Roar came awake gradually to the sound of the hunters shuffling around her. She recognized their voices, the tight, worried whispers that carried despite their stealth.
“And I thought I had a temper,” Jinx said. “My emotional outbursts are mild compared to that.”
“Your last emotional outburst ended with a blade entirely too close to my special bits,” Ransom answered. “I wouldn’t call that mild by any means.”
“Funny. I wouldn’t call your bits special.”
Ransom huffed in annoyance while Jinx laughed with glee. But the friendly teasing was cut through by a quiet, stern voice that Roar barely recognized she had heard it so little.
Sly. The quiet, stealthy girl who spent more time watching than participating in the group’s conversations. “She is not to be trusted. She lies.”
“About what? How do you know?” Locke barked, joining the conversation for the first time. The voice came from right above Roar, and she realized that the warmth cradling her head was not a pillow but Locke’s lap.
“I—” Sly began, and then stopped. “I cannot pinpoint exactly what—”
“So you don’t know at all. Yet you would call her a liar.”
“I’m saying that maybe you should be resting rather than guarding the girl who attacked you. Rabid as a diseased dog.”
It took Roar effort to fight off a flinch at those words. She kept her lids low and her breath even, and tried not to feel the crush against her heart as Sly spoke truths that she wished were lies.
Sly continued: “She says little of her life in Pavan. Little about her life period. She flits around like a brave little butterfly with a broken wing, and you all rushed to accept her. She’s supposed to be a poor girl from the streets, but she came with her own horse. Her own supplies. She knew the man who sold three Stormhearts to Duke as if they were nothing more than trinkets. And yet, she pretends she knows nothing about our world. Had never seen eternal embers or storm charms or anything. I can tell you nothing more than that and the feeling in my gut. This girl is not who she seems.”
“Her reaction was … extreme,” Bait said, his voice tentative. “What if it happens again? Should we tie her up to be safe?”
“We’re not tying her up,” Locke growled.
Duke’s calm but stern voice cut in. “Be still, Locke, or you’ll damage yourself worse than you already are.”
“I’ll be still when you promise not to treat her like a prisoner.”
There was a tense silence before Duke spoke in a measured tone. “Locke, I know you are fond of her, but we must be cautious—”
“Did you see her face? Before you smashed a bottle into her head? Did you see the way she cried between screams? I guarantee you, whatever was happening was causing far more pain to her than it was to me. For skies sake, she was the one to suggest knocking her out. And yet you all think her, what? A military spy? She could have called for a raid on the market, and we would all be rotting our lives away in the dungeons of Pavan. A thief? There are easier ways to make coin than out here, unprotected and in constant danger. Perhaps she does not tell us about herself because she trusts as easily as you do, Sly.”
Roar wondered if he would defend her so fiercely if he knew exactly what secrets she was hiding. The hunters had made plain their disdain for Stormlings and the oppression inherent in their way of life. Locke, in particular, seemed to grow especially tense when talk turned to them.
A long silence followed. Too long for Roar to keep calm, and finally she gave up the pretense of sleep and opened her eyes. She looked in the direction Sly’s voice had come from, planning to gauge if she knew Roar was awake, but all she saw was the small girl’s back as she walked away toward the horses.
That pulled Roar abruptly into awareness, and she tried to sit up. “Honey!” Pain shattered through her head, as if she’d been hit all over again. Then Locke pulled her back into the cradle of his lap and laid a newly wetted rag against her head. The water was cool and helped clear her mind.
“Your horse is fine. Bait rounded them all up,” he said above her, and she tilted her head back to find him shirtless and bloodied as Duke worked to wrap a wound in his shoulder.
“What happened back there, Roar?” Locke asked.
She blanched and her mouth went dry. Of course, the only reason he would be here, taking care of her, was because he wanted answers. Well, she had none.
She shot up, ignoring the stinging pain in her head, and turned the attention back to him. “What happened to you?” Her voice was a barely there rasp.
Locke answered, “Nothing,” as Ransom said, “The fool got skewered by a tree branch.”
Locke glared at his friend. “I did not get skewered.”
“Pierced, impaled, punctured, spiked, stabbed—should I go on?” Jinx asked.
“Penetrated,” Bait said. “You forgot penetrated.”
They all laughed, and even Locke rolled his eyes. As if there weren’t a hole in the man’s shoulder that was already beginning to bleed through the bandages Duke wound over it.
All the hunters were covered in dirt, and some had darker stains that were likely blood. But everyone was alive and uninjured, at least in comparison to Locke. The land, though … it looked as if it had been gutted and all its entrails poured out.
