The Second Death of Locke — Chapter no 9

nine

HEY SET OUT AN hour later, moving quietly out of the far side of camp,T heading north. It was the only instruction Attis had given them, besides Stay alive and deliver the girl: north first, to put distance between them and the encampment; then east, toward the mountains and the sea. Anything else, she told them stiffly, was up to Kier.

Later, as he’d adjusted the straps of her bag, he’d met Grey’s eye.

Deferring to her judgment, as usual.

“Follow Attis’s directions for now,” she said quietly. Kier nodded.

Now, they trudged on, off the main roads, on a small path that farmers from this area once used to bring their wares to the port, when the port belonged to Scaela. It was overgrown, but at least they were not up to their knees in mud.

Grey barely knew herself out of her black-trimmed Hand’s cloak or the armor of the Scaelan army. She would not admit it to anyone, but she missed the familiar weight of the leather, the scuffed armor broken in by ages of sweat and battle. Now, she wore a loose-fitting rough-spun shirt and a leather vest buckled over her stomach—the closest thing she could find to armor without actually reaching for her breastplate and helm. The trousers were black, just nearly too thin for the season, but at least she had her well- worn boots, and they were dry for once. She kept her knives on her belt and her sword across her back, like the merchants wore them. It wasn’t unusual for travelers in these parts to be armed: with the military’s attention diverted elsewhere, there was no one to keep the paths or the main roads clear of bandits.

She and Kier walked in front, followed by Ola and Brit on either side of

the girl, then Eron at the back. The prisoner was out of her dirty travel clothes and wearing a new thick gray dress and too-big coat. Glancing at her, Grey was reminded of the uncanny feeling of seeing her on the battlefield, wearing Kier’s armor; how much she then looked like a child.

Attis had handed something over to Kier upon their departure with a quiet word, which Kier explained to the others as he opened his hands to reveal cuffs.

“They’ll hurt,” he told them and the girl as he strapped them to her wrists with unshaking hands. He didn’t seem to care that she had stabbed him only days before. “A constant flow of magic needs to run through them —Grey and I will take the first shift, then Ola and Brit. But if she strays too

far, they’ll do some damage.”

Ola had winced. Grey had not.

After the cuffs were secure, Grey had looked the girl straight in the face and said, “I’ll need your name.”

“Maryse,” she said, her voice high and clear. Grey had not quite been able to figure out her accent. It had taken Grey herself months, when she first settled in Scaela, to eradicate any traces of the burr of her own, but the prisoner’s accent bore no trace of the Isle.

“Something else,” Grey said, flippant.

Only then did the other girl look at her, ice-chip eyes sad and empty. “I suppose it doesn’t matter.”

Grey gritted her teeth. “It matters to us,” Ola said. She glanced at Kier, and seeing no sign of protest, she took a step forward. She pulled the girl’s coat tighter around her shoulders (did no one remember that she’d just stabbed Kier? Was Grey the only one who carried that?) and wrapped a scarf about her neck. “What would you like to be called?”

“Sela,” the girl said finally.

So Sela she was, and now they walked.

“So,” Brit said, not too long after they left Mecketer, loud enough that they all could hear. Grey startled, already lost in her own thoughts. “What are our roles, Captain?”

Kier glanced up at Brit, then at Grey, then back at Brit. He seemed just as lost as Grey felt. “What?”

“Our roles. Responsibilities. What are we in charge of?”

“The prisoner,” Grey said flatly, ignoring the frightened look Sela aimed in her direction. “We’re in charge of the prisoner, and making sure she doesn’t die. And that we don’t either.”

The group flattened a little, forming more of a line than a pod. “It’s not a true quest if we don’t have our own roles.” Brit smirked at Grey, their bright blue eyes sparkling. Next to them, Ola rolled her own eyes. Grey had noted Ola’s power early on when the pairing had joined Kier’s company, and in turn, Brit’s humor. She was never really certain what to do with people who were funny rather than just bitter, self-deprecating, or sarcastic—they always left her feeling a little on the back foot, like she wasn’t sure if they could genuinely be trusted.

She wasn’t sure if Brit could be trusted.

“It’s not a quest,” Grey said. “It’s a mission.”

But Kier glanced down the line, then at Grey, then at the girl, and Grey realized he was actually going along with this. “Well,” he said, considering.

“Flynn is our healer, for obvious reasons. That, at least, was assigned. And I’m in charge. What other roles are there?”

A pause.

Brit elbowed Ola in the ribs. “I can… navigate?” Ola offered, uncertain.

