Page 33 of Heir

“I failed to kill Tiral,” Aiz said. “Even if I succeeded, we don’t have enough Sails or Loha to leave Kegar.”

Do you know whatDafra, the name of your home, means?

Aiz shook her head.

It was the name of the evening star, the brightest in our sky far away, in the land to which I was born. Aiz bet-Dafra, you are a daughter of the evening star. You are not meant to be caged. Despair is death. Crush it. Stoke your rage instead. Escape. Kill the pretender. Take our people home.

“The clerics—”

I will not leave my most loyal servants unaided. Escape. Swear it.

“I—I swear.”

Mother Div touched Aiz’s hand, the cool slide of the cleric’s skin as real as if she was in the room. Aiz felt sudden pain. She looked down to find aDcut raggedly into the skin between her thumb and forefinger.

I mark you, daughter of the evening star. You are my anointed. Do not fail.

Mother Div took one step back, then another, until she faded, the light surrounding her dimming, leaving Aiz alone in the dark.

Kithka returned Aiz to the main prison block hours later, hissing impatiently as Aiz limped along the Tohr’s serpentine halls behind her.

“Thought she had another week.” Gil glanced up at Aiz from his post at the end of the cellblock, picking at a flea in his beard.

“Orders,” Kithka said. Aiz watched her, wondering whose orders. Wondering if her early release from the Hollows was the work of Mother Div.

Aiz ran a finger over the letter carved into her hand. Perhaps she’d been hallucinating. Her nails were bloody. She must have clawed the mark into her own skin.

Or Mother Div did it and you aren’t meant to die here. Find a way out, Aiz.

Before, she’d thought the ceiling of the cellblock low, the shadows teeming with nightmares. But after the dark and silence of the Hollows, the spitting torch at the far end of the hall felt like a miracle. Prisoners peered out at her from their cells as she passed. They were crowded with more people, including clerics who weren’t from Dafra cloister.

Whispers trailed as Aiz passed.

“It’s the tale-spinner.”

“Aiz. She’s alive.”

“The tale-spinner lives.”

“Shut your holes,” Kithka snarled, voice echoing. “And you”—she shoved Aiz in her cell—“the next time you open that rat trap, I’ll stick a rusty knife up it.”

The moment the jailer was out of sight, Noa, Olnas, and little Hani swarmed Aiz, helping her to a cot, pulling a threadbare blanket over her shivering body. She wanted to weep at their careful hands, their warmth.

Jak hung back, shy, but Finh, the red of his hair barely visible beneath the dirt, offered Aiz a wrinkled apple.

“I saved it,” he said. “For you.”

Aiz took it gratefully. “I was so worried. I thought—”

“We’re fine,” Noa soothed Aiz, though the bruises across her arms said otherwise. “Tiral sent nearly a hundred more clerics here. The ones who asked the Triarchy to release us. Our people have been rioting. A highborn neighborhood was burned down.”

The low, the broken, the forgotten, the hungry—they will be your shield, your sword, your army…

“Aiz,” Jak whispered, rubbing her shoulder the way Hani did when he had nightmares. “Shall I tell you a story?”

Aiz kissed the boy on his forehead. “Another day, Jak.”

“Let her rest.” Olnas herded the children away. “A good night of sleep is what she needs.”

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