The boy’s eyes flash. “It wasn’t like that. Lord Kairyn protected the people of the monastery. It was filled with corruption; we watched him purge it, help the acolytes. Help us. He said we’d been waiting too long for a Queen who would never come to help the realms. But he’d help it. All we had to do was follow him.” Mozi drops his head. “But it wasn’t like that at all. He sided with the very thing we were taught to fight against. He took over the minds of the people of Spring. I saw it happen. Then he banished Prince Ezryn.”
“The prince deserved it,” I say.
“No one deserves that,” Mozi whispers. “I didn’t want to follow the Green Rule anymore, but it was too late. Yesterday, my squad was chosen to accompany Lord Kairyn out here to the Ribs. He took a whole fleet of airships. Once we landed, I saw an opportunity to escape and thought I could outrun the storm and make it to Autumn for a fresh start—”
“Wait.” I crawl across the trench toward the boy and snag his chest plate. He gives a peep. “Kairyn is here?”
The boy gulps. “He’s looking for his brother, Prince Ezryn, and the Princess of Summer, too. He wants them dead.” Mozi looks into my eyes then to Delphie. “You’re … you’re them, aren’t you? You’re the ones he’s looking for?”
I drop the boy and shuffle away, collapsing back against the side of the trench. I say nothing.
“How does he know we’re here?” Delphia’s eyes widen, and she grabs my arm. “Ezryn, what are we going to do?”
“How many soldiers does he have?” I ask.
“One hundred, Prince Ezryn. Five airships.”
“I am no prince,” I growl.One hundred soldiers to catch me—
Mozi crawls closer, eyes frantic now. “This storm’s his doing, you know. He’s trying to funnel you toward Solonius’s Spine.”
Solonius’s Spine: the bridge at the end of the world. A passage between the Ribs and greater Summer. It had been too far away from the coast for us to take into the red clay sands, but it would be the closest route back to Hadria.
“We’ll have to figure something out quick,” Nori says in her monotone voice. “This trench is getting filled with sand by the second.”
“I know how to get back to the bridge. You’ll be safe from the storm, but his army is lying in wait, sir,” Mozi says. “There’s no way over the canyon but that crossing.”
“No way over unless we take him down,” Delphia says.
“He’s got an army of one hundred soldiers,” Nori says. “The odds are terrible.”
Delphia shakes my shoulder. “Ez, what do we do? Fight or run?”
To run would be to lose ourselves in the sandstorm. If we make it out, we’ll be even farther from Hadria. Rosalina and Dayton are counting on us.
But to fight …
I can’t win against Kairyn. I know this. As much as every part of me screams to demand back my Blessing and to make him pay for what he’s done, I can’t lose myself in that storm again.
I keep expecting the world to change to one where the Prince of Blood isn’t needed. But it’s not the world shackling me to my vengeance. It’s been me all along.
My strength doesn’t come from my sword. It comes from my will to protect those I love. I don’t need to kill to do that.
I don’t need you anymore, I whisper in my mind to that dark shadow, the one I call the Prince of Blood. Maybe one day, I’ll be able to say it to the beast.
I look at Delphia and Nori, staring at me expectantly.
They need me to guide them.
I suck in a deep breath. “We’re not going to fight.”
Delphia starts to protest, but I interrupt her.
“And we’re not going to run.”
I look up at the swirling sands above our trench, the wind that screams and rages and roars. I know that feeling all too well. I picture Delphia, kneeling beside me and wiping my hands clean of blood. I can do the same for Kairyn. “We’re going to talk.”
CHAPTER 88
