Page 98 of Heat of the Everflame

“Protect the Crown at any cost.”

My frown deepened. “Shouldn’t it be to protect the realm or protect its people?”

“That’s your job. Ours is to protect you.”

“I’m addingthatto the list of things I need to change,” I muttered.

His jaw tensed, but he said nothing.

As we pushed into the horde streaming between the stalls, I couldn’t tear my eyes from the sharp lines of his face, silhouetted by pinpricks of light. To the rest of the world, he looked blank and impassive, but I recognized the temper within.

“Luther, if you’re angry with Alixe for leaving us back in Ignios—”

“Angry doesn’t begin to describe it. She’d be out as Vice General, if I had anyone I trusted enough to replace her.”

I stopped and turned to him. “She followed my orders. You can’t hold that against her.”

“I can and I will,” he said tightly. “I have to know there are people who—” His mouth snapped closed, and his expression shuttered. “We’ll discuss it later.”

He glanced down at the wound on my chest, which I’d haphazardly bandaged. He’d insisted on it—while refusing to let me tend to his own wounds, of course.

His eyes bounced back up to me and narrowed. “She’s not the only one I intend to have words with about what happened today.”

I swallowed. “I did what I had to do.”

“We’ll talk aboutthatlater, too.”

“Luther, this is—” A passerby bumped against my side and sent me stumbling into Luther’s chest. We both winced as the movement jostled our injuries, but despite his obvious pain, his arm curved around my back, drawing me closer.

“Later,” he said again, gentler this time. He pulled my hood lower. “Right now, let’s just get out of Umbros unseen and go home.”

For all its secrecy,Umbros was anything butquiet. From the moment we’d arrived in the city, my head had been filled with the buzz of voices. Here in the heart of the central hall, they pressed in on me like a tangible force.

The deeper we pushed, the louder they grew—whispering and shouting, cooing and sneering. It was deafening, infiltrating my thoughts in a muddled jumble of words. I cringed at the throbbing headache already beginning to form.

Though I wanted to seal myself off in a silent room and lose myself in a warm bath, a warm meal, and a warm bed, a part of me thrilled at the exotic newness of it all. I couldn’t resist stealing curious glances at each stall we passed.

More than a few drew me in with the urge to see more, like one offering the rarest medicinal herbs and another packed with messy stacks of dusty, leather-bound tomes. Others had me burrowing into Luther’s side, like the woman with turmeric eyeswho tended a pit of live snakes beneath rows of bottled venom and, for thrice the price, antivenom.

In another, dirt-smudged children no older than ten stood in a long line, hands clasped, their eyes cast low. When a portly, gap-toothed man stepped forward and beckoned a finger to two young girls, I froze in place, seconds away from turning the market into a warzone.

The girls reached into their tattered, dirt-soiled garments and whipped out narrow blades. They launched into a display of whirling footwork and jabs that would have put even Alixe’s prowess to shame.

“Assassins,” Luther explained. “They pose as beggars, so their targets ignore them until it’s too late.”

“They’re only children,” I breathed, though in truth, I’d witnessed far darker fates for the orphans back in Lumnos. At least these girls had the means to protect themselves.

The man turned to a dark-haired woman, who dropped a pouch in his hand with a metallic clink. The girls looked at each other and beamed.

“I can’t wait,” the woman’s voice carried to me as she turned. Something about it sounded strange—hushed, like a whisper, even though she was yards away. “They’ll do to him what I should have when I was their age. I just wish I could see the bastard’s face when it happens.”

Her words faded as she disappeared into the crowd, the girls giggling and scurrying like ducklings behind her.

Luther’s voice caught my ear as he muttered to himself in that same odd, hushed tone. “Need to get out of this market. Too many people here need saving, and her heart’s too big to leave any of them behind.”

I sighed and fell in step beside him. He wasn’t wrong. It was easy to romanticize a place like Umbros, but it was another thing to see the reality of what it took to fulfill all those dark desires.Turning a blind eye had never been my strength. It was only a matter of time before I set this whole place ablaze.

“Give it time,” he said, his voice returning to normal. “You will remake this world. You will be the voice they never had and the sword they were never allowed to wield.”

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