“Marching us into battle with me chained like an animal...you or him?”
She winced. “Me. I so desperately wanted to die. The late Mattock, your father, fought him, but over time he weakened, and fighting Death only leads to death. He had chosen Asterie as his new envoy. But when you killed her—”
He’d picked me instead.
I let my arm drop to my side with a fist clenched around the dagger’s handle. In those awful visions that haunted me, I’d seen her there helping my father.
“And who are the others?” I asked.
“I have good reason to believe Barden is one—he was always near where the map showed the mark. I never found the other. He only needs envoys until the next black moon, when his Reverist power will return to him in full. Then anyone and everyone is at risk of coming under his influence.”
I reached down with my free hand and raised her chin to force her to meet my gaze. Crystal-blue irises greeted me—like the prettiest blue skies. I wished their beauty brought me the joy I’d thought seeing Ryssa for the first time might. “How do I know you’re not lying?”
She rasped out, “You don’t.”
I scanned her face while running my thumb over the scarring that ended just above her cupid’s bow. Flatly, I said, “You died. Asterie saw it.”
Why did I pity her?
A lump formed in my throat.
I was one of Caym’s envoys. If he could truly hop between us, then it was imperative that we avoid Sybilla’s cousin like the plague, and anyone else for that matter.
“Are you loyal to him?” I demanded with inches between our noses.
She shook her head. “No. He ruined me. He ruined everything...I don’t want to see you meet the same fate.”
Those clear skies began to well with tears again. I had to think. I had to do something.
We had a chance to get away.
I had a chance to getheraway. I wasn’t entirely sure when that had become important to me.
“Do you know if the deathmarks are exclusively on his envoys? Could he be tracking others or other objects?” I asked.
She swallowed hard. “It’s possible. They are crafted with a dark charm. The envoys cannot see them. All those books in there I’ve collected for centuries—I’ve scoured every page, every line. These are uncharted waters.”
I slipped a finger around one of the buttons of her cloak and undid it.
“What...”
Her mouth hung open as I undid the next button.
“What are you doing?” she breathed.
“Undressing you. Take every bit of cloth, every pin and piece of jewelryoff.” We would take no chances of being marked by Death wherever we traveled next. “I have been seeing memories of you. He might have realized you were near. It seemed that subconsciously…I knew you were near.”
In that moment, I might not have been possessed by the Death Origin, but surely something possessed me. For months, Firose had loomed in my shadow-filled nightmares and Ryssa in every moment of light. Somewhere between the two planes, she stood before me, embodying the truest forms of love and of hate rolled into one.
“If it is the relics he uses to track us, then you need to be rid of any before we go,” I said.
“Go?” She stilled. “With you?”
“Yes.”
I stepped back to allow her room to undress herself.
I couldn’t put the pieces together fast enough. But I knew that I wouldn’t leave her there. After dropping her robe, she pulled her tunic over her head. She discarded the golden ring from her finger, and it fell with a metallic ping on the stone of the greenhouse path.
