In the silence, the only sound was that of water vapor rising from the gently steaming ground where the icewolf had stood.
The fire had sputtered out, shrinking and outlining a dark silhouette behind.
“You weren’t easy to find,” Yuri said, blowing at his smoking fingers. “Hello, Ana.”
Linn dreamt a familiar dream.
At first, she was flying. Soaring, over an endless ocean of Kemeiran fir trees and mountaintops jagged against the horizon, the wind in her face and the wings of her chi buoyed like sails. The golden sun, threading through a fabric of mist over the shimmering sea, and the sky open and the earth endless, stretching all around her in infinite possibilities. Her brother, Enn, dipped ahead of her like a black-tailed sparrow, his laughter trailing in the breeze.
The dream always ended the same way.
She awoke with a gasp and sat up straight, her senses sharp as blades, her hands on the daggers at her hips. For a moment, there was only the darkness and the lingering taste of salt water and fear, fading fast as sleep gave way to wakefulness. And for a terrifying few seconds, she was once again sitting in the traffickers’ caravan, drugged with Deys’voshk.
A soft wind stirred, bringing with it the sharp scent of snow and pines—and a presence that was at once familiar and not.
Linn turned and met a pair of eyes silvered by the snow.
“Bad dream?” From the shadows of a nearby pine, the yaeger—Kaïs—stepped forward with the grace and lethal poise of a Kemeiran snow leopard.
Linn tensed. “Yes and no,” she murmured. What did you call a dream that was also your reality? She closed her eyes, trying to wash out the images of Enn’s body, folding and bending in all the wrong ways, falling toward that foreign ship with the flower-emblem sails and sailors whose hair looked to be spun of gold. Only later, once she’d boarded a similar one in search of Enn, had she understood what the ships were.
She could sense his gaze, still on her. Those piercing eyes had a way of making her feel as though he saw everything in her head. Her soul. “What was it?”
“My brother.” The words left her before she had a chance to stop them. Not that he could use that information to hurt her, anyway. That was one good thing about the dead. “He is the reason I came here.” She paused. “Was.”
She had learned not long after her arrival in Cyrilia, from a broker’s log she had stolen that had earned her twenty vicious lashes, that her brother had died in an accident at a factory in a remote Cyrilian town.
Kaïs lowered his eyes. “I am sorry.”
Linn stood. The chi fell to her feet, exposing her to the cold of a predawn morning in the grand Northern Empire. Her head had cleared, her hunger and thirst were bearable, and whatever balms Kaïs had given her had reduced the pain of her wound to a dull ache.
Kaïs watched her test her body and balance. “We should keep moving.”
They were two days out from the Wailing Cliffs, but one could never be too cautious about whether guards were on their trail.
Her wound still throbbed beneath the salves and bandages she had applied, but she was glad Kaïs insisted on moving. It was a soldier’s approach—and it assumed nothing less of her.
“We go,” Linn said. She bound the chi and strapped it to her back, her fingers lingering on its shimmering, translucent fabric.
Kaïs shouldered their pack and turned to her. “Where are we going?”
Linn froze, small bells pealing in alarm in her head.Goldwater Port,she thought. She knew, only tangentially, that the Redcloaks’ base was there, and if there was anywhere she might get closer to Ana, it would be there.
Besides, Linn had studied the map in Kaïs’s office last time she was there, and it was the only town large enough in their vicinity where she could lose this yaeger, if she needed to. Cloak or not, he was still an Imperial Patrol, and her distrust of them had started eight years ago on the moonlit shores of the Cyrilian Empire.
“Perhaps it is better that I lead,” she said instead. “Do you have a compass?”
Kaïs looked at her for a long moment. And then he held up his hand and tossed her something.
Linn’s fingers closed around the cold glass surface of a compass. She didn’t look at him as she looked down and found southwest, to Goldwater Port, and began walking. She suspected he already knew she didn’t trust him.
In which case, this was a gesture of faith. A step back, letting her lead.
He followed her, his boots making almost no sound in the freshly fallen snow. He didn’t say another word, never pressed her. Perhaps that was why she started talking.
“I boarded a trader’s ship to Cyrilia,” she said quietly, her voice barely carrying, “when I was ten years old. When I arrived, the first thing I saw were Imperial Patrols, standing guard at the harbor checkpoint. I remember their silver armor and the crest of the Cyrilian tiger on their chests. I saw their white cloaks.
“I cried out to them. I pleaded that I was here against my will. I begged them to take me back home.” Her voice was steady, but she felt less steady than she’d been in years. Her knees threatened to buckle beneath her with each agonizing breath she took. “They laughed at me.”