“That would mean handing over the maps,” Kier said.

“If I’m navigating, you don’t have to worry about guiding us in the wrong direction.”

“Kier is already good at directions,” Grey said, hoping to put an end to this ridiculous discussion. They didn’t need jobs—they just needed to survive. “And everyone else can just be very good at listening.”

“I’ll care for the weapons,” Brit said. They opened their coat, revealing belts of blades that shone in the sunlight and dark metal axes and thin bars of raw metal. Grey stopped in the middle of the road, shocked despite herself.

“Where did you even get all of that?” Kier asked. “Attis didn’t…”

Brit shrugged. “I made them. I’m a materialist. A metalworker.” Which Grey knew, of course—she knew the affinities of everyone in their company. But she hadn’t realized what Brit was capable of.

She and Kier exchanged a long look. I told you Ola was powerful, Grey tried to convey. They could not have done all of that without a strong well,

and I knew she was good, and I told you so.

This mission is fucked, Kier’s expression said, his lips pressed tightly together. Finally, he sighed, raising his eyes skyward. “Okay. Ola, you navigate. Brit, you’re in charge of weaponry. Fastria?”

Eron looked up. He was quieter than the others, and always had been— when he was promoted to be one of Kier’s officers, Grey had questioned it at first. But whenever he did open his mouth, it was like he always said the right thing, at exactly the right time. She’d wondered sometimes what he would be like if she was actually in his confidence. Perhaps, on this mission, she would find out.

No. She caught herself—they were not here to become friends, or confidantes. She sent a pulse of annoyance down the tether to Kier, hoping

he’d wrap up this foolishness soon.

“I’ll cook, I guess,” Eron said.

Kier raised an eyebrow. “Are you good at cooking?”

“Guess we’ll find out,” Eron said. “I’ve always wanted to try.”

Kiernan, Grey thought at her mage with all possible force.

“And what about me?” Sela asked. Badly timed—Grey turned a glare on her. To her right, Kier sighed.

“Your job is to listen,” Kier said. A beat. “And not piss Flynn off.”

“Not piss Flynn off any further,” Brit amended. It was the only sensible thing they’d said since the retinue left Mecketer.

“Don’t lose focus,” Grey said. She nodded to Kier, and they re-formed their pod around the girl, falling back into silence.

The signs of failure should’ve been obvious, because it was Eron who questioned the mission first, to her surprise—Eron, who was usually much more considered.

He caught up to the pair of them when they were safely in the woods.

Eron cleared his throat, looking between the two of them. “Captains? A word?”

Grey and Kier exchanged a glance. Kier nodded. “Yes, Fastria?”

“It’s confidential,” Eron said, rubbing the palm of one hand with the thumb of the other. A nervous tic if Grey had ever seen one.

Kier pulled a trickle of power from her, then drew a sound shield around

the three of them. “We’re protected,” he said, his voice going fuzzy for the barest moment.

“Right.” Eron took a deep breath. “The prisoner. She’s meant to be the heir to Locke. But isn’t Maryse… dead?”

Grey winced. “She’s meant to be,” she said. She did not like her own name in so many mouths after so long, distorted by the Scaelan accent.

“Severin lived,” Eron said, pressing forward. “He even wrote to Scaelas.

Fled to the continent. No one has ever suspected Maryse of surviving, given the proof. So why are we on a mission to the death to protect her?”

“It is believed, due to recent discoveries,” Kier said shortly, “that the letter from Severin was a forgery.”

He sounded like that, Grey thought grimly, because they knew it was.

“We are to protect the girl and deliver her safely. If Scaelas believes she is the heir to Locke, then we are not to question it,” he went on.

A pause. A beat. Eron ran a hand through his close-cropped hair— another fidget. Perhaps he, like Grey, wore his anxiety in his inability to stay still. “Yes, Captain. Very well.”

“Thank you for your honesty, Eron,” Kier said, the dismissal clear as anything. When Eron fell back, Kier aimed a long, telling look in Grey’s direction.

The truth was, there was a letter. The first time Scaelas’s forces came to Leota, searching all the children for any trace of survivors, Grey was so ill with the pox she was nearly unrecognizable. Imarta had carried her to meet the soldiers, showing her face for only the barest of moments before they demanded she take the contagious girl away. It was a lucky thing she had been far too sick to tether.

The second time the soldiers came, weeks later, she was struck with such unbelievable terror she could hardly move. If they saw her, they would know. If they tethered to her, they would know.

