Page 32 of The Second Death of Locke
Brit sighed, looking up through the trees. “My first was Lanavin.”
Grey quirked an eyebrow. “Oh?” She’d heard of it: no one wanted to go to Lanavin. In fact, it wasn’tunheard of for soldiers to be sent there strictly for punishment. She herself had been threatened with it more than once. “How was that?”
Brit simply looked at her. There was no use speaking of the blood when they were out of it.
“Here’s hoping Grislar has improved,” they said.
Grey snorted. “Doubtful.”
In a lower tone—though it didn’t matter, Grey thought, becauseOla and Kier had moved from conversing over the map to arguing over the map, and Eron was now arm in arm with their prisoner, quietly asking her questions she didn’t answer about her schooling—Brit asked, “What do you know of Locke?”
She had to stop jumping every time someone mentioned it. She had to get used to it. Not in public, but they’d want to talk about it within their retinue. There was no way Ola and Brit and Eron would not have a single word to say about their mission. Perhaps she didn’t trust them, but she had to figure out a way to dance around the topic all the same.
“Not much,” she lied. “I was a child when it happened.”
“But you and the captain—you’re from the seaside, aren’t you?”
“We are. Kier remembers better than me.”
“Who do you think did it?”
Grey raised her eyes skyward, looking at the dappled sunlight streaming through the trees. Even after all these years, that was the question. No one knewhow, exactly, the island had vanished—but the overarching theory was that it hadn’t been unprovoked. All that the few witnesses of its destruction reported was this: a ship was spotted by one of Scaela’s port guards, gliding across the bay toward Locke from an unknown origin. Then, an hour later, it appeared that most of the Isle was on fire. Just as Scaelas was sending his own ships to its aid, there was an explosion, and when the smoke cleared, the Isle was gone.
Evaporated or submerged, it didn’t matter—Locke vanished that day, and no trace of it had been seen since. No bodies. No debris. No survivors. Just a blank span of sea in the Bay of Locke, with nothing remaining of the Obsidian Isle and its thousand-year legacy of power.
Besides her.
“I hope,” she said, “we never know. It doesn’t matter anyways. Locke is gone.”
“Shemight know,” Brit said quietly, their eyes cutting to Sela.
Grey shrugged. “Maybe.”
Brit must’ve read her discomfort, even if they did not know the reason. “The captain,” they said, switching directions. “You’re from the same town?”
This train of conversation was easier to swallow. “Nearly the same house.”
“What was he like as a boy?”
Grey considered this. She didn’t usually talk to mages other than Kier unless she had to, and she certainly hadn’t since Kier had been raised into command. It wasn’t that she disliked them—but she saw him, how he felt when someone much older than him pushed back, the strain it took for him to claim some semblance of authority. She’d felt it too, but with wells, power was more a sign of authority than age, and she’d always been quietly capable. She was respected because she had power. For all of Kier’s miraculous triumphs on the battlefield with that power, he’d had to fight for every bit of respect he’d garnered.
But this was different. For one thing, Brit wasn’t digging for ammunition to use against him, which Grey might have otherwise suspected—that they were looking for the subject of a joke, or a way to tease him. They already respected Kier. And they couldn’t have been that much older than him either, so it wasn’t that.
Let go, Grey chided herself.Not everyone is trying to hurt you. But her gaze flicked to the prisoner, thegirl, Sela, and she bit her tongue.
“The same, in some ways,” she said. Then, before she could stop herself, “He was always kind. Even to me. Even to his brother. Even when he didn’t have to be.”
“Mm.” Brit walked in silence for a few paces, long enough that Grey figured they’d ceased the need to talk and could continue the rest of the day’s journey in relative quiet. “I think I’ve forgotten how to be kind.”
Grey looked at them as if seeing them for the first time, taking in the shorn shimmer of their pale hair, traced through by and growing oddly around scars that had long since healed. She understood their humor now, despite herself. It was a mask over the anger they all carried, the fear. It was its own kind of armor.
She glanced at the four ahead, at Ola’s laughing face—she and Kier had finished their argument with some success—and the prisoner’s drawn, angry mouth. She flexed her hand, remembering the feeling of the girl’s hair in her grip. “I don’t think I ever knew,” she confessed.
It was easy to be lulled into a false sense of security, to forget it wasn’t just an adventure, especially now that she had warmed somewhat to Brit’s unfailing optimism and noted how it spread so easily to the others.
The Scaelan south was not much to look at, but in comparison to Grey’s memories of Locke, it was verdant and green. They would reach the foothills of the Aloducan peaks in a few days’ time, according to Kier’s calculations, but for now, they were cutting through miles of forests interspersed with rolling hills of green grasses and grazing sheep, past stands of closely crowded trees. They were careful to avoid the villages, choosing farmers’ fields and bits of woodland to travel through instead.
The night came too quickly in the wood, and Kier paused in a small clearing, just big enough for the six of them, and declared, “This will do.”
