against the wall, too many of the enemy—outnumbered, half their mages dead—and she’d felt the ice in her stomach as cool and depthless as the sea below the cliffs of the Isle.

She turned—trying to cover him, trying to keep him safe, trying to get out alive. But when she turned back, he was not there. If he wasn’t still tethered to her, she would’ve been certain he was dead.

There was another mage, one of the Eprainish, his face half blood. He hadn’t even hesitated when he saw the black trim around the Scaelan seal she wore on her chest. He lowered his sword and grabbed her throat, slamming her back into the cliffside. He lifted her, her feet scrabbling for purchase as she dropped her sword, as her hands went to his as if she could peel him off her neck.

“Fucking bitch,” he snarled, and that was when she felt it—a tether pushed at her. She tried to bat it away, but she couldn’t breathe, and she lost the tether with Kier entirely. When she went to reconnect with him, blind with panic that this was it, he was dead, it was all too slippery and she couldn’t focus. She found a tether and grasped it.

The mage’s smile grew in front of her. But then something flickered in his eyes: recognition. Understanding. He started to pull from her, power that she didn’t want to relinquish, and the pain was so great that she nearly lost consciousness. He slammed her against the cliff again, and Grey felt everything inside of her giving up, shutting down.

Severin, she thought desperately. Severin, I’m dying.

Maryse, someone said, very far away.

She fought. She grappled for the knife in her belt and tried to stab at the man’s arm, but she was too weak, and everything was going shadowy and uncertain. Then she was covered in blood, warm and metallic, and the mage’s face changed. She only just realized that his throat had been cut; she was covered in his blood. His hands went slack on her, and she fell, sliding down the wall, crumpled at the bottom. The unwanted tether snapped.

Kier kicked the body aside. He dropped to his knees in front of her, his hand cupping her head. Everything hurt. It hurt so much she couldn’t think

past it.

“Grey?” he asked, shaky and terrified.

She gripped his surcoat, the blood leaving a mark on the coarse fabric.

“Take it,” she murmured, tethering to him and pushing as much power at him as she could. The surge rushed through her so hard she choked as she gritted through her teeth, “Take it all. Get us home.”

And he had.

Grey didn’t know what happened nor how Kier got her back to camp after, but she slept for three days straight, interrupted often as healers monitored her concussion, and spent two more in the infirmary under careful watch.

He came to her on the evening of the second day, his eyes dark with grief and something else she didn’t recognize. It took Grey a moment to realize that he was ashamed. “I’ve applied for reassignment,” he said.

“Where are we going?” Grey asked, barely able to speak through the tightness in her throat. She’d glanced in the mirror, once, and nearly wept at the bruising. She hated the way he looked at her, as if he expected her to recoil, to fear him—as if he himself had bruised her.

“We’re not,” he said, deflated. “I’ve asked for retraining. And for a new Hand.”

Grey sat up so fast her head spun, so fast she knocked her forehead against his chin and hissed at the sudden burst of pain. “Hand Lieutenant!” one of the healers nearby shouted. “Watch yourself.”

Grey waved him off. “What have I done wrong?” she asked Kier, unable to keep the devastation out of her voice. “Send me for retraining, or… I don’t know, Kier, you have to—”

“It’s not you,” he said, taking a quick glance around, his hands fluttering above her shoulders like he wasn’t sure how to touch her but couldn’t keep himself from trying. “Dear heart, Hand…” He winced, as if her station brought back all the things she’d sacrificed for him, and looked away.

“Grey,” he said unsteadily. “It’s not you. I can’t keep doing this.”

She shook her head, gripping his hands to stop his fluttering. “No.

Don’t. You’re not—”

“I’ve requested medical dismissal on your behalf. Go home, Grey. Don’t

come back.”

“Kier—”

“I’ll send my wages. Stay with our mothers, and when I can leave my contract, I’ll come.”

She didn’t care who saw. She gripped the back of his head, vise-like, and drew his forehead to hers, nose to nose. Her hair was lank and greasy, falling in her face, but he just pushed it back like always. He was always so careful with her.

“You would be so much safer,” Kier said, “away from me.”

“Don’t ask that of me.”

