Riot of Storm and Smoke Page 18

  I’m old hat at disregarding her by now. “We’ve kept Liam and his men waiting long enough, I think. I’d never have made it here without him.”

  Meddie stands, eyeing the door of our little room mistrustfully and cracking her dirty knuckles. “Those the Egrian soldier-folk who busted in with you? Have to admit I thought for a moment that you’d cracked and decided to turn back to King Langdon.”

  “No. Never. They’re Egrian soldiers, but undercover Underground. The guise provided us with enough credibility to stay at inns—”

  “That must have been nice.” Meddie purses her lips, not looking at me.

  “Sorry,” I apologize, wincing. Of course she and the others hadn’t experienced very comfortable accommodations since I’d left them. “Anyway, they let us right through at the Clavish border, no trouble at all, and—”

  “Must have been very relaxing,” Meddie interrupts again.

  “Sorry,” I say again, the spark of irritation igniting. She could be a little more grateful, considering I just saved them all. “Look, did you have something to say?”

  “Yes, if I’m honest. And I have to wonder how it is that I’m the first to ask it.” She glares at Aleta and Tregle. “Listen, don’t take this as me not being glad to see you and not being damned appreciative of the escape from that hellhole, but we all saw Tofer hold you under.”

  I suck in a breath. With good reason, we’d been keeping my status as a Water Thrower from Meddie. It appears that, in my absence, Aleta and Tregle saw no reason to clue her in. I turn to Aleta with a question in my eyes.

  “We hoped,” she says. “You remember me telling you how I wouldn’t sustain burns from a flame. I’d hoped drowning would be the same for you, but you did... you did die rather convincingly. Still, Adept Tregle and I thought it best not to—”

  “There are plenty of ways that Tofer could have tried to kill me that would have worked,” I tell Meddie, sparing her any further mystery. “But water? Drowning me won’t work. I’m a Water Thrower. Or I was, anyway.”

  Aleta’s brow furrows. “Wait, Breena, was?”

  I’m so tired of secrets. At least this one, I can unload. It’s time, I think.

  As it turns out, I’m wrong. Apparently the time to explain my lack of Throwing hasn’t quite arrived. Liam interrupts us, crashing back into the room with none of his usual grace. The wooden door is like the boom of a cannon when he plows into it.

  “I assume your ladyship has had plenty of time to catch up. Let us make our introductions. We’re all going to need to get to know each other very quickly.”

  The shred of military man left in Tregle stands at attention at this abrupt entrance. He relaxes almost sheepishly when he realizes.

  “Sir Liam, what in Egria…?” Aleta stands. “It’s but dawn. We’ve hardly slept, save for Lady Breena.”

  “Oh, yes,” I mumble, rolling my eyes. “Posing a rescue mission, being torn into shreds by a rabid dog, seeing dead women…” I smile sweetly and bat my eyes at Aleta, wrinkling my nose in feigned amusement. “Very restful stuff, that.”

  Liam ignores my witty repartee, looking at me with wild eyes. “There are soldiers in the city.”

  My amusement fades. Of course this happens now that I finally have my friends at my side again. “Egrian?” I ask.

  “Yes—” he starts, but I cut him off with a sharp laugh.

  “Naturally.” I limp over to the window to see for myself, fingers drifting to the edge of the canvas curtain. Sure enough, the glint of armor shines from the city square to here.

  We were so close.

  “You little fool.” He grasps my shoulders, and for the first time, I see that the wildness in his eyes isn’t panic. It’s not fear.

  It’s joy. A fierce and unbridled joy.

  “The King of Egria isn’t here,” he says. I can only open my mouth soundlessly, and his eyes hold me as tight as his hands. “Do you hear me? King Langdon is nowhere in sight.”

  But still I can’t speak. I can only wait, my weary heart throbbing painfully in my chest, too tired to jump, too tired to even turn over.

  A smile splits Liam’s face. “Don’t you see? It’s his son.”

  His son.

  His son.

  His son.

  My defeated heart leaps at the words.