“How are you all so calm?” Her heart was thundering as hard now as it had been when the twister manifested.
“This is what we do,” Locke answered grimly. “If only one of us gets hurt, it’s a good day.” He lightly touched her forehead. “Though I suppose two of us got hurt today.”
She jerked away, unable to hold back the rush of violent memories any longer. She closed her eyes as she thought about how she’d felt, what she’d done. “What—what happened to me?”
“We need you to explain that to us,” Duke said, his old eyes alight with suspicion that cut like a razor’s edge. She had been so grateful when he kept her Taraanese words secret. If she had known he understood, she never would have been so candid about Locke, about how she was glad he was being so irritable with her because it made it easier to ignore how handsome he was and the way her lungs didn’t seem to work right whenever he drew too near. Now Duke looked at her like she was dangerous, like he regretted having her here.
Roar shrank away, and her eyes found Locke. His hair had been tied back again, safely out of reach of her hands. Bruises littered his chest and shoulders, and she wasn’t sure if they were from the storm or her. She flushed hot with shame and squeezed her eyes shut.
“I don’t know,” she whispered. “I’m not without a temper and my mouth has gotten me into more trouble than I care to admit, but never … I’ve never felt anything like that. Earlier, before we arrived at camp, I had been upset. But then out of nowhere there was so much rage, and it pushed out every other thought and feeling. It was like … I wasn’t me.”
Locke looked up at Duke, then back down at Roar. “And are you you now?”
“I don’t feel … wrong. Not like I did then. Do you think the storm mesmerized me?”
Duke frowned, running a hand down his beard. “I’ve never heard of anybody experiencing added emotions while mesmerized. Usually, it’s the opposite. The storm’s thrall drains away fear and all other emotions. One feels almost blank. But I suppose it’s a possibility this came from the storm’s magic. An evolution of their ability to attack. We likely know more about storms than anyone else in all of Caelira, but even we have barely scratched the surface of all there is to know.”
She thought back to the night Cassius had faced the skyfire storm in Pavan, the only other time she’d been near a storm instead of locked away in the shelters. It hadn’t been as strong then, but she’d felt a surge of emotion then too. Not rage, but … “I might have felt something like this with another storm. I had thought it was just the situation I was in, that my own emotions were high because of stress. But during the skyfire storm that hit Pavan before we left, I felt overcome with jealousy, not quite as all consuming as the twister but … similarly out of control.”
Locke asked Duke, “Is she a sensitive?”
Sensitive was code for those who could feel storms when they approached. Which was every Stormling with abilities, and a few without who had traces of diluted Stormling blood in their ancestry. But most sensitives described the sensation as a tingle of unease or dread. A restlessness that pricked at their sense of self-preservation. This had been far more than a tingle.
Duke shrugged, rubbing at his mustache. “Maybe. But the manifestation is still highly unusual.”
The group fell quiet. Her head felt like it was about to cleave open, but she forced her eyes to meet Locke’s. “I’m sorry,” she said. “So very sorry.”
“Don’t worry about it, princess.”
She would worry about it. Knowing her, she would worry herself sick over it. “I attacked you. Attacked, assaulted, mauled, beat—whatever word you want to use.”
“Mauled,” Bait murmured to Jinx behind them. “Good word choice.”
Roar continued: “If I had had the chance, I think I would have hurt you much worse. Whether I wanted to or not.” She buried her head in her hands.
“But you didn’t hurt me. I’m tough enough to take a little brawling with a girl half my size.”
His hand smoothed over her shoulder, and she recoiled. He was the last person who should be comforting her. The soft, concerned sound of his voice grated over her nerves, and she wished he would yell. That he would be angry and aggressive like always. “I bit you,” she hissed.
Locke held out a hand to Ransom, who helped him to his feet now that Duke had finished binding his wound. He used his uninjured arm to brush off dirt and dust from his bare torso while he casually tossed out, “Not the first time I’ve been bitten by a pretty girl.”
Jinx snorted, and Ransom groaned and rolled his eyes.
“Really?” the big man said. “That’s what you’re going with here?”
Locke bent at the knee, squatting in Roar’s line of vision. “You didn’t hurt me. Besides, you’re in much worse shape than me.”
“You were speared through the shoulder.”
He shrugged, unsettling his bandages for the moment. “I wasn’t the unconscious one.”
“What if it happens again? What if I am filled with rage when you all are sleeping or focused on something else?”
“We’ll be cautious. If you feel any emotion that isn’t your own, let one of us know. And—” He looked at Duke again, frowning. “Perhaps we hunt only smaller storms until we know more.”