His hands were at her waist, gripping the coarse fabric of her shirt. “He stole your power, Grey. I can’t even think of that kind of violation without getting…” She heard the anger rising in his voice. He took a deep breath and continued, “He knew who you were, what you were, when he tethered.

I will not risk you again. The things I wish I could say to you…” He caught himself again. “Losing you, living without you would be a fate worse than death.”

She shook her head. She couldn’t think of it, of the invasion of that other tether. It made her sick to remember it. “I don’t… I can’t. It’s just, with the tether as it is, it’s so slippery sometimes. It’s hard to manage. Hard to grasp.

Because there’s you, and then sometimes the power goes elsewhere in offshoots, and I can’t hold it in battle—but Kier, if it was just you, if I could guarantee that…”

He’d gone very, very still under her hands. “You want to bind to me.”

She chewed on her lip. They’d spoken about it before, on other assignments that hadn’t felt so life-or-death—to bind oneself to a single mage, to limit power like that, was so dangerous… but it changed the quality of magic entirely. She could give him so much more, and he’d be able to take with abandon. There were other rumors, about the power of a bond: they’d be able to communicate without words, pushing feelings along the tether. It wouldn’t feel like a fraying rope between them, but like a

strong tie, a knot.

But.

If they were bound, she wouldn’t be able to use her power on another mage—those tethers would be closed to her unless Kier died. And he would never be able to use another well. His tether would only work for her, would only seek her. It didn’t matter if she died—he would only ever be able to use her. If she died before him, in battle or in age, he would never be

able to do magic again.

He leaned back, cupping her face.

“You can’t want that.”

“It would be a protection,” Grey said quietly. “For me.”

Kier studied her face. They both knew what she could not say, not in public: to bind to her was to bind to Locke.

“You’d really do it.”

Her voice was fierce, insistent as she laced her fingers through his.

“There’s nothing I want more. Only you, Kier. No reassignments. No retraining. Bind to me, take what I have. Let me be your Hand in earnest.”

“And what about you?” he murmured.

She squeezed his hand. “Never ask me to leave you,” she said, voice cracking. “Use my power well. Protect me. It has always been this; it has always been us. Let it be us until the wars end or we find our deaths— whatever comes first.”

When she was out of the infirmary, alone in their little lean-to—it was the first assignment they weren’t in one of the long communal tents, and she was absurdly grateful for the privacy—they sat together on the floor, cross- legged, knee to knee. It was a binding of blood and power, true name to true name, and when he took the name of Locke into his heart, she swelled with such great power that the magelight between them glowed pure, warm gold.

They were fools when they were young: so often on the edge of death, so desperate for someone else to fall into the chasm alongside them, as if the reaper’s teeth would not gnash them to nothing as long as they remained together.

She kept watch by herself as the sun rose fully over the not-so-distant mountains. No one came down the road by the inn. Eventually, she felt a hand on her ankle, gently rubbing the knob of her bone. She looked down to find Kier’s eyes open.

“We have to keep moving,” he said quietly.

Grey glanced around. No one else was awake yet. “I don’t know if we can move Brit. I need to assess.”

Kier sat up, rubbing his face. “There’s a farm close by. I’ll see if I can buy a horse. The faster we move on, the better.” He didn’t say they’d

already been loitering there too long. If one group of spies had already found them, the rest weren’t far behind.

He leaned forward, resting his forehead on her thigh. She stroked his hair. “The innkeeper,” he said quietly. “What would you do with her?”

Her hand paused, his hair like silk against her fingers. She knew what her mother would have done: the last High Lady of Locke had a reputation for ruthlessness, to match the bloodlust of their ancestors. The best option, the safest option, was to kill her.

But right now, Grey’s stomach turned at the thought of more blood.

More killing. Another life on their hands, the life of someone who had not done her any harm.

“Drug her again,” she said. “I can make something—it will make her ill for a few days, but it will leave the memory clouded.”

“If you’re sure,” Kier said. He did not say, If you’re sure we can let her

live.

“I’m sure,” Grey said.

He woke Ola, who blearily agreed to keep watch but was awake enough to aim another firm glare at Grey.

“This is not going to be a good morning,” Grey muttered as they left the room, padding down the hall in their socks.

