The Second Death of Locke — Chapter no 5

five

IVE ME ONE REASON, Captain Seward,” Attis said, fingers steepled in“G front of her on the desk. Her clear, stern eyes were focused on Kier as if Grey wasn’t even in the room, and Grey chewed on the inside of her cheek at the weight of that stare, glad it wasn’t anywhere near her. “One reason why I shouldn’t demote you, separate you and your Hand, send her on the first convoy out to an infirmary as far away as I can manage and keep you on the front as a typic. One.”

Because Kier was a pain in the ass first and a mage second, he said,

“Because we’re too good for that.”

Grey very nearly kicked his chair.

They were in Attis’s office, Kier seated in front of her desk, Grey positioned behind him with her hand resting on his shoulder. He was fully dressed, which was an improvement, and only winced occasionally when he moved—partially for the drama. She’d possibly gone too far in healing him, into a territory that was nigh unattainable for a regular well, but having him whole and hale was more important than anything else.

She’d warned him about what Concord had said, but shockingly, Grey was not the one being reprimanded, and no one had asked about her capacity. Hopefully Kier was playing it up enough that Attis wouldn’t want to see his wound, wouldn’t want to look any closer.

“You nearly killed your Hand.”

“Hand Captain Flynn knows her limits.” A dangerous line of conversation, if they went probing into Grey’s limits.

“But do you?”

Grey’s fingers dug into Kier’s shoulder: a warning. “I trust her,” he said,

very carefully. “She untethered from me, Master Attis, when it became too much, as she was trained to do.”

Behind Attis, Mare’s face twitched—the only indication that she was paying any attention at all. Grey wanted to jump over the desk and shake her: What did you say?

“You let your guard down,” Attis snapped, and that was the one thing Grey couldn’t argue with. With Kier in the infirmary, she hadn’t had a moment to speak to him alone. Why had he given the girl his armor? Why had he untied her restraints? What had the girl said to him? These were the questions she’d wrestled with the night before, alone and insomniac in their tent.

“She was just a scared girl,” Kier said. “I was doing my duty. Trying to

help.”

“She’s a prisoner, Captain.”

Silence hung between them, and Grey swallowed any protestations she had. She felt herself softening, her own angry questions withering away.

This was the line, the thing that she and Kier could never quite get over: the people they fought, the people they killed… It didn’t matter what Attis or the others high up in command said. They were just people. These wars, these endless battles over land and territory, they all amounted to nothing.

She’d been disillusioned with war since the first soldier died under her hands at sixteen, but it wasn’t like there was anything better. The battles never ceased. The armies were never sated. No one was actually going to avenge the death of Locke, and until that happened, Scaelas and the other high rulers would not be satisfied. She, Kier, and Lot had realized when they were children that they could either wait for some attacking army to stomp through and burn their village or they could enlist and fight back.

There were no other options. Never had been.

The soldiers they fought had the same choice. The prisoner was just another person with no other decisions to make.

Attis sighed. “I need to know you can follow orders, Captain Seward.”

“I don’t believe I’ve ever put that in doubt. Though you might dislike my methods, I did deliver you the asset.”

“Nearly at the cost of your Hand,” Attis snapped. “Captain Seward, I know your history. I know you and Hand Captain Flynn have been paired for a while. I know you two are very good at what you do.”

Grey tensed, her gaze flicking to Mare. But the Hand’s face was unchanged. If she’d told Attis something, there was no way to know now.

“Your power is like that of a bound pair,” Attis said. “Which you could be investigated for if an accusation is made.”

It took a lot of Grey’s concentration not to let anything show on her face.

Binding was foolish and forbidden, and the military didn’t care about the value of sacred acts or devotion.

It was a shame they’d been forbidden from doing it. It was an even bigger shame that they’d disobeyed that order years before.

But it was the only guarantee of Grey’s safety. She did not regret it.

Kier did not give in. “This isn’t about my command, or the fact that you can’t accept my Hand is powerful. This is about the prisoner. And you sent us in without any indication of the stakes or the cost. It’s no wonder my Hand was forced to use so much of herself and I was nearly killed—we did not know what they were fighting for, and we still don’t.”

It was justified, but perhaps not the best way to go about it. Grey wanted to point out that they had bigger problems—if Attis could prove her suspicion that she and Kier were bound, they could be punished, or discharged, or even sent to the High Court if she was angry enough. It wasn’t a small infraction.