“No!” Roar leaped to her feet, head still spinning. “Please. Don’t shut me out. I’m here. I want to do this. I need to do it.”
“Why?”
“Because I do. Because I left behind everything to do this, and if I fail … I cannot fail.”
His expression softened, and again she wanted to shake him until he was as angry as he should be. As angry as she was with herself.
“You won’t fail. But hunters who want to stay alive must be as prepared as they can possibly be. And for that, we need time to figure this out.”
Duke added, “The first rule of hunting is knowing your limits—when to fight, when to run, and when to be cautious. We’ll camp here for a few more days so that the two of you can recover. Perhaps the rest of us can make hunting runs nearer to Sorrow’s Maw and begin bulking up our supplies.”
Locke began to protest, but a firm look from Duke cut him off. “You’re no good to us if you don’t heal properly. Ransom, set up his tent. If he won’t lie down, make him.”
* * *
The others did have to force Locke to rest. In fact, they had to force him back into his tent several times that day while remaking the camp. Roar thought her tent looked a little sturdier this time, though still somewhat jumbled. She would get better. She had to.
Hour by hour, the others began to unwind from their adrenaline-filled morning, but she could not seem to do the same. Roar was consumed with doubt and shame, but these feelings she knew were all her own.
She thought physical activity might calm her mind, so she busied herself with clearing the debris left by the twister, piling up broken tree branches on the sides of the road to clear a path. There were gouges in the earth where the storm had torn up the soil, and even with the debris removed, the road would be rocky.
When there was no more she could do, she made her way back to the Rock, studying the outside for damage, of which there was remarkably little. Dents and dings certainly, but with the way that twister had looked she would have thought it could tear anything apart. As she stood marveling, Duke ambled over to stand behind her.
“How are you feeling?” the old man asked. His voice was not as soft as it used to be, and his lanky frame was stiff.
She almost said fine. But there were precious few things she could tell the truth about, and this was one of them.
“Confused,” she answered. “Sore. Worried.” Guilty.
“Confusion leads to knowledge for those brave enough to seek it.”
“And if there are no answers to my questions? You’ve been doing this work for decades, and my problems are unfamiliar even to you.”
“And is that where you want to draw your line? When you give up? At things that are unfamiliar?”
“No. Of course not. But—”
“All things were unfamiliar once upon a time. If we all gave up when there were no answers to be found, there would not be hunters like us. Sometimes you must make answers when there are none.”
Her lip wobbled at the familiar saying. “How did you know I loved that book? Did you see it in my things?”
“What book?”
“The Tale of Lord Finneus Wolfram. Those were his last words to his uncle the king before he left on his doomed search for a new world. All my life I’ve dreamed of an adventure like that.”
“Ah. It’s a popular saying in our line of work. I did not know that was its origin.”
“Perhaps it wasn’t. But those words were my greatest hope when I was young. To find answers for the unanswerable, a path through the impossible.”
“Then lean on them now. But let us avoid ending up like Lord Wolfram, yes? No tragedies here, Roar. This world will make you a victim every chance it gets. Don’t let it.”
She nodded, feeling those words sear straight to her gut.
“I’m sorry I put you all in danger,” she whispered. “If you want me to leave, I would understand.”
“And what would you go home to if you did?”
She hesitated, but then decided to give him more of her truth. “My mother. And a life that is stifling on the best days, suffocating on the worst.”
He hummed low in his throat. “No one expects you to leave,” he finally said. “I do not know what lies ahead for you. Sometimes the paths of our lives wander far from what we expect; they twist and turn and branch into dead ends. I have lost count of the number of dead ends I’ve encountered in my long life. Each time, when I could see no future beyond a certain point, the future always came anyway. Yours will too, Roar. All you can do is be ready to meet it when it comes.”
Duke nodded his head and wandered back to the group. She considered following, wanted to, even. But then she saw Sly watching her with suspicion. Even Bait wasn’t his usual silly self around her. She did not blame them. They should be wary of her.
She tried to do some resting of her own and retired to her tent for a nap, but she could not turn her mind off. The hunters gathered round the campfire got more raucous as the day passed, celebrating their victory and survival. She had the feeling this was a ritual, a cleansing of sorts. Each laugh hit her with the force of a punch, bearing down on an already impossible weight that sat upon her chest. Soon she was crawling out of her shoddy tent and seeking out Locke’s. Maybe she would be able to sleep if she saw that he was well.
There was a faint blue glow behind the canvas of his tent, and when she opened the flap, she saw a lightning lantern in the corner, casting light on Locke’s sleeping form. His chest was still bare except for the bandage, and his blankets were pushed down around his waist.