She poured these fears into Kier, who summoned Lot down to their protected cove by the sea. Lot paced as Grey spoke, telling him of Severin’s death, of her own identity, of the destruction of Locke.

Except buried in all of that, she kept one final lie.

“Severin,” she said, finishing. “He was the heir to the Isle. He was a well, too. I was just… the extra. A backup.” She let Lot comfort her as she cried, ignoring the seed of guilt that grew in her stomach. She watched

Kier’s face as he heard the lie, believed it, swallowed it down.

Finally, Lot asked, “Do you want to go to Scaelas?”

“No,” she said, voice cracking. “I don’t know if it’s safe.”

He nodded then, a decision made. He was twelve, nearly thirteen, and to Kier and Grey, he was the smartest person they’d ever known.

“Then here’s what we’ll do,” he said. “Grape, go and get parchment.

Good parchment. Kier, bring me Ma’s sealing wax. I will write a letter to the High Lord saying I’m your brother, asking him to leave me alone. That way, it looks like Severin survived, and they’ll stop looking for you. Maybe they’ll take the letter to heart and stop searching entirely.”

Grey blinked at him. “How can we be sure they’ll believe it?”

“Do you know your brother’s true name?”

True names are for Hands and husbands. But Severin was dead, so what did it even matter?

“Yes,” she said. Then, chewing her lip, “And diplomatic symbols. I know the one for my mother’s line. It will get the letter to Scaelas faster.”

“Then Scaelas will know it, too, and he’ll believe it.”

“Yes. I can show you how to make it,” Grey allowed. “And Sev’s signature.”

It was the only good option, and they couldn’t think of another. So Grey fetched parchment and writing instruments, and Kier got the sealing wax.

Lot wrote the letter, because he was the oldest and his handwriting was the nicest, and Grey taught him Sev’s true name and signature, then drew the lines of Locke’s symbol under the forgery.

After, Lot decided it would be too close to send the letter from Leota, so the trio packed a single bag and slipped out of the Seward house after dark.

They walked inland all night, ducking into ditches and behind bushes when they saw others on the road.

An hour after dawn, they reached a minuscule village. Lot went alone to send the letter. When he returned, he took Grey’s hand and they made the long walk back. On their return, they found Pia and Laurella and Imarta angrier than they ever had been before. Imarta left the punishments to Pia and Lo, because she was barely more than a girl herself, and she knew little of raising children.

That night, they went to bed grim-faced and silent, holding their secret, mad at one another and themselves in the way of children caught

misbehaving—but it was worth it. The plan worked, in some ways. After that day, no one went looking for Maryse again.

It failed in some ways, too—because they never stopped looking for Severin.

After a few hours, Ola moved up to the front of the group, trading places with Grey, so she and Kier could mutter and argue over the map. They came to a place where the path ran parallel to the wood. Kier turned, finding Grey’s eye, and she nodded. Kier led them into the wood. The route through the underbrush was too narrow to walk three abreast, so Brit and Grey let Eron and the prisoner go ahead and followed behind. Grey waited, tense— she was certain Brit would break the silence between them soon enough.

She was unsurprised when they finally cracked. “What will you do with your six months of leave?” they asked.

So Attis hadn’t told the others about Kier’s proposition, what he and Grey would get. Grey filed that away for later chewing.

“Sleep,” she said. She was still feeling irritable, but also a bit bad about how sharply she had spoken earlier. A conversation with Brit would not kill her—and perhaps it would help her uncover what lay under their humor.

Brit snorted. “That would be something. And then a new assignment… Can’t say I’m sad to go. That place was a shithole.”

Grey wrinkled her nose, stepping delicately over a tree root. The last thing she needed was to sprain her ankle on the first day. “I’m just glad to

be out of the mud,” she admitted.

“Where were you before?”

“Karlot. Then Orakey before that. We were at Grislar on our first

assignment.”

“Ah. Familiar territory.”

Grey shrugged. She’d never much liked Grislar—it was too close to Locke. She’d grown up near the coast, always aware that Locke was there, but in Grislar she had to look at the place where it had once been. They were higher on the cliffs, with the camp built backing the sea, so sometimes she’d wake up to the smell of phantom smoke in the air. It was a sensation all of the wells claimed to have, looking uneasily over their shoulders as they discussed it over bowls of mealy porridge at breakfast.

The other wells, she realized soon enough, did not hear the screams that came along with the smoke.

That was the assignment when Kier had promised her, after night after night of nightmares, that they wouldn’t go back.