Attis’s lips twitched. “Then let’s talk about the prisoner.”

Grey’s chin inched up. She hadn’t had time between keeping Kier alive, putting herself back together and helping Leonie with the wounded to get more information on the girl—or to find her and give her a solid kick in the stomach to repay her for what she did to Kier.

“Very well,” Kier said.

Attis was silent for a moment, gathering her thoughts. Grey watched Mare’s hand on Attis’s shoulder—she’d flinched, calling attention to it, and now Grey saw how tightly the Hand gripped her mage.

“Hand Master Concord and I have our suspicions, but in this case we are willing to set them aside. There are bigger issues afoot, and it has become clear that you and your Hand are a strong pairing, for whatever reason.”

“Master Attis, I can assure you—”

“Keep your lip service for someone else, Seward. We have an assignment, and it looks like you and Flynn might be the only two here equipped to carry it out.”

That was… a far cry from being reprimanded, and Grey couldn’t fight the feeling that they were being tricked. She wished she could tell Kier to be careful in how he proceeded. She didn’t like the narrow line of Attis’s mouth, the way she kept her gaze on her own hands, the tight grip Mare had on the master’s shoulder.

“Are we being reassigned?” Kier asked, and Grey knew him well enough to detect the palpable relief in his voice. After all, they’d been here, on the front against Luthar, for six months, and right on the border of Cleoc Strata for nearly a year before that. They were due an easy assignment.

“Not exactly,” Attis said. It took Grey a second to identify the emotion on the master’s face, but when she did, her chest felt very, very cold. Master Klara Attis, the most put-together of any commanding officers they’d yet faced, was terrified.

“Master,” Kier said, finally betraying the depths of his exhaustion. “I don’t mean to push, but in the last forty-eight hours, I have been stabbed and nearly died at least twice. I am tired. My Hand is tired. I have followed each instruction you have given me to the letter. The least I can ask of you is that you are forthcoming with our assignment.”

“I need your discretion. This assignment—the future of Scaela, the hopes of our military, the promise of a day without battle, they all rest on this. Do you understand the weight of what I am telling you, Captain?”

Kier made a small noise, a half-sigh. Grey interpreted it as one of his favorite lines, reserved for when he was ill and she asked him to do the bare minimum, like eat: I suffer and I suffer, and yet. And yet, you ask me to suffer still? She felt his pulse jump, ever so slightly, and she frowned at the master in front of them.

“Yes,” Kier said, resigned, because he could not accuse the master to her face of adding to his suffering. After all, what could they possibly do to

protect the future of Scaela?

Do you promise to let us go?

Grey wrestled with the memory like it was a physical attacker, pushing it away before it could take root. She set her jaw, clenched her teeth. She’d need to ask Leonie for a sleeping draft tonight. She couldn’t keep dreaming like this.

“What do you know of the Isle of Locke?”

A pause. Grey’s back went ramrod straight, and she had no doubt her

fingers were clenched on Kier’s shoulder tight enough to bruise. When Kier spoke next, his tone was even, cautious. “I was a child when the Isle was destroyed, Master. But my Hand and I are from a village on the eastern

coast—we know enough of it.”

“You remember its destruction, then.”

Grey bit the inside of her cheek. Kier said, “The air tasted like smoke for days, when it vanished.”

“I imagine it did,” Attis said, sweeping right past the trauma of the event. “Captain Seward, every nation has been searching for years for the lost heir to Locke, to no avail. Could you imagine the sheer power in Scaela if our own High Lord found Severin of Locke, if he restored it?”

Grey could imagine the sheer power. She worried that she was breaking Kier’s skin under his jacket. As if he could hear the thudding of her heart, he reached back with one hand, covertly hidden by the desk, and wrapped it around her thigh.

Perhaps it was the combination of Locke prickling in her ears, Kier’s near-death, and the warmth of his hand on her, but it only took that much for Grey to forget herself.

“No one could have survived that,” she said before she could think better of it.

A silence. Mare and Attis both regarded her like she was something left to rot on the battlefield for a good long while. “You mustn’t, Hand,” Attis said, raising one dark eyebrow. “I would expect more… discretion from one of your rank.”

Grey bit her tongue before she could lash out. Again. She stepped back half a pace, shaking off Kier’s hand.