His tent was large enough that she could fit with just a slight hunch of her head and shoulders. She had to practically crawl in and out of her own tent by comparison. She crossed toward Locke on tiptoe and knelt beside his sleeping pallet.
His body was a master study in strength—all hard muscles and scarred skin. The waves of his long hair were spread out on his pillow. He had lashes that rested on cheeks that looked as if they had been cut from stone. She wanted to trace the slightly crooked line of his nose, rasp the pads of her fingers over the thickening stubble along his jaw.
She was still angry over the way he had treated her in the river, and she did not know where to put that anger when what she had done was far worse.
The bandage at his shoulder was clean, so at least the wound seemed to have stopped bleeding. She was glad she had been unconscious when he was injured. Her stomach rolled just imagining what he must have looked like with a branch piercing his skin. So like what had happened to her brother.
The bruising on his chest had darkened, and even in the areas where his skin was undamaged, she could see the faint white lines and marks of dozens upon dozens of scars. Hesitantly, she reached out and lightly traced her finger over a raised mark near his lower ribs. His skin was warm, and the muscles firm beneath it. Her pale skin contrasted against his darker coloring, and she had the sudden urge to splay both hands over his chest, touching as much as she could with the spread of her fingers, but she settled for skimming that scar once more.
“Bandits,” he murmured, making her jerk backward. His eyes were still closed, and she wondered if she had imagined it, but then he kept speaking. “Not just storms and military that are a danger to us. We move a valuable commodity, and some people are not content to buy it in a market.”
“You were stabbed?” She wanted to touch the scar again, but she shoved her hand beneath her thigh to keep it away.
“Between the ribs. It was a close call.”
“That’s terrible.”
“Would have fit with the rest of my life. Survive hurricanes and firestorms, only to be brought down by a small blade.”
“I’m glad you weren’t,” she murmured, her eyes cast down toward her lap.
“Me too.”
Those words settled into the quiet between them, and her heart kicked up speed as she searched for the right words to say.
“I’m sorry I woke you.”
“I don’t mind. I’ve been sleeping all day.”
She swallowed. “I only wanted to be sure you were well. I feel … I feel so terrible about…” She trailed off, and let her hand hover over a set of scratch marks on his arm. At the last moment, she thought better of it and pulled back, but Locke caught her hand before she could go too far, pressing it down over the damage she had done to him and holding her palm against it.
“It’s nothing, Roar. Doesn’t hurt at all.”
Her gaze traveled to the bandage on his shoulder.
“Don’t you dare take that on you. Things like this happen.”
“I distracted you. Delayed you. If you hadn’t had to deal with me, maybe this never would have happened.”
“If your goal is to not distract me, I regret to inform you that it’s a lost cause.”
She didn’t know what that meant, couldn’t tell if she was just reading into his words because of his deep, gravelly voice and his bare chest and the skyfire glow inside the tent that cast them both in shadows.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “About the river. I did not mean to—well, I did, but my intention was not to hurt you.”
“What was your intention?” she whispered.
“To teach you.”
She froze and tried to tug her hand free, but his reflexes were too fast and he closed his grip around her hand before she could.
“To teach me what? That I’m soft? Easy to manipulate? Someone already beat you to that lesson. Though I guess I did not learn it as well as I should. But I have now.”
“Roar. That wasn’t … I—”
She ripped her hand from his grip and stood, her head glancing off the canvas before she remembered to hunch.
“I should let you rest.”
She scrambled out of his tent and fled toward her own. She was almost there when Sly stepped out from the darkness to block her path. Roar jerked to a stop. “Sly, I didn’t see you.”
“Most people don’t.”
The female hunter had an eerie stillness to her … like a predator that could be on you before you even took a breath to scream.
“I think I’m going to sleep. Long day.”
The girl let Roar pass, but before she made it to her tent, Sly called after her, “Just remember. When you don’t see me, it’s because I see you. I see the things that other people miss. The things that they don’t want to see. And I’ll be watching you.”
Roar threw herself into the shaky refuge of her tent, pulled a blanket over her head to block out the world, and tried not to think of all she was missing back home.
* * *
Nova held herself entirely still, trying to will her body calm. When she moved, heat surged in every joint like her bones were flint and steel, sparking as they shifted against each other. She had lost track of time in her cell, but she knew days had passed since Roar left. And with each hour, the room seemed smaller, her mattress thinner.
A tray of food sat by the door, but it had long since grown cold. She did not trust herself to move toward it. Stillness was the only friend she had right now.
