“And has a shadow slipped into ours?” Venick asked. The alarm bells in the distance had halted. Moonlight shone through the trees, drawing strange shapes. He remembered the moonlight through the sewer grate too, and wondered.
“No.” Certain. Unblinking. Venick didn’t know if that was true confidence, or the elven mask of it. A mask, he thought, and was about to say so when—
“Ellina.” Dourin’s voice cut through the night. They turned. He looked pale in the dark. “The horses.”
Ellina shook her head. “We cannot go back for them.”
“It is not that.” Stiffly, quietly. “They were homing horses.”
Venick did not immediately understand, but he felt Ellina harden beside him and followed her gaze back through the trees toward the city, barely visible in the distance. He didn’t see them, not at first, until he noticed a ripple in the tall grass, two black blotches heading their way.
The memory came then, blurry and ragged. Lorana in Irek’s woods, the sturdy mare underneath her. How she dismounted the horse, leading Venick to the river. They had walked back on foot, never minding whether the mare would follow. Lorana knew she would. Venick had never asked how.
“Homing horses,” Ellina said.
“I did not think—we left underground. The sewers. Our trail should have been lost to them.” Dourin’s face remained calm, but his eyes were intense. “They are loyal. They found us anyway, but…it appears they are alone.”
“Which means nothing,” Ellina said. Venick thought he understood. If the southern elves recognized these as homing horses, if they saw the horses leaving the city—alone, in the middle of the night, so soon after a certain northern spy had escaped capture—they would know better than toridethem. More likely, the elves would crouch out of sight, trailing the horses from a distance. More likely still, the elves would weave their shadows onto the horses. They would follow them straight to Ellina.
Several long seconds passed. Ellina reached for her bow.
“Ellina.” Dourin’s voice was a hollow shell. “No.”
She nocked an arrow. “Your horses will give away our position. It is possible they have already.”
“They are innocent.”
She aimed. “The southerners will shadow-catch us. Do you know how to shake a shadow binding? Because I do not. They will be able to follow usanywhere. We will never escape.”
“Ellina, please.” Dourin took a step. “I summoned the horses to me and they came. Do not punish them for my mistake. They will follow me if I lead them away. Let me lead them away.”
Venick remembered Ellina’s face in the forest when she killed the wanewolves. The way a storm had settled into her, the dark set to her mouth, the sorrow followed by fierce resolve as she let her arrows fly. She looked that way now. Dimmer, the usual glow in her eye replaced by—something else. Grief, perhaps. Regret. Venick’s eyes grazed her slender hands, pale skin, hair as dark as the sky above. Her fingers held the green glass arrow in perfect form. She aimed through the trees with both eyes open.
She released the first arrow. The beat of a moment, then a break in the horse’s stride, the sound of him stumbling, crashing into the ground. Dourin made a noise. His eyes were wide, wild as he watched her nock another.
“Ellina.” Venick spoke before he could pull the word back. This was not his business. And he knew about sacrifice. He knew how to make hard decisions for the greater good. He had seen it and done it. And yet: “Is there no other way?”
Ellina glanced at him. He read the answer in her eyes.
Venick remembered Ellina’s mercy in the forest that was not truly mercy, but a single thread in the web of her larger plot. He remembered how she questioned him in the circle of firelight, threatened him, bargained with him, only to shove a dagger and coins into his hands and set him free. Just as he was beginning to understand her, she would draw a jagged line across the picture he’d painted. He had seen her ruthlessness and her kindness. Had been on the receiving end of both. He thought of her words spoken over the metallic clang of the alarm bells.Because I trust him.The warm pleasure, followed by confusion. He had not asked her to trust him. Did not understand what he’d done to deserve her trust. He thought of all the truths and lies they’d been laying at each other’s feet, all the things still left unsaid. He remembered their conversation in the brothel, and as Venick watched her aim, he felt as if there was something missed. Some vital truth hovering just out of reach. Because if he had learned anything about Ellina, it was this: she did nothing without reason.
She released the second arrow. The horse screamed as he fell, a terrible, keening sound that carried through the night.
???
Venick understood the silence that followed was not the kind to be broken.
He understood that Ellina was worn thin. He saw it in her hunched shoulders, the line of her brow, the way she met his eye, as if she was asking forhisapology and worried for his answer.
Venick swallowed and let the silence hold. She needed space. She needed time to mend things with Dourin, who hadn’t spoken to either of them since that last arrow was drawn. Venick did not fully understand the bond between elves and their horses, but he did know the heartbreak of loss. He knew the cut of betrayal.
He knew the pain of watching someone you loved die.
???
There had been a time when Venick could still remember Lorana clearly. He would recall the lilt of her voice, the way she smiled, the gleam in her eye when she was after something and determined to get it. He remembered the ache of loving her so fully, so deeply he could hardly bear it. She made his chest hurt. The memory of her did. Venick used to worry he would forget pieces of her. He would tunnel his fingers through his hair and the ache would turn to true pain, the kind that kept him up at night, that changed a fond memory into a living, breathing nightmare.
As the years went by, he did begin to forget. The exact color of her eyes. The feel of her skin under his hands. It plagued him, the way he struggled to remember these things and could not. But there was one memory he could never forget. Screams. A trio of elves. The bright flash of blood as the arrow struck her chest. The night of Lorana’s death crawled through his thoughts, his dreams, relentless in its clarity.
