Page 34

TYCHO

The day after our fight, I’m sore and hung over, so when guards rap at my door at sunrise, they’re not welcome at all . Unfortunately, the king has issued more orders: Malin and I are to move to new quarters in the distant wing where we met on the night we arrived.

We gather our things and all but stumble down the hall.

“Is this a punishment?” Malin says, wincing every time we pass a beam of sunlight.

“Not for you,” I grumble.

The new rooms are just as plush and opulent as anywhere else in the palace, but they’re far from court, and far from everything. No chance of accidentally encountering the queen or the princess—or anyone else.

So I guess Grey was serious about staying out of sight.

Fine .

That spike of tension in my heart has shifted into a wedge of bitterness. I don’t even go to visit Noah.

Malin and I saddle our horses and ride into the mountains twice a day: once early in the morning, before soldiers are in the stables, and again during the dinner hour, when the training fields are empty. At first, I keep our rides short, hour-long patrol loops I remember from my days as a recruit. I worry we might be watched or restricted, and I’m ready to receive a terse order from the king that we’re not even allowed to do this.

But when no one questions us—or even seems to care—Malin and I spend more time in the mountains. We race along trails and spar in empty clearings and hunt for food when we’re hungry. Once we even slip bottles of spirits into our saddlebags and our thoughts are loose and fuzzy by the time we return. In the absence of duty and obligation, our shared isolation begins to bond us together like brothers.

And when we’re alone, I practice my magic. It’s more boredom—or rebellion—than any kind of desire to gain proficiency. But I discover that the more I use it instead of trying to hide it, the more readily those sparks and stars flare in my blood, and the easier the magic becomes.

I don’t even bother to hide it from Malin. There’s no point.

At first, these bursts of power are tiny, inconsequential. I send a pulse of magic into the ground to check for other soldiers on patrol, or I start a campfire, or I cut a slice across my palm to heal it. I’m cautious, because I heard Nakiis’s warnings, and I don’t want to draw more scravers here.

But as days pass, my magic grows bolder, responding the instant I need it. And if I’m being honest with myself . . . ?I like the little burn of defiance in my chest each time I do it.

I think Malin does, too, because he’s grown a little more vicious when we spar—and a lot more reckless. He tries to get inside my guard once and misses , and my sword cuts right into his hip before I can deflect. He swears and goes down.

I stare at him. “Mal! What were you thinking —”

“Silver hell, shut up !” He’s breathing through clenched teeth, a fist pressed to the wound. “Just fix it so I can try that again.”

Anytime we let the horses rest, we talk. He has a lot of stories, which I like. Which I envy . What I told him before was true: my years as a soldier weren’t full of mischief and fun. No one showed up for duty hungover or spit in their commanding officer’s food—at least not in front of me . Malin shares it all openly, and it’s a new kind of trust I’ve never had. Most of his stories carry a warm note of camaraderie, especially when he mentions Sephran, and it makes my chest ache a bit. I’ve never had that kind of friendship with anyone.

Well, until now, maybe.

The instant I have the thought, I realize that my friendship with Malin has grown closer than my relationship with Jax. We’ve certainly spent more time together.

That’s striking, and I’m not sure what it means—or if it means anything at all. I certainly don’t have any romantic inclinations toward Malin, and it’s clear he has none toward me. Every night, when we walk past the training arena on our return to the palace, he asks if I want to watch the guard drills. I don’t know who he thinks he’s fooling, but it’s not me. He’s hoping Nolla Verin will try to slice him open again.

But I remember Jax teasing me when I was jealous of the time he spent with the soldiers. I remember the pang in my chest when I realized someone else taught him about archery. I wanted him to make friends, and I genuinely hope he’s making them now—but I wonder if he’s finding a similar closeness with someone else, too.

It shouldn’t worry me, but it does. Noah’s warnings are still present in my thoughts, the way he said this time apart would strain . . . ?whatever we have.

The way he thought Jax might break my heart.

I think of our last night together, hiding in the hayloft. My thoughts were all wrapped up in anxiety about the soldiers for so many reasons, so I kept a distance between us.

But now, looking back, I wish I’d thrown caution to the wind. He was so beautiful in the dark shadows of the stables, his hair unbound and his eyes shining.

Come back to the Shield House with me , he whispered. I turned him down.

I’m such an idiot.

As time passes, the conversations between me and Malin turn to darker things. One day we’re letting the horses walk after a long gallop, and Malin tells me more about the Syhl Shallow prisoners he had to care for, back when his father was trying to convince him not to join the army. He tells me how Emberish officers would come to question the prisoners, and he was supposed to starve them so they’d be more willing to talk. He says he could never do it. He’d go hungry and sneak them his own food.

“I was supposed to hate them,” he says. “But they were already terrified. It’s one thing to fight for your life in battle. It’s hard to starve someone right in front of you.” He shrugs, offering his horse a loose rein as we walk along the path in the sunlight. “And when they marched on us, they were just following orders. We would have done the same thing.”

He’s right. I think of the number of times I’ve pulled my sword or drawn back a bow in battle. Following orders.

The person on the other side of that violence was doing the same.

