Up ahead, the Cyrilians slowed, pushing against the gale. One turned around, pulling a dagger from his hips. He flung it at her, forcing her to duck and roll.
The move broke off her focus; her winds died as the weapon clattered to the ground, passing a hand’s breadth from where herneck had been. The men took off again, hefting the large blackstone chest between them.
Linn swept her hands against the sheaths at her hips. Her daggers leapt into her palms, sharp, smooth, and cool, shifting to every subtle move of her body like an extension of her arms. Her sheaths were now empty; these were her last two knives.
Her last chance.
Linn’s grip tightened against them as she parted her cracked lips to whisper a prayer to her gods.
The answer came: Her blades struck straight and true. In front of her, the two Cyrilians sagged and collapsed onto the road.
Linn limped over to the men and their bounty. With trembling hands, she pried at the lock on the chest. It clicked open. Not even locked.
The inside of the chest was empty.
Linn pushed it back, nausea roiling in her stomach as she turned to the two dead Cyrilian soldiers. It was only when she flipped them over that she realized their faces were different from those of the men she’d seen in the bookhouse.
She’d been duped by the multiple units of Imperial Patrols. They’d known the value of the jade tablet, known she and the Temple Masters would chase after them.
Linn reached for her Affinity but found the winds to be faint as an echo, slipping between her fingers where they would have once leapt at her command. The world was swaying around her, shapes morphing and shifting before her eyes. Any further overuse of her winds and the hallucinations would utterly incapacitate her. Her tell with her Affinity had never been external—it was her mind that it warped.
She closed her eyes, the gravity of her failure hitting her. She’d spent all this time pursuing the wrong people—the true tablet could have been taken anywhere in Bei’kin now. They could have reached the harbor, taken it onto the ships. She’d exhausted her Affinity and her body; the entire front of her shirt was warm and wet with her blood.
But she could not stop. Ruu’ma had given her this command; she’d addressed Linn as a windsailer. In Kemeira, disobeying a Master was as good as a sin. Even if her chances of finding the Cyrilians and the jade tablet were slimmer than the stir of winds around her, even if she bled out and died en route, Linn needed to try. For this was the Kemeiran way.
Linn pushed herself to her feet and began to limp forward, one step at a time.
She’d gone half a street when something caught her eye. A figure, lying crumpled to the side of the street beneath the awning of a shop. From here, all she could make out was a flash of brown skin and black hair. He could have been Kemeiran—but she had come to know Kaïs’s build as well as the shape of her own fingers.
Linn took one, two steps, and then she was running, her exhaustion forgotten as hope roared through her veins. She knelt by the figure’s side, turned his face up.
Kaïs’s eyes were closed, his lips parted. A large gash on his cheek still bled; his body was covered in slashes. A long, thick wound gaped on his abdomen.
No. No. No….
Linn placed a trembling finger beneath the straight edge of his jaw.
At first, there was nothing.
Then, in that eerie stillness, there came the faintest flutter. A pulse, tapping against the pads of her fingers, whispering to her.
Alive.
She looked up. If she took Kaïs back to the Temple of the Skies right now, he might live. If she continued her fruitless pursuit of the Cyrilians and the jade tablet, there was no guarantee that she would even find them, let alone catch up to them before their ships sailed, in her current state.
Linn thought of Fusann Gen, of how he and the other Temple Masters had died to protect the information about the jade tablet. Of how choosing to save one individual over the greater good was selfish, of how it was against the Kemeiran way—no matter how ridiculous the odds. Vows were forged of iron, unbendable and unbreakable even as the circumstances and the world shifted around them. Tradition and deference were carved of unyielding stone, unchanged throughout time.
But Linn looked down at her friend, at her ally, at the man who had fought by her side for so many nights and saved her life more than once. She owed him, and she had promised herself that she would repay her debts. Action, counteraction.
Perhaps the years in Cyrilia had changed her; perhaps, as much as she’d hated herself for it, a small part of her heart now belonged to the icy Northern Empire, which had undeniably, irrevocably, and indelibly carved itself into her skin and bones. She was Kemeiran, yet fate would have it that she was also something else now—someone completely new.
The choice lay in none other than her own hands.
—
Linn had no idea how she made it back to the Temple of the Skies. All she knew was that she did.
The battle had quieted. The courtyard, once a peaceful harmonization of the elements, had been cleaved apart down the middle, a tumultuous mix of rock and water and molten metal and trees strewn about chaotically. The Temple Masters stood in a line before the entrance of their temple, deep in conversation. Around them, the wielder guards and apprentices worked to remove the bodies of the Cyrilian spies.
