North dismounts, long legs tangling in the saddle. Once on the ground, he bends into me, breathing hard, irregular, holding his infected hand stiffly away from his body—away from mine. Wrapping an arm around his waist, I brace my legs, struggling to bear his weight against my own, desperate to be useful. Are you North’s apprentice?
A week ago, all I wanted was my sister. But my insatiable heart has tasted an impossibility and now I want this, I want him, I want more, so badly it hurts every bone of my body.
But North doesn’t exist anymore.
The Burn is a graveyard beyond the shrine, a battlefield. The remnants of a village lie just beyond its edge, a collection of stone structures and hollow trees worn smooth as glass by years of fire and wind. Nothing could possibly live beyond the gold line on the ground, but the Burn somehow breathes, dunes of scorched earth that drift and eddy and throw plumes of ash into the air. There’s an untamed, tragic beauty to the way the world dies.
“My mother knew it was coming,” North says softly. “She saw Merlock begin to unravel during the war.” A sad, fleeting smile crosses his face. “Dalliances in the court were allowed, but after the Fire Wars, bastards were put to death at birth to prevent diluted blood from ever claiming the throne. So she never told him she was pregnant. She ran from Prevast and took a life that would hide a fatherless son, but she never let me forget who I was. A warning against what happens when ambition turns to greed. When compassion turns to complacency.”
Straightening, North steps out of my hold. “Don’t—don’t follow me,” he says.
I watch him go reluctantly, tensed as if to catch him should he fall. But he walks steady, certain, wavering in place before he drops to his knees and faces his father’s legacy.
“Avinea,” I hear him say, but I don’t know if it’s a blessing or a curse or maybe a promise of what’s still to come.
Bending forward, North flattens both palms to the earth, as though he intends to pray. Then pain ripples through his body and he screams as he excises the poison inside him directly into the ground. I twist away from the heat of it, squinting through my tears to watch the infection sliding out of his skin. The moss beneath his hands turns yellow to brown to brittle to dust as a gold red ribbon curves outward, producing a toxic cloud of yellow smoke.
A new pocket of the Burn.
North tries to stand and almost collapses. Rushing forward, I lead him back to the stones. He leans against them with a breath of relief, sliding down until his legs are spread ahead of him, his hands loose at his sides. Swollen, red, but clean.
Beautiful.
Humid wind ruffles his hair; sunlight leaks through the storm clouds and picks out threads of raven blue and hints of gray in the stubble on his chin.
He’s too young to be this old.
“I’ll find you some water,” I say.
North shakes his head, eyes closed. “Too close to the Burn,” he murmurs. “Not safe to drink.”
I stare at him, biting the inside of my cheek. We’re both already poisoned, I want to say. What difference does it make? Instead, I swallow my complaints; we can’t spare the energy to argue. Exhaustion carves lines across his face and there’s a hard edge of finality to the set of his jaw. A small bruise, more red than yellow, stains his neck where Solch broke skin with his needle.
He sees me staring and winces, touching the wound. “Bad?”
“I’ve seen worse,” I say, forcing a smile as I demonstrate my own bruised forearm.
“You win,” he agrees, closing his eyes again, swallowing hard enough his throat wobbles.
How do I comfort him? Cadence drank hot water with sugar. Thaelan wanted the stars. What does North want? What would he need?
An ounce of your strength.
Anxious, I stand, scanning the horizon. The road curls out of sight, leading northeast; to the south, it cuts back through the mountains. A flash of blue between the green catches my eye, dull against the vibrant hillocks and stones around us, and I stand, straining to see.
The wagon. My breath catches, part relief and part fear: They should have gotten further than that.
Baedan.
Out of habit, I touch the spell around my wrist but there are no new aches, no new wounds, nothing to indicate that Bryn has been harmed in any way.
“I can see the wagon,” I say, resisting the urge to sweep a stray hair off North’s forehead—the urge to touch him any way I can. “It looks abandoned. Can I trust you alone while I make sure it’s safe?”
North cracks one bleary eye open and gives me a weak half smile. “Now you’re protecting me.”
I squeeze his arm. “I won’t be gone long.”
He doesn’t answer, tipping his head back and closing his eyes.
I jog toward the wagon, slowing on my approach. It sits in a ditch of water, tipped against a rising swell of stone. The front wheel is crushed; the back wheel hangs an inch off the ground.
Holding Kellig’s knife in one hand, I edge closer to the open door. Other than the broken wheel and the damage from the shadow crows, there doesn’t appear to be any outward sign of attack or forced entry.
Maybe it was just an accident, I tell myself, a rock in the road that Tobek couldn’t avoid—that North’s magic couldn’t prevent. I hold on to that hope as I reach the doorway, squinting through the darkness inside. “Tobek?” I call, soft and cautious. “Bryn?”
Or maybe it’s Bryn playing tricks again. Maybe Baedan found them and Bryn exploited the opportunity. But what could Baedan offer her that North didn’t already agree to give?
Something shifts, slow and low to the ground. Tensing, I raise the knife as a ball of orange fur hurtles out of the wagon. Darjin. He mewls with pathetic, weak cries of pleasure, winding between my legs before he stretches on his hind quarters, front paws against my leg. Relieved, I crouch to kiss the flat spot between his ears, made braver by his company.
I call for Bryn and Tobek again, wait a beat, then step into the stairwell. My heart breaks at what I see: fallen books and broken glass and everything shattered, every inch of North’s home disrupted. Even the stove grate hangs open, spilling ash and charred wood across the tangle of bedsheets from the mattress half torn from the bottom bed.
The first casualty of war.
After coaxing a fire in the stove, I lead North and the horse back to the wagon. He struggles up the stairwell and collapses halfway, too exhausted to go any further. “The wards are still in place,” he says breathlessly. “They left on their own accord.”
I don’t disagree, but he follows my gaze to Darjin, grooming himself in a heap of tea leaves. Tobek would never leave Darjin behind.
I pull the mattress off the bottom bunk and guide North to lie down before filling a bucket with water from the thin stream running along the bottom of the ditch. By the time I return, North has shrugged out of his coat and is on his back, squinting at the stars painted on the ceiling.
“I don’t understand what this means,” he says, still slurring as he lifts his hands, mimicking the way I often hold mine.
I fill the samovar with water to boil before stretching out a soft pain in my lower back. “It was the view from home,” I say. “We could hold the entire sky between our hands.”