Page 6 of The Second Death of Locke
“Past,” she said. “All over—I felt my hair singeing. I felt my clothes burning away.”
“And then?”
She shrugged, words failing to encompass it. There was no “andthen.” She was on fire. She was awake, sitting up on her pallet with her fingers knotted in her blankets, soaked in sweat, panting into nothing. Barely a second passed between the two.
And they were screaming. That was the one thing she wouldn’t tell Kier: around her, they were all screaming.
“That’s all,” she said, punctuating with another squeeze to his hand.
He didn’t push. He knew better by now.
They lay like that for a while, listening to the sounds of the camp outside: boots in the mud and half-heard conversations and the wind through the tents.
Finally, Kier sighed. “We should sleep.” His fingers left hers as he eased himself up. She watched him, his shirt untucked from his trousers, revealing a dimpled sliver of skin on his back.
“We should,” she agreed.
Kier gripped her hand and tugged her up from the floor with him, pulling just enough power to adjust the fire to a comfortable temperature for sleeping. She went to her trunk to rifle for clean sleep clothes. Kier pulled off his boots and shucked his clothing, folding it on his own trunk. He’d always been comfortable with his body in a way she was not with hers: even now, she turned to the wall to undress.
It didn’t matter. Whether she cared or not (and truthfully,caredwas not the correct word), they’d seen every inch of one another. She knew every scar on his body as well as her own, every expression his face could create. There was no real modesty between them, nor could there be. Even when they pretended.
It made everything more difficult, the knowing. Most notably for her traitorous heart.
“Flynn?”
“Hmm?”
She turned to see him sliding into his bedroll, rolling onto his side to face her. After she shrugged into her sleep shirt, she slid into her own blankets and mirrored the posture. In training, their bedrolls had been so close that she could see every detail of his face when they lay like this.
“Last night,” he said uncertainly. “Your nightmare.”
“Kiernan.”
“You shouted your brother’s name.”
Grey sucked a breath through her teeth. “What of it? You shout your brother’s name, too, when you’re sleeping.”
His face did not change. With two dead brothers between them, what else was there to say?
“You just… haven’t had a terror like that in a while. If something is happening… if something ischanging…”
She rolled on her back angrily before he could see her face or say anything further. “Sleep,” she said. “You use so much of me when you’re tired.”
He was quiet after that, and she felt the sting of her words hanging in the air between them. He never used too much of her, no matter what she said, and that was the truth—however much he needed was just as much as she was willing to give.
The knights of the Idistran order enter the High Sovereign’s service as men-at-arms. The order of ranks is as follows: soldier-at-arms, officer, lieutenant, captain, master and then commander. Mages and typics are promoted on their own merit. Wells, assigned as Hands, follow the ranking of their assigned mage and share the rank—but deference is, in all cases barring death, given to the mage who has earned the rank.
The Idistran Military Orderby Master Aluna Hutchins
two
GREY WAS FOUR WHENshe learned what it meant to be a well. There was no magic without wells: mages had to draw power from them, tether into a well and siphon to perform any action. It was like a water wheel, generating power. As a well, she was the river, the source that made the magic move.
She remembered sitting on her mother’s lap, their hands linked, heads bowed together. It was one of her father’s guards she tethered to first, when she was just a child: his name was Iowain, and he had a boisterous laugh and a sheet of silver hair and a beard down to his stomach. He crouched next to them, his face open and earnest, his hands palms-up on his knees as if to prove himself harmless.
“It’ll hurt, at first,” Alma, her mother, murmured into her hair, “but only because it feels like a loss—your body doesn’t know yet what it’s doing.”
“Push away as much as you need, child,” Iowain said.