Kier sighed. “We’ll have a tactical meeting. Preferably out of town.”

Grey’s stomach growled. “And over breakfast.”

“As long as Eron isn’t cooking,” she said.

She found her kit and sorted through the packets of herbs, labeled in Leonie’s hand. She picked out the appropriate ones and ground them together, then added water to make them into a paste. She sniffed it, wincing at the immediate trace of a headache, and handed the concoction to

Kier.

“She has to ingest it,” she said.

“I’ll find a way.” He pulled a heavy ring of keys out of his pocket and hesitated outside the doorway. “You are still… Grey, don’t take this the wrong way, but you look like you nearly lost a battle. I think it’s best if I go in alone.”

Grey pursed her lips and crossed her arms over her chest. “Not pretty enough for you, Captain?”

He smirked, but it didn’t reach his eyes. “You are a vision, even with

blood clots in your hair. But I don’t know if all would share my depraved tastes.”

She sighed, but relented, going into the room with the packs by herself while Kier tried his best to poison the innkeeper.

It didn’t take more than a few minutes for Kier to work, but to her, it felt like an eternity. She set her medical kit back to rights and tried not to worry.

She heard a door shut downstairs, then footsteps. He came back, leaning on the door frame.

“Did it work?” she asked, closing the kit and replacing it in her pack.

“She’s asleep,” Kier said. “We’ll leave her ample pay for damages when

we go. Now we need to get moving.”

“After I examine Brit.”

“If Ola lets you close enough. She’s… not happy.”

Grey was not ready to think about that. “Where are the bodies?”

“Burned. In the woods. Eron and I dealt with it.”

“Mm.”

“There’s new clothing for you in there,” Kier said, nodding to a gray- green saddlebag they must’ve bought in the village. “And… not to put too fine a point on it, but it might be a good idea to clean up. I wasn’t kidding about the blood in your hair.”

She flipped him a rude gesture as he shut the door, leaving only his laugh behind, ringing in her ears.

She did not have the luxury of time, so she raced through bathing. She scrubbed the blood out of her hair and off her skin, careful not to pull her stitches. The clothes Kier had gotten her were nondescript but softer than what she’d been wearing: a loose black shirt and black breeches, thick woolen socks, her same buckled leather vest. She liked the vest; it reminded her of a similar one her mother used to wear, and it had the close, heavy feel of armor.

He’d gotten her a new coat, too: heavy dark gray fabric, trimmed in black, with wide lapels and deep pockets. It was too big, but she preferred that. She folded it and left it on the bed, retrieving her kit to go check on Brit.

It was only Ola and Brit in the other room when she went in. Ola had moved the mage to the bed and was halfway through changing the bandage on their arm.

“I’ll need to look at those stitches,” Grey said wearily.

“What? Do you care now?”

She was too tired for this. “Of course I care,” she snapped.

“She did her best,” Brit said, eyes closed. “With the stitching, at least.”

“Not to remind you of your station,” Grey said, even though that was exactly what she was doing, “but leave off. And listen. Ola, I need you to tether to Brit—”

“Ah, because you have no power left, do you?”

“Fucking listen to me,” she snarled.

Ola did not respond. She only glared at Grey with a ferocity that made her oddly sad—but she listened. Grey sensed the tether as it took, felt the flow of magic from the well into the mage. She could not give Brit her own power, but she was still a Locke, still a daughter of the very place where the power took root.

She sensed the fiber of the tether—like all other times, she found herself wondering idly how other mages and wells could cope with such a slippery, unstable connection; she’d grown so used to the thick knot of her tether to Kier—and nudged it. She directed the wealth of Ola’s power to the wound in Brit’s stomach, pushing it to bind the meat of them.

Brit clapped a hand over the wound, hissing, “Brine and bone, Ol, what

in Locke’s name—”

“I’m not doing anything!” Ola insisted.

Grey felt the heat of infection starting in Brit—“Focus, Ola, I need more”—and nudged it to the fore. Pinkish-white pus seeped through Brit’s skin and she wiped it away, then layered on more antiseptic salve. She probed around the wound, but it was otherwise clean, and much better than

it had been yesterday.

“You can detach,” she said.

