It was all she could do to keep plowing forward, the snow at her ankles, her breath hitching as she fought against the pain of those memories she’d kept locked away.
“I’m sorry.”
She reminded herself that his words meant nothing.
“I know you don’t trust me,” he continued. “But trust me when I say that I will change all of this. That I will help you get back home.”
Home.
What would be left of her home? The thought inevitably drew the last memory she had of Kemeira, watching the misty coastlines and jagged mountains grow farther and farther away from the trader’s ship. The image of Enn’s body plummeting toward the ship, seared indelibly into her mind. The thought of Ama-ka, sitting by their wooden hut stirring rice and salting fish, gazing out at the setting sun from between the fir trees for a glimpse of her two children who had vanished into the fog.
She’d long ago stopped believing in anything. Promises were made to be broken and lies were easier than the hard truth. But something in this soldier’s voice gave her pause.
“I know it’s hard to believe,” Kaïs continued in that steady bass of his, “but I was like you, once. I was born in Nandji and taken to this empire at a young age by a trader’s caravan.” His voice was calm, as though he were reciting facts instead of his life story. “When they discovered my ability as what they call a ‘yaeger,’ they took me away from my mother to train as an Imperial Patrol.”
Linn clutched the compass to her chest. It had been years, almost a decade, since she’d opened herself up to someone like this. Since someone had confided in her in turn. “You told me you were searching for her still.”
A pause. “Yes,” Kaïs said, softly and heavily at once. “I want to find her. And when this all ends, I want to take her back home. Across the Dzhyvekha Mountains and the Aramabi Desert.”
His tone stirred something in her. Linn looked at him, his face clear in the light of day that had broken across sleepy blue skies. “Do you still remember her?” she asked. She did not mention that the memory of her own mother faded a little every day, and that there was so little to cling to that Linn didn’t know if she still had enough of Ama-ka and Enn to love.
“I do,” Kaïs said at last, and this time Linn let herself look back at him, allowing herself to drink in the quiet loveliness of it all. It was one of the few moments of truth between them that she would remember. Perhaps, in another life, they might have been friends. “I remember the scent of her. The feel of her. She always told me I had her eyes.”
Her gaze lingered on his eyes for a moment longer than she had intended. They were striking: the pale blue of clear springs that first broke through winter’s ice. “What is her name?” she asked.
Nearby, a hawk cried out, sending showers of snow tumbling from a nearby conifer as it took off into the misty gray skies.
Kaïs’s reply was a long time coming. “Shamaïra,” he said softly. “Her name is Shamaïra.”
The name meant nothing to Linn, but she understood, all too well, the way he spoke it, with a gentle tenderness that belied an ocean of longing and love. Perhaps, she thought as she picked up her stride again, there was something she shared with this yaeger after all.
They continued onward, the sky giving way to violets and then corals and then the gray-blue of a Cyrilian winter morning. The sun hid behind clouds that promised snow. At some point, Linn sensed it: a thrumming in the air around them, an urgency to the breezes that whispered to her.
By her side, Kaïs tensed. “Patrols,” he said, his eyes narrowed as he scanned the area around them. He nodded at a large cluster of pines. “They’re on horseback. We’ll hide there and let them pass. Can you sweep our tracks?”
Linn drew a deep breath and summoned her winds. She held out a hand and guided them over the footprints they had left in the snow until there was nothing left but a smooth, glittering surface.
Together, they crouched behind a thicket and waited.
Gradually, they heard the rhythmic squeak of wagon wheels and nicker of horses. A procession of Imperial Patrols emerged into view, sitting tall on their valkryfs. The first, presumably the kapitan, bore an unfamiliar emblem on his breastplate.
“That’s an Inquisitor,” Kaïs said, his voice low. “Affinites handpicked by Morganya to run the Imperial Inquisition.”
Several Whitecloaks rode behind the Inquisitor, followed by a tall black wagon that emanated cold and made Linn think of her prison back at the Wailing Cliffs. “Blackstone,” she whispered.
Kaïs shifted his head in an almost imperceptible nod. He then paused, and pointed, his eyebrows creasing.
The wagon was followed by another lineup of Imperial Patrols. Linn had never seen so many accompanying a single blackstone wagon. She remembered, so vividly, the feeling of coldness and emptiness seeping into her very veins, robbing her of her power and her breath. The view, through the bars, of a shifting landscape of ice and snow, crystalline trees and gray skies, and the ever-present flash of a white cloak, a pale-eyed valkryf.
By instinct, she shrank back, her pulse quickening, her palms sweating.
A firm hand on her shoulder. “It’s all right,” Kaïs whispered. “They won’t find us.”
She swallowed, counting. Twenty Whitecloaks, accompanying a single wagon. “I have never seen so many.”
“Me neither.”
A scream cut through the silence, an animal sound so raw that Linn felt it scrape against her insides. It tapered into a moaning sound, eerie as the whistling of the wind between empty peaks, and Linn found herself digging her nails into her skin, the hairs on her arms standing.
