The feeling in my bones when I awake in the cellar safe house cannot be regret. But it is not happiness either. I wish I could understand it. I know it will only eat at me until I do, and with so many miles yet to travel, I cannot afford for my focus to erode. Distraction leads to mistakes. And I’ve made enough of those.
Though I don’t want to think that what happened earlier between Keenan and me is one of those mistakes. It was heady. Intoxicating. And filled with a depth of emotion that I did not expect. Love. I love him.
Don’t I?
When Keenan’s back is turned, I swallow the concotion of herbs that Pop taught me about—one that slows a girl’s moon cycle so that she cannot get with child.
I look to Keenan, quietly changing into warmer clothing in preparation for the next leg of our journey. He senses my regard and comes over to where I’m lacing my boots. With a shy affection that’s so very unlike him, he caresses my cheek. An uncertain smile lights his face.
Are we fools? I want to ask. For finding comfort in the midst of such madness? I can’t bring myself to say the words. And there’s no one else to ask.
A desire to speak to my brother sweeps over me, and I bite my lip angrily to keep my tears at bay. I’m certain Darin had sweethearts before he began apprenticing with Spiro. He would know if this unease, this confusion, was normal.
“What’s bothering you?” Keenan pulls me to my feet, holding tight to my hands. “You don’t wish that we didn’t—”
“No,” I say quickly. “I just … with everything going on, was it … wrong?”
“To find an hour or two of bliss in such dark times?” Keenan says. “That’s not wrong. What is there to live for if not the moments of joy? What is there to fight for?”
“I want to believe in that,” I say. “But I feel so guilty.” After weeks of keeping my emotions bottled and corked, they explode forth. “You and I are here, alive, and Izzi is dead, Darin is in prison, Elias is dying—”
Keenan wraps an arm around me and tucks my head beneath his chin. His warmth, his wood-smoke-and-lemon scent soothe me immediately.
“Give me your guilt. I’ll hold on to it for you, all right? Because you shouldn’t feel this way.” He pulls back just a bit and tips my face up. “Try to forget the anxiety for a bit.”
It’s not that simple! “Just this morning,” I say, “you asked me what the point was in being human if I didn’t let myself feel.”
“I meant attraction. Desire.” His cheeks go a bit red, and he looks away. “Not guilt and fear. Those you should try to forget. I could help you forget”—he cocks his head, and heat flashes through me—“but we should get moving.”
I muster a weak smile, and he releases me. I cast around for Darin’s scim, and by the time I buckle it on, I’m frowning again. I don’t need a distraction. I need to work out what in the skies is going on in my own head.
Your emotions make you human, Elias said to me weeks ago in the Serran Range. Even the unpleasant ones have a purpose. If you ignore them, they just get louder and angrier.
“Keenan.” We start up the cellar stairs, and Keenan unhooks the lock. “I don’t regret what happened. But I can’t just will away the guilt.”
“Why not?” he turns back to me. “Listen—”
We both jump when the cellar door opens with a blistering squeal. Keenan draws, notches, and aims his bow in one motion.
“Hold,” a voice says. The figure raises a lamp. It’s a young, curly-haired Scholar. He curses when he sees us.
“I knew I saw someone down here,” he says. “You need to leave. Master says there’s a Martial patrol on the way and they’re killing every free Scholar they find—”
We do not hear the rest. Keenan grabs my hand and drags me up the steps and out into the night. “That way.” He nods at tree line to the east of us, beyond the slaves’ quarters, and I fall into a jog as I follow him, my pulse frantic.
We pass through the woods and turn north again, cutting through long, fallow fields. When Keenan spots a stable, he leaves me and disappears. A dog barks, but the sound is suddenly cut off. A few minutes later, Keenan returns, a horse in tow.
I’m about to ask about the dog, but at the grim look on his face, I keep silent.
“There’s a trail through those woods up ahead,” he says. “Doesn’t look heavily traveled, and the snow’s falling hard enough that our tracks will be covered within an hour or two.”
He pulls me in front of him, and when I keep my body apart, he sighs.
“I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” I whisper. “I feel like—like I can’t find an equilibrium.”
“You’ve been carrying too much weight for too long. All this time, Laia, you’ve led, you’ve made difficult decisions—and perhaps you weren’t ready to. There’s no shame in that, and I’ll gut anyone who tells me different. You did the best you could. But let go now. Let me carry that weight for you. Let me help you. Trust that I’ll do the right thing. Have I steered you wrong yet?”
I shake my head. My disquiet returns. You should believe in yourself more than this, Laia, a voice within says. Not every decision you’ve made has been a bad one.
But the ones that mattered—the ones where lives hung in the balance—those decisions were wrong. The weight of it is crushing.
“Close your eyes,” Keenan says. “Rest now. I’ll get us to Kauf. We’ll get Darin out. And all will be well.”
???
Three nights after we leave the cellar safe house, we stumble upon a half-dug mass grave of Scholars. Men. Women. Children. All tossed carelessly within, like offal. Ahead of us, the snow-capped peaks of the Nevennes Range blot out half the sky. How cruel their beauty seems. Do they not know the evil that has taken place in their shadow?
Keenan quickly urges us past, moving even after the sun is up. When we’re well away from the grave and traversing a high, forested bluff, I catch a glimpse of something to the west, in the low hills that lie between us and Antium. Tents, it looks like, and men, campfires. Hundreds of them.
“Skies.” I stop Keenan. “Do you see that? Aren’t those the Argent Hills? It looks like an entire damned army out there.”
“Come on.” Keenan pulls me onward, worry driving his impatience and igniting my own. “We need to take cover until nightfall.”
But the night only brings more horrors. Hours into our journey, we come so suddenly upon a group of soldiers that I gasp, nearly giving away our position.
Keenan pulls me back with a hiss of breath. The soldiers guard four ghost wagons—so called because once you disappear inside, you might as well be dead. The wagons’ high, black sides prevent me from seeing how many Scholars are within. But hands clutch at the bars on the back window, some large and others far too small. More prisoners are loaded into the last wagon as we watch. I think of the grave we passed earlier. I know what will happen to these people. Keenan tries to pull me onward, but I find I am unable to move.
“Laia!”
“We can’t just leave them.”
“There are a dozen soldiers and four Masks guarding those wagons,” Keenan says. “We’d be slaughtered.”
“What if I disappeared?” I look back toward the wagons. I can’t stop thinking of those hands. “The way I did in the Tribal camp. I could—”
“But you can’t. Not since …” Keenan’s reaches out and squeezes my shoulder in sympathy. Not since Izzi died.
At the sound of a shout, I turn back to the wagons. A Scholar boy claws at the face of the Mask who drags him forward.
“You can’t keep doing this to us!” the boy screams as the Mask tosses him in the wagon. “We’re not animals! One day, we’ll fight back!”
“With what?” The Mask chuckles. “Sticks and rocks?”
“We know your secrets now.” The boy throws himself against the bars. “You can’t stop it. One of your own smiths turned against you, and we know.”
The sneer drops off the Mask’s face, and he looks almost thoughtful. “Ah yes,” he says quietly. “The rats’ great hope. The Scholar who stole the secret of Serric steel. He is dead, boy.”
I gasp, and Keenan puts a hand over my mouth, holding me steady as a I flail, whispering that I cannot make a sound, that our lives depend on it.