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Basira nodded. “It’s all right to be afraid. You don’t have to be strong all the time.”

“But I do. I have to be strong now more than ever. I have to go find him.”

“But it’s all right to be worried. It’s normal to worry about people you love.”

Zara’s heart ached a little at that word,love.Somehow, that word made everything better and worse at the same time.

Chapter 30

“What are you doing?” Nero asked tiredly, running a hand over his face. He was pacing as he watched Vaara, who had been kicking at the wall for several minutes now. The noise was giving him a headache.

They’d been taken back to Zara’s village and shoved into a dark, empty room in the back of the inn—the very same room Nero had been locked in last time he was here. Both of them had bruises and scratches from the fight at the mountain, but the Paladins hadn’t hurt them… yet. Which was a surprise. Nero guessed it was only a matter of time. But there wasn’t much they could do about it from inside this locked room. The Paladins had taken all their weapons, and anything that could conceivably have been used as a weapon.

Vaara kicked the wall again, and the wood splintered a little. The beam was half rotted, but not decayed enough that he’d be able to break through it.

“If you’re trying to get out, you might want to try breaking the door instead of the wall,” Nero said.

“I’m not trying to break the wall down, genius. I’m getting us a weapon.” He kicked again, dislodging a thick splinter of wood. He tore it loose from the wall and held it aloft. It was about a foot long and pointed at one end.

Nero raised his eyebrows, grudgingly impressed. “Do you suppose that will pierce through Paladin armor?” he asked dryly.

“Aim for the face. It will pierce human skin well enough. And I hear the envy in your voice. Your sarcasm can’t hide it.”

He was envious, truthfully. “When they come to take us out of here, they’ll have a dozen men with swords. Your little stick won’t slow them down much.”

“I’ll happily go down fighting if the alternative is to die quietly.”

Nero leaned against the wall, crossing his arms. He’d hoped that he could fake his way into relaxing. So far, it wasn’t working.

When he looked up, he noticed something he’d not seen before: a faded mark above the door. It was a crescent moon and a flower, the Goddess’s symbol, drawn with charcoal and half-heartedly cleaned off.

He stared at it, bemused. The only person who would have put it there was Zara.

Only someone like Zara would put a protective symbol of Ravi in an inn in an Ardanian village. She hadn’t known any better. And of course the Paladins had made her scrub it off. She had done it to try to protect the inn—probably from the Varai themselves—because she cared about the people here and she’d been trying to help. And she’d probably been punished for it.

She was so much better than the Paladins, and they had no idea. She’d come to help him escape the inn that night for the same reason she’d insisted on helping Naika, the same reason she’d helped save Vaara, the same reason she’d been sneaking supplies to her people’s supposed enemies: Because she couldn’t stand to see someone being treated unjustly.

Zara was everything the Paladins wished they were.

She had spent her life being treated unfairly, and she had come out of that life filled with compassion and fury and ready to fight to protect everyone else from that fate.

Nero leaned his head against the wall, staring at that mark.

This was Valtos all over again. He was about to lose everything. And somehow, the thing he was most afraid of losing was a woman he’d only known for a few weeks.

“I feel like I’m going to throw up,” he said tonelessly.

Vaara’s head jerked toward him. “Don’t do it in here.”

“I don’t know if I can hold it in.”

“Try.” He looked Nero up and down. “Are you sick?”

“I don’t know.” They’d both avoided talking about the others. They both knew that neither of them wanted to think about it. Neither of them wanted to acknowledge the possibility that something terrible might have happened to them.

Finally he looked up at Vaara. “Where do you suppose Crow is?” he asked, because he couldn’t bring himself to say Zara’s name. He hoped they were together, wherever they were, if they were still alive. They would take care of each other.

“We saw them get out,” Vaara reminded him. “They were well into the tunnel when the cave-in happened.”