Page 56 of The Second Death of Locke
He laughed. Kier raised her hand to his lips, and she felt the brush of his new beard. “I do,” he agreed, “though sometimes I wonder.”
“Are you two going to eat, or are you just going to keep necking in the corner?” Ola called.
Grey sighed, untangling from Kier’s side. “We’re not necking,” she grumbled, even though she blushed as she said it. She half crawled back across the rocks to the circle of warm light. Sela handed her a bowl with a tentative smile.
“Captain Flynn?” she asked, moving closer with her own bowl, and Grey immediately knew from the girl’s tone that she was in for something.
“Grey works, kid. What do you need?” she asked, already mentally cataloging the things she had to do before sleep. Kier was across the light with Ola, going over tomorrow’s route.
“Can you explain binding to me?”
That again. Grey forced herself to get down three spoonfuls in rapid succession, thinking it over. “Maybe when you’re older,” she said finally. She was rewarded with a pout that made Sela look even younger.
“I don’t believe it has anything to do withthat,” Sela said primly. “But you and the captain are bound. Why?”
Grey nodded. There was no point in edging around it: the fact was out there. “Why didn’t they train you as a well?” she asked. She knew the girl had power—she also knew how little she was able to use it.
Sela shrugged one shoulder. “I’ve tried, a few times, but I’m no good at it. So we decided to focus on my education instead. Diplomacy, magical history, geography. All that.”
Grey took this in. She remembered what Sela had said before, about barely being a well at all. Perhaps she was too weak for training—but she’d tethered to Brit in the battle, so there wassomethingthere.
Beyond that, she wished someone had been able to make such a decision for her. There were so many gaps in her own knowledge, holes that she didn’t think she’d ever be able to fill: history and geography, mathematics, continental languages. Her schooling had been so singularly dedicated to preparing her for a life at war, life as someone else’s tool, a life as a well and a healer, that she sometimes didn’t know who she would be if she’d genuinely had the choice.
“So why did you come back?”
Sela sighed through her teeth, poking her spoon around in hersludge, which she hadn’t finished. For all her sweeping declarations about the passable mediocrity of Eron’s cooking, she didn’t seem keen to eat it now. “I don’t know if I can explain it,” she said. “Do you ever miss your home? Familiarity? The place you know better than any others?”
Grey shrugged. She’d been moving around since she was sixteen. And though she’d lived in Leota for years, though that had been her home for most of her childhood, it wasn’t Leota she thought of when she smelled the salty brine of the sea.
“I guess that answers your question,” she said slowly, choosing each word with deliberate care. “About Kier and me. With power—with your mage. It’s like that, sometimes. You find someone, and they feel like home, and everything is stronger. I think that’s how it’s meant to be, for some of us. Not moving from mage to mage with every reassignment. I know Kier just as well as I know myself.”
“Do you love him?” Sela asked with the shamelessness of a teenager.
“Of course I do,” Grey said. There was no point in clarifying the way she loved him, or the ways it was unreciprocated. “But… there’s more to love than that.”
“Ola said it’s a foolish thing for anyone to do,” Sela admitted. For a second, Grey thought she was talking about love, and that she and Ola had been gossiping, but Sela clarified. “Binding, I mean. She said that Kier is useless without you, and that if you die, he’ll never be able to do magic again.”
“He’d be useless without me anyway,” Grey said, trying to make a joke, and finding it bitter in her mouth. She shrugged. There was no way to break a bond, no way to undo it, and they’d known that four years ago when he whispered her true name and pressed his blood to her mouth. “But we’re capable of a lot, bound as we are. It has its benefits. It makes both of us stronger.”
She looked at Sela’s full bowl, her upturned face. She wasn’t even pretending to eat anymore. Grey elbowed her gently in the ribs. “Eat something,” she said. “We’ve mountains to cross, kid.”
Sela sighed, but she did as she was told. A few moments later, when she’d finished shoveling the gruel in—speed was the only way to make the meal palatable—she said, “Can you train me?”
Grey had been expecting this. She watched the steady glow of the magelight, felt the warmth on her fingers. “I can try,” she said, “but I probably won’t be any good at it.”
“Trying is nice too.”
“And Brit needs to agree to help.”
“They probably will, if I ask nicely.”
Grey did not contest this. She sensed a shadow over her, then Kier came close. “We should probably get some rest,” he said. He’d clearly already told the others—Brit and Ola were already setting up their bedrolls. “Eron is taking the first watch.”
“Thanks,” Grey said. She watched him go back, setting out their sleep areas, leaving Sela’s closest to the warmth of the magelight. To Sela, she said, “Then we’ll try.”
I expected a lot of things from this marriage, but not love. It’s Isaak’s fault for loving me first and I am a fool because I have allowed it. The fact that it has found me,weakenedme, makes me incandescently angry. I think of him, always, and nothing could enrage me more.
Letter from Alma, High Lady of Locke, to Wren Locke Teinek, her sister, 18 yearsAD
