The inferno in Yuri’s expression calmed to flickering flames. He looked away and exhaled deeply. “I want to believe you, Ana—”
“Then believe me,” she said earnestly.
Yuri folded his arms across his chest, and she suddenly noted how corded they had become, the skin on his hand crossed with new, raw scars. “You want to know how I really feel, Ana?” he said at last. “I resent you.”
For a moment, she couldn’t breathe.
“I resent you, and what you’ve done to our empire,” Yuri continued. “If you hadn’t been so intent on taking back the throne, we could have worked together from the start. We could have stopped Morganya from launching the Imperial Inquisition. Our empire needn’t have burned. And my mother needn’t have died.” His jaw clenched for a moment, and he drew another deep breath. “It’s all too little, too late, Ana.”
She would rather have taken a knife to the ribs than listen to him speak like this. The air was suddenly frigid, piercing, her lungs turned to ice.
Everything he said was true.
“I know,” she whispered, and her voice broke. “I resent myself for that, too.”
Yuri looked up, the inferno of his expression calming to flickering flames.
The room blurred, her eyes stinging and an ache rising deep in her throat, but Ana kept speaking. If she didn’t, this tentative moment between them would fade, along with her chances of convincing Yuri.
“You remember May,” she continued. The ache in her chest welled. “She was the first friend I learned to love. Besides you.”
Yuri was silent. The pause between them was soft as a held breath.
“There was once when I woke early in the morning, and she was gone from my bedside.” Ana closed her eyes, pulling on the memory, gently, gingerly, lest it crack and all the pain and sorrow she had kept buried beneath come pouring out. “We were sleeping in an abandoned dacha, and it was cold—in the middle of the winter. I panicked, of course, but when I looked outside the window, there she was.” She could remember the image so vividly, so indelibly was it seared into the deepest parts of her heart. “Sitting outside on the fresh-fallen snow. She’d brushed some aside and cupped her hands around the smallest seedling that had sprouted from the ground. And the plant was growing, right before her hands—the leaves turning green, the buds blooming into flower.” She drew a sharp breath, and the words slipped from her lips: “It felt a little bit like magic, watching her.”
There was so much she would give to return to that quiet morning, when the sun was but a silver whisper across the horizon, its light so distant that it felt as though the entire world had fallen away but for her and May and the magic of that flower.
Ana opened her eyes, the memory dissipating. “I want to make that world,” she said, and she found that she was no longer crafting her sentences to convince Yuri. She turned, and found him staring at her, that crease between his eyebrows, that golden-red glow to his hair. “I want to make a world where a small earth Affinite can sit on the sidewalk and make a flower grow. I owe it to her.”
They looked at each other from across the table, and the tent with all its open books and messy parchment and makeshift furniture seemed to fade before them. A gentle breeze stirred in from the open tent flap, bringing with it the sound of laughter and song.
It tasted like hope.
Yuri loosed a breath. Ana thought she glimpsed the shine of tears in his eyes as he stood and began pacing the perimeters of his tent. She pretended to look away as Yuri swept a hand across his face. He’d known May; when she had been held prisoner by Alaric Kerlan as part of his Affinite trafficking scheme, Yuri had worked with her to free the Affinites and destroy the Playpen.
May had been the girl to spark this revolution. Now, she was gone.
It was up to Ana to finish what her friend had started.
“All right,” Yuri said. He stepped back in front of her, hands clasped behind his back, conflict blazing in his eyes. “The Redcloaks will work with you to intercept Sorsha Farrald and take these siphons back. But that’s it. You’ll be at our mercy. You’llobey every instruction I give you. And you won’t speak of your movement—of the Red Tigress—while you’re with us.”
The proposal was bittersweet, but it was a start.
Ana stood and held out her hand. She noticed Yuri’s gaze drifting to it as he reached forward, likely taking in how the bones jutted on her wrist and how wan her skin had become. A shadow of emotion flitted across his face, there and then gone. He pressed his lips together and said nothing as he shook her hand.
Then, as quickly as though she were the one who held fire in her hands, he let go.
“All right, then,” he said grimly. “Two weeks for us to form a plan and get to Salskoff. We stop Sorsha, and we rescue Shamaïra.”
The sun was bright and high in the sky when she stepped outside.
Ana tipped her face to the heavens and sent a prayer, not to the Deities or to any gods.
This is for you, May. I’m going to finish what you started.
With every day that passed, the hope of finding Kaïs again diminished. Linn walked in silence with Gen, through bamboo forests and stretches of pine trees that had once rung with birdsong and the hum of cicadas.
The birds had fallen silent, the cicadas still.
