The curls at the end of my hair sift in the wind. No, please... Just when I thought I’d managed to shake her.
I don’t move. Maybe if I’m still, if I don’t somehow rattle her voice loose from my mind—
“Never satisfied with the answers you’re given, are you, little princess?”
I should have known her absence was only wishful thinking. My madness paints Kat’s voice with a sneer, just as superior as she sounded in life. I’d hoped that she was gone, some sort of residual insanity brought on in the wake of my grief. That appears to have been foolish. Pretending to have something in my ear, I wiggle a finger in it and pointedly don’t respond to the ghost’s question.
Meddie tosses her makeshift fishing rod aside, along with a too-small fish, and pushes to her feet, nodding at our haul. “Think we have enough?”
“Yeah,” I say, standing as well. “I think I’ve had more than enough.”
I wake up, teeth clamped down on the back of my palm.
At least I haven’t screamed aloud this time.
Poor Tregle has been doing double time between me and Aleta as we wake sobbing, retching, and shouting in turn. He hushes us softly. Tells us in a low voice of his time growing up as a baker’s apprentice in a port village. Fills our ears with gossip around the courtships and marital lives of people we don’t know. It’s strangely comforting to think of other people’s simple existences.
Occasionally, on nights like tonight, I manage to awaken quietly. When Aleta’s already awake, I stare up at the stars, listening to the grin in Tregle’s voice as he answers Aleta’s questions about the life he’d lived in Orlan—until Meddie, disgruntled to find herself awake again, throws something at the two of them, hissing dire warnings of how their conversations will draw bandits right to our camp. Bandits that, despite all of her certainty, we’ve seen neither hide nor hair of.
Tonight, though, I’m the only one awake. Just as visions of Lady Kat have plagued me with near constancy, my nightmares live on.
Sometimes, I dream of her. Or of Da. Sometimes it’s the both of them.
Sometimes, it’s a strange amalgamation of King Langdon and Tutor Larsden holding me captive, torturing me. My hands are roped above my head. Fire roasts me alive.
Sometimes, it’s Caden’s gentle hands on my waist, in my hair, eyes soft. But then they turn hard and it’s the king’s hands squeezing at my throat. I’m thrown into a lake, his fingers holding me under, the water refusing to release me, my Throwing useless. Until, finally, I fade away and come gasping into consciousness and reality.
I exhale a shaky breath and release my hand, wiping spittle on my bedroll.
“Troubles in dreamland?”
“Leave me alone,” I whisper back to Kat desperately, staring up at the trees outlined against the lightening sky. I bite down on my lip, regretting the answer. Am I more mad for imagining Kat or for talking back to her?
I won’t be able to sleep any more—it’s nearly sunrise anyway. Eyeing the others, still asleep and none-the-wiser, I wriggle out of my bedroll and straighten my clothes.
We camped near another river tonight, and I can’t resist the temptation the water represents for me. I have to know if I can Throw. And with the early hour, no one else needs to know about my little experiment.
I slip away, remove my shoes, and set my pack on the river’s edge, contemplating the water. The current is calm, undemanding and unhurried. I’m buoyed with hope, watching it, listening to its trickle as it flows past.
This will work. It has to.
When I slide into the water, it feels incredible. Warm and welcoming, it instantly relaxes the muscles I hadn’t realized I’d been holding tight. I massage my calf and heave a sigh as some of its soreness ebbs; my body’s not used to what it’s been put through this last week. The water is shallow here. I take a moment to stand in place, kneading first one leg, then the other, then dance my thumbs over the achy parts of my back.
A twig breaks my respite by bumbling into my arm as the current carries it away, disappearing down-river, and I swallow. The others will be awake soon.
Moment of truth. It’s now or never.
Taking a deep breath, I push off on the river’s spongy bottom so that I’m floating, the surface caressing my back as I drift downstream.
I let it take me for a moment before I grab a tree root that dips into the water to keep myself still.
This is it.
