“They were going…” The woman’s eyes were fluttering shut,her voice growing faint. “…to Salskoff…”
Linn saw the spark of realization in Kaïs’s eyes as he reached the same conclusion she had: that there was a high possibility theImperial Patrols who had passed through this village were the very ones who had stolen the jade tablet from Kemeira—and they were now delivering it to Morganya.
Kaïs drew a small glass vial from his pack. Linn recognized it as the same sedative he’d given her back in Kemeira, when the pain from her wounds had been too much to bear. “Here, meya dama, drink this,” he said, tipping it to her lips. “It’ll ease the pain.”
The woman gulped it down, then leaned back with a sigh. “Sacha,” she whispered. “My son…Sacha Zykov. Will you…tell him…I’m waiting….” Her eyes fluttered shut; the tightness to her face bled out, giving way to peace.
“Osengrad,” Kaïs muttered to Linn once they were sure Dama Zykov had fallen unconscious. “That is one day’s travel east of us. We must reach Ana’s army before Morganya’s forces deliver the tablet.”
Linn was already scrambling to her feet, her heart pumping, all else forgotten. Judging by the still-smoking ruins, Morganya’s army could not be too far ahead of them. “We go, now.” She hesitated, her gaze drifting to Dama Zykov.
“Her injuries are far too grave,” Kaïs said softly. “She is beyond our help. A swift death would be a kindness at this point.” He drew a dagger from his hip. Hesitated. His eyes glinted as he turned to Linn: the cut-glass look of a trained soldier, expressionless, emotionless. “Scout ahead, see if you can find Ana’s army’s tracks.”
Linn swallowed, looking from his blade to Dama Zykov’s chest, which rose and fell gently in the injured woman’s sleep.Kaïs’s face betrayed nothing but calm as he gave Linn another nod. His voice, however, was bladed. “Go, now.”
She took off without looking back. There was warmth in her eyes that blurred the world, spilling over onto her cheeks. She swiped her tears away with a hand; the pain in her chest gave way to anger.
Dama Zykov had been a person, with a family and a life. Morganya had razed over her entire world without so much as a blink, wiping her from existence like a star blinking out in the night sky.
And she would do the same to tens of thousands of innocent lives, should she prevail.
By the time Linn reached the path leading out of the village, her hands were shaking. The snow here was flattened by what looked like hundreds of pairs of boots; she knelt down to examine them, her head sharp with a new emotion.
Hatred.
There were footprints she recognized as the steel-tipped boots of Bregonian Navy soldiers; fresher, though, were prints with rounded toes, and rows upon rows of sharp grooves specialized for traveling in snow. Cyrilian Imperial Patrols’ boots.
Morganya.
Night had fallen; the skies above her flared with sudden light. Linn tipped her head up. Through the sheen of her tears, the glow of the Deities’ Lights was magnified. Yet there was something different about them: a violence to the way they twisted and writhed, colors flashing and bleeding into one another with urgency—as though they were running out of time.
“Even the weather looks agitated, does it not?”
She turned at Kaïs’s low voice. He gave her a half smile; his dagger was nowhere to be seen.
Linn shook her head. “The spirits are angry,” she said quietly. “Ruu’ma shi’sen was right. The balance of the world…has not been right for a very long time. We have simply accepted it as our reality—yet this is not how it was meant to be. How itcouldbe.”
Affinites, toiling under blackstone chains, the first element imbued with the gods’ powers to be discovered and exploited by humanity. Searock, twisted and remade to be used against humans, prompting another cycle of Affinite trafficking to the Kingdom of Bregon. Linn would never forget the haunted gazes of the Affinites she had rescued from the dungeons of the Blue Fort.
And now, Morganya was on the brink of harnessing the source of magic that, combined with siphons, would allow her to control anything that held alchemical power. Linn could only hope that Ana would find the siphons before Morganya did. That they would not be too late.
So much of this world rested on hope—on their shoulders.
A cold wind suddenly gusted their way, scattering stray pine leaves in a susurrus. Snow whirled into the air, twirling silver in the moon’s fluorescence. When it settled, though, Linn realized there was something crouched in front of them, a dozen paces away.
Out of a pool of moonlight rose a shape, twisting like smoke. It glowed a soft blue sheen as it stretched, two nubs forming claws and another two forming wings, then a head.
“Syvint’sya,” Linn whispered. “Snow spirit.”
She’d encountered some of these with Ana before, and certainly many a time she’d woken outside a trafficker’s wagon to see these spirits dancing beneath an open sky. Eagles, soaring with wingspans longer than her own body; deer loping through trees;rabbits bounding in the underbrush, all shimmering a gentle blue. Back then, with so little to look forward to in her life, she’d thought of them as friends.
The syvint’sya turned to her. Surprise bloomed in her stomach: It had taken the shape of a small bird. It cocked its head at her, and she thought those blank white eyes stared directly at her. And then it hopped two paces forward and took off, its silhouette shrinking until it was swallowed by the night sky.
Somehow, Linn felt lighter. Surer.Hopeful.
She straightened, glancing at Kaïs. “We go,” she said. “And we do not stop until we have reached Osengrad and found Ana.”
Night had fallen outside, and the windows reflected the soft glow of the globefires and the fire crackling in the hearth. Ramson sat at the makeshift table, book splayed across his lap. He couldn’t help but glance up every so often at the figure sleeping on the pallet so close to him.