  Something wells within me—a familiar feeling that I can’t name as I tear from Liam’s grip, Aleta’s laughter pealing like a temple’s bell tower behind me. Pain in my hip is but a memory. The stairs are clouds beneath my feet. I float, I hover, I fly over them, over the ground, past the currents of people crowding the halls of the inn, curling around the ones in the street.

  And there he is.

  Like a dream. Only not one of my dreams because here, there are no hooked shadows to spear me with darkness before I can reach him. I slam into Caden and have the pleasure of seeing his gray eyes—not like his father’s, nothing like his father’s, how could I have ever thought—delightfully perplexed before I bury my face in his neck, my fingers in his hair. I revel in the tactile pleasure of him as I lock him in my embrace, breathe him in, and find a name for the feeling.

  It’s hope.

  Hope.

  Several weeks ago

  When the rains start, Lilia and I cautiously deem it safe to stop.

  The Reaping’s fire had spread in a thousand directions, that tiny vial at the Torcher’s lips the epicenter of disaster. Only a storm could make the fire yield to smoke. Reaping would not be suffocated by lack of tinder. Only a drenching could drown it properly.

  The rains were well-timed. I lift my face to the sky, welcoming the water cascading over me. I shudder to think it, but there was a very real possibility that, if the weather had been a pleasant sort, we would have fallen victim to its flames as well.

  I voice this aloud as Lilia eases thighs that tremble with fatigue over the side of our shared mount. “I hope you don’t think it a coincidence,” she says with a withering look. She shakes out each leg in turn, trying to get proper feeling back into them.

  I had actually, but before I can tell her that, she holds up a hand. Like the rest of her, it’s streaked with soot. Ashes litter her hair. “No,” she said. “I’m sure you do believe it was a coincidence. ‘A lucky thing,’ am I right?”

  Again, she speaks before I can. “We’ll discuss your fool notions later,” she says. Exhausted scorn coats her voice. “When the troops aren’t limping in.”

  The few men we have left to our number quietly dismount. There are none left who were not astride. Human legs aren’t built for the running or endurance that steeds are. We’d lost those who’d had to rely on their own speed well before the rains started.

  I swallow, seeing the great difference in our numbers. “How many, do you suppose?”

  “Three quarters gone,” Lilia says grimly. “At the least.”

  Damn. I shake my head and kick at the ground. And I’d been worried about facing Father’s troops when we’d had a full number. Jospuhr will revel in this when he hears of it. Father’s winning the race after all.

  “Don’t lose heart,” Lilia says, watching me. “We’ll say a prayer that they passed safely into the Makers’ embrace.”

  Guilt swamps me, and I open my mouth, unable to speak. My first thought had been for the battle. For the war. Not the souls lost.

  What am I becoming?

  I clear my throat and agree with her hastily. “Let’s check on those we have left. See what resources we have left to us in the saddlebags. We’ll have to ration of course—”

  “Of course,” she cuts me off. She puts a calming hand on my shoulder, and I realize that I’d been clipping out my words in a staccato. With a jerking nod to her, I stride off in the opposite direction.

  My jaw clenches over the pain in my injured arm as I check on the men, but I pay it no mind. Stepping through the bloodied and soot-streaked people, moans surround me. I do a poor job of assessing their conditions, walking blindly. I’m so appalled that I
can’t seem to fixate on any of them. The horror blurs them, fogs my vision. So much suffering.

  I only stop when a hand reaches out to me, beseeching. Sorrow clenches a fist around my throat. Here’s one who I doubt will make it through the night. Truthfully, I marvel that he’s managed not only to hold on, but to stay mounted on his horse as long as he has. His tunic is soaked through with a rust-colored stain that can only be blood, and he holds an arm to his stomach. The other arm shakes on the reins as he looks at me without seeing.

  “I need a priest. Or a priestess,” he whispers to me.

  My response is a wet-sounding laugh. “I am so sorry, soldier. None of their holinesses elected to make the journey with us.”

  “Then a prayer,” he asks. “Will you pray with me?”

  This is a task far more suited to Lilia, but the man is dying. I’ll not deny him a last request.

