Let Maud trust me as I trusted her. I couldn’t lose two in one day.
Not Maud too.
“Anything you want—hairpins, a pet, a new employer.” I touched her arm and pulled her close, the possibilities of what was wrong endless. “I don’t want you to leave.”
Her mouth opened. The little muscles at the corners of her mouth pulled taut, and she laid her hand over mine. Her shoulders tensed. “I’m not mad at you. Not at all. Please, don’t worry. I haven’t been home in ages, and I want to see it now in case anything happens.”
“Nothing’s ever happening to you.” I pulled her into a hug, the baby hairs around her ears tickling the skin between my mask and scalp, and as soft as I could, asked, “What’s wrong?”
No one could see my mouth move. Only Maud would know I’d spoken.
“Go home,” she whispered back, lips hidden from view behind my arm. “Trust me.”
I squeezed her once, let her go, and nodded to Lena. “You owe me a servant.”
“Of course.” She smiled. “I believe Maud selected a temporary replacement?”
Maud laughed. “Oh yes, someone has to clean up Opal’s messes.”
I laughed too.
Something was definitely wrong. Maud always used my full title when making fun of me, and I’d heard her style of jokes often enough to know one. This wasn’t one.
But she’d told me to go home, not help.
It wasn’t like she was with someone terrifying. Lena had sent me after Caldera and been vital to Our Queen. Something else was wrong.
I ducked—Lady bless, I was covered in blood and Maud hated it—and bowed a little lower and longer than would’ve been necessary. “Unless you would like an escort, I’ll leave you.”
The Left Hand served as court bodyguards sometimes, and maybe I’d be able to figure out what was eating Maud.
I shuddered.
Eat.
My circle of family was ever shrinking and now it began and ended with Maud.
Was there some other Nacean out there? An Erlend Sal as lonely and cut off as I felt? Or maybe they’d willingly given up being Nacean and not had it ripped from them? It hurt to hope, to think I’d even one person to share my life with.
“We’re well.” Maud’s eyebrows wrinkled together. “I am to assume the barn is not a comfortable resting place?”
“No,” I said, thoughts stuck on the Nacean-runed ear. “I wouldn’t recommend it.”
Maud stepped back into the carriage, not even glancing at me. Was she hiding something, or did she truly not care?
Lena joined Maud, but she stopped on the steps and stared at me.
“Will you tell Our Queen I’ve seen no sign of Hinter guards?” she asked. “I know you are not a messenger, but Lord Nevierno del Farone has been expanding since Lord Mattin del Aer’s death. I would like to reassure her of our success.”
“I will.” I did not tell her I had spoken to Elise. That information was mine and mine alone, tucked away to keep me going. “Sure you got enough guards?”
“There are more ahead and behind.” She smiled and ducked into the carriage. “Please do not kill them. Though I am sure Lady Emerald would take offense at the idea of anyone killing her. She’s traveled near us for some time.”
I bowed, side burning, and waved her farewell.
Once the carriage left, I started walking south. There was nothing left for me here. I’d days to travel before I made it back to Willowknot, and even then, I’d have to leave soon enough to begin the hunt for Cam and Rath. I needed to ask a mage about the ears too.
Why’d they mistake the Nacean language for runes?
Course, I had too, but my memories of Nacean were little more than fog. The Nacean books I’d been gifted hadn’t helped much. The writing and printing looked nothing like my father’s careful handwriting. Didn’t even sound the same when I said them.
An Erlend soldier, no ranger but just as annoying, rose up from the underbrush and aimed his crossbow at me. I stopped.
Two out of ten. I could take him, but I should never have been caught.
“Hands out, little traveler.” The soldier whistled with the blade of grass between his lips and an arrow ripped through his throat.
Chapter Seventeen
The soldier clawed at his neck, dropping his crossbow. I lurched away, knives drawn and looking around, but nothing else came flying. His fingers tugged at the turkey feather fletching. Same kind rangers used.
He gurgled and collapsed. I ducked.