It was the not knowing that plagued her most. They’d thrown her in this cell, and she had seen no one since except the array of arms that reached inside occasionally to drop a tray of food. Her mind, duplicitous as ever, provided an unending stream of dire possibilities for why she was being kept in here and what was happening outside these four walls.
Even now, she wondered if this had nothing to do with Aurora. If perhaps they had somehow learned her secret, and this room, this nothingness, was what she had always feared.
She’d been living on borrowed time since her magic manifested as a child. A Stormling amir, the Taraanese equivalent of an admiral, had visited the house for dinner. Nova had been young, and she accidentally knocked over her drink, sending the liquid into the man’s lap. He’d grabbed her wrist and snarled, and out of nowhere, the fancy tie about his neck had caught fire. The burns to the man’s neck, face, and hands had been extensive. And her family had left in the middle of the night with only what they could carry, using all the money they had saved up to pay for an escort from a hunter, like the ones Rora was with now.
At the memory, the fire climbed so high up her throat that she could swear she tasted soot on her tongue. She tried to push it down, to lock it behind that door deep inside, but it would not budge. She broke her stillness to tear a strip of fabric from the bottom of her skirts. She cupped it in her hands, and then let free just a little of the power churning inside her. The flame caught quickly, easing some of the pressure in her chest. The scent of smoke calmed her somehow, reminding her that she was not helpless.
The fabric burned down to ash too fast, leaving behind an aching hunger to do it again, to burn and burn until all the heat was outside instead of inside.
A loud clank sounded at the door, and her head jerked to the small barred window above her head. It was not yet time for another meal to be delivered. She barely had time to dump the ash from her hands before the heavy wooden door swung open, revealing the Prince of Locke on the other side.
She remembered the way he had looked at her when he wanted information about the markets. His eyes had been hooded, suggestive, alluring. She had not been deceived in the slightest, but she preferred those eyes to the flat black coals she faced now. He made eye contact with someone out of sight and nodded, then he strode into the cell and locked the door once more behind him.
He leaned against the stone wall, crossing his arms over his chest. With a clenched jaw, he breathed in slowly through his nose, and her stomach dropped, fearing he would smell the smoke.
He reached into his pocket and pulled out something that gleamed in the dim room. He rotated it between his fingers, and Nova finally placed what she was seeing.
A skyfire Stormheart. The one Rora had gifted her.
“Anyone with storm magic can use any Stormheart that matches their affinities,” he began. “We pass them down to our children and their children. But when you destroy a storm yourself, its heart is forever tied to you. It is a dangerous feat. There’s no skill to it that can be learned. No magic spell. It is simply your will to live versus the storm’s, and the strongest one wins. That kind of battle leaves a mark.” He tossed the Stormheart into the air, light reflecting off the pearlescent surface, then caught it once more in his fist. “Imagine my surprise when I found one of my Stormhearts, a heart marked by my soul, by my sacrifice and given to my betrothed … in the room of a servant.”
For the first time since she had been tossed in this cell, Nova went cold. Bumps rose along her skin, and the air felt charged with fury and magic. She reached for her fire, found it flickering low inside her, but could not call it out. The air was too thick, too smothered with the prince’s power.
“Explain to me, Novaya”—he dragged out the syllables of her name as if they belonged to him—“how this came to be in your room.”
She hesitated, heart thundering in her ears, fire sparking inside her, trying and failing to catch. “The princess gave it to me.”
He flew across the room, and caught her by the throat. “You lie.” The touch of his hand spread a shock wave of residual storm magic over her skin. Her own magic leaped up to meet it, pushing at the barrier of her skin. She leaned back, splaying her hands on the mattress, and he loomed over her.
The fire made her brave, made her stupid, and she hissed back, “She loathed you.”
He sneered, “Because of the knife wound? She’s not so weak as to be bothered by that. I apologized, and she accepted.”
Nova smiled, past caring about the consequences. Maybe he would kill her. Maybe she would burst into flame and kill them both. At least then, she would never waste another second worrying herself into misery. She choked out the words, “She knew. Knew you were … using her. Just … wanted throne.”
All at once his constricting grip was gone, and he stood back glaring at her. His chest jerked with the rise and fall of his breath, and he spun back toward the door without a word. He rapped hard against the heavy wood until the guard outside answered. When the door clanged shut once more, locking out the world, Nova lifted her hands to find she had left behind a charred imprint of two hands on her mattress. She laughed, a high desperate sound, because she did not know what else to do.
She knew this was not over. He would be back. But she was just as capable of inflicting damage as he.