“Death, thirst, and starvation,” Linn corrected, but her voice was small and shaky.
“I told you, I am not your enemy.”
She was silent, the cogs in her brain working faster now. He’d told her he wanted to join ranks with Ana, but she didn’t trust him.
She couldn’t escape him, either. Not now, when she’d lost all her strength. “You wish to defect,” she said, stalling for the moment. “You would throw away everything—your rank, your honor, your badges—to join a rebel group?”
He didn’t move, but there was the slightest shift in his eyes, like a cloud passing overhead. He turned away, brows creasing. “I told you. I cannot stand under the leadership of this empire, watching innocents—children—die.”
A memory rose, unbidden: men seizing her from her bed aboard the trader’s ship, rough fingers on her shoulders and back hauling her out, piercing sunlight, and then a view of a cold, frozen land. Soldiers at the docks, in uniforms of pure white, silver insignias flashing at their chests.
She’d recognized the silver-tiger emblems of the Cyrilian Empire.
Help,she’d screamed in the Kemeiran tongue.Please, help!
They had looked at her, and they had laughed.
Linn said nothing.
The yaeger watched her a moment more, then crossed the room. He fumbled in some drawers, and moments later plonked a set of folded clothes and leather boots beside her. “Get dressed. We move soon.”
Move?He was asking her to move already, when it hadn’t even been an hour since she’d been stabbed? Linn frowned at him, then gathered what was left of her dignity and straightened. “What is your plan?”
He drew a set of keys from his belt and unlocked the window at the corner of the study. The metal-latticed shutters banged against the walls. A cold wind swept in, scattering papers on the oakwood desk and stirring Linn’s thin linen shirt.
The candle extinguished, plunging them into darkness.
By the windowsill and draped in night, the yaeger looked as though he had been cast in liquid silver and shadows. “My plan,” he said, “is to throw us out this window, seeing as you’re so good at jumping from tall places.”
It took her a few moments to realize he wasn’t joking. Linn gaped. “You are anImperial Patrol,” she emphasized. “Surely you have other methods of escape?” She waved a palm. “The front gates, perhaps?”
“I am as much a prisoner here as you are,” he replied. “The Empress and my kapitan sent me here in lieu of exile. Disobeying the Empress’s direct orders is punishable by death. I’m worse off than I would be should I defect.” His head snapped up, and his gaze sharpened. “That’s why I’m here with you.”
Linn watched him carefully. She didn’t trust him nearly enough to lead him to Ana, but she did need him to escape this wretched prison.
It helped that he was exceptionally skilled at fighting. And that he might have some knowledge of Morganya’s troop movements and plans.
She slipped from his desk, testing her balance. Her wound warned her with subtle pulses of pain, but she ignored those and limped toward the open window.
A wintry breeze rushed toward her, the cold stinging her cheeks and bringing with it the scent of snow and darkness. Linn shivered but leaned forward. Embracing it.My element,she thought, and when she opened her eyes again, the world became the movement of air, the subtle shift in currents and drafts as they circled each other in a never-ending dance.
I am the girl of wind and shadows.
“We go,” she said.
—
The night swallowed them as they climbed out onto the sill, stars unfurling above Linn’s head in a kaleidoscope of silver. She breathed in deeply, entranced for a moment by their quiet magic and ever-present glow, the light of other worlds glimmering through that vast stretch of fabric of the sky.
A story flitted through her mind—one her mother had told her, of how the stars were formed by the tears of two lovers separated.Their love now lights the night sky,Ama-ka had said, before she brought her eyes to meet Linn’s,just as mine will light yours and Enn’s, wherever you are.
Linn pushed the memory away, and it dissipated as easily as snow in the wind. “This is going to be—” she began, but the wordharddissolved on her tongue as the yaeger cinched something around her waist.
Smooth, transparent fabric, shimmering just slightly to give it existence, draped over her shoulders. She would know this fabric anywhere—just as she would know this contraption around her waist and shoulders. By her side, the yaeger had stepped out onto the stone ledge and strapped himself to her.
Linn’s heart tumbled as she touched the fabric between her shoulders. “Chi,” she said, in her native tongue, the word tasting bittersweet.Wing.“A Kemeiran chi. Where…where did you get this?”
“I’m an Imperial Patrol,” the yaeger replied, looking faintly amused. “Surely I’d havesomebetter method of escape than jumping off the edge of a cliff.”