She glanced up, saw the back of his head. She didn’t resent him for it, for the fact that he couldn’t keep his promises. Perhaps she just had to stop asking him for things he couldn’t control.

“It’s also a shithole,” she said apologetically. “Or at least it was when we were there, and I doubt the situation has improved.”

Brit sighed, looking up through the trees. “My first was Lanavin.”

Grey quirked an eyebrow. “Oh?” She’d heard of it: no one wanted to go to Lanavin. In fact, it wasn’t unheard of for soldiers to be sent there strictly for punishment. She herself had been threatened with it more than once.

“How was that?”

Brit simply looked at her. There was no use speaking of the blood when they were out of it.

“Here’s hoping Grislar has improved,” they said.

Grey snorted. “Doubtful.”

In a lower tone—though it didn’t matter, Grey thought, because Ola and Kier had moved from conversing over the map to arguing over the map, and Eron was now arm in arm with their prisoner, quietly asking her questions she didn’t answer about her schooling—Brit asked, “What do you know of Locke?”

She had to stop jumping every time someone mentioned it. She had to get used to it. Not in public, but they’d want to talk about it within their retinue. There was no way Ola and Brit and Eron would not have a single word to say about their mission. Perhaps she didn’t trust them, but she had to figure out a way to dance around the topic all the same.

“Not much,” she lied. “I was a child when it happened.”

“But you and the captain—you’re from the seaside, aren’t you?”

“We are. Kier remembers better than me.”

“Who do you think did it?”

Grey raised her eyes skyward, looking at the dappled sunlight streaming through the trees. Even after all these years, that was the question. No one knew how, exactly, the island had vanished—but the overarching theory was that it hadn’t been unprovoked. All that the few witnesses of its

destruction reported was this: a ship was spotted by one of Scaela’s port guards, gliding across the bay toward Locke from an unknown origin. Then, an hour later, it appeared that most of the Isle was on fire. Just as Scaelas was sending his own ships to its aid, there was an explosion, and when the smoke cleared, the Isle was gone.

Evaporated or submerged, it didn’t matter—Locke vanished that day, and no trace of it had been seen since. No bodies. No debris. No survivors.

Just a blank span of sea in the Bay of Locke, with nothing remaining of the Obsidian Isle and its thousand-year legacy of power.

Besides her.

“I hope,” she said, “we never know. It doesn’t matter anyways. Locke is gone.”

“She might know,” Brit said quietly, their eyes cutting to Sela.

Grey shrugged. “Maybe.”

Brit must’ve read her discomfort, even if they did not know the reason.

“The captain,” they said, switching directions. “You’re from the same town?”

This train of conversation was easier to swallow. “Nearly the same

house.”

“What was he like as a boy?”

Grey considered this. She didn’t usually talk to mages other than Kier unless she had to, and she certainly hadn’t since Kier had been raised into command. It wasn’t that she disliked them—but she saw him, how he felt when someone much older than him pushed back, the strain it took for him to claim some semblance of authority. She’d felt it too, but with wells, power was more a sign of authority than age, and she’d always been quietly capable. She was respected because she had power. For all of Kier’s miraculous triumphs on the battlefield with that power, he’d had to fight for every bit of respect he’d garnered.

But this was different. For one thing, Brit wasn’t digging for ammunition to use against him, which Grey might have otherwise suspected —that they were looking for the subject of a joke, or a way to tease him.

They already respected Kier. And they couldn’t have been that much older than him either, so it wasn’t that.

Let go, Grey chided herself. Not everyone is trying to hurt you. But her gaze flicked to the prisoner, the girl, Sela, and she bit her tongue.

“The same, in some ways,” she said. Then, before she could stop herself, “He was always kind. Even to me. Even to his brother. Even when he didn’t have to be.”

“Mm.” Brit walked in silence for a few paces, long enough that Grey figured they’d ceased the need to talk and could continue the rest of the day’s journey in relative quiet. “I think I’ve forgotten how to be kind.”

Grey looked at them as if seeing them for the first time, taking in the shorn shimmer of their pale hair, traced through by and growing oddly around scars that had long since healed. She understood their humor now, despite herself. It was a mask over the anger they all carried, the fear. It was its own kind of armor.

She glanced at the four ahead, at Ola’s laughing face—she and Kier had finished their argument with some success—and the prisoner’s drawn, angry mouth. She flexed her hand, remembering the feeling of the girl’s hair in her grip. “I don’t think I ever knew,” she confessed.