Brit pushed themself up on their elbows, grunting at the movement. Ola stared at her, wide-eyed. Kier was used to the itching of her forcing his wounds back together, but Grey didn’t usually do something like that unless the mage was unconscious and beyond notice—but there was no point in hiding. Ola was right: they had to be honest, and they were relying on one another for survival. What was she meant to do? She would never get over the guilt of nearly letting Brit die because she couldn’t tether to them. She’d never forget the agony in Ola’s eyes when she returned to find her mage

nearly dead.

If it had been Kier… She gathered up her things and packed her kit. Before either of them could stop her, she went downstairs to find Eron and Sela sitting at a table with steaming cups of tea. Cloth-wrapped bundles sat on the table in front of them: breakfast, Grey surmised. It was dark in the tavern, the curtains

pulled over the windows.

“Where’s Kier?” she asked.

“Seeing a man about a horse,” Eron said. “Close by—don’t get your nerves in a knot, Hand.”

“Impossible not to,” Grey muttered. She glanced at Sela. Though she knew the girl had slept, her face was still pale and drawn. “Are you okay?” she asked, softer. She realized Sela wasn’t wearing her cuffs, but with one mage down and Ola untrusting of Grey’s power, she couldn’t find herself surprised by it.

“I think so,” Sela said. It was unconvincing.

Kier returned a short while later, smelling of the cold, and soon Ola was helping Brit down the stairs too. They assembled around the table and…

waited.

“We need to go,” Kier said.

Ola crossed her arms. “I’m not leaving until I have answers.”

Grey gritted her teeth. “You’re endangering our mission.”

Ola looked at her. So are you, she didn’t say.

Kier sighed. She felt the tug of him tethering, then her ears popped as he created a sound shield around them. “You have ten minutes,” he said, his voice sounding like it was underwater for the briefest of moments before it came back into clarity. “And then we’re leaving. We have food for the road.”

“A picnic. Quaint,” Ola said, sitting back, arms crossed—but she’d stopped glaring. “Now. Sorry, Captain, we need to talk about your Hand.

And you.” She turned on Sela. “You didn’t tether to Brit either, until the very last moment. Isn’t that something you should, I don’t know, control?”

Grey drew a breath. Ola stared Kier down across the table. Brit, looking pale and caught in the middle of it, said, “If there’s information the captain deems unfit for us to know…”

“That information nearly got you killed,” Ola said. “I have just as strong

a memory as your Hand, Captain. Sela might have harmed you, but your well did not tether to my mage in a time of need, and that is, frankly, despicable.”

Grey flinched, but after all, she agreed.

“What Hand Captain Flynn determines to be necessary action would certainly be my call—”

“And you’d let a mage die?” Ola said at the same time Grey said, “Kier.” He didn’t look at her, but his jaw tightened, pulsing with tension.

She wasn’t sure how much she liked the beard anymore—it made his expressions uncanny, harder to read.

At least they’d given up on pretending they weren’t in the army.

Grey folded her hands on top of her reports. “There are a few things we need to discuss.”

“Either you’re a heartless bitch who only thinks of your own mage,” Ola said, leaning back even further, “or you and the captain are bound.”

“We are.”

Ola blinked owlishly, like she hadn’t expected Grey to actually confirm —it was odd how well Brit mirrored that expression, how similar the two of them were, yet Brit had not told Ola that Grey and Kier were bound. It was information, Grey thought, that she would not keep from Kier. Eron choked

on his tea, sputtering, “Since when?”

“A while,” Grey snapped.

“Sorry,” Sela said, very quiet, “but what does that mean?”

Meanly, Ola said, “When a mommy well and a daddy mage love each other very much—”

“Oh, fuck off, Ol,” Brit said, surprising Grey. She raised a brow before she could stop herself, then quickly composed her expression into neutrality. “You’re pushing this too far.”

“I’m sorry,” Ola exclaimed. “I thought that would be necessary information! We are on a highly dangerous mission, and the least—the literal least—I expected was to know if we had two capable, interchangeable wells and mages in case of injury, and I can’t even get that?

Not to mention that binding is highly forbidden in the first place. What kind of mission are you running, Captain?”

“I’m bound to Grey,” Kier said. “It has never been detrimental before. I apologize for not telling you—for not telling any of you—but it was a

matter of safety.”

