‘It was somewhere out here that we lost Soraya,’ Kinlear said suddenly.
Ezer glanced over her shoulder to find him staring down at the Expanse.
‘What was she like?’ Ezer asked.
He chuckled against her back. ‘Bold. Daring. Beautiful. She was a lot like you, always content to challenge what is known.’He sighed. ‘But challenging people does not bode well in the Citadel. Soraya paid penance quite often. And when the penance became too much to bear … she left.’
Like Zey,Ezer thought.
She hadn’t told a soul when she’d eventually packed Zey’s book in her cloak pocket. Some part of her couldn’t let it go, even though the pages were still utterly empty. Even though she did not believe the story of the symbols to be true.
She’d leave it somewhere in the wilderness on the other side. A tribute to the Eagleminder … because there would be no sword plunged into the snow around the Citadel’s ancient tree for her.
The wind shifted, and the snow began to fall a bit harder. Six held steady, heading towards true north, that ever-present ring of black mountains just visible before her beak. And the shadowstorm above it, with dark shapes swimming through the sky. It truly never stopped, no matter the time of day.
What sort of man, Ezer wondered, could handle such raw, endless power?
Perhaps Wrenwyn was right. Perhaps it trulywasa god on the other side.
Or – she shivered – a devil.
‘The night she left,’ Kinlear said, and coughed as his sickness was spurred on by the frigid wind, ‘She claimed that the Acolyte could save me, could heal my ailments in ways that the magic of the Five never could.’
‘But … you said that’s impossible,’ Ezer said.
He shrugged against her back. ‘People deal with grief differently. Some run from it. Others try to fix it. Soraya was a fixer, even when we were children. My sickness was only another battle for her to fight.’
The shadowstorm rumbled, silencing his sigh.
‘I asked her for hard proof. She showed me a small black book. She called it the Shadow Tome and claimed it was full of promises and hope for healing. She said it wasalive.That it called out to people. To those who were ready to see and believe.’ Ezer’s heartsank. Soraya … another one lost to the darkness, just like her mother and father and Zey. He paused, and she felt his eyes on her back. ‘Have you ever heard of a book like that, Ezer? A book thatlives?’
She was about to tell him yes, of course she had, because she carried such a book in her cloak pocket now.
But something within her knew it was better to lie.
‘No,’ Ezer said, as easy as breathing. ‘What did her book say? Was it true?’
The distant shadowstorm rumbled again, and Kinlear tensed.
But Six stayed the course, unbothered, as if she finally understood the sound and feel of the Acolyte’s magic. Like it was calling her north, instead of warning her away.
‘Kinlear?’
For a second, she wondered if she was wrong to doubt the driving in of that knife, night after night.
He nodded against her back, and said, ‘I looked at it. Every page.’
Ezer’s breath hitched.
What if he was leading her north, all along, not to kill the Acolyte. But to try and discover him for himself? He was a prince without a ruling crown. He was doomed to die. What if he believed what Soraya said?
What if Ezer was wrong about him?
But then he said, ‘It was empty. Completely blank.’
It was an effort for her not to sigh in relief.
‘I knew then that her mind had been poisoned. She was going the same dark route others had before, defecting.’ His grip tightened as Six shifted, catching an updraft. ‘I wanted to turn her in. I wanted to keep her there in the Citadel, until someone could make her mind right again. But then I remembered the others that had defected. The ones who paid penance … until they couldn’t pay any more.’