It was easy to be lulled into a false sense of security, to forget it wasn’t just an adventure, especially now that she had warmed somewhat to Brit’s unfailing optimism and noted how it spread so easily to the others.

The Scaelan south was not much to look at, but in comparison to Grey’s memories of Locke, it was verdant and green. They would reach the foothills of the Aloducan peaks in a few days’ time, according to Kier’s calculations, but for now, they were cutting through miles of forests interspersed with rolling hills of green grasses and grazing sheep, past stands of closely crowded trees. They were careful to avoid the villages, choosing farmers’ fields and bits of woodland to travel through instead.

The night came too quickly in the wood, and Kier paused in a small clearing, just big enough for the six of them, and declared, “This will do.”

“No town?” Eron asked. Grey glanced around at the ferns creeping into the clearing, the shady canopy of birch and ash that hung above. It wasn’t muddy, which made it immediately better than Mecketer.

“Not tonight,” Kier said. “I want to stay in the wild a bit longer.”

They unpacked their bedrolls and Eron set to food preparation, using Brit and Ola to heat the pot of thick reconstituted gruel without lighting a fire. He whistled as he stirred, rifling through the supply kit and adding a

mysterious combination of things to the pot. Grey watched with resignation as the gruel turned a frightening shade of gray, speckled with unknown herbs.

“Are you sure this was a good idea?” she muttered to Kier. “Leaving Eron in charge of feeding us?”

“I refuse to be the one to break his heart,” Kier whispered back. But he did go to his own pack and slipped her a bit of dried fruit when no one was looking.

“We’ll take the first watch,” he said, louder, so the others could hear.

Grey turned away, pretending to search through her pack for another knife as she chewed on the leathery strips of apple and apricot. “Ola, can you and

Brit handle the cuffs for a while?”

“Of course, Captain,” Ola said.

“Kier,” he corrected. They all paused, glancing at him uneasily. Kier shifted his weight. “We’re not in a position for titles. So, Kier. Just Kier, or

Seward, if you have to.”

“Right. Sorry.”

Once she had swallowed the last of her haul, Grey checked that the others were thoroughly occupied as she retrieved her healing kit. “Sela?”

The girl looked up from watching Eron stir. Grey felt Kier’s gaze on her, and the question within it.

“Leonie said you have some injuries in need of care,” she said, clipped as ever. She was investigating, and she would do her job to the letter—it didn’t mean she had to be nice about it. “Ola, could you restrain the girl?”

“Is that necessary?” Ola asked.

Grey stood, kit in one hand, eyes hard as flint. “Need I remind you,” she said, leaning into the authority she so rarely used, “that she nearly killed Kier?” Was she the only one who remembered this?

“Flynn,” Kier sighed.

But Grey held firm. Leonie didn’t know who this girl was—and until Grey did, she would not let her guard down. There was no reason for someone to just pretend to be Locke with no reason for it.

“She has the cuffs,” Eron said.

“Doesn’t stop her from attacking me,” Grey pointed out.

“I won’t hurt you,” Sela said quietly. Grey didn’t bother with a response —she’d like to see the girl try.

But Ola only held Grey’s gaze for a moment longer, then went in her bag for a length of rope.

“In front of her, please,” Grey said. Her shoulder was probably still sore, and that was a mercy she could grant her. When Sela was bound, Grey went to her and hauled her up by her good arm. “I’ll take her for some privacy.

Kier, a light?”

She felt the thin trickle of power and then the light flared cool and blue in Kier’s hands. “Need backup?” he asked.

She could tell from his look that he was displeased about her tying Sela up, but he wasn’t going to say anything about it in front of the others. She

didn’t want to hear it alone, either.

“No.”

She led the prisoner a little ways away to the edge of the clearing, still within open view of the camp. She nodded to a fallen tree trunk thick with moss. “There,” she said, “please.”

The girl lowered herself to the trunk. Kier’s magelight was, as always, a neat piece of work: Grey could see, and the girl probably could too, but no one more than a few feet outside of its warm glow would be able to catch it.

She felt the threads of magic within it, his work tidy as ever. She set the magelight next to Sela and crouched in front of her.

Leonie had left detailed accounts of her examination. “I should put you in a sling,” Grey murmured, looking through the notes, then up at the girl.

Sela was small in stature, fine-boned—she looked too breakable to be a soldier. Grey suspected that she hadn’t been conscripted at all before she was taken captive. “Let me check for swelling.”

She eased the coat off the girl’s shoulders—awkward when Sela’s hands were bound, but she wasn’t compromising on that point just yet—and probed with her fingertips, pausing only for a moment when she heard

Sela’s quick indrawn breath.