I take a deep breath and let go, willing the water to keep me in place with all my might.
No. It doesn’t respond. Rolling in the river’s grasp, I’m carried downstream, trying again and again to no avail.
Air bubbles out of my nose as my head is submerged, and I gasp as I surface, legs flailing below me for purchase on the muddy ground.
A spike of fear slices through me, the memory of drowning in a dream, unable to master my own element, too recent for its impact to have faded.
Urgency growing now as I’m carried farther from camp, I concentrate as I come up for air again, flapping my hands, gritting my teeth, and stiffening. I manage to float again as I’m trying to halt the water’s flow, but if there’s any further result, it’s infinitesimal.
Blindly, I reach out, hoping for something to grab to halt my course to Makers-only-know-where.
There. Wood brushes my palm, and I gratefully seize another root to haul myself, grimacing, out of the river and collapse, sopping wet and panting. I sit up, wiping the moisture from my eyes and glaring at the misleadingly calm-looking river.
It didn’t work.
How did it not work? How is it that even surrounded by water, I still can’t Throw? I can’t believe it. I won’t believe it. I crawl forward and hold my hands determinedly above the water.
“Come on,” I whisper.
The river flows lazily past my hovering hands. The sun dapples patches of light across its surface. The water’s so clear I can see all the way to where dirt and muck line the bottom, where twigs and leaves and other growth have settled.
“Come on,” I say louder, thrusting my hands toward it, gritting my teeth. If it doesn’t work here, it’s not going to work anywhere. This is the biggest body of water we’ve come across, and I only need a small bit of it. I’m not asking for much. Just enough for a ripple. A tiny wave. Anything.
A breeze drifts past, the leaves on the trees scraping together like flint on stone, but there’s no change in the river.
“Damn it!” My temper spikes, hot and frustrated, and I smack the water, earning nothing but a small splash for my trouble.
The ripples fade as I sit at the edge and watch the current wipe them away. Back to where I started. No Elemental powers and naught to my name.
“Damn it,” I repeat quietly.
If anything, the Throwing situation is only getting worse. I’ve managed to hide it this long, but Elemental instincts had been quick to grow in me. I keep reacting to ordinary moments in a way that are bound to catch the others’ notice. Just the other night, Aleta had made one of her dry comments at my expense as we ate, and Tregle piled on, teasing. I’d made a face and, without thinking, gestured for their water to splash onto them.
It had stayed safely in their water skins.
Somehow, they haven’t connected the dots. I’d passed it off as an ordinary gesture, but I can’t keep up the charade much longer. Water just doesn’t respond to me the way that it used to. Or…the way that it has twice now. My Reveal. Kat’s death.
I close my eyes against the mental image of her body bucking, blue eyes furious and accusing as she fought to expel the water I funneled into her lungs.
Naturally, her translucent form stares back at me when I open my eyes. I should have expected that, but frustrated tears sting my eyes nonetheless. Suddenly, I can’t take the sight of her face anymore. It’s too much, just one more brick added to an already heavy pack.
I lunge at her, snarling. “Get out! Get out of here, out of my head—”
She smirks as m
y hands go through her eyes.
Makers, I can’t do this. I press the heels of my palms to my eyes, angrily ordering my tears to stay put, but an insubordinate sob breaks rank.
By the ether, why does it have to be Kat that I’m stuck with after death? I’d give anything—anything—to have Da with me. I’d take him at my side in any form, but instead I’m saddled with the woman I killed. The woman who killed him.
Nothing in my life is fair. I breathe shakily as the tears dissipate. I can’t break free of Langdon’s reach, I left Caden behind to his father’s mercies, and now I can’t even wield the water that is supposed to come to me as easily as breathing.
Lifting my head to the clouds, I release a yell of pure frustration and kick at the ground, vexed.
“Am I being punished for something?” I demand of the skies. “I mean it—what did I do that has you so upset with me? Besides keeping my head down and steering clear of trouble back home.”
