“I suspect the gods are keeping it safely tucked away in the godsworld, where they believed I could never reach it.”
“What happens tohimif you regain your own body?” She motioned to Keiran. His revived corpse.
Sidraeus considered her. “What do you want to happen to him?”
Emory didn’t know how to answer that. Part of her wanted Keiran to have some awareness of what was going on, if only so that he could see how strong she’d gotten. No longer the vulnerable girl he’d taken advantage of, but someone who was taking her fate into her own hands—even if that fate was closely linked to a god who might be using her too.
If anything, she wanted Keiran to know that the Shadow of Ruin himself was using him as a vessel the same way Keiran had wantedherto become a vessel for the Tides. She wanted him to suffer for what he’d done and everything he’d wanted to do to Eclipse-born. He deserved it.
And yet.
Perhaps death had been punishment enough.
It was a death she might have prevented. Perhaps the first real death she had on her hands; where Travers’s and Lia’s and Jordyn’s deaths had been accidents, Keiran’s could have been avoided. His final plea as the umbrae ravaged him still rang in her ears. The look in his eyes as she’d ignored him, letting him be dragged to his death.
“I can’t tell you he forgave you in the end,” Sidraeus said, as if he knew exactly what she was thinking. “He was too selfish for that, I think, and valued his life too greatly. But this guilt you carry over his death… the longer you let it weigh on you, the harder it will be to set it down.”
“Are you speaking from experience?”
“Am I that obvious?”
“Would that be such a bad thing? Not everything has to be veiled behind double meaning, you know. Honesty is a nice change.”
Sidraeus considered this. “Honesty, then. I had centuries to think of what I might have done differently to avoid what happened to the Tidecallers. They would never have been killed by the gods if I had listened to Atheia and chosen to give up on our dream before it got that far. They would never even have been created had I not set foot in your world to begin with.”
There was such devastation on his face, it gave her pause. She didn’t want to sympathize with him, but she knew this guilt, this blame. The thirst for power that remained all the same.
“You’re not the one who killed them,” Emory said, forcing forgiveness into her tone. Not for him, but for herself.
“Neither are you.” He watched her intently, as if trying to make sense of something. “Perhaps you and I are more alike than we think.”
Well, I do have your magic, she thought to herself bitterly, ignoring the way her blood sang at his words.
Emory woke with his hand covering her mouth.
A scream of protest died in her throat as Sidraeus pressed a finger to his own lips, the solemnity of his expression urging her to be quiet. It was a wonder she saw him at all in the dark: their fire, she noticed, had been doused.
Slowly, he let go of her mouth. “We need to move.” He was close enough that when he whispered, she felt his breath on her face. “The knights are nearby.”
She heard it then, the subtle clink of armor, the faint shuffle of footsteps. They looked over the edge of the canyon they had set up camp atop for the night. In the canyon pass below were at least two dozen draconics marching toward the east, carrying a few torches between them. There were armored knights and robedsages alike, as well as a young page Emory recognized as Caius. Tears glistened on his cheeks. He made to wipe them away, and the sage beside him—Master Bayns—seemed to admonish him for it.
Sidraeus tugged urgently at Emory’s sleeve, dragging her under a copse of spindly trees just as the sound of flapping wings assaulted them. Above them, a handful of draconic knights passed, surveying the canyon from the air. Two of them set themselves down a few feet away from where Emory and Sidraeus hid. A screeching growl rent the night skies from somewhere in the distance, drawing the two knights’ gaze.
“Is it wise to leave the beast there?” one of them asked.
In the other, Emory recognized the voice of the Knight Commander: “If the Night Bringer comes across it, it’ll send him a message.”
“Remind me why we’re not prioritizing going after him instead?”
“Because Anatolius is with the Golden Helm. They hold all the secrets of the dragons. More importantly: they know where the Sun Forger slumbers. If we follow them, we can find an unlimited resource of dragon flame to make more of our kind with. The Night Bringer will be no match for us then.”
“What about Anatolius?”
A pause. “I won’t let him escape death a second time.”
Emory’s heart raced. If the knights caught up to her friends before they made it to the Sunforge…
She had to stop them. But before she could think of drawing on her magic, the knights were off in a great flap of their wings. And Sidraeus was no longer at her side.