“It’ll still be tender,” Grey said.

“Can you give me anything for the pain?” Sela asked, surprising Grey with her trust. Grey could just as easily slip her poison. “Polla weed?

Something like that?”

Grey blinked, hesitating before she caught herself. “Yes,” she said after a moment. “I’ll make you a solution when we get back to the fire.”

She let go of Sela’s shoulder and pulled the coat back up, then worked

through the rest of her injuries carefully, applying antiseptic salve and a new dressing to the wound on her shin, rebandaging the broken skin on the knuckles of one hand. Sela was quiet the whole time, her heart too fast in her chest.

“Done,” Grey said, sitting back on her heels.

Sela’s head snapped up. She was on guard, tense, and probably for good reason. Grey had, after all, threatened to kill her.

Something was shifting inside of her, something she didn’t like at all and would not acknowledge to Kier or any of the others. Sela’s eyes were wide and blue, her chin sharp, her face round and young. The severe cut of her hair did nothing to make her appear any older—if anything, she looked like a girl in need of protection.

Grey sighed. She untied the restraints and moved the girl’s arm carefully, refashioning the rope into a sling. She could hold a grudge with the best of them, but cruelty didn’t suit her.

“Do not give me any reason to distrust you,” she said, annoyed with herself. “You’ll be tied right back up again before you can blink.”

“Understood,” Sela said, her voice very small.

Grey nodded and hauled the girl back up. At camp, Eron had finished cooking the beige abomination and was spooning it into a line of collapsible bowls. Grey stopped to mix some of Leonie’s pain-reducing solution with water and handed it to Sela. After, she took the bowl she was given with a quick nod and thanks, then settled against a tree at the edge of camp with her food, the magelight and the stack of Leonie’s notes on all of their previous injuries. If she was to be the team medic, it was good for her to be informed.

It only took her two mouthfuls to decide that making Eron the cook was a terrible idea, but it was too late to change things now. Grey leaned back, setting her bowl aside for now, listening to the nighttime sounds of the forest: the rustling of small animals in the ferns and brush, a creek babbling nearby. Against her tree, the air smelled of autumn: leaves decaying into rich soil, and the barest bite of winter on the wind.

The others chatted idly in soft tones while they ate: Eron and Brit compared notes on previous assignments; Ola held a one-sided conversation with the silent girl about a pastry shop in Grislar. Kier was off on the perimeter watch, tethered to Grey but not pulling any magic since they’d

switched with Brit and Ola for Sela’s cuffs, the connection dormant but still comforting.

She flipped through Leonie’s notes. There was nothing dramatic: Eron had suffered a concussion three months before, so he had an alert for further head wounds. Ola’s left arm had been nearly cleaved off in a previous assignment and the muscle still ached sometimes; Grey made a note to apply a heat compress when they reached the next town. Brit had also had a concussion five months ago, a broken ankle two assignments ago, and recurring but treatable kidney stones due to a run-in with an internal mage on the frontline near Nestria. Then there was Kier: a patchwork of so many injuries over the years that she’d lost count. There was no point in reading them: she knew them all by memory.

She went back to the girl’s papers, searching for Leonie’s report about healed injuries. It was short, perfunctory: none. Nothing. No sign of previous injury. Not even an interesting scar. Sela certainly hadn’t been fighting before: that empty injury report would be nigh impossible if she had. And Leonie was thorough—she’d even noted Kier’s eyebrow scar, even though that had been acquired in childhood.

Grey chewed on her lip, flicking back to another page: Leonie’s notes on Sela’s general well-being. She ran her finger over the writing, careful not to smudge the ink. She read the line again, Missing third molar, no sign of surgery, and her tongue immediately traced the place where her own back molars had come in—and been removed—only a couple of years before.

Further down, Leonie noted that she’d employed help from a bone mage to make sure nothing had been broken. There, she’d written, Humeral head unfused, and included a diagram.

It stirred a memory within Grey, of one of her worst days as a healer.

She had been called out of her bed and taken to a back room in the fortress full of tables laid with bones. There, the lead healer of the camp had asked for her help: they’d found the remains in a village nearby, the flesh picked away by scavengers. It was her job to determine how many of the bones belonged to children, make an assessment of the sex of the assorted bodies and find any other nuances in the remains, in the hopes that relatives could be informed. They had worked for hours trying to line the bodies up, Grey’s mind clouded with the progression of bones and how they grew in the body until she could barely think of anything else.

