14

Eliana

“Since our war with the humans began, I have had only one dream. Every night, the fog surrounding it lifts, and I understand more of what I see: a woman, made of gold brighter than the sun. She stands in a river of blood, and light falls from the ends of her hair. Is she friend or foe? This my dreams have not made clear to me. But I know this: she will come. In this war, or the next, she will come.”

—Lost writings of the angel Aryava

“I hear you’re a storyteller,” said Navi.

Eliana waited for Remy’s response.

Nothing.

For two days they’d been driving the horses north by night, hiding in tense silence when they heard signs of pursuing adatrox patrols, and then, from sunup to sundown, waiting in the trees for nightfall.

The moment they’d had a chance to rest, hiding in a ditch lined with reeking mud as the sun shone dangerously bright above, Remy had whispered, “What happened to Harkan?”

“He stayed behind to give us time to escape,” Eliana had told him, her voice carefully careless and her heart in shreds. “I left him instructions. He’ll catch up with us later—”

“Don’t lie to me. He’s dead, isn’t he?”

She couldn’t look at him. “Harkan? Come on, you know it takes more than a few adatrox to—”

“Shut up.”

“Truly, Remy. We can’t know for certain.” Even as she said the words, she couldn’t bring herself to believe them. “He could still be alive—”

“Please.” Remy had drawn his knees to his chest and turned away from her. “Just shut up.”

He had said nothing since.

Now, however, Navi seemed determined to make him speak.

“What kind of stories do you like to tell?” she asked.

Eliana, on first watch, leaned against a nearby silver oak, Arabeth in one hand and Whistler in the other. She glared into the forest. Slender silver oaks with faintly gleaming bark surrounded them, as did waxy-leaved, white-flowered gemma trees. Stout watchtowers, branchless save for frazzled-looking clusters at the top, stood lopsided throughout. They were popular along Orline’s outer wall, traditionally planted to ward off invaders, which Eliana found hysterical. She’d always thought they resembled old men with soft bellies and wild hair.

When she’d first told Remy that, he’d considered the tree nearest them, then put his nose in the air, bowed, and said to the tree, “Well met, good sir. Might I offer you a comb?”

Eliana had laughed so hard she’d actually squeaked.

Her hand tightened around Whistler. God, it’d be nice to fight something.

Instead of standing here, feeling sorry for myself.

And angry.

Mostly angry.

No. She drew a long, slow breath. Mostly missing Harkan.

And Mother.

And Father.

For a moment she allowed herself to imagine Harkan there beside her, on watch with her, distrusting Simon with her, worrying about her mother with her—and her throat tightened so painfully that she lost her breath.

Pay attention, Eliana. You’re on watch.

She glared at the trees until her eyes dried, then glanced sidelong at Simon, who had settled down to rest. He sat in the shadow of another oak, scanning the dawn-lit forest.

She considered him. Grief and worry nettled her insides. This stillness was maddening.

What would he do if she lunged at him with blades drawn? He’d bested her back home, but only because of his gun. If she could gut him before he could reach the holster—

And then what? The whole point of this mad venture was to use him, not kill him.

Eliana thumped her head against the tree at her back and glared at the sky.

“Talking to me might make you feel better,” Navi insisted, her voice kind.

Eliana rolled her eyes.

But then Remy surprised her. “I like to write stories about magic,” he replied hoarsely.

Eliana’s breath caught. She hadn’t realized until that moment how deeply she’d missed the sound of his voice.

“Magic?” Navi sounded intrigued. “You mean the Old World?”

“I like writing about the elementals. Especially earthshakers.”

“Why earthshakers?”

“Sometimes I wish an army of earthshakers would come to Orline. Crack open the ground, let it swallow the city whole.”

“I see,” said Navi evenly.

“Sorry,” Remy muttered. “Eliana says I shouldn’t talk about things like that. It isn’t kind.”

That seemed to amuse Navi. “And your sister is?”