“Not to come back to this,” Sela said, “but why does it matter?”

“How do you not know what a bond is?” Eron asked. “Isn’t that basically mage/well ‘don’t do this if you don’t want to fucking die’ rule number one?”

“She’s not a soldier,” Grey murmured. “Not everyone is a soldier,

Fastria.”

But Ola was frowning too—and Brit.

Kier sighed again, rubbing his eyes. “Grey, don’t.”

Grey did. “She’d know if she wasn’t a fucking kid. What are you, thirteen?”

“I’m fifteen,” Sela said, indignant as only a mislabeled teenager could be.

“Hold on,” Eron began at the same time Brit said, “Fifteen? Impossible.

That’s…”

The blood drained from Sela’s face.

“How old was Maryse?” Eron asked.

“It is impossible,” Ola said very carefully, “because Locke disappeared sixteen years ago. And you didn’t tether to Brit earlier because…”

“Because she couldn’t,” Grey said. “Because she wasn’t trained.”

“Congratulations, Ola,” Kier said, ever-suffering, ignoring Grey for now.

“You win the prize.” To Sela, he said, “You’re not Maryse of Locke. So who are you? And why?”

“Wait,” Ola said, even more indignant. “You two knew?”

Sela had gone a very interesting shade of greenish-yellow ivory. Grey, who’d spent quite a lot of time with the ill and dying, did not associate that shade of skin with a living body. “If I tell you,” the girl said, pulling at the fabric of her dress anxiously, “do you promise not to kill me?”

“No,” Grey said, but there wasn’t any heat to it. At the girl’s stricken expression, she said, “Sorry, Sela; we promise. You were… very helpful yesterday when I could not be, and I am thankful for that. You’re forgiven for stabbing Kier.”

“I don’t think you can apologize for my stabbing,” Kier said. “But… Sorry. What happened with her yesterday?”

“We’ll talk later,” Grey said. She turned back to Sela. “We won’t kill you. But we do have to know—because there are a lot of people after us,

and if you’re just a peasant girl caught up in a lie, this is going to be very difficult to explain. Sela, who are you?”

For another moment, the girl looked like she was going to vomit all over the table. She put her elbows on the surface and dropped her head to her hands, her dark hair falling in a choppy curtain around her, hiding her face.

“My name is Wilisela Naudé.”

“Naudé?” Eron repeated, chewing it over. “Why do I know that name?”

But Kier was staring at Grey, sending a heady blend of frustration and exhaustion over the tether. She caught all of it, sending back equal measures of annoyance. He was basically telling her he’d told her so—they should’ve deserted. They should’ve left and not even considered this damn mission.

He raised his eyes skyward. “I suffer and I suffer,” he muttered. “And yet. And yet.”

And to his credit… The horror was prickling and insistent. She had a memory tugging from some distant past of running her fingers over the name in cursive, flicking up the accent on the e. She remembered the shape of it in her father’s voice, his hand caught on her mother’s waist as he said, There’s a letter on the desk for you. Naudé—the new Cleoc—sent a proposal—and she was again on the island, again watching the wind through Severin’s hair; and her mother was leaning over to kiss her forehead before bed, the cold silver of her necklace skimming over Grey’s nose; and her father was carrying her up to the tallest tower of the fortress, up and up and up, and she sat on his shoulders as he pointed at the different masses of land and said, Look. You have to know them all, Maryse. You have to understand them all, and determine who you can trust.

“Eron,” Kier said, “you know that name because the Naudés are the High Family of Cleoc Strata. And if my incomplete knowledge of political inheritance is correct—which I really fucking hope it isn’t— Sela is the First Daughter of Cleoc Strata, heir to our enemies.”

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Sorry it’s been so long since I last wrote. We’re on the northern coast, near Cleoc Strata. Being so close to the sea has me feeling tense. I don’t think Kier has noticed, thank the gods. I don’t want him to worry about me with everything else going on.

Letter from Hand Captain Grey Flynn to Imarta Flynn, undated

Grey has been having nightmares again. They don’t wake her, but her fear keeps me up at night.

Letter from Captain Kiernan Seward to Imarta Flynn, 14 years AD

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