Page 112 of Destroyer

As if in a trance, Ru rode up to where Archie and Gwyneth waited, a few yards away. Archie’s brows were furrowed, his lips pursed with indignation. The moonlit road stretched out beyond them — they should have been on it by now, riding at breakneck speed to put distance between them and the Children.

“How?” Archie demanded when Ru was close enough to hear his lowered, stricken tone. “When?”

Gwyneth was staring at Ru with wide-eyed disbelief. “Where… What did he do? Where did he go?” She glanced at Ru, then back at the stable where Fen had vanished into a sphere of crackling black lightning.

“He pickpocketed me,” Ru spat, remembering with perfect clarity the sensation of Fen’s deft hands inside her jacket, distracting her so thoroughly that she had been completely taken for a fool. It had never once occurred to her that he might lie to her. That he mightuseher, like some piece of machinery to toss aside once it had served its purpose. All those words about how much she meant to him, how he was hers, herinstrument… They were lies. A trick to worm his way into her heart, to gain her trust.

She had been so naive. So unbelievably foolish.

Tears threatened, a twisted knot in her throat making it hard to breathe. But she wasn’t going to cry, she couldn’t let her emotions get the better of her now. They only had one choice.

“But what happened?” Archie was saying. “Where’s he gone?”

“Magic,” said Ru, half distracted as she wracked her brain with what felt like a thousand calculations of a thousand possibilities. “He used magic. Hevanished. I hadn’t been sure that my exact theories were correct, the displacement of particles… but he must have hidden it from us the whole time…” her mind was reeling, the truth of it coming slowly, bit by bit.

Fen wasn’t a traveling historian. He was a mage, a sorcerer, a thing of myth. And he had known it, hid it from her. He could haveshownher, he could have turned her world on its head. Instead, he had kept secrets. Lied to her. And now, betrayed her.

“Ru?” Gwyneth ventured, twisting her reins in one fist, anxious. “Did you say magic?”

Ru shushed her, frowning.

She considered every knowable solution. Fen was a wielder of magic. And he had found her at the Shattered City, at the center of the crater, naked and alone with the artifact. Fen hadn’t come there by chance — he was looking for something. The dig site, he had said, out of curiosity. But that was a lie.

He had come for the artifact. How he could have known it was there, how he might have guessed, she had no idea. But instead of whatever he might have expected to find, he’d found Ru. And for some twisted purpose, he had decided to follow her all over Navenie instead of immediately taking the stone from her. He had waited until the last possible second, waited until they were in the stable, ready to leave.

But why?

He’d asked to come with them, almost begged for it. And Ru had told him where they were bound: Mirith. He wouldn’t be going to Mirith, then. If he wanted the artifact, and didn’t care about Ru’s involvement, he wouldn’t have waited so long to take it. Ru’s admission that they were taking it to Mirith… that was when they embraced, when he reached into her waistcoat.

She bit her lip, thinking.

Fen didn’t have a home to go to. Then… factor in the revelation that he could use magic and, based on her theories on displaced matter, if that was his method, then he could be… well, anywhere. But where would Fen want to go? Where would he bring the artifact? He had seemingly been as dedicated as she had to the research, had been truly curious, interested…

“I think he’s gone to the Shattered City,” Ru said, finally.

Gwyneth paled. “He’s what?”

“He brought it back to its place of origin. He needs it for something, something he can’t get at the Tower or at Mirith. He stayed with me, he helped us study it. I don’t think he knows what it is, or if he does he only has a theory. This is his last chance, his final option to get whatever he needs from that stone. And if I were him, I would take it back to the Shattered City, where I found it. That’s where he’s gone.”

She expected her friends to be skeptical, perhaps to argue, to question the magic, to delve into detail that Ru deemed irrelevant. Instead, they accepted her word. Ru led the way, Gwyneth and Archie following behind, as they set off on the road southeast toward Ordellun-by-the-Sea, the Shattered City.

* * *

The journeyfrom the Cornelian Tower to the Shattered City was a little longer than three days, four at a leisurely riding pace. Ru was determined to get there in two.

They would ride past Dig Site 33, continuing south on that road until they came to the miles-wide crater on the southern coast. The journey she had taken with the King’s Riders, when Rosylla had tossed her sweets as they rode… it felt to Ru like several lifetimes ago, a distant past that had been so easy and kind.

There had been so much death, confusion, and pain in the past weeks that Ru felt as if an entirely new Ruellian Delara made the journey this time.

Gwyneth and Archie conversed intermittently as the three of them rode. Their voices were always low, and when they spoke to Ru, they seemed, at times, afraid of her.

Ru understood why. A combination of rock-hard determination and rage had bloomed up from within and curled around her from the inside out, a sort of armor, a shield from anything that might deter or distract her from the only thing that mattered: finding Fen and the artifact.

There was plenty of time,too muchtime, to mull over everything that had happened as they rode. Every interaction with Fen, every moment they’d shared that had felt meaningful and real and which, now, Ru understood to have been false.

Even the swirling golden light, the night of the party… for all Ru knew Fen had used his own magic to trick her into succumbing to him, trusting him. She fought down a constant swell of nausea every time she recalled her inexplicable attraction to him, her need for him, the way her heart had opened up for him without restraint.

Every urge she had felt in his presence could have been manufactured.

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