Chapter Forty-Three
Milo
The gods had come. Was that because I had invoked them?
No, that’s illogical. You’re being unreasonable, Milo.
I blinked. I could have sworn I’d heard that in Isla’s voice. But Isla was gone. My mother was gone. Nick was gone. Helena was gone. Uncle Ambrose was gone. Nascha was gone. I’d never hear any of them again.
I wanted to kill Cosmo and Raghnall. I wanted to throttle them both with my bare hands even if their Heirs put me to death for doing it. It wouldn’t matter anymore. I wasn’t the Heir of anything. There was no House Avus or Viper or Lynx. There was no House of Harlowe or Valin or Alosia. All of it, the careful social constructs we’d spent millenia assembling and defending and fighting over to the death were stripped away the moment Adrian blasted our city apart and set us free. None of it had ever mattered.
Cosmo had gone from a powerful patriarch set on taking over the city in the name of his gods to a wandering refugee faced with evidence that his gods had never been more than other power hungry men, but still I couldn’t take any satisfaction inthat. We’d all lost. Cosmo and Raghnall had lost their power but Avus had lost our family. It was hard to have sympathy for anyone else. Even the House of Harlowe, lost as they were without a leader, a leader I’d killed, did not deserve my empathy.
Olympia watched me now almost as closely as Pax, maybe even closer because, while Pax watched for threats to my safety, Olympia seemed capable of peering into my soul. She knew I lied every time I said I was fine. She saw through the motions I went through to get through the day. She understood my grief for the crippling, debilitating thing it was even if I was getting better at hiding it. Cleo saw too, sometimes, and Pax seemed to step lightly around me, but no one understood like Olympia.
“Does it ever get any easier?” I asked her a week into our travelling.
The warriors who’d ushered us out of our city and into the incredible landscape that was the desert had claimed we’d need to travel immediately or risk being found by the Geist. We’d been told bits and pieces about the two thousand years of history we’d missed along the way but most of the citizens of Sanctuary had been too stunned or too mournful to retain much of it. I heard, though, and felt sorrow for the Milo I’d lost, the one who would have been right up front in this line, asking questions with eager glee and revelling in the answers to so many mysteries. As it was, I hardly cared where they were taking us or why or even about the centuries old war against the beings who called themselves gods and gave us trials to win a place among them. I’d hardly cared about the cremations Olympia had demanded were done and arranged herself. I’d gone, of course, and listened as a warrior I didn’t know and had never known us sang the saddest dirge I’d ever heard.
“No,” Olympia answered after a moment of thought and I realized I’d lost myself in considerations of my own. “It never gets easier. It only gets more…bearable.”
“You didn’t lose him though,” I argued, eyeing the wagon toward the front of our line, the one that we all knew held Adrian, our savior, and Dante, her betrayer.
“I did,” Olympia answered, also watching the wagon. “Just not in the same way.”
I nodded, unable and unwilling to argue with that. Behind us, Harrison walked beside the girl with the braids who’d been reunited with her Culled sister, Zya, upon the Freeing. I knew her now as Izara, a daughter of the House of Chasina, and she’d joined the rebellion apparently to honor the memory of her sister who’d been “stolen” by the gods Cosmo claimed to serve. I could feel the Fletcher boy’s eyes on me as I spoke with my cousin. He was more protective of her than she’d allow so he always ended up falling into her orbit but never directly intervening. Any other man might have been offended, but it seemed to work for them. That is, if anything was working between them at all. I hadn’t summoned the strength to pull myself out of my own wallowing to ask. Now, though, I risked a look back at Harrison before lowering my voice and speaking to Olympia again.
“Whatever he did, forgive him,” I muttered.
Her gaze finally left the wagon to shoot in my direction.
“Life’s too short,” I said with a sigh. “If you care about him, don’t waste the time you have together.”
Olympia frowned and glanced over her shoulder but then turned back, clearly unconvinced. I didn’t have it in me to push. Truthfully, I didn’t care enough. Not anymore.
“Did you know about all of this?” Olympia asked even more quietly a moment later, dipping her head in the direction of the warriors and wagons in front of us.
“Some of it,” I confessed. “Nascha knew more.”
“Is this what you were studying for all those years you spent in the library?”
“Sometimes. There was never much information about it, just enough to know there was a world beyond our city, a world which had given birth to Sanctuary.”
“You knew the Trials ended in betrayal,” she said and the accusation had entered her tone. I didn’t mind. It was well placed.
Truthfully, I’d been waiting for her to bring this up with me. I knew she’d wondered how much Nascha and I had known before, how much knowledge the matriarch and her Heir held away from their House.
“Is that why you never tried all that hard to compete in them?” she continued.
“I didn’t try hard in the Trials because I didn’t believe in the gods they represented,” I answered. “The reward for succeeding in all ten Trials was to join the gods I never believed in even before I knew the truth. It wasn’t all that motivating for me.”
“You were never one for glory.”
I shook my head and began to argue. I’d wanted knowledge. I’d craved knowing the answers to questions no one else thought to ask. I’d sought out justification for my own beliefs, thinking I was superior in my contempt for the gods. To seek knowledge was to seek power, even if the rest of the world didn’t recognize the pursuit for what it was.
Before I could explain any of that to her, however, we crested a small rise to see a river running below. I stared at the free flowing water, knowing I should feel something. Some wonder at my first time seeing a river. Some incredible awe at the little creatures standing at the edge, dipping their large antlered heads to drink. Instead, I felt nothing. Olympia noticed because she always did.
“Come on,” she said, reaching out and taking my hand in hers. “They’re crossing now.”