“I’m curious if your survival until this point has been due to luck or skill.” Emerald—clad in dark blues and greens, wearing a faceless midnight mask, and carrying a long bow with three more arrows clasped between her fingers and ready to shoot—crept out of the shadows. “You looked like you needed help.”
I groaned. “Depends. How much lecturing am I about to get?”
“Well, it is several days back to Willowknot.” The skin above her ear tightened, and I knew she was raising one perfectly arched eyebrow at me. “I take it the rangers are dead?”
“Very. Caden de Bain too.” I glanced at the empty, little clearing ahead of us. “What are you doing here?”
She held up her bow. “One of the assassins Weylin sent after Our Queen years ago abandoned his post and lived a normal life in Willowknot until three days ago. I’m hunting him.” She gestured me forward.
I hesitated.
“Don’t worry,” Emerald said, tapping the empty quiver at her hip. “The soldiers who were camped out this way were very terrible people and are now very dead.”
We started walking. Emerald didn’t say much for the first bit. I’d plenty to tell her, but my mind kept shoving all my news into my mouth, making it impossible to get any of it out—until we started running. Then, no words came at all. Only the empty rhythm of nothing rang in my head.
The moment we stopped, I said, “It’s Nacean.”
“What?” Arms resting on her head, Emerald huffed—she’d taken her mask off without mentioning it to me and only suggested I do the same once I was gasping. “Finish your thought.”
“The runes on the ears aren’t runes.” I pulled out the ear Deadfall had been carrying and showed it to her. “That’s Nacean.”
“Eat.” She stared at the black lines, tracing them. “This is odd.”
“Who’s writing Nacean words on Igna ears?” I asked. “And why did you all mistake it for runes?”
“Runes could be anything. That’s nothing.” Emerald waved her hand and kept walking, gaze fixed on the ear. She turned it over. Studied the cut. Picked at the inked bit. “What I’m wondering is why?”
I shrugged. “Make it look like magic’s back and shadows are possible.”
“Maybe.” She tapped the runes on her eyelid and stylized tulips on her eye patch—the emerald eye was too telling, she said, for public—and then drew the first letter of the Erlenian and Alonian alphabet in the air. “The runes knew no language or geographic boundaries and answered to any who called upon them. It was a Triad-sent gift that countered our monarchy, improved the lives of many, and ruined an equal number. It granted power to those who sought it. We had to regulate it.”
“Language boundaries?” I glanced at her. “I thought they were their own language.”
“There was no one language of runes but many. Runes were whatever you needed them to be—Erlenian, Alonian, Nacean. It’s why Mizuho’s magic is completely different from ours.” Mizuho was a country across the wide ocean to our west, and even though they’d supported Our Queen during the war, few had traveled here after the loss of magic. Kita Nanami was the only person from there I’d ever properly met. “Magic doesn’t even require runes in Mizuho, and Nanami says only specific royals are allowed to use it anyway.” Emerald drew a symbol on the back of her hand. “They weren’t always necessary here either. We used runes to help focus the magic into a medium. They strengthened our control over it like a handmade river lined with stones instead of dir
t. The only difference between a word and a rune was intention.”
“Seems dicey.”
Emerald grinned. “I believe Naceans referred to it as the Lady being fickle with who she blessed.”
I laughed.
“It was mostly Erlend mages who tried to set up a standard,” Emerald said. “Poor Nicolas was sent to the Thrice-Blessed School thinking magic could only be done in old Erlenian and that Naceans couldn’t do magic, not that they chose not to. Some did, the physicians. Much like us, they took up an occupation so that others wouldn’t have to.”
I’d spent my life not thinking about magic. It was one of the only Nacean things I knew for sure—we did not meddle in magic—but that wasn’t true. There’d been Nacean physicians. Naceans had attended the Thrice-Blessed School. The world I’d built was falling out from under me.
“If I’d wanted to be a mage,” I asked, “how’d it have worked?”
She glanced at me, canteen half raised to her mouth. “Really?”
