I didn’t have the first fucking idea where I was. And he knew as much.
One careful step at a time, I climbed out of the wagon until my feet finally touched damp earth. The rain had become the faintest spray, and it blew speckles into my face as I followed the sound of his footsteps into the dark.
CHAPTER SEVEN
We passedthrough brush into a dense, tall forest. His stride was twice mine, though he always stayed just close enough for me to follow. If he was going to kill me, he’d had twenty opportunities to do it by now. All he had to do was run me through with his sword in that first attack on the wall.
But he hadn’t. Which meant he was keeping me alive for something.You’ll get your chance to run, he’d said, and the memory of those words was an iron weight on my chest.
I didn’t have the first idea where we were headed, but I did know we weren’t in the Kingdom of Storms. The air was clean, the rain only water, the pine sharp in my nose. Under my boots, the grass tamped rather than crunched. Hell, therewasgrass.
For twenty minutes we walked in silence, and I evaluated how much of my body was broken. I could walk, which meant my legs were capable and my spine was mostly intact. My back screamed with each step, most of all from when I’d been thrown into the barracks’ yard well.
I still couldn’t breathe through my nose because of the cotton plugs. A pang struck me when I realized they were still there—a last remnant of Isa. All the same, I needed to breathe. I tugged them freeone at a time, but I couldn’t bear to throw them away. I held the bloodied wads between my fingers like a talisman.
Eventually I felt brave enough to touch my temple. Pain flared, their touch a brand, and I winced away from my own fingers. I sensed I had a large welt, but that was all I could tell. Maybe I had a skull fracture, but I’d never learned more than basic field triage.
Last of all I set my hand to my breast. My captor hadn’t stripped me, which meant…
My fingers slid under the edge of my guard’s jerkin, and there it was. My mother’s journal, untouched. Somehow it was completely intact, the pages so dry I could have wept.
Everything I knew about myself had been reduced to what I wore on my body. Somehow I’d been left my knife, and the Eurydice Waters I’d known all my life would have long ago unfolded it and carried it in hand, blade ready. But not me, not now. Holding a weapon—even a sunlit one—had never felt so futile. Not after what I’d seen those creatures do.
But why was this one alone? Why just him and me in the wagon? And why had we left the horse and wagon behind?
My mind revolved on those questions. I didn’t come to a good answer.
After twenty more minutes of walking, the pain in my back radiated down my left leg. I had to limp at the same pace as before, because he didn’t slow.
I was about to open my mouth when he stopped. One of his hands went up in a staying motion. I stopped hard, watching him.
His face lifted as though he were searching the trees.
With a whistle, something pierced the air. I barely had time to register it before he was at my side, jerking me a foot toward him with his hand at my back.Thunk.The bark of the tree nearest me splintered. There, not a foot away, an arrow as long as my arm stuck out of its trunk. White, almost iridescent feathering glinted in the moonlight.
That arrow had been meant for me.
His arm stayed around me as he let out a warbling three-note call like a bird I’d never heard.
A beat, and then the same call answered from somewhere in the trees.
He spoke words, loud and guttural and foreign. The tall trees rustled in a faint breeze, and he said to me, low, “Death seems to want your head.”
Said the monster who’d domed me.
I was breathing too hard and fast, my vision swimming, my heart too erratic to snap back. Like a rabbit, I didn’t move until he did. I hated myself for that, but there was something to it. Rabbits were survivalists.
He stepped away, turning from me.
“Will any more arrows come for me?” I breathed after him.
“Not tonight,” he said. “Come.”
He stepped toward a thick section of brush where the path seemed blocked. His hand went up in an arc, sweeping through the air. At the bottom of the arc, his fingers came to rest on an iron gate.
That gate hadn’t been there a moment ago. Or maybe it had, but I hadn’t noticed it. And now that I had, I realized it wasn’t alone: it was connected to a ten-foot-high wrought-iron fence overgrown with vines and brush that extended left and right for as far as I could see—which was about twelve feet in either direction.
The gate sagged with rust and when he pushed it open, it protested with a squeal. Almost a shriek. The noise was familiar, like a faint echo of what I’d heard inside the city. The memory came over me like a shroud, sudden, in flashes?—
