“Kaïs?” Shamaïra whispered.
The yaeger’s voice was thick with emotion. “I am here,” he said, and closed the gap between them. He knelt by her bed and she folded him into her arms, pressing her forehead to his. The years that had lined Kaïs’s face and worn down his shoulders seemed to melt away.
Ramson stood and crossed the room to the door. He paused, throwing one last glance back.
“Sweet, isn’t it?” came a bright, clear voice.
A girl had appeared in the doorway, several years his junior.Her shock of bright red hair framed her freckled face, which looked prone to smiling. Right now, however, she looked at Kaïs and Shamaïra with a quiet wistfulness. Her eyes were rimmed red.
“I’m Liliya,” she said, holding her hand out. “Liliya Kostov.”
He knew who she was—he’d seen her before around camp, and perhaps they had been in the same strategy meetings before, though they’d never had the chance to properly meet. She’dmostly hung around Yuri and the Redcloaks, a radiant flame of a presence.
Yuri.He’d seen Ana leading the valkryf with the Redcloak commander’s body draped over its saddle.
Ramson clasped the girl’s hand. “Ramson Farrald.”
“I know,” she said, and fell silent.
Ramson looked back to Shamaïra. Kaïs had taken a seat on the edge of her bed, their hands clasped together. Mother and son murmured words that Ramson had no wish to intrude upon.
“The waiting’s the hardest part, isn’t it?” Liliya said quietly. “When Kaïs told me, my first instinct was to prepare our troops for battle again. But…” She gestured to the ward around them, the beds filled with their injured. “I just couldn’t take this moment of safety away from them. We’ve all lost so much.”
Ramson frowned, the words stirring a whisper of wrongness into the serenity of the scene before them. “Prepare our troops for what?”
Liliya gave him a blank stare. “Did she not tell you?”
His chest tightened. “Tell me what?” Across the chamber, Kaïs had tipped his face to them. A frown began to crease his brows.
“Morganya left hours before our siege,” Liliya said. “She took half her forces with her to search for that artifact.”
The final piece of the puzzle clicked into place, the meaning of her words cutting like a dagger to his chest. The moment in the snow, the way Ana looked at him, tears limning her dark lashes silver.
He did not need to hear the rest of what Liliya had to say.
“Ana went after Morganya. She’s gone to the Silent Sea.”
The temperature seemed to plummet with every day of Ana’s journey north. Overhead, the skies became eternally shrouded in gray snow clouds, and each morning they woke to frost clinging to their clothes, fog threading through the frozen conifers. At night, the Deities’ Lights flared in the sky, jagged and erratic, the colors shifting sharply.
Each step of the valkryfs, each squeak of her carriage wheels, carved a path from which there was no going back. She looked to her wrist every so often, the siphon nested tighter than ever against her skin. Dark substances writhed across its surface, and around it, her flesh seemed leached of color.
When the time came, she would not hold back. She would fight to her last breath—for her empire and for her people, but also for those she had left behind and those who had left her behind.
Ramson’s face came to her, hazel eyes open and earnest as he held her. Ana closed her eyes, trying to recall that exact moment: the roar of a burning fire surging through her veins, the rush of water in her ears, the touch of Ramson’s skin to hers as his arms closed around her, the feeling of being made whole again.I loveyouwere the last words he’d said to her, to which she had only been able to reply,I’m sorry.
Ana thought of Luka, of Papa and Mama, the wreckage of her family too soon gone.
She thought of all those who had given their lives for the revolution—Yuri, Kapitan Markov, Lieutenant Henryk, and all the fallen soldiers, on both sides.
Finally, she thought of a small friend she’d held close to her heart since the start of it all. The girl with the ocean eyes and soft black hair, who’d breathed hope into Ana the way she’d coaxed life into a dying flower in the midst of winter. Ana’s lips curled in a smile, and as though in response, a soft wind stirred the fragrance of winterbells against her cheeks.
May,she thought.I promised you.
On the fourth night of their travel, Ana woke to Linn gently shaking her. Her friend parted the curtains on the windows of their carriage, and with Daya, they peered out. The landscape outside had shifted. The trees of the Syvern Taiga had given out to a frozen tundra, stretching vast and empty beneath a sky of weaving lights.
“This is it,” Daya said quietly. “The Ice Port should be right up ahead.”
They drew to a stop and stepped outside. The cold immediately invaded their bones with a biting vengeance. They were in the ghost hours before dawn, the moon low in the sky, half-hidden behind clouds that filtered an eerie, colorless light unto the land. Somehow, Ana thought, tipping her head up, the sky here seemed closer, the stars gleaming as though she could stretch out a hand and touch them. Behind her was the battalion of soldiers, trailingin a long, winding line. Ahead, Ana thought she heard the rush of the ocean, smelled the briny tang of sea carried by a breeze.