“One does not get to our position,” Kier said, always diplomatic, even in the face of her sharp tongue, “by ignoring obvious truths, no matter how inconvenient.”

Master Attis did not look impressed. “Then you must know the truth of your mission. Captain Seward, Hand Captain Flynn, I’m trusting you with a lot. I know that you two may have committed an egregious error, and I will not investigate whether you are bound, because I need the kind of power you have for this mission. But if you refuse this quest, then I cannot guarantee that your precarious position will not be investigated.”

They were caught, and there was nothing they could do about it. Kier

rubbed his face, long-suffering as always. “I understand. And who is the asset?”

“The girl,” Attis said, “is Maryse of Locke, daughter of the last High Lady of the Isle.”

A sharp indrawn breath—Grey didn’t know if it was her or Kier, or both of them, because they knew the truth and neither of them could say it.

Under her hand, Kier was very, very still. His own hand snaked back again, gripping her thigh with a new ferocity.

“But Maryse of Locke is dead,” he said. “If anyone survived the death of the Isle, it is Severin. The boy. It must be the heir. He wrote to Scaelas after —”

“Maybe the letter was forged. After all, Severin Locke was never found,” Attis said.

Kier did not look at Grey, but he stiffened beneath her hand. “He didn’t want to be found. When excerpts were released, that much was clear. It can only be speculation.”

Attis waved a hand in dismissal. “It’s all speculation,” she said. “Yes, the High Lord did receive a letter, supposedly from the elder child—but what if it was the girl who survived? What if the letter was a fake? What if, all this time, we have been looking for the wrong one?”

“And what are we meant to do?” Kier asked, and Grey was so very grateful in that moment that he was the one responsible for responding.

“I expect you and your Hand to deliver Lady Maryse to the High Lord Scaelas, who will be waiting for you on the eastern coast. There he will reunite with his goddaughter and work with her to restore the Isle. You are to protect the girl on your journey and be at Scaelas’s disposal when you get there,” Attis said. “Unless that is too difficult a journey in your current state.”

The High Lord. They were to deliver the girl to the coast, the coast that haunted Grey always as her childhood home—and something more. The High Lord, Scaelas, probably now graying with age and changed by loss, but when she’d seen him last, he was— No. She refused to think of it, as if Mare and Attis could see right through her, could read her expression even as she fought to keep it placid.

If Kier let go of her now, she would come unmoored. “It’s not too much,” he said, like an absolute fool.

He insisted on coming back to their tent instead of the infirmary, and Grey was not in a position to protest. When they returned, there was a tray on her bed with a note from Leonie warning her what would happen if she didn’t take the time to eat. She sat, half catatonic, and unwrapped the bread, eating with mechanical precision. It took her almost a full minute to realize Kier had pulled his bag from the trunk at the foot of his cot and was unceremoniously shoving clothes into it.

“Hey, hey,” she said, abandoning the bread for a moment, grabbing his hand. “Attis didn’t say we were leaving now.”

He looked at her, confused. Nothing remained of the cut on his cheek, not even a scar, and she was proud of her work—though his nose was still a bit crooked.

“Grey,” he said, perplexed as ever. “We’re not going.”

She glanced at his bag, half-full, then back at him, wondering if she had finally, utterly lost it. It was bound to happen sometime—no surprise it had happened now.

“We’re leaving,” he said, looking back down at his pack, shoving in his shaving kit.

His words hit Grey like a punch in the stomach—like the punch she still owed the damn prisoner, whenever she found her. “Leaving?” she repeated, considering the idea that she had also lost understanding of common speech.

Kier straightened, huffing a breath, and it was something when he looked at her straight on like that. When she was a girl, she’d convinced herself that she valued him more than he valued her, and sometimes she still deferred to that line of thought—but then he looked at her in that way, the measure of devotion clear on his face, matched to her own, and it was all

moot anyway.

“Don’t make me say it.”

“Kier… are you deserting?”

He laughed, short and harsh, and the sound went right to her chest.

Reality zoomed in around her again, pounding like a migraine against the back of her eyes. “What other choice do we have?”

She blinked at him, waiting for an explanation. For the rest of the sentence. He stared back at her, just as shocked, and she realized that for possibly the first time, they very much weren’t on the same page.

“Where would you even go?”