  “I will,” I say. “But first, I think your feet had best be set to earth.” I ease him from his horse, his weight heavy and limp against me. He wheezes in my ear, his breath hot.

  He passes quickly as I kneel at his side, whispering words that have always felt like nonsense to me. A lump sits like a rock in my throat, a warm tingling in my eyes. Gently, I fold his hands together and close the man’s eyes, staring glassily up at the gray, drenched sky.

  Lilia finds me there after a time, her stride halting as her feet stutter to a stop. “Makers above,” she says on a breath. “Another one lost already?”

  My jaw clenches. Another one, she says.

  By Egria, what am I fighting for?

  At least a hundred people just lost their lives at my behest. And that’s discounting Father’s forces. If I include them, the death toll likely doubles.

  “Oh, Makers,” Lilia sighs. She splays out on the ground beside me. “I know that look, Caden. You looked the same way when the fencing instructor caught the lot of us—”

  “Don’t.” I stand, foot slipping in the wet earth as I fight for purchase beneath me. “Don’t compare a childish punishment to death.”

  “I’m comparing your self-flagellating then to your self-flagellating now. Every person here made their own choices, Caden.”

  “Would they if I hadn’t pushed them?”

  “Better you pushing them to make a decision for themselves than the king coming along and doing it for them. I mean, Makers—”

  “You keep saying that.” I run a hand through my hair, frustrated. “‘Makers.’ But look where we are, Lilia. We’re in the middle of ether-cursed nowhere. We have few supplies, no plans, and—”

  “And,” Lilia says, “we are alive.”

  Angrily, I wave this away. What good is being alive when so many others are dead?

  “I am serious,” she insists. “Look, you don’t have to believe in the Mother and Father if you don’t want to, but it gives the rest of us comfort to think that this—” She waves her hand, encompassing the scene around us. “—is not how it ends. To think that there is some sort of divine plan and that things happen for a reason. I believe that.”

  She grabs my chin and forces me to look at her. “Maybe you think it makes me a fool, but I believe in the stories. I believe that the Makers started our world after the first failed. That some people’s connection with the elements is their attempt to bring us all closer to them. I believe that things like The Bestowing are their ways of explaining that to us.”

  The Bestowing? What have the stones outside of Masonstone to do with anything?

  Seeing my lack of understanding, she explains. “They say that The Bestowing stones are representative of the Makers and the first Elemental Adepts. It’s part of the reason I thought it so interesting that you chose to meet me there before. It was like…like a sign.”

  In my defense, I try very hard to keep my skepticism from my expression. Lilia spots it anyway and boffs me on the back of the head. “Yes, I see connection in events. Sometimes, I can’t ignore it. Hasn’t there ever been any coincidence that you can’t dismiss?”

  For a moment, I remember the warmth of my Underground token in my hand as I stared up at those stones.

  I remember a voice telling me to turn the instant before Ruin’s Reaping was lit.

  I remember meeting Clift in a bar.

  And meeting Bree in a jail cell.

  I look away, squinting at the horizon and whatever the future will bring.

  “Maybe,” I say.

  Lilia,

  Happy news: Father’s health has improved by a modest degree.

  He’s sitting up unaided now and has fed himself. We let him try when he once again began protesting the healer spoon-feeding him. As you know, that was an arduous battle at the beginning of his illness, so I supposed that if he was well enough to argue it again, perhaps he could manage.

  He didn’t let me down. Since then, he’s managed small steps, hesitantly walking across his bedchamber. I have little doubt that soon he will be pacing about the grounds, spewing his vitriolic opinions on all matters of the realm once again.

  His improvement couldn’t have occurred at a more opportune moment. We’ve received notice of a visit from royal emissaries three days hence. With some clever staging, I think I may be able to engineer an audience with Father. As his mind has remained sharp, I will simply need to make sure that he arrives to the dining hall before our visitors and leaves after them.

  And then there is the matter of replenishing our supply of guards and other staff. I must be off to make inquiries in the village.

  I hope that you and your companion are safe.

  Please write back.

