I shouldn’t listen to her. She’s probably lying, probably just trying to save herself. I should just take her out like Larus and Adria have taken out all the others.
Why can’t I do this?
Gods, and they think I’m going to be an assassin. I can’t kill a couple of nameless bandits in the Machair Wastes, let alone God-King Ronan III, ruler of Selara.
Thankfully, I’m just Plan B. Plan A has finished the barbecue and has moved on to the dessert: helping me.
The woman cowers against the carriage as my sister, a fiery blonde champion of death and destruction, arrives.
Adria doesn’t panic. She doesn’t even lose her footing on the churned-up patch of road. Adria is everything I am not, and I don’t just mean the hair. (Mine is brown like our mother’s was.) No matter how hard I train, I can never seem to put muscle on my small frame, but Adria is seemingly made of muscle alone. She’s wearing the same leather armor that I am, but where it hangs awkwardly over my curves, it seems to fit her like a glove. Adria was trained by Larus just as I was, but no matter how many times I’ve practiced with my sword, my moves are clumsy and easy to read. Adria is the embodiment of Kerensa’s grace and Sai’s fury.
Adria doesn’t hesitate. Adria doesn’t second-guess herself. She approaches the gasping man, the man I stabbed.A man named Marcus. And she puts him out of his misery with a clean, powerful thrust of her sword to his neck.
I gag as I watch his blood pour out into the sand beyond the road, turning my head and hoping she doesn’t notice.
I’m ashamed that I left him in that state. I should have finished him. What she did to him was a mercy.
Then she turns to face the woman who surrendered.
“Please,” says the woman.
There’s a glint in Adria’s eyes. A flame appears at the end of the index finger of her sword hand. Tiny, precise, no larger than a candle’s. Her fire isn’t the wild wind of the forest fire, the fires that burn the trees to make the ash that harvesters like the dead man—Marcus—sweep up to give to Selara. No, her flame is like an arrow. I’ve seen it before, once. Not long after the war, when the Orsa thought they’d take what little we had left.
The black, smoldering holes between their dead eyes.
I shudder at the memory. I can’t let her do this.
“She surrendered,” I say as I lower my sword, trying to conceal my shaking hand. “She knows something about the ambush.”
Adria pauses, frowning. Something unreadable flickers across her face. There’s a chance here. She’s curious. “Go on,” she says.
The woman stammers now, far more frightened than when it was just the two of us. “It’s—it’s like I said. There was a man who paid us. Marcus met him.”
“So you’ve never seen this man?” asks Adria.
“N-no,” says the woman. “But I could find him, maybe. He said to take out the carriages. Said there would be food in it, and coin for us if we did it—”
“Kill her,” says Adria.
“What? Me?” I expected Adria to ignore me. I expected my plea for the woman’s life to fail. But I didn’t think she’d make me do it.
“No, Sylvie. I was talking to her,” she says, glaring at me. “I mean, I might as well have been. She could have killed you ten times over by now.”
She could have, but she didn’t. How could I kill her? This woman is our prisoner. It’s one thing to kill the man who attacked me. I was defending myself, and Adria killing him was a mercy I was too weak to grant him. But this woman is innocent. She may have been involved in the attack, but she didn’t hurt us. “She said she could find the man who hired them.”
“We don’t need her to know who sent them. It’s Ronan, Sylvie. It’s always Ronan.”
The God-King of Selara. The man who invited us, the children of the failed rebellion, to the Great Festival. The man who killed our father.
The man we’re going to kill.
“If you let her live, she’s going to run right back to him. Kill her.”
Adria is right. I know she’s right. I knew it the moment I saw her.
If Ronan hired her, if he hired these people to kill us, we can’t let them live. We can’t take the chance that they’ll come for us again. We can’t take the chance that they’ll come for our people.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
