Page 66 of The Second Death of Locke
“I have you,” he said. “I’m not letting go.”
He didn’t have to. Grey closed her eyes and slipped back under.
“Grey.”
She was back in herself, back near her own body, though she had no memory of leaving or returning. Her name was soft, insistent, in a voice she wasn’t fully certain of—she was conscious that her head hurt, an endless beating pain behind her eyes. She hissed at the pressure of it, the wet heat of her mouth, the taste of metal. She did not think she could move—every limb was cemented, paralyzed, as if someone had draped a great lead-lined blanket over her and tied her to the ground.
Hands on her forehead, brushing her hair away—something cool. “Grey,” they said again, then more distantly, “Captain. She’s stirring.”
“Our fucking luck to lose the healer,” someone else said. Brit.
“Go be unhelpful somewhere else,” Kier snapped.
Movement. More shuffling. Something warm and dry was on her cheek, then a door closed elsewhere. All other voices ceased—all other noises cut off. She stretched her hands and felt fabric underneath them; nice soft fabric, not the bedrolls they’d been using for the last two weeks.
The emptiness stretched out inside of her like a raw wound, like something had been cleft from within her, leaving her a bloody shell in its wake. She moved her hand to her stomach as if to prove it was still there—a hand caught hers and something tried to spark to life in that emptiness.
The migraine flared. She hissed against it. His lips brushed her forehead, and she sank back into nothing.
She came awake like a small vessel cresting over a wave. She sucked in a breath, asleep and screaming one moment and awake and screaming the next, her throat cracking and bleeding again, and the dark was so full and awful and complete—
Noises sounded in the other room, but in this one, she sat straight up into nothing. The fire ceased—Grey stopped screaming. She opened her eyes.
She didn’t know where she was—an enclosed space, dirt floor, thatch roof. She was in a small room, alone, even though he’d promised she wouldn’t be.
A shape darkened the doorway. She knew it as she knew her own heart. Kier stepped into the room clutching a magelight to his chest—not his, not without her; this one was pale green—and kneeled down before her.
“Are you here?” he asked, and she didn’t understand. She reached for his face, ran her hand across the new beard and felt a deep, throbbing ache in her middle. The tether was limp and empty inside of her.
“I can’t feel my power,” she said, unable to contain the edge of panic.
He shifted his weight to sit cross-legged next to her, drawing her out of the blankets and into his lap. “It’s okay,” he murmured. “I feel it. There’s just—there’s so little left. You need time. We used… a lot.”
She buried her face in his chest, searching for memories, even as the dread rose like bile inside of her. “What did I do?”
Kier paused. “I don’t know if—”
“Tell me.”
Pause. “We killed them.”
“How many?”
Pause. “Forty-three. All of them. Mages… and wells.”
The breath left her in a whoosh—she remembered the catastrophic ache in her gut, the implosion of forty-three hearts at once, the massive death that drained her to the bone.
“I didn’t know,” Kier said carefully, “you could do that.”
“Mm.” She let her eyes slide closed, let that unspoken grief unfurl through the tether. He gripped her harder. “Don’t get used to it.”
“I won’t.”
He was quiet for a moment and she listened to his heart, the beating of it, forcing herself not to think about forty-three lives lost in the blink of an eye, forcing herself not to think of the thousands who went down with her lost nation. So much destruction, so muchpain, all because of her.
“Grey.” There was hesitation in his voice, and she wanted to weep. This was why she’d hidden herself for so long. She couldn’t bear it, now he knew the truth of her. “They never named the heir to the Isle, before it vanished. Because you weren’t of age.”
She felt the fear in her chest—but this was Kier, and he already knew. “No,” she said. “They didn’t.”
