Page 19 of The Second Death of Locke
“We’releaving,” he said, looking back down at his pack, shoving in his shaving kit.
His words hit Grey like a punch in the stomach—like the punch she still owed the damn prisoner, whenever she found her. “Leaving?” she repeated, considering the idea that she had also lost understanding of common speech.
Kier straightened, huffing a breath, and it was something when he looked at her straight on like that. When she was a girl, she’d convinced herself that she valued him more than he valued her, and sometimes she still deferred to that line of thought—but then he looked at her in that way, the measure of devotion clear on his face, matched to her own, and it was all moot anyway.
“Don’t make me say it.”
“Kier… are youdeserting?”
He laughed, short and harsh, and the sound went right to her chest. Reality zoomed in around her again, pounding like a migraine against the back of her eyes. “What other choice do we have?”
She blinked at him, waiting for an explanation. For the rest of the sentence. He stared back at her, just as shocked, and she realized that for possibly the first time, they very much weren’t on the same page.
“Where would you even go?”
“To the continent. Lindan, or Nisielle, or Arkun,” Kier said, completely serious. “Two travelers, unobtrusive… We can make our way to the south coast and hire a boat to the continent, like we should’ve done years ago.”
Her brain quite possibly stopped keeping up. Though Scaela was doomed to lose its power forever, though all the nations that made up Idistra were doomed, they were home. They werehers. She andKier and Lot might’ve spoken about running when they were children, or in the early days of recovery after battle, but she couldn’t bear the thought of it now. And they didn’t have the resources to escape.
“You can’t leave this behind,” she said mildly, keeping level to staunch her own panic, smoothing imaginary wrinkles from his shoulders. “We don’t have the money for that. Not by far.”
He caught her hand. She didn’t look at him, because if she did, that would be the final crack in her composure, and it would be over. She had the sudden, awful memory of digging around in his insides less than two days before—it was a miracle he stood in front of her now. It was a miracle of her own making.
“I promised you,” Kier said.
“Promises don’t—”
“I swore on my brother’s grave that you’d never have to go back there, Grey,” he said.
“I would never ask you to give up everything.”
“You wouldn’thaveto,” he said, his voice taking on a new urgency. “If we go at nightfall, then we have time…”
She wanted to throw something. She was obtusely, immediately angry, the flames of it crawling from her stomach up her throat and into her mouth, and she wanted to pull down this tent and this entire camp and cast it into the sea. At the end of the day, all Grey was was an endless well of anger with nowhere to put it all.
“We’re not leaving,” she snapped, turning away. She shrugged out of her cloak in protest, as if that would keep him here, draping it over her trunk, relishing the prickle of cold on her bare arms.
“Then what? We’re going on this fool’s errand? What happens when we get there?”
“I don’tknow,” Grey said, desperate.
“When Locke fell,” Kier said, “they found the sister of the High Lady in Nestria and drowned her and her three boys in the bay in an attempt to restore the Isle. They dismembered the bodies to see if their blood or flesh would resurrect it. Killed the servants, slaughtered the entire household.”
“Kier—”
“In Eprain, a cousin. Burned as an offering to the old gods. In Luthar, they got a child from one of the uncles of the dead High Lady to bring the power back. They killed the man, and then the child, when they proved useless. Across Idistra, hundreds of boys fitting the vaguest description of Severin of Locke were kidnapped in attempts to resurrect the Isle and control the power it once held. Do you need me to catalog them all? Every single remaining bit of Locke’s blood was hunted, tortured,trialedto find out how to bring the Isle back.”
How much of that was my fault? Yours? Lot’s?She pushed the thought away, her anger mounting. “Scaelas never killed one of them, Kiernan,” she said. “Hewouldnever.”
“But he cannot protect them. How many times have you told me that? There is no way to know, no way to trust anyone else, because that could be our very undoing. If we take this girl to Scaelas, she will be identified, and what? They’ll try to use her to resurrect the Isle and find that they cannot? Or worse, someone else will kidnap her and kill her trying to bring Locke back?”
“That is not my responsibility,” Grey said tightly. “When she’s out of our hands—”
“When she’s out of our hands,” Kier said, “they will know she is not truly the blood of Locke.”
Grey knew what he was doing: after all, every barb he threw at her now, she had supplied him with herself.
“Grey,” he said. “The only reason you are safe now is because everyone is certain you are dead. I’m just trying to—”