  Elsbeth

  “Caden,” I breathe. My arm loosens from its vice embrace, drifting to his shoulder which rises and falls slowly with each exhalation, his arms coming up around me like maybe he thinks I’m a mirage. “Why…? What are you…?”

  He pulls back and waits, grinning widely, eyes patient.

  I hadn’t allowed the thought to unfurl, but without reports… An angry, choked sound escapes, and I punch him in the arm.

  “Ow!” He leaps back and regards me warily, rubbing where I struck. “Bree, what in Egria—”

  “I thought you were dead, you ass.” I step back and swipe at my eyes, where the suspicious prickling of tears has started. “We heard about the signs of Reaping. Liam…” I flap a vague hand. “You’ll meet him later. He had reports that you’d been nearby. And nothing since then. Where in the black, banished Beyond have you been?”

  “Egria,” he says. “After the running from the fires—I’ll explain later—we ended up just short of the border. It was… Makers, it was the biggest coincidence I could have hoped for.”

  Despite his appearances in my dreams, I haven’t seen Caden in months, and I take a step away, tucking my hair behind an ear as I recover myself. His eyes on mine does something to my insides, turning them to jelly.

  I haven’t spoken to him in months either, and there is so very much to say that the words swirl and collide, clogging my throat. Finally, I manage a reiteration of a previous thought. “You’re alive.”

  His mouth quirks up. “If I’m dead, then I’m afraid I’m the last to know it.” He dodges as I swat at him again, failing to repress a grin. Makers, it is good to see him, and, if a bit well-worn, at least he is well.

  “How did you wind up in Clavins?” I ask.

  “Ah.” His smile fades. “Necessity brings us here, I’m afraid.”

  Oh, no. The happy butterflies fluttering around my heart regress to plodding caterpillars along the lining of my stomach. “What’s happened?”

  “I—” He starts, looking over my shoulder at something. “‘Lo, Lady Lilia,” he says, turning red.

  I turn to see a warrior woman standing behind me. A limp curl escapes from beneath her helmet, and she smirks, arms crossed. “Going to introduce me to your friend, Highness?”

  Caden straightens. “Of course.” Lady Lilia and I shake hands while Caden rattles off our titles and our significance to th
e war effort. “Lilia’s helped me amass the Egrian forces loyal to the people, rather than my father,” he explains.

  “Oh,” I say. Lilia is still enthusiastically pumping my arm, eyes alight with a devilish gleam, and we withdraw. “And that’s gone…well?” I ask, turning from her to Caden, eyes searching.

  His expression darkens. His hands clasp my shoulders, and I lift a hand to settle on his. “There is much we need to speak about.”

  “There is!” Lilia agrees cheerfully. “I didn’t know that His Moroseness was missing a special friend.”

  Heat fills my cheeks at the implication, and I remember the feel of Caden’s strong arms around me, my back pressed to a wall as he drizzled kisses down my neck, my bones like liquid. Pointedly, I avoid his eyes, wondering if the same memories course through him.

  “Where are Adept Tregle and P—Aleta?” he asks, avoiding her title even among his men. “You do still travel together?”

  Oh, Makers bless him for being as eager to change the subject as I am.

  “We do,” I confirm. “I just left them, in fact. They’ll want to see you as well. It’s just that when we heard the news that you were here, I was…quicker.”

  He bites his lip over an escaped grin.

  Lilia volunteers to oversee the booking of rooms for their people while Caden and I reunite with the others. When we find them, he lifts Aleta’s hand in the air and bows. She curtsies back solemnly, and Caden, predictably, breaks from formality first. He seizes her in a bear hug, brow furrowed with emotion. Gingerly, Aleta pats him on the back, but even she has the hint of a smile tugging at her lips.

  He and Tregle clasp forearms. For a moment, it almost feels like it did back in our secret room in the palace, the four of us thick with small plots. But then reality catches up with us.

  We introduce Caden to Meddie; they’ve both heard of each other through Clift. And then we catch him up on our journey. He looks suitably impressed and really…he has reason to. We are impressive. My gaze flits about the room. A collection of teenagers who have progressed further against the King of Egria than anyone else has in nearly twenty years.