“To the continent. Lindan, or Nisielle, or Arkun,” Kier said, completely serious. “Two travelers, unobtrusive… We can make our way to the south coast and hire a boat to the continent, like we should’ve done years ago.”

Her brain quite possibly stopped keeping up. Though Scaela was doomed to lose its power forever, though all the nations that made up Idistra were doomed, they were home. They were hers. She and Kier and Lot might’ve spoken about running when they were children, or in the early days of recovery after battle, but she couldn’t bear the thought of it now.

And they didn’t have the resources to escape.

“You can’t leave this behind,” she said mildly, keeping level to staunch her own panic, smoothing imaginary wrinkles from his shoulders. “We don’t have the money for that. Not by far.”

He caught her hand. She didn’t look at him, because if she did, that would be the final crack in her composure, and it would be over. She had the sudden, awful memory of digging around in his insides less than two days before—it was a miracle he stood in front of her now. It was a miracle

of her own making.

“I promised you,” Kier said.

“Promises don’t—”

“I swore on my brother’s grave that you’d never have to go back there, Grey,” he said.

“I would never ask you to give up everything.”

“You wouldn’t have to,” he said, his voice taking on a new urgency. “If we go at nightfall, then we have time…”

She wanted to throw something. She was obtusely, immediately angry, the flames of it crawling from her stomach up her throat and into her mouth, and she wanted to pull down this tent and this entire camp and cast it into the sea. At the end of the day, all Grey was was an endless well of anger with nowhere to put it all.

“We’re not leaving,” she snapped, turning away. She shrugged out of her cloak in protest, as if that would keep him here, draping it over her trunk, relishing the prickle of cold on her bare arms.

“Then what? We’re going on this fool’s errand? What happens when we

get there?”

“I don’t know,” Grey said, desperate.

“When Locke fell,” Kier said, “they found the sister of the High Lady in Nestria and drowned her and her three boys in the bay in an attempt to restore the Isle. They dismembered the bodies to see if their blood or flesh would resurrect it. Killed the servants, slaughtered the entire household.”

“Kier—”

“In Eprain, a cousin. Burned as an offering to the old gods. In Luthar, they got a child from one of the uncles of the dead High Lady to bring the power back. They killed the man, and then the child, when they proved useless. Across Idistra, hundreds of boys fitting the vaguest description of Severin of Locke were kidnapped in attempts to resurrect the Isle and control the power it once held. Do you need me to catalog them all? Every single remaining bit of Locke’s blood was hunted, tortured, trialed to find out how to bring the Isle back.”

How much of that was my fault? Yours? Lot’s? She pushed the thought away, her anger mounting. “Scaelas never killed one of them, Kiernan,” she said. “He would never.”

“But he cannot protect them. How many times have you told me that?

There is no way to know, no way to trust anyone else, because that could be our very undoing. If we take this girl to Scaelas, she will be identified, and what? They’ll try to use her to resurrect the Isle and find that they cannot?

Or worse, someone else will kidnap her and kill her trying to bring Locke back?”

“That is not my responsibility,” Grey said tightly. “When she’s out of our hands—”

“When she’s out of our hands,” Kier said, “they will know she is not truly the blood of Locke.”

Grey knew what he was doing: after all, every barb he threw at her now, she had supplied him with herself.

“Grey,” he said. “The only reason you are safe now is because everyone is certain you are dead. I’m just trying to—”

“Trying to save me?” she snapped, turning back to face him. His cheeks blazed with color, his eyes alight with anger. They fought so rarely that the effect was something to be savored. She wondered with a fierce swell of desperation if this was what he looked like in other fits of passion, then pushed it away immediately—that was a thread she couldn’t bear to untangle.

He reached out, tugging her against him. It was awkward with the pallet between them, banging against her shins. She caught herself with both hands against his chest. His hand cupped the back of her skull, nearly big enough to cradle her from ear to ear. He lowered his mouth so his lips were against the shell of her ear when he spoke the name she’d only said to him a handful of times, always under the cover of darkness.

“What will we do,” Kier said, “if they discover that you are Maryse of Locke?”

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She has my eyes and her mother’s power, and she will not stop screaming, no matter what any of us do. We are all, predictably, besotted.

Letter from Isaak Masidic Locke to Genevieve Masidic, his mother, 8 years Ante-Destruction (AD)

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