I nod when I’m supposed to and manage a few grunts that sound like agreement, but all the while Serik’s cynical laughter plays in my ears. His disappointed face hovers at the edges of my vision.
Would it kill you to believe in something?I want to shout at him across the Eternal Blue.To believe in me?
Guilt wallops me over the head a breath later.
You don’t need a master. Be your own hero.
Serik does believe in me. Just not how I want him to. Not how I need him to.
“Are you listening to a word I’m saying?” Temujin cocks a concerned brow at me.
“Yes, sorry. I’m just—”
“If it’s too much too soon, we can find another way,” Temujin offers. But his voice is small and he can’t meet my eyes.
I stand and pull on my greaves. “We both know there’s no other way.”
When I arrive at the rendezvous point, I find Kartok huddled in a gully thick with scrub oak. His brown cloak and tunic blend so perfectly with the decaying leaves, I see the breath ghosting from his lips before I see the man himself. I dismount and settle into the weeds beside him, shocked anew at the pallor of his skin—so white, it’s nearly blue from cold. This far south, less snow covers the ground, but the wind is far more punishing, whistling through the slot canyons and stripping the last of the leaves from the trees.
“Took you long enough.” He blows into his hands. “I was beginning to think you left me to freeze to death.”
“I’m sorry. The ride was long and my legs kept cramping. I had to take breaks. Do you want to build a fire?”
He levels a glare at me and points across the flat, barren field, in the middle of which sits a sprawling fort surrounded by tall wooden walls. There’s nothing else for leagues and leagues, not even a gnarled tree.
“Have you forgotten?” I snap my fingers and momentarily blacken the sky directly over us. “I promise they won’t see a thing.”
“Yes, yes! Praise the goddess of the heavens,” he moans.
I quirk a brow as he grapples for grass and twigs to use as kindling. I’ve never heard that particular expression before, but he was trapped in a Zemyan prison camp for a good deal of his life. He’s bound to do things differently.
“This job is much more pleasant since you came along, Enebish the Destroyer,” Kartok says once our fire is roaring and I’ve stitched a veil of night around us. “Though, don’t get too comfortable. We have a job to do.” He tuts his tongue like the monks at the Ikh Zuree and points an accusatory finger at me, reclined on my elbows, the threads of darkness resting slack in my palms. “You’re acting like you’re Queen of Night after one successful mission.”
I laugh because it feels so natural to be lounging in the darkness like this, I almost forgot to be afraid. Almost forgot a monster prowls beneath my skin.
Kartok and I exchange tales while we wait for the recruits to extinguish and relight the lantern in the eastern tower—our signal that it’s nearly midnight.
“It was by pure luck I escaped from the Zemyans,” Kartok says in a faraway voice. “I’d been captive so long, and was so docile and defeated, they stopped checking the shackles around my ankles. One day I discovered the iron had corroded from the filth, so I climbed out when the night watch changed, bludgeoned the unsuspecting guard over the head, and ran to freedom.”
“I am the opposite,” I tell him. “Poor luck brought about my freedom. Had I never been discovered and tortured at the Qusbegi Festival, Ghoa never would have sent me on my mission. I would still be trapped within the walls of Ikh Zuree, ignorant to the truth about the Protected Territories and the Imperial Army. Afraid of my own shadow.”
Across the field, a light winks on and off, ordinary enough to look like a gust of wind or a clumsy hand—but we know better.
Our approach at this camp is much different than the first; with the high fortress walls, I can’t simply slip into the encampment and dodge from tent to tent. Thankfully, Kartok devised a different plan.
I wrap the darkness around us like a thick wool shawl and we creep across the barren field to the wall. Kartok reaches into his cloak and extracts a handful of long steel bolts and a tiny crossbow that he straps to his wrist. When the bells in the watchtower toll the hour, Kartok shoots a bolt into the wood at knee level and then another slightly higher. Deft as an acrobat, and, in perfect rhythm with the clanging bells, he drives handholds and footholds into the wall and pulls himself up, higher and higher until he settles into the valley between two sharp parapets, just as the bells fall silent.
My mouth drops open as he lashes coils of rope to the parapets. I no longer have any trouble picturing him climbing out of the Zemyan prison pit.
He squints down at me expectantly, which is when I remember I’m more than just a spectator on this mission. Using his handholds and footholds, I carefully pull myself up to the top of the wall. It takes me five times longer than Kartok, and I don’t even have to place the bolts.
Shaky and out of breath, I swing into the parapet beside him and whisper a quick prayer to the Lady of the Sky, partly in thanks, but mostly for additional help; the treacherous climb was the easy part.
Below, in the fort, there are rows and rows of barracks surrounding a stone watchtower in the center. At the top of the tower, alongside the bells, is a massive rotating lamp that illuminates sections of the camp at random. “You failed to mention there was a spotlight,” I snap at Kartok.
“I didn’t think it would be a problem.”
“Of course it’s a problem! My darkness only blends in if it’sdark.”
