What has she lost that she wasn’t already willing to leave behind?
Bryn unrolls a clean length of bandage and starts wrapping my hand. “Pem again,” she says with an absent smile. The magic beneath my skin skitters away from her touch, dropping out of sight only to resurface again, the braided threads more knotted than before, as if strengthened by her proximity. “I used to watch him conducting his experiments before my father found out.” Snorting, she tucks the end of the bandage into place. “I can marry an executioner, but I can’t show an interest in his work. Especially the work he’s not being paid for.”
“Your father thinks I kidnapped you,” I say.
Her smile widens, showing her teeth. “Which is good,” she says. “I worried he would assume I ran away on my own.”
I stare at her, stomach sinking. Everything that’s happened, even her insistence that I kill Loomis, has been orchestrated down to the details. Blood on my hands ensures innocence on hers. If her father does find us, he’ll find a daughter eager to return home and a girl whose family he first unraveled ten years ago. It’s not that she needed a vessel, or even a bodyguard. She needed someone to blame. Just in case.
“My father will send more men when Loomis doesn’t return,” she continues, “which is why you have to trust the decisions I make for us both. If we don’t reach New Prevast before his men reach us, then all that’s left is to pray that Pem kills you quickly.”
I swallow hard, past the tightening ache in my chest. I doubt mercy will be granted the girl who kidnapped the princess and murdered a councilman. “Why would your father waste the effort to recover a redundancy?”
Bryn eyes me shrewdly. “I’m not the one he’s worried about losing,” she says.
Her words slide like ice down my back. Of course. Nobody leaves Brindaigel, but I did. And until Perrote knows I’m dead, I’m a liability to the safety of his kingdom.
Bryn cocks her head and studies me, dark red hair curled across her shoulders. “You hesitated in the woods, after I gave you an order. Don’t do that again, Faris. An instant can change everything. Do you understand me?”
I press against the table, bone melting into wood as I remember the weight of the pistol, the recoil of its shot, the sound of one last breath and then nothing left. Living with that murder is fear enough; it terrifies me to know that she may ask worse of me before this is done. Seven days to New Prevast, North had said.
Seven days too many.
Swallowing hard, I lower my eyes and take a deep breath to slow my racing heart. “Yes, your majesty.”
“Faris.” She tips my chin higher and I force myself to hold her gaze even as my fingers clench my skirt against my thighs. If I were home, I could lay my fear on the fighting floor and find solace in the taste of blood down my throat.
But I’m in Avinea now, and the rules are completely different.
“Hate me if you’d like,” Bryn says. “Hate keeps people alive when they have nothing else to keep them warm. And I need you still breathing.”
Remember this, I tell myself: remember her. Pointed teeth and sharpened claws hidden behind soft curves and sweet smiles. I killed a man but she’s killed two already. “And how do you stay warm without a heart?”
Bryn smiles, almost sad, and traces the curve of my cheek before she slaps me.
I refuse to touch my face, to give her the satisfaction of knowing that even her pathetic strength has power over me.
“You will never understand what it takes to be queen,” says Bryn.
But I do understand what it’ll take to get my sister back: the same thing it takes to be a slave.
Complete and utter obedience.
Thirteen
I DREAM OF ASH AND burning things, broken cities and coward kings. Everything is iron turned to gold beneath my touch. Everything is dead. Maybe I am too.
Rough hands shake me awake, pulling me out of my nightmare. “Faris,” Bryn hisses with a hint of fear. “We’ve stopped moving.”
I open my eyes to sunset colors seeping across the floor from the window above the bunks. The edge of a dream lingers, gold threads unraveling around me with the feeling of looming inevitability. I frown at Bryn, struggling to place myself in context. Painted stars on the ceiling, a groaning stove beside me, and a striped cat asleep at my hip.
Avinea.
Propping myself up on my elbows, I stare across the empty wagon, confirming Bryn’s assessment. The rattling of the wagon, such a constant lullaby since we left at dawn like North had promised, has been replaced with something far less soothing. Voices, muted by distance and thick walls.
My heart plummets. Perrote found us.
I push out of bed, disrupting Darjin, who mewls in protest and jumps to the floor.
Bryn clutches her dinner knife, following me to the door as I brace my weight, hands tightening at my hips, stretching open the scab on my palm. Last night, long after Bryn’s soft snores filled the silence, I crawled on my hands and knees across the wagon, searching for the dagger I had dropped, but never found it. Now I scan the room, looking for something to replace it.
Before I do, the door rattles in its frame and swings open. I lunge down the stairwell, knocking into Tobek before he can react. We somersault off the running board and hit the ground hard. Grabbing him by the shoulders, I roll him flat on his back and prepare to strike.
North watches from several yards away, on the other side of a campfire. Stones rattle in his hand. “You are determined to see him dead,” he says.
Tobek growls with frustration, rocking his head back in the grass, and I sit against his squirming legs, humiliated by my mistake.
“What’s going on?” Bryn demands, still safe in the wagon. Her dinner knife flashes silver in the fading sunlight. “I’m paying you to get us to New Prevast.”
“We’re making camp for the night,” North says, arching an eyebrow before he scrutinizes the stones in his hand. “There’s clean water through the trees if it’s needed.”
Tobek lifts his head off the ground and offers Bryn a wide, cheeky smile. “Warm enough for a swim.”
“That’s the second time you’ve been pinned by my servant,” she says.
He deflates a little and I pity him, for believing she might be human beneath that pretty skin. Rocking back to my heels, I stand, offering Tobek a hand up. He refuses it, embarrassed, scrambling to his feet and edging away from me. “Stop doing that,” he says, petulant, spitting out a mouthful of dust and casting a sideways glance toward North. Then he notices what I’m wearing and straightens. “Those are my pants.”
And his shirt, judging by the size. I found them buried in a drawer last night while looking for the dagger.
“My dress smelled like the marketplace,” I say tightly. Like blood and guilt and gunpowder.
“So then wash it.”
“Tobek,” North warns in a low voice.