No answer but for a bird taking flight with an angry caw. I wince, glancing back in the direction of camp. If Meddie worried about whispered conversations in the dark bringing bandits down on us, she’d likely throttle me after that display.
But my lack of powers doesn’t have me worried about just me. It’s more what it means for all of us. I’m not a fool. Our path to Nereidium is far from clear, and having the water on my side would be a real help. An asset when we have very few to our names.
“I’m going to do it, you know,” I tell Kat. I eye her relaxed position on the riverbank warily. “I’m going to take King Langdon down.”
Kat shakes her head, rolls onto her side, and sighs. “Believe that all you want, little princess, but I know what your father would say. He’d prefer you didn’t,” she says. “Because, well…” She simpers. “He wouldn’t think you could.”
“Well, unfortunately—no, thankfully, in your case—neither of you get a say anymore.”
That’s enough for now. I spare enough energy to give the river one last scolding glower and give the Throwing cause up as a lost one for today before locating my pack to change into spare clothes and rinsing my dirty ones in the river. Drying my hands against my breeches, I trudge back to camp.
Tregle looks up at me curiously as he ties his bedroll closed. “Where’d you run off to?”
My hands are fists at my sides. “Went fishing.”
“You’re soaked. There’s mud on your cheeks.” His eyes narrow. “And it doesn’t look like you caught any fish.”
“No.” My mind flashes to the king, and I picture him snared, dangling neatly from a hook over the river. My powers will come back eventually, and then... “But I will.”
When I open my eyes, an unfamiliar boy peers back at me.
We blink at each other for a moment as my eyes focus. I have just enough time to process his age (I’d hazard a guess at twelve, maybe thirteen), hair and eye color (black and brown, in that order), and Makers bless, the smell of him before he bellows, breaking the stillness. “CLIFT!”
I start as he leaps up a staircase, taking the steps two at a time. “HE’S AWAKE!”
Any louder and I’d not only be awake, I’d be deaf. I rub at my ears, still ringing from the boy’s shout, and take a moment to get my bearings. The room I’m in resembles the cellar of The Soused Turkey. It has the same lighting, the same sort of tunneled-in, hollowed-out quality to it. But it’s bigger than the cellar where I spent so many nights plotting with Clift, nervously eyeing the barrels of Reaping he was accumulating. Those barrels are absent from wherever it is that I am now.
Still, hearing Clift’s name is promising. It means that not only am I underground, but that I’m Underground. Possibly in the cellar of another ally. I’ll need to get a better look, assess my surroundings to be sure.
But when I sit up to do just that, my side bolts with pain.
What in Egria…?
I wince and cautiously lift my shirt, hissing. My side is badly contused, a bruise so dark and bloody it’s almost black. And my legs… I peer under the blanket and see ferocious gouges lining my calves. How I missed those pains, singeing now as they brush against the rough sheet, I have no idea. If I have one thing to be grateful for, it’s that Larsden seems to have at least avoided my muscular tissue.
Things come back in a rush. Larsden. One hand curls into the bed coverings as I review my torture at his hands.
And Clift… It had been him who’d gotten me out, hadn’t it? How had he found me? I dimly remember him slinging my arms over his shoulder and another man’s, staggering past several unconscious guards. We’d somehow walked right out the entrance without anyone sounding the alarm.
“Ah.” I lift my head at the sound of Clift’s voice and follow his eyes to my side. He looks grim. “Have to say that doesn’t look too good. We’ll need to get someone to take a look at it. But if it’s any consolation, once I got a look at you, I made damn sure the other bloke got it worse.”
I flash back to that stumble out of the dungeon, barely able to support myself on two feet. My swollen eyes skittering over the ground. And then seeing it: a thin figure, lying broken, neck twisted at an unnatural angle.
The “other bloke.”
Larsden.
“He’s dead, then?” I ask. There’s a grim sort of satisfaction simmering in me at the thought.
“He is.”
