His eyes widened in surprise, and then he smiled, a little more shyly than the playful grin he’d worn before. He didn’t seem sure what to make of me. I wasn’t sure what to make of myself, either, but I liked the steadiness of being connected to him. After spending most of my life alone, I was learning to be grateful for the opportunities I got for good company and easy companionship. I’d have to work on accepting that no relationship, and certainly no love, could last forever.
I could learn to enjoy my simple and temporary connection with Hal because it didn’t have to last. I’d been a fool to hope for a lifetime with Ina. Perhaps love was only an ephemeral thing that existed for a breath or a heartbeat, there and gone like a sunbeam breaking through the clouds of a storm.
After a hard day’s walk east, we found the northern road. There were not many signs of other travelers. A few pairs of wagon ruts cut lines through the road, none of them fresh. I tried to keep my mind on how light I’d felt in the few moments when Hal had made me laugh. I had to focus on the future, not the past, which meant I needed to know more about Nismae.
“That Fatestone your sister is looking for—why does she still want it?” I asked. “It makes sense to me that she left the king’s service after he sent her on a suicide mission, but why keep chasing the artifact that nearly got her killed?” If I didn’t have problems I needed the Fatestone to solve, I would have run as far as possible in the other direction.
Hal snorted. “My sister laughs in the face of the shadow god. She’s as competitive as a gladiator, and she doesn’t suffer betrayal. She’ll probably sell it for as much money as she can to whichever buyer lives farthest away from the king. Or see if she can figure out some way to use it against him.”
I thought about telling him that Veric was my brother, the Fatestone was meant for me, and the letter was the proof, but it would pose a thousand other questions I didn’t want to answer. I didn’t know if I could trust him with knowledge of my powers, or the admission that I barely knew the scope of them beyond the simple enchantments logged in my journal. There were too many secrets in my past unknown even to me that I needed to unravel first. The thought of them made me ache. I hated how rootless I felt.
“Do you think your sister will expect anything in exchange for her research?” I asked Hal as we crossed a wooden bridge over a stream rushing with spring snowmelt.
“It’s hard to say,” he said.
“What does she care about?” If I needed to offer her something, I wanted to know what I might be able to trade her for the information I needed.
Hal looked up at the sky for a moment, then ticked off a few things on his fingers. “Achievement. Knowledge. Success at any cost. Me.”
I raised an eyebrow. “In that order?”
He sighed. “You have to understand why Nismae is the way she is. Things weren’t easy for us growing up. Our mother was a cleric sworn to the wind god. She joined the temple after Nismae’s father died, several years before I was born.”
I pushed aside the prickles of envy that he knew where he had come from and who he belonged to. Now that I knew the wind god wasn’t my father, my connection to Veric was the only evidence that I might be related to anyone, but it didn’t do much good for my only known sibling to be several hundred years dead.
“Nismae never cared for the temple much, in spite of growing up there. So she spent a lot of time getting the farm children in trouble for shirking their chores, or hiding from my mother in the temple library, reading. So it was no surprise that she manifested as an eagle and turned out to be a scholar—one as respected for her knowledge as she was for her sharp eyes and quick right fist.”
“So you grew up in the temple as well?” I asked.
He shook his head. “Our mother died before my third winter, when Nismae was fourteen. Nismae had no desire to stay, so we left for Corovja, where she could further her studies. But the crown city was a more challenging place to navigate than she expected. It’s a hard place to stay alive, much less keep a little brother safe. So she started training to become a Nightswift. All that time she’d spent hiding and sneaking and fighting with the farm children at the temple came in handy.”
“But what did you do?” I asked. “How did you survive?”
“I grew up on the streets, learning to make a living stealing this and that and talking my way out of trouble. It’s much easier when you’re small, let me tell you. Once they stop seeing you as a child . . . well, you know how we met. You know where we would have ended up if we hadn’t managed to escape and if you hadn’t given those drunk guards a little extra help to forget us.” He stated it calmly, like a fact, but his tense fists betrayed him.
“It must have been hard to grow up like that,” I said. I wondered how, in spite of that beginning in life, he’d turned out to be so kind.
“It was,” he admitted. “I’ve never liked to fight. Even if I were mortal and given the choice, I never would have wanted to be a Nightswift.”
I understood that sentiment all too well. Neither one of us had ever wanted to deal in death. It seemed to be all I did lately.
“But Nismae . . . she had high hopes when she started working for the king. She wanted to be his chief adviser, and as it turned out, the fastest way into his inner circle was to serve as one of his elite assassins.” He frowned a little, like there was some part of the story left untold.
“What about you, though? Did you work for him, too?” I didn’t know why the idea hadn’t occurred to me before.
He shook his head. “No. Sometimes I helped Nis, but I never worked for the king directly. It’s convenient to have spies who don’t need to get very close to eavesdrop on secret conversations.”
“How did you feel about that?” I asked. Having been told never to use my gift, it seemed a foreign idea that Hal would be expected to use his at the insistence of anyone, especially a mortal—even if she was his sister.
“Truthfully? I hated it. I stopped doing it a few years ago. It made me feel awful to listen in on people’s secrets. By then, Nismae had plenty of others to do her dirty work anyway. And more lining up in the wings. She had quite a devoted following in Corovja.”
I pondered his comments for a moment. Would I have been as good as him if I’d been raised the same way? How did he know the difference between right and wrong when those kinds of expectations were placed on him as a child? And what about his own wants and hopes and dreams?
“What would you do if you could earn a living any way you chose?” I asked.
“I’m not sure.” He shrugged. “I haven’t ever had much choice in the matter.”
Sympathy welled up. I knew what that felt like.
“Maybe I would have been a messenger, or gone into service with the crown someday if Nismae hadn’t broken away from it. I like to travel. I like to move fast—and I’m good at it.”
I could see it even in the way he’d behaved since we had left the Tamers’ forest. He liked to be moving, and it put a spring in his step to be headed somewhere new.
“You would be good at that,” I said.
“What about you?” he asked.
“Honestly, I never thought I would leave home. I was a good herbalist. I liked helping and healing people. I just wanted a family someday, even if I had to cobble it together.” I thought also of Miriel’s dark warnings, of her promise to the wind god. It was too late to hold to any of those now. I hoped that someday I’d be able to help people again, maybe even to have a community where I belonged.
“You aren’t doing so badly at the adventuring,” Hal pointed out.
I smiled weakly. He didn’t know how terribly I’d failed, to end up here in the first place.
A few fat drops of rain slapped down on us, warning us of a spring shower about to come. We pulled up our hoods, ending the conversation, keeping our heads down as we hurried onward.