My role as liaison was not just an honorary position. I was still Rahtan, and most important, I was still in the queen’s employ. She had given me duties to perform to ensure the smooth transition of power. She also believed the presence of a representative from a major kingdom would carry weight and add stability as the changeover took place, and warned me that resistance could come from unexpected places.
She had given me an additional mission—to be my first priority when I reached there. I had told her about the youngest scholar’s final guilt-laden words: I’m sorry. Destroy them. While we’d believed all the documents burned, where there was even a fragment of doubt, there was a mountain of concern.
Secure those papers, Kazimyrah,
and if you can’t safely send them to me, destroy them. We have no idea what information the scholars escaped with after the fall of the Komizar, or what they have developed since. We don’t want these papers to fall into the wrong hands if there’s even the slightest chance for a repeat of the carnage—or worse.
Worse?
There was only one thing worse than the Great Battle. The devastation.
Only a handful had survived, and the world still bore its scars.
I promised her it would be the first matter that I addressed.
She also asked me to send a history book or two if there were any to spare. I’d like to read more about this land. Greyson Ballenger was a brave leader. So very young, but determined to protect his charges against scavengers. It doesn’t always take an army to save the world. Sometimes it takes just one person who won’t let evil win. It is heroes like Greyson and those twenty-two children who inspire me.
The queen, inspired. She didn’t seem to grasp that she inspired most of the continent. She inspired me. She made me see myself differently. She saw me as someone worth saving, in spite of my rags and past. She inspired me to be more than what others expected of me. I dared to believe I could make a difference because the queen had believed it first. Even when I landed our whole crew in prison, she didn’t give up on me.
And now, with some pride, I knew she counted on me.
I imagined that by now Gunner had found the mysterious papers and would be trying to decipher their secrets. But regardless of what they contained, Gunner would be required to hand them over to me—no matter how loudly he protested. Tor’s Watch would forfeit the recognition of the Alliance if the Ballengers didn’t comply. In any event I had my own means to make him hand them over. Nothing would stand in the way of me keeping my promise to the queen, or in the way of Tor’s Watch becoming a recognized kingdom. It wasn’t just Jase’s dream, it was mine too. And it could be that by now the papers had been brushed aside while Gunner was consumed with other matters, like preparing for Jase’s return.
Jase had sent Gunner a message saying he was on his way home and he had good news to share. That was all he was willing to tell him. As energized as Jase was by the prospect of Tor’s Watch becoming a recognized kingdom at last, he wanted to explain everything personally, and not have Gunner impulsively announcing things to everyone that Jase—and the queen—weren’t ready to publicly share. He also didn’t mention that I would be with him. That would take some personal explaining too, more than a short note could convey. But at least for now Jase’s family knew he was well and coming home.
The message sent by Valsprey would reach the Ballengers through the same circuitous black market route as all their messages did—first to the Valsprey handler in the Parsuss message office, where the Ballengers secretly had someone on their payroll. The queen had raised her eyebrows at this revelation, and Jase promised that little transgression would be remedied too. Of course, as a new kingdom that would soon be receiving trained Valsprey of their own, there would no longer be a need to pinch the birds from other sources. The king said we could expect the handler with Valsprey to follow on our heels within a few months.
I heard the scuff of footsteps on the gritty marble floor behind me, then felt Jase’s heat at my back. He still radiated the warmth of the springs, and as he drew close, he rested his hands on my shoulders.
“What are you looking at?” he asked.
“The perfect beauty. Things lost. Us.”
“Us?”
“These past weeks have been—”
I didn’t know how to finish, but I knew there had been something in these days together that I didn’t want to lose, something that was pristine and almost sacred. We’d had no outside influences to come between us. I feared that might change.
“I know, Kazi. No one knows more than I do.” He brushed aside my hair and kissed my neck. “But this isn’t an end. It’s just the beginning. I promise. After all we’ve been through, nothing can pull us apart. I’m afraid you’re stuck with me now.”
I closed my eyes, breathing in his touch, his scent, and every word he spoke. I promise.
Things had changed between us in a way I hadn’t thought possible.
Only now did I understand the unbearable weight of secrets. You can never know their true burden until they’ve been lifted from you. These past weeks we had been swept up in the near-giddy lightness of truth.
We shared everything freely, no longer stumbling over our words. As much as I thought I knew about Jase, I learned far more—all the day-to-day details that had shaped who he was, from the mundane to the agonizing. I discovered more about his vulnerable underside, his worries as his father lay dying, and the new responsibilities that had so recently fallen upon him. He had thought it would be years before he had to shoulder the weight of being Patrei, but at nineteen, all the decisions were suddenly up to him.
He told me a secret he had never shared with anyone else—about his sister Sylvey and her last pleas to him, his guilt over denying her, refusing to believe what Sylvey already knew—she was dying. Even after four years it was still a raw wound for him, and his voice cracked as he told me. It helped me to see myself better—the impossible choices of a fleeting moment—the regrets we bury deep within us, the things we would do differently if only we could have one more chance, if only we could rewind a moment like a card of yarn and weave it into something else. Run, Kazi, run for the stick. Jam it in his groin, bash in his nose, smash his windpipe. Why didn’t I? One different choice might have changed everything. But my mother’s voice was strong too. Don’t move. Say nothing.
For Jase it was the opposite—he hadn’t listened. The last look in Sylvey’s watery eyes before she closed them forever still haunted him. He hesitated when he shared what was perhaps his darkest secret of all, that he had stolen her body from her tomb and buried her at the base of Breda’s Tears in the Moro mountains. It was sacrilege in Hell’s Mouth, in all of Eislandia in fact, to desecrate a tomb, a crime punishable by death. Not even his family knew what he had done. I tried to imagine the torment he must have gone through as he traveled alone with her wrapped corpse slung over his saddle on a dark mountain trail.
Other truths were harder to share—they surfaced in layers—some buried so deep they were only a vague ache we had learned to ignore. We helped each other find those truths too. How did you survive, Kazi? Alone? He didn’t just mean, how did I eat or clothe myself. I had already told him that. He meant the day-to-day loneliness of having no one to turn to. It was inconceivable to him. I didn’t have an answer because I wasn’t exactly sure myself. Some days it felt like all that was left of me was a hungry shadow, a thing that could disappear and no one would notice. Maybe believing that was what helped me slip away so easily.
Though our truthfulness was a heady elixir that I wanted more of, the closer we got to Tor’s Watch, the more I felt the weight of new secrets creeping back in. I had concerns about Jase’s family that I didn’t want to share because I knew he would dismiss them. He was the head of the family, the Patrei, after all. They would listen to him. But could hatred really be erased by a command? And his family’s hatred toward me had been visceral. It consumed them to the core.
I will gouge your eyes out one at a time and feed them to the dogs.