An unsettling smile crept across her lips, and I swore I could see the dragon in her eyes again. “Yes. I do think I will go to Corovja. I thought killing these people who destroyed our village would satisfy me, but the only reason they succeeded was because the boar king refused to send us support or help.” Her voice grew more savage. “A king who doesn’t take responsibility for the people of his kingdom is no king of mine. He is the one at the root of this, and he will pay.”
I stared at her, aghast. The boar king’s guards would surely kill her before she got anywhere near him. I racked my mind for an argument that might dissuade her.
“There’s still time to think about this, to seek justice some other way. Even if you challenged him for the crown according to tradition, you’d need a god to stand behind you. A geas like he has with the spirit god.”
“Who said anything about challenging him traditionally? I don’t have to wait for the first snow of next autumn. I could fly there right now and kill him before he wakes.” The savage glee in her expression made me shudder involuntarily. She said it like it would be the easiest thing in the world, like it wouldn’t take her days, if not weeks, to fly that far with her manifest so new.
As if an act of treason meant nothing.
As if taking life no longer carried any guilt.
As if the spirit god, ruler of emotions and the intangible, would let her touch the king even if she made it past his guards.
“He’d destroy you before you got within striking distance. Don’t you remember how his last challenger died? The spirit god turned her mind against her body until she bled to death devouring the flesh from her own bones!” My voice rose to a fever pitch of desperation. My panic felt like a creature that was no longer under my control, writhing and twisting inside me, desperate to escape, impossible to soothe.
Ina hissed in frustration, more dragon than girl. She knew I was right. “Then I’ll find another way to ensure he dies.” Before I could argue any further, she was already struggling to take dragon form again, anger giving her another wave of strength to draw on.
“But I love you.” I choked out the words. It was the only true thing I had left to cling to. The wind whipped over the lifeless road and a sob tore loose from my throat as my words were lost amidst the flapping of her wings as she took to the sky.
CHAPTER 8
AFTER MY PRAYERS FOR THE DEAD WERE ALL SPOKEN, I forced myself to put one foot in front of the other, waiting to wake up from the nightmare. Eventually the smoke of the burning trees dissipated into a whisper on the breeze and dawn curled her pale fingertips over the horizon. I continued on for days, gathering what food I could from the forest, but taking very little in the way of rest. Every time I stopped somewhere for more than a few hours of restless sleep, I began to feel as though the ghosts I’d left behind were dragging their icy nails down my back.
All I could think of were the lives lost—babies I’d helped bring into the world now dead before their time, entire families charred to ashes, familiar faces reduced to cinders. In no way could I have ever failed my duties—or Miriel—more than I had by contributing to the destruction of the entire village. Stopping Ina was the only purpose I had left. She was all I had left of home, and I couldn’t let her die trying to kill a monarch who wasn’t to blame. Confessing the truth was all I could do.
Worst of all—even though I’d seen her kill without mercy, I still ached to feel her lips on mine again.
Traffic increased once the mountain road joined the main thoroughfare north just beyond the foothills, but I didn’t dare try to beg a ride. The thought of interacting with strange people filled me with anxiety. I didn’t know how to talk to them, or how long it might take them to figure out I didn’t have a manifest. Would they shun me as they did other mortals without manifests, or might they suspect I was something more? I couldn’t risk it. I envied riders their horses and humans their manifests, and without hesitation would have traded the power of my blood to take the shape of a deer or a common sparrow, anything that would have given me an option other than slogging along the road on foot. I kept the hood of my cloak up, fearful of what people might see when they looked at me. Did they see a witch? A demigod? Or only a girl, weak, hungry, and lost?
After the effort of killing the bandits and taking a new manifest, I assumed Ina would have to stop in the city of Valenko to rest and gather her strength, but not once did I see any sign of her—no white wings overhead, no shed scales or scorch marks anywhere alongside the road. Ina was far too clever to make herself obvious. My heart grew heavier each day that passed. So did the weight of all the death for which I was responsible. Even if I caught up to Ina and confessed the truth to stop her from doing any more damage, it still wouldn’t make amends for the lives already lost.
Every evening I left the road and found a secluded place to say my prayers at sundown: a copse of spindly pine trees that shivered and swayed in the wind; a nook near a waterfall that surged with muddy snowmelt, so loud it drowned my words; an abandoned farmhouse, the remains of the stone structure covered in climbing vines.
I made my offerings to the gods by chanting vespers. With my eyes closed, I made monophonic songs of the most sorrowful melodies given to me by all that surrounded me on those lonely nights—the wind rushing through the trees, the lilt of water over rocks, the distant calls of night birds waking. The music allowed me to sink into my Sight, widening its reach, and I used it to search for any sign of Ina. All I sensed was a soft tug to the north, and when I opened my eyes, it was only ever to the same solitude and grief.
I crossed beneath the stone arch into the city of Valenko at midday almost half a moon after my departure from the mountain, feeling like a wild animal caged for the first time. Guardsmen stood sentry on either side of the road, wearing brown jerkins bound with wide triple-buckled belts of red leather. They had their weapons sheathed and bored expressions on their faces, but passing by them still made my skin crawl. I didn’t like that violence might be required to keep order in this place.
As I wandered deeper into it, the city tore away the last threads of my connection to home. I had never seen so many people crowded so close together. Their skin ranged in tone from milky pale to dark brown and every shade in between. They lived stacked atop one another in stone buildings and shouted to their friends and neighbors across the cobbled streets. None of their business was quiet. Everyone seemed to be in a hurry to get to where they were going, knocking me out of the way if I didn’t keep up speed. The warring smells of roasting meat, baking bread, and the dirty sludge trickling through the gutter alongside the road assaulted my nose. Every touch and sound felt like flames on my raw nerves.
I had no idea where to begin searching for Ina. I had never dreamed Valenko could be this big. In spite of Miriel’s warnings to stay away from mortals in case they noticed I was something else, I felt more invisible than ever now that I was among them. I ducked down a narrow alley, trying to find a quieter street, only to be buffeted by the churning wings of an entire murder of manifested crows that burst out of nowhere. Every space in the city seemed to belong to someone or something, and territory was not something to be shared. I gave in to the flow of the crowd until the street opened up into a cobbled square. A communal fountain adorned the center, water spouting from the mouths of stone animals all along its length. I swallowed, my throat dry.