Good. It’s what he deserves. Justice. “Can’t say I wouldn’t have preferred to do that myself, but—”
“But,” Clift emphasizes. “He’s dead just the same. And you? You’re alive, Rick.”
Hearing my alias is a balm for my soul.
I grin and swing my legs down to the floor, regretting it when pain ricochets back up. Ah. I try to ignore it, massaging my thigh to assuage the hurt.
“You do know now that it’s Caden, yes?” I ask, trying to distract myself from my aching injuries.
He shrugs. “Don’t much matter what I call you, does it? You’re still the same person.”
I lean back as I absorb that. It’s true. I hadn’t revealed all that there was to my life to Clift, but I am still the same. I haven’t changed. Who I am is who I was.
Or is it? As time goes on, I’m less sure. I have changed. I’ve evolved. I once would have said that I was loyal above all else. But never had I expected my loyalties to be so at odds. My blood—that is, my father—came after my friends. My friends after the needs of my people.
“Rick?” He’s studying me, head tilted to the side. “You all right there, Highness?”
I shake my head. I think the point now is that I must choose. It’s time I define myself.
“Don’t worry about the titles,” I tell Clift. “But it seems foolish to pretend. My name isn’t Rick. It’s Caden.” Caden of Egria, I finish silently. I choose my people.
He crosses his arms and smiles. “Caden, then. We’ve got to do something about those wounds of yours. I don’t doubt your da could get you a Rider as a healer, but there’s a medicine woman a couple doors over. She may have a…I dunno, a poultice you can rub on or summat that you can drink to make it heal faster.”
“I’d be grateful,” I say, choosing not to mention the obvious: that my father would never bring me a healer now. I lean to the side, testing the limits of the injuries, and suck in a breath as they twinge sharply.
I need to concentrate on something else. “What news of the Underground movement? And by the ether, Clift, how did you find me?”
He gets me up to speed as he sends his errand boy for the medicine woman, telling me that Bree and the others made it to him shortly after their escape from the palace grounds. A great wave of relief washes over me.
“It’s her you’ve got to thank for us knowing to look in on you—and that we should be looking for the prince instead of someone named ‘Rick.’“
I can’t help but be a little surprised. The way Bree had looked at me before they left…It was like she couldn’t quite decide if she hated me.
“I told them not to t
ell me where they’re going, but if they’re smart, they’ll head north to Clavins. Fair bit of Nereid smuggling goes on in the cities there from what I hear, and there are plenty of ports scattered along that coast.”
At least I know they made it out. I just hope that Father remains overconfident in his abilities to keep the citizens confined to the city and concentrates his search here.
“How long have I been asleep?” I ask. What I really want to know is does my father know I’m missing yet?
Clift has known me long enough now to read this in my expression. He nods. “The king knows you’re gone. I think the search for you might be worse than the one for your girls and that Torcher lad.”
That catches my attention. Dread fills me. Worse. But Bree and Aleta’s escape had driven my father to torture his son. How much further could he go? “Worse in what way?”
He hesitates.
I push myself up to a full sitting position, now officially alarmed. If he’s holding back from telling me, it’s because he can’t bring himself to say the words aloud. “In what way, Clift?”
He sighs, cutting his eyes away and capitulating. “There was a family. Part of the Underground. He found evidence in their home tying them to the movement when he sent his soldiers in searching for you. The family was hauled from their house out into the street, forced to their knees, and then…” He breathes heavily, unable to continue.
“Then?”
He shoots me a dark look. “What do you think?”
I meet his eyes, stare him down.
“You’re going to make me say it, aren’t you?” He sighs and looks away. “They were slaughtered, Rick. Sliced clean across the throat. The blood…” He shook his head. “It sprayed dark and gruesome from their necks as the bodies fell. I don’t think it would have truly mattered if they were a part of the Underground or not. The point was he wanted to make an example of them.”
My stomach rebels, beating at my insides. Makers, I feel sick. I swallow. “Children?” I ask, throat tight. It shouldn’t matter. Lives lost are lives lost. But it does somehow.
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