She sat now staring at nothing until her eyes went dry with strain. She stared until someone nudged her on the shoulder and she looked up to find Eron standing over her.

“You should finish eating,” he said kindly. “Do you want to join the ca — Kier on the first watch?”

She fussed with the papers, putting them in order before she buried them at the bottom of her kit. “Yeah, I have to be awake if he’s on watch—can’t siphon without me and all,” she said. Eron probably knew quite a bit about mages and wells, but not being one himself, she wasn’t sure how aware he was of the technicalities. It was true that a normal mage couldn’t draw on their well if they were sleeping, but with Kier bound to her, that left another loophole. She got up, knees popping, and took the med kit back to her bedroll.

The others had finished their food and were settling in for the night.

Grey should’ve made more of an effort to talk, to get to know them—but this wasn’t a mission for friendship.

They’d arranged their bedrolls in a haphazard formation with Sela at the center. The girl was already down, lying on her uninjured shoulder, eyes closed but not asleep. Brit and Ola were on either side of her, angled in, with Eron at her head.

“Everyone feeling okay before I head off on watch?” Grey asked. She kept her head low as she searched her pack, coming up with the stub of a pencil and a ragged notebook she’d purchased in a mountain village three assignments ago.

“Mmph,” Brit muttered, burying their face in the jumble of a coat they were using as a pillow.

“Would love a cup of tea,” Ola said, one arm thrown over her face to block out what little glow emanated from the dimming magelight.

“Fuck off,” Grey said kindly. She pressed her hand on the magelight to take the power back into herself, evaporating the glow, then set off toward the perimeter, where Kier lurked, pausing on the edge of camp to scribble.

She found him perched on a stump, worrying at the hilt of a knife as he stared into the darkness. She slipped him a mug of gruel and the note she’d written. “I’ll take care of the other side,” she said. “Sharp pull when you need me. Pass and switch whenever.”

Kier winced around his first sip of stodgy porridge. She should’ve

watered it down. “God. Three weeks of this?”

“Two if we’re lucky.”

“We won’t be.” They never were.

“It’s your fault,” Grey muttered, “for allowing them to treat it as a quest.”

Kier cast her a wounded look. “If it gives them the morale to survive?

I’m not taking it back.”

She didn’t bother responding. She moved quietly through the perimeter of the camp, her eyes soft and searching in the darkness. It had taken her a while to adjust to the forests of Scaela. The Isle of Locke was a scrabbly, mountainous thing, half cliff and sea spray. The trees that grew there were sparse and tall, so she could see her brother even halfway across the old patch of growth they called the Ghostwood, which separated the fortress from the Isle’s villages. Severin, seven years older than her and barely more than a boy when he died, used to take her into the largest of the villages when they had time away from tutors and lessons. She remembered holding his hand as they made their way through the scant forest, listening to the scream of the wind (on Locke, the wind was always screaming) as Sev tried his best to convince her they wouldn’t be eaten by ghosts. Sometimes they’d go off the trail, into the trees, all the way past the little creek to the circular clearing, climbing over the ruins of the temple that lurked on the cliff’s edge. That was where all Lockes were buried, all the way back as far as they went, all the way to the first well.

It hurts my stomach, Grey, then Maryse, always said when they went there. She didn’t like to go in, didn’t like the feeling of a cavern opening all the way inside of her, like it would turn her inside out and swallow her up.

It’s nice, Sev said. He liked to raise flowers there, when they went, and little saplings that bent to him. It was the only place on the Isle that she could remember being rife with color, from Sev’s flowers. Everything else was unchanging, steely gray, from the sky to the stone of the cliffs to the angry expanse of the sea.

Far off in the distance, depending on where they were on the Isle, they could see Cleoc Strata or Scaela or Luthar or Eprain. There was only one bit, far up in the highest reaches of the Barrens, the part of the Isle uninhabited and covered by rocky cliffs and thin trees, where they could look out and see nothing but sea.

That’s where I want to go, Sev said.

Where?

Anywhere but here.

She hadn’t realized, when she was only a girl, how difficult it had been for Severin. In the tradition of the Isle, the heir to the title and its power would not be declared publicly until all children in consideration were fully grown. Until that came to pass, all eligible children were kept on the Isle for their own protection, apart from closely guarded diplomatic journeys. With seven years separating Grey and her brother, he had a long time to wait before he could officially either take up the role of Locke or leave the Isle and its customs behind for her to rule.