I nodded. “The Lady knows what they’re doing with those ears, but there were Nacean words on them that you’re saying were runes. So how’d magic work? Some Nacean is out there somewhere thinking they’re doing magic. Or trying to pretend they are. So why the runes?”
Plenty of people had needed magic to live comfortably or to live at all, and it was a necessity to them. It hadn’t always been a weapon, not till Erlend’s taste for power was thrown into the mix.
“Being good at magic wasn’t dependent on noble rank or wealth. You could study all you wanted, but to use magic, you had to want it. You had to know exactly what you wanted and what you were giving up, or else, no matter how many runes you drew or blood to lost, you would not accomplish what you set out to.” She bushed aside a branch, letting it swing back to hit me, and chuckled when I snapped it. “You would have been good at it. The most stubborn were. Magic wasn’t innate. It was like wind or light or gravity. It was without us—always there in our world but not how we think of things. Like how shadows, normal shadows, exist but are not real. It’s power. Just as lightning harms what it strikes, great magnitudes of magic harmed the mage. That’s why runes were used. They tied the magic to this earth and forced the power to use up the medium and not the magic.”
I reached out and touched her shoulder. She’d a rune under her shirt, an old one with a series of jagged lines I couldn’t decipher. “If it uses up the medium and you don’t want to get used up, why the ink?”
“Because the stronger the medium’s tie to this earth, the greater control you had. Blood beats paper any day, and bone is better than most.” She paused, chuckling. “Was. It’s why we priests were the only ones allowed to use blood. All energy must be derived from somewhere, and we had enough control to keep from using too much. It’s why we never used soft tissues except for the most delicate and necessary of workings. Only the most important ones were placed in flesh.”
Like the ones along her eyelid or around Isidora’s wrists. But Lady’s sake, they’d misjudged everything about the shadows, letting the magic devour their whole body and mind, somehow thinking they were the exception, the soul strong enough to keep their self intact.
I scratched at the scabs on my arms, skin prickling at the thought of that child’s ear I’d found in Caldera’s study and whatever was happening to them now. I might’ve made that Cam’s fate.
“We never put runes on ears,” she said softly. “They’re like your nose. They wouldn’t grow back.”
“What about—”
She shushed me. I scowled.
“One question each day,” Emerald said softly. “Every time we stop to rest, you may ask a question and I will give an answer.”
That was fair.
“You done talking, or should I tell you about how I went to see Elise?” I asked after a long, long silence.
Emerald spun to me. “Is this really the time for petty?”
“I’m just asking.” I liked riling her up. She was wonderful, beautiful, brilliant, but she’d been one of the court members who let Nacea’s slaughter fall by the wayside. She’d helped erase it and erase Erlend’s guilt. “The rangers went to Hinter, so I talked to her. She’s not coming back, but she’ll try to send us news.”
“Good. I did not expect her to return even if we sent the whole army to save her.” Emerald turned from me and kept walking. “What did she say?”
Sharing her words hurt, but I had to.
“A girl, making a real difference,” I finished. “Seems like all you were wrong about Weylin.”
She hummed. “And here I thought him incapable of conceiving a woman’s work as outside of the home.”
We didn’t speak again till we’d settled in for the night, deep in the woods and far away from travelers and rangers. Not that either of us slept much, but we pretended to. I sat with my back against a rough trunk and stared through the gaps between trees. She twirled an arrow in her hands.
“Can I ask my question?”
“Tomorrow,” she said, exhaling through her nose. “Shush.”
I glanced round. “You think the trees are spying on us?”
“No.” She pushed her hood back and drew her small, hazel bow. “But I can at least imagine this is restful if it’s quiet.”
A rustle in the bushes drew her attention, and head turning toward the sound, she drew back her bow. The arrow sliced through the branches, and something small let out a last chattering breath. Emerald pulled her prey from the underbrush.
She’d hit the squirrel clean through the skull.
And I had my next question.