Bitch. Eliana flashed her the smile she usually reserved for marks she wanted to coax into bed. “When I want to be,” she replied.

Remy threw her an irritated look.

Navi put her arm around his shoulders. “I do understand wanting to tear down your city,” she said. “Sometimes I think life would be easier if the oceans would rise up and drown Astavar. Then I wouldn’t have to spend every moment of my life in an agony of worry for it.”

Remy nodded. “Waterworkers could do that.”

“Indeed they could, if there were any left. And they’d have to be quite powerful, even then, to sink an entire country.”

A beat of silence. Then Remy said, hushed, “Queen Rielle could have done it.”

“Ah.” Navi let out a little sigh. “The Blood Queen herself. Yes, I’m sure she could have plunged every mountain standing to the depths if she had lived long enough to do it. Do you ever write stories about her?”

“I wrote a story once about what would have happened if she hadn’t died. If she’d lived forever with the angels, and the world still had magic in it. Do you think the angels would have made her one of them? That’s what I wrote, in my story. She led them to the sky, and they searched for God in the stars.”

“I think,” said Navi slowly, “that if the Blood Queen had lived, she would have become something more powerful than even the angels, with all their millennia of knowledge, could have comprehended.”

Eliana pushed herself off the tree, no longer able to stand there and listen to Remy’s voice grow more and more excited, as if this Princess Navana were some dear friend of his, as if he didn’t care that Eliana waited in the shadows, ready to slit any strange throats that might happen by.

And would he rather I stand idly and watch him get torn to pieces the next time we’re attacked?

She knew what he would say: Yes.

The fool.

Because at least then I wouldn’t be killing. Is that right, dearest brother?

“Do you like writing stories?” Remy asked.

“I like telling stories others have written,” Navi answered. “Stories about Astavar most of all.”

Remy hesitated. Then, shyly, “Will you tell me one?”

Eliana dared to look back at them. Remy had wedged himself against Navi’s side in the bracken, their backs against a felled watchtower tree, his head tucked under hers. The girl was stroking his shaggy hair, slow and soft, and when she caught Eliana staring, the expression she wore was one of such compassion that Eliana fantasized, for an immensely satisfying moment, about stalking over and striking her square in the jaw.

She turned away, toward Simon—

But he was gone.

She froze. Fear carved her chest into ribbons.

“I certainly will share a story with you, and I’m honored that a wordsmith like you would ask,” Navi replied. “You know, of course, that the patron saint of Astavar is—”

“Tameryn the Cunning,” Remy said, his voice lighting up. “She was a shadowcaster. I read that she slept under the stars with her black leopard for a pillow.”

“And did you also read,” Navi said, “that shadows grew out of her scalp instead of hair? Her favorite comb was coated in crushed black pearls and carved from the bones of a wolf who died saving her life when she was a girl.”

“I don’t know that story,” Remy whispered, awestruck.

Eliana crept away from them, their murmured voices following her into the morning air like an unfamiliar lullaby. Daggers out, she circled the tree under which Simon had been standing. Gone.

She supposed he could be relieving himself somewhere, but the unease inching up her torso said otherwise.

Ducking underneath a drooping oak branch, using Whistler’s blade to part a curtain of hanging moss, Eliana knew she was moving too far away from camp, that she shouldn’t leave Navi, Remy, and the horses untended, but without Simon, they were all lost. They’d get turned around in these swamp-riddled forests faster than—

A shift in the air, slight but undeniable.

Someone was near.

Eliana crouched in the shadow of a gemma tree, searching the forest.

Then something cold pricked the side of her neck.

“Give me a reason to kill you,” came a woman’s voice, vicious and made of gravel, “and I’ll do it.”

Eliana pressed her neck harder against the woman’s knife, felt the blade’s tip sink into her flesh. The pain thrilled her. I am here, it said, and I do not run from death.

I seek it out.

She laughed. “You’d die trying, I’m afraid.”

The woman made a scornful noise. “Unlikely,” she spat out, and then brought the hilt of her knife down hard against Eliana’s head.