Who wrote the note, how it managed to get to us, or if it was even true became secondary questions. Getting home was what mattered now. We stopped at watering holes only for the sake of the horses. For us there was no rest until the evening when darkness closed in.
I looked back at the long path we had trampled in the sandy soil, a crooked line on the red landscape. Dying rays of sun puddled in our tracks.
We built a fire in silence, gathering twigs and sticks and breaking off branches from a dead bush. Jase wrestled angrily with one branch that refused to break free. “Dammit!” he yelled, yanking furiously.
I reached out and touched his arm. “Jase—”
He stopped, his chest heaving, his nostrils flared, his eyes still fixed on the brittle bush. “I don’t know how it could happen,” he said. “Except for his hand—” He turned and met my gaze. “Samuel was strong and sharp-eyed, but his injured hand—” His voice caught.
Was. Samuel was.
“It will be all right, Jase. We’ll figure it out together.” Every word I uttered was hollow and inadequate, but I wasn’t sure what else to do. I felt pathetically useless.
He looked away, and his chest rose in a slow, deliberate breath. He raked back his hair and squared his shoulders, and I could see him stitching back together whatever had come undone inside him, refusing to give in to despair. I opened my mouth to speak, but he shook his head and walked away, rifling through his gear. He pulled out his ax and in one fierce swing parted the branch from the bush.
“There,” he said and threw the conquered wood onto the fire. Sparks danced into the air. He turned his attention to the dead stump, hacking away at it with the same ferocity. The noise was bleak in the emptiness, and every whack juddered through my bones.
“Jase, talk to me. Please. Do you blame me? Because you weren’t there?”
He stopped mid-swing and stared at me, the fury draining from his face. “You? What are you talking about?” He lowered his ax to the ground. “This is not your fault, Kazi. This is us. Ballenger history. This is what I’ve tried to tell you all along. It’s always been the wolf at our door. Our history’s been riddled with violence since the beginning, but not because we want it that way. Now we finally have a real chance to end it. No more power plays. No more black markets. No more paying taxes to an absentee king who never does anything to improve the lives of people in Hell’s Mouth. Lydia and Nash are going to grow up differently than I did. They’re going to have different lives, ones where they’re not always having to watch their backs. They won’t need straza trailing them everywhere they go. Our history is about to change. We are going to change it, together, remember?”
I nodded, and he pulled me into his arms, the bush forgotten.
The wolf at the door. I couldn’t help but think of Zane.
My history was about to change too.
Lest we repeat history,
Let the stories be passed,
From father to son, from mother to daughter,
For with but one generation,
History and truth are lost forever.
—Song of Jezelia
CHAPTER FIVE
JASE
The winds howled across the plain like a forlorn beast.
Kazi and I burrowed close together in our bedroll, the blankets pulled over our heads, sharing each other’s warmth. Her sleep-filled breaths were moist against my chest.
Do you blame me?
I knew what silence could do, the fear and dou
bt it could sow. I used it with calculating purpose on prisoners, letting the long ticks of silence twist their imagination into something hideous and painful. I used it on traders and ambassadors to push a negotiation in my favor, making them think I was about to walk away. I used it on Zane to produce Devereux’s name. I never meant to use it on Kazi, but I had been consumed, feeling my denial fade with every mile we traveled. I wrestled with the fact that the note could be true. The silence Kazi heard was only fear trapped inside me. But how was she to know that? I knew firsthand how silence had pushed me to a breaking point when my father wouldn’t speak to me.
Give it time, Jase, Tiago had told me. He didn’t mean anything by it. He’s blind with grief right now.
Tiago’s words had meant nothing to me.
My father had burst through the front door, yelling for my mother. The news of Sylvey’s death had reached him. He’d been away, chasing down the perpetrators of an attack on our farmstead. He had stomped through the hall, muddy, dripping with the wet of a storm. I tried to stop him at the foot of the stairs to explain, and he shoved me aside. Get away from me!