Chapter Eighteen
We walked from before dawn till after dusk, clothes drenched in sweat even in the dim, frosted light of early morning, and by noon the sun was bearing down on us with streaks of fire-hot light burning through the backs of our necks. I’d a layer of sweat and dirt thicker than my clothes and my overworked ribs ached with each shallow breath.
We didn’t stop until the sun had long since disappeared under the horizon. Emerald paused in a clearing, stared to the east, and nodded. I collapsed.
“I’ve got a question,” I said after downing an entire mug of boiled water. Scalded my tongue but it was worth it. “It’s about your eyesight and archery, but I won’t ask if you don’t want me to.”
She turned to face me, fully, and the weight of her stare pushed me back. “Ask, and I will decide if I answer.”
“I get worse if I shut one eye.” I pulled out my pack of dried turkey and offered her some. “How do you aim? Or how’d you learn?”
“Easily. My eye was removed when I was very young, and I had plenty of time to practice.” She pulled a strip of turkey from the pack. “I found it calming, as a child, to have consistent movement. I juggled first though. The physician asked other patients what had most helped them, and they told me to juggle to learn how to judge depth. But you are not me. Do what’s best for you and practice.”
She tore into her turkey.
I laughed. “You juggle?”
“Oh, yes.” She tossed a rock at me. “And I am very good at it.”
Course. She was good at most things. “If I let you throw two more rocks at me, will you juggle them?”
“All the way back to Willowknot after leaving you here.”
I laughed, and she smiled, the strain on her face easing.
In the dark, as Opal and Emerald’s peer in rank if not in years or experience, the words came easily.
“Caden de Bain was on my list,” I whispered. “Deadfall.”
“Good.”
***
The next night, after a day of hiking up and down the grassy hills of southern Erlend, we crossed over into northern Igna. We were probably in safe territory, but the overlap between the two had become a festering mess of soldiers, rangers, scouts, spies, and civilians all tripping over each other in their frantic movements. We camped at the base of a ridge in the safety of a narrow cave. Emerald waited for me to ask.
; I closed my eyes. “Why’d you let history sweep Nacea out to sea and swallow it?”
A lost, sunken ship with the survivors set adrift in a confusing, endless sea.
Metal dragged across skin, catching on the short ends of shaved hair. “You didn’t go to school. You would have—”
“Don’t lay this at my feet.” I snapped a twig in my hands. “We were already dead and you needed to save the living, nonsense, nonsense, nonsense. I get it. I don’t want to, but I do, and I hate you all for that. But telling me stories like that does nothing but soothe your guilt.”
I’d heard some of the stuff schools taught, and I’d heard the same explanation before.
Their actions had severed me from Nacea, and now they wanted me to learn about Nacea from the people who’d made its destruction possible.
“Are you looking for real answers?” She tapped her cheek, fingers slow. “Or are you trying to hate us less?”
I closed my eyes. I didn’t know what I wanted. I’d wanted to be Opal and hunt down my Erlend lords, but now, with Rath running after Cam and a heavy chunk of guilt sitting in the back of my throat, the truth of being Opal was lonely. There were so many things I needed to do.
So many wrongs I had to answer for.
“It’s hard to stop hating people you’re meant to trust when they keep lying to you.” I peeked at her with one half-open eye.
She shook her head. “You used to look at Our Queen with stars in your eyes.”
“Did you think twice about it?” I opened both eyes, not wanting to see her face but needing to put an expression to the answer. It was another question, but if she refused, she was crueler than I thought. “Did you want to avoid it?”
Guilt was what set us apart from the Erlends. Guilt and regret, empathy and grief, the way joy felt after dealing with them.
“We regretted it constantly.” She held up her hand and shook her head. “I regretted it. I will not answer for others. And that means nothing to anyone but me, does it?”
“It makes it so much worse,” I whispered. “I’ve got no one to talk to about Nacea, not really, and when I tell them what happened to me, it’s all they can do not to say something starting with ‘from what I heard.’ Then there are those young kids who’ve never heard of Nacea. How was I supposed to be Sallot Leon when all my choices on how to be Sallot were taken?”
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