They were. I looked up to find the warriors ahead of us were slowing to assist the wagons and the beasts some of them rode upon, called horses, across the rushing waters. Some of the citizens of Sanctuary balked at the idea of crossing but were urged onward by exasperated warriors who gestured to the water and nodded vehemently to get them moving. I watched them and remembered their commander, the man who had returned to the city alone to find the jewel I’d tossed down the pit to the Underground before the Geist did. I wondered if he’d been successful. I wondered if it even mattered. I hoped it did. My wife had died for that necklace.
“Milo,” Olympia said again.
I responded to my cousin’s prodding with a tired nod before stepping forward into the water with everyone else. Crossing a river was hard work and took a while as the warriors had to keep delving back into the depths to keep one of the refugees from drifting away. They didn’t complain though, just kept their expressions set in determination and went about their tasks in perfect formation. A dozen of them spent the time carrying children across before going back for more. Another dozen pulled out litters to carry the elderly, sick, and infirm. They didn’t care about the classes. They didn’t ask what ring you were from or where you lived in the city. They helped everyone, First Ringer and Decker alike, as it should be. Again, I thought of their commander and the man he must have been to train such a respectful force. A better man than I, clearly.
There was a camp through the trees on the other side, not visible until you were upon it. It had been carved out of the forest beyond the river and settled beside a cave some of the warriors stopped and bowed at before entering the camp.
Children and women and men too old or young to fight themselves came rushing forward the moment we entered the camp, grouping us together by those we walked beside andsteering us off in the direction of makeshift accommodations. Though, I noticed, all of the accommodations looked temporary here. Harrison and Izara were pulled away to their own tent, though the boy watched Olympia as she split off with me, led by a middle aged woman in a gauzy blue dress.
I stared at that dress while she walked us to our small tent in the thick of the refugee side of camp. Blue like Avus. Blue like Isla’s. I couldn’t fight the memories as they rushed in. Even after so many days of walking through the desert to reach this place, they were just as fresh as if I’d lived them only moments earlier. An ivory bird pin covered in blood, blue silk pooled upon the bed, copper hair braided down a pale back, wide eyes, slit throat, and those words.
We’ve been betrayed.Hide, Milo. Please hi–
“–know this must be a lot for you,” the woman was saying as I blinked and pulled myself out of the fog of my memories. “Prima is meeting with our leaders now to discuss what must be done to accommodate everyone comfortably but for now…”
She trailed off, glancing back at the hastily constructed tent.
“Where is the meeting?” I asked before she could turn away.
She stared at me for a moment, apparently surprised that I’d spoken.
“In the cave,” she informed us. “On the other side of camp. It’s where they always meet.”
Olympia was watching me but I only nodded and the woman walked away.
“Milo,” Olympia began.
I heard the warning in her tone. She knew I was up to something. She just couldn’t tell what.
“I’m going to that meeting,” I announced.
Olympia opened her mouth to argue but then simply nodded and didn’t come after me when I turned around and headed straight for the cave our guide had indicated. She’d been right.It was all the way on the other side of the camp and that was a considerable distance now that the camp had been extended to allow for a city’s worth of refugees. Well, a city and the city beneath it, I supposed.
It took some time to reach the cave so I arrived after everyone had already left, but I saw her.
Standing in front of a dais containing three older individuals who must have been this camp’s leaders and an unaged woman in her early twenties with smooth brown skin and a coarse dark braid running down her back I recognized as Prima, Adrian looked furious. I was so stunned to see her that her name left my lips before I knew what I was saying.
“Adrian?”
She whirled around to face me and a sob escaped her that had my throat constricting with the grief I’d so long held at bay. Then she was running from the platform, sprinting across the cavern, and throwing her arms around me in an embrace much warmer than I’d expected, much warmer than I deserved. I hesitated before wrapping my arms around her as well and then pressed in closer, needing the embrace more than she could possibly know.
“What happened?” she asked when we separated.
I tried to tell her, tried and failed, just as I’d failed every other task I’d been given in my life. She looked so confused I gave up, then asked her if she’d known the man who’d gone in after the jewel, the man who commanded the warriors who’d brought us here and went alone into the city. Her reaction was unexpected. A grief sharp enough to nearly match my own entered her gaze and a terror so strong I could feel it coursing through the air between us accompanied it. When she nodded in answer, I could do no more than pull her in for another embrace. Though I wasn’t sure whether the hug was for her benefit or mine. I seemed to need to lean on her strength to hold my own.
Then Dante was there and I was spitting all the venom at him I’d held in my heart these past few months before pulling Adrian out of the cave and away from him. She didn’t need him, not anymore, and all I wanted to do, suddenly, was protect her. I wanted so badly to protect the girl no one had ever protected before, to make up for all my failures by doing better this time.
“I'm sure he's fine,” I told her, hoping she would believe me. “I'm sure he probably just got caught up in the sands on his way back and he'll be here any—”
I was interrupted by someone screaming Prima’s name and the galloping I’d learned came only from horses. A man I’d never seen before claimed a king I’d never heard of before sent him with a letter from the city of the gods and everyone clamored over themselves to see it. But only I, positioned just behind Prima as she emerged from the cave to rip the page from the soldier’s hands, actually saw its contents. I read it over her shoulder and couldn’t help the way my mouth popped open in recognition of the name it contained.
“They have him,” Prima said aloud.
Gryfon,the letter said. They hadGryfon.
Adrian collapsed to the sand and I nearly fell with her. A memory of a journal my wife had found, a journal written by a madman’s son harboring an account of a divine encounter, flickered through my mind. I could see the words again, as plainly as if they were right in front of me once more.
Father claims a god came to visit him, a true god, a god who called himself Nyx, the god of night. He gave my father a jewel he claimed contained a trapped god, one the Light feared, one the Geist feared. He told my father he’d warded the stone so that as long as it remained within Sanctuary, the Geist could not enter the city and therefore posed no threat to our people. The moment my father took the jewel, the man disappeared, leaving behind only the stone and his companion, a manwith silver hair and piercing blue eyes called Gryfon. He too vanished a moment later. My father never saw either of them again.