They never made it that far. The heir to the Isle was never revealed. On the mainland, it was assumed that Severin was the true heir, that he would inherit; after all, in the rest of Idistra, inheritance followed the right of primogeniture.

In Leota, there hadn’t been much more in the way of forests. Cliffs overlooked the stony beach, and the rest was seagrass and scrubby old rock.

She remembered the long ride to the training camps, her arm pressed to Kier’s in the convoy as they wound toward the mountains, further from Locke than she’d ever been before. They stopped to stretch their legs and they were in the middle of a wood, trees stretching on either side and high above, so thick and dense that she worried they’d all fall in on her.

But now she’d been everywhere, seen every terrain Scaela had to offer.

Forests were no longer unfamiliar, and she found she liked them. There was something peaceful here that she’d never found by the sea—she could move through the trees without her heart in her throat.

For years, she looked at every single view, forcing away that awful thought that Severin had never gotten to see any of it. That he died only really knowing the Isle.

Grey eased into the monotony of the watch and the pain of her own unceasing guilt, scanning the forest ahead, moving every so often. Her sword was drawn, but there was no need to use it.

When her joints were just beginning to ache, she heard a stirring in the wood. She searched for the source and saw Kier cutting through the brush before her. He slipped the note back to her, stub of graphite wrapped inside.

“Switch,” he said. Grey nodded and moved away. At her new post, she

checked the note and frowned.

The girl’s shoulder joint is unfused

MEANING? EXPLAIN LIKE I’M A CHILD

There was no point in saying she’d talked him through this process hundreds of times before purely out of boredom. Kier had not lived her life, her training: he had not been brought the bones of lost villages like she had; he had never been asked if there were children among the dead.

Twice more in the deep hours of night, they switched positions and notes. When Grey’s eyes were heavy, she gripped the tether between them and sent two pulses of exhausted power in Kier’s direction. She felt an answering two pulses and turned back to camp.

He caught her just outside the clearing and handed her the note. She skimmed over it.

Like a child: shoulder ball fuses to arm bone. Full fusion happens in late teens. The girl has too big a gap. Her bones are too young.

WHEN DID L GO?

16 yrs

IT’S ALMOST YOUR BIRTHDAY

She looked up at him, gaze steely. “That’s not the point.”

Kier shrugged. He took the note back, and with a fine twist of his fingers, the paper burned in a quick, flameless burst and crumbled to ash.

“She was probably a baby when Locke disappeared, if she was alive at all,” Kier said quietly. “You got all of this from, what? Bones?”

“Mm.”

He sighed.

“To be discussed,” she said, turning back toward camp.

“To be shared?”

Grey hesitated. “Not yet.”

She followed his tracks through the darkness back to camp. He roused Ola and Brit while she stretched out on her bedroll. The rough-spun shirt

she wore was uncomfortable, but she’d deal: they each only had space for one other change of clothes in their packs, so she wouldn’t switch until they had the time and means to properly wash.

Sela and Eron slept soundly, Eron snoring just slightly. After a moment of consideration, Grey abandoned her own bedroll and slipped into Ola’s recently vacated pile of blankets instead, putting herself closer to Sela in case the girl tried to escape in the middle of the night. Years of training had made Grey a light sleeper. Plus, Ola’s blankets were already warm.

Kier mirrored her, slipping into Brit’s bedroll and turning on his side to

look at Grey over Sela’s head.

She looked back.

The corner of his mouth quirked up and she tried not to read too much into it, first because it was half scar tissue, after all; and second because they’d gone to sleep like this every night for years, face-to-face and sometimes closer, though never with someone between them like Sela was now. Maybe it was because they were out of camp and only three weeks of gruel and hiking stood between them and the rest of their lives, but she ached for him to reach out and push the hair out of her face like he sometimes did when they were on the edge of sleep, as if he couldn’t bear to drift off without seeing her face.

Somehow, in the indeterminate haze of Eron’s snoring and Sela’s measured breathing and the liquid hazel of Kier’s gaze, Grey fell asleep.

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The situation in Idistra has become beyond unstable. It’s their fault for destroying the very root of their power—I cannot think of a single other nation that would do something so unbelievably foolish. I will be surprised if any magic survives this war as the nation states continue to cannibalize.

It’s been years, and there’s been no sign of that boy—chances are he’s either far from here, or dead.

Nowhere in this damned island feels safe. Our own lord is still impulsive with his anger, and still bitter with grief.

Official report from Piotr Ralkonikov, Ruskayan ambassador to Scaela, 3 years PD

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