After a week, the sky turns heavy with clouds, and rain filters down through the trees. We take the horses out anyway, because the thought of being locked in the palace is worse than rain soaking through our armor. It’s too muddy to risk galloping, so we’re weaving between trees at a walk, heading for a small rocky clearing where one of us will probably break an ankle when we spar because we’ve both gotten too reckless.

I don’t know what makes me think of my childhood, but I’ve been trapped in my memories for miles, so when Malin says, “It’s your turn for a story, Tycho,” I tell him what happened when I was young. How my father gambled money he didn’t have, how the Emberish soldiers attacked my family. I don’t quite tell him . . . ? everything , because that’s too much. But I tell him enough—and I think he guesses the rest anyway.

He pushes damp hair back from his forehead and glances over at me. “No wonder you joined the army on this side.”

I frown. “I told you why I joined on this side. I first came here with Grey.”

“Yeah, but it’s really her army.” He scoffs. “The king joined it, too. Even now, he hardly has any of us here. It’s all hers.”

I’m struck by that, because until this moment, I never really thought about it that way. We did join the Queen’s Army in the beginning, for complex political reasons. And maybe Malin is right that some of it was an unconscious rebellion against Emberfall’s army on my part.

Was that true for Grey as well?

I think of the armor the king wears. Black, just like mine.

I’ve always avoided the Emberish army, the way Rhen avoids sparring in the arena at Ironrose.

Has Grey been avoiding Emberfall ?

Malin is still talking. “Who could blame him? Some people still worry that the king is just biding his time until he takes revenge against his brother.”

That cuts through my meandering thoughts, and I snap my head around. “Wait—really?”

“Sure. Why else would he spend this much time here? Everyone knows what Prince Rhen did to him.”

I don’t know what to say. My shoulders have gone tight.

Malin glances over. “You know about that, don’t you? How the prince had him flogged against the castle wall? You’d have to know.”

My chest feels hollow. It’s weird to hear about this so casually. Just a point of gossip repeated by a soldier. I still remember everything about that night with painful acuity, from the shackles on my wrists to the torchlight flickering on the cobblestones of the courtyard.

“Ah . . . yeah,” I say. “I know.”

The horses plod on, and Malin shakes his head, musing. “I’ve heard people say that the prince strung up a little boy beside the king, but who could believe that ? A child would never survive a—”

“Silver hell,” I snap. “I wasn’t a little boy . I was fifteen.”

Malin all but jerks his horse to a halt. The sudden silence between us is so loud that it screams .

I keep a loose rein and Mercy continues on. My eyes are fixed on the path.

After a moment, he must realize I’m not going to stop, because his horse trots a few steps to catch up.

“Tycho,” he says, and his voice is dangerously quiet.

“Forget it. It doesn’t matter.”

“I didn’t know.”

“It’s not a secret. It was a long time ago.”

“I should have figured it out. I knew you were close to the king, but I didn’t realize—”

“It’s fine.”

“When they said a child , I never thought—”

“Would you shut up?” I growl. “I said it’s fine .”

He shuts up.

I don’t have a flask of anything in my saddlebags today, but I wish I did. Somehow it’s a relief that people have forgotten that I was a part of what happened that night—while also wildly disheartening. Like I didn’t matter at all. Just a pawn in a political game.

As usual, I suppose.

Malin looks over, peering at me. “So if you were fifteen then, how old are you now?”

His voice is easy, like the last few minutes never happened, and I appreciate that. “Nineteen. I’ll be twenty after the solstice.”

His eyebrows go up, and he whistles through his teeth. “You are a child. Here I thought you were older than I am—”

I punch him in the shoulder and he laughs.

But that’s enough to coax a smile out of me. “How old are you , old man?”

“Twenty-two.” He pauses. “You must have been really young when you started as a recruit.”

“It was right after we came here. The marks were still fresh on my back.” I pause. “The king’s too.”

He’s quiet for a moment. “Again: no wonder you joined the army on this side.”

I frown, but maybe he’s right. I remember walking with Prince Rhen in early spring, the first time we admitted our fears to each other. He confessed that the training arena carried his bad memories, while the courtyard carried mine. But it’s not just the courtyard for me, just like I’m sure it’s more than the training arena for him. These memories can be provoked in myriad ways, like that ride when Malin bound my hands, how my panic flared and made magic spark in my blood.

For the first time, I wonder what part of Ironrose carries the king ’s bad memories. Grey is always so strong, so stoic. I’ve never in my life seen him as vulnerable, so it’s odd to consider him in this light. But he and Prince Rhen were trapped there, tortured season after season, for what must have seemed like an eternity.

I want to find Grey and confront him.

What are you afraid of?

He used to ask me that all the time, when he was teaching me to fight. I’ve never asked him what he’s afraid of.

And right now, with scravers attacking magesmiths and the Truth-bringers working so hard to remove him from the throne, I wonder.

Because, for the first time, I look at the way he’s confined me here. I look at the way he’s confined himself here. How he’s isolated himself in a distant wing of the palace. How he’s separated himself from the queen.

And even, I realize, how he’s distanced himself from me .

Since I arrived here, I’ve been assuming Lia Mara was the one pulling away, that the growing chasm between them was from her side: a way of protecting herself and her daughter from a man whose abilities put them at risk.

But maybe that’s not it—or at least, not all of it.

Maybe Grey also sees this magic as a torment.

Maybe, after all this time, he’s afraid of himself .