Page 12 of The Second Death of Locke

A silence. Mare and Attis both regarded her like she was something left to rot on the battlefield for a good long while. “You mustn’t, Hand,” Attis said, raising one dark eyebrow. “I would expect more… discretion from one of your rank.”

Grey bit her tongue before she could lash out. Again. She stepped back half a pace, shaking off Kier’s hand.

“One does not get to our position,” Kier said, always diplomatic, even in the face of her sharp tongue, “by ignoring obvious truths, no matter how inconvenient.”

Master Attis did not look impressed. “Then you must know the truth of your mission. Captain Seward, Hand Captain Flynn, I’m trusting you with a lot.

I know that you two may have committed an egregious error, and I will not investigate whether you are bound, because I need the kind of power you have for this mission.

But if you refuse this quest, then I cannot guarantee that your precarious position will not be investigated. ”

They were caught, and there was nothing they could do about it. Kier rubbed his face, long-suffering as always. “I understand. And who is the asset?”

“The girl,” Attis said, “is Maryse of Locke, daughter of the last High Lady of the Isle.”

A sharp indrawn breath—Grey didn’t know if it was her or Kier, or both of them, because they knew the truth and neither of them could say it. Under her hand, Kier was very, very still. His own hand snaked back again, gripping her thigh with a new ferocity.

“But Maryse of Locke is dead,” he said. “If anyone survived the death of the Isle, it is Severin. The boy. It must be the heir. He wrote to Scaelas after—”

“Maybe the letter was forged. After all, Severin Locke was never found,” Attis said.

Kier did not look at Grey, but he stiffened beneath her hand. “He didn’t want to be found. When excerpts were released, that much was clear. It can only be speculation.”

Attis waved a hand in dismissal. “It’s all speculation,” she said. “Yes, the High Lord did receive a letter, supposedly from the elder child—but what if it was the girl who survived? What if the letter was a fake? What if, all this time, we have been looking for the wrong one?”

“And what are we meant to do?” Kier asked, and Grey was so very grateful in that moment that he was the one responsible for responding.

“I expect you and your Hand to deliver Lady Maryse to the High Lord Scaelas, who will be waiting for you on the eastern coast. There he will reunite with his goddaughter and work with her to restore the Isle. You are to protect the girl on your journey and be at Scaelas’s disposal when you get there,” Attis said.

“Unless that is too difficult a journey in your current state.”

The High Lord. They were to deliver the girl to the coast, the coast that haunted Grey always as her childhood home—and something more. The High Lord, Scaelas, probably now graying with age and changed by loss, but when she’d seen him last, he was—

No. She refused to think of it, as if Mare and Attis could see right through her, could read her expression even as she fought to keep it placid.

If Kier let go of her now, she would come unmoored. “It’s not too much,” he said, like an absolute fool.

He insisted on coming back to their tent instead of the infirmary, and Grey was not in a position to protest. When they returned, there was a tray on her bed with a note from Leonie warning her what would happen if she didn’t take the time to eat.

She sat, half catatonic, and unwrapped the bread, eating with mechanical precision.

It took her almost a full minute to realize Kier had pulled his bag from the trunk at the foot of his cot and was unceremoniously shoving clothes into it.

“Hey, hey,” she said, abandoning the bread for a moment, grabbing his hand. “Attis didn’t say we were leaving now .”

He looked at her, confused. Nothing remained of the cut on his cheek, not even a scar, and she was proud of her work—though his nose was still a bit crooked.

“Grey,” he said, perplexed as ever. “We’re not going.”

She glanced at his bag, half-full, then back at him, wondering if she had finally, utterly lost it. It was bound to happen sometime—no surprise it had happened now.

“We’re leaving ,” he said, looking back down at his pack, shoving in his shaving kit.

His words hit Grey like a punch in the stomach—like the punch she still owed the damn prisoner, whenever she found her. “Leaving?” she repeated, considering the idea that she had also lost understanding of common speech.

Kier straightened, huffing a breath, and it was something when he looked at her straight on like that.

When she was a girl, she’d convinced herself that she valued him more than he valued her, and sometimes she still deferred to that line of thought—but then he looked at her in that way, the measure of devotion clear on his face, matched to her own, and it was all moot anyway.

“Don’t make me say it.”

“Kier… are you deserting ?”

He laughed, short and harsh, and the sound went right to her chest. Reality zoomed in around her again, pounding like a migraine against the back of her eyes. “What other choice do we have?”

She blinked at him, waiting for an explanation. For the rest of the sentence. He stared back at her, just as shocked, and she realized that for possibly the first time, they very much weren’t on the same page.

“Where would you even go?”

“To the continent. Lindan, or Nisielle, or Arkun,” Kier said, completely serious. “Two travelers, unobtrusive… We can make our way to the south coast and hire a boat to the continent, like we should’ve done years ago.”

Her brain quite possibly stopped keeping up.

Though Scaela was doomed to lose its power forever, though all the nations that made up Idistra were doomed, they were home.

They were hers . She and Kier and Lot might’ve spoken about running when they were children, or in the early days of recovery after battle, but she couldn’t bear the thought of it now.

And they didn’t have the resources to escape.

“You can’t leave this behind,” she said mildly, keeping level to staunch her own panic, smoothing imaginary wrinkles from his shoulders. “We don’t have the money for that. Not by far.”

He caught her hand. She didn’t look at him, because if she did, that would be the final crack in her composure, and it would be over.

She had the sudden, awful memory of digging around in his insides less than two days before—it was a miracle he stood in front of her now. It was a miracle of her own making.

“I promised you,” Kier said.

“Promises don’t—”

“I swore on my brother’s grave that you’d never have to go back there, Grey,” he said.

“I would never ask you to give up everything.”

“You wouldn’t have to,” he said, his voice taking on a new urgency. “If we go at nightfall, then we have time…”

She wanted to throw something. She was obtusely, immediately angry, the flames of it crawling from her stomach up her throat and into her mouth, and she wanted to pull down this tent and this entire camp and cast it into the sea.

At the end of the day, all Grey was was an endless well of anger with nowhere to put it all.

“We’re not leaving,” she snapped, turning away. She shrugged out of her cloak in protest, as if that would keep him here, draping it over her trunk, relishing the prickle of cold on her bare arms.

“Then what? We’re going on this fool’s errand? What happens when we get there?”

“I don’t know ,” Grey said, desperate.

“When Locke fell,” Kier said, “they found the sister of the High Lady in Nestria and drowned her and her three boys in the bay in an attempt to restore the Isle. They dismembered the bodies to see if their blood or flesh would resurrect it. Killed the servants, slaughtered the entire household.”

“Kier—”

“In Eprain, a cousin. Burned as an offering to the old gods. In Luthar, they got a child from one of the uncles of the dead High Lady to bring the power back. They killed the man, and then the child, when they proved useless. Across Idistra, hundreds of boys fitting the vaguest description of Severin of Locke were kidnapped in attempts to resurrect the Isle and control the power it once held. Do you need me to catalog them all? Every single remaining bit of Locke’s blood was hunted, tortured, trialed to find out how to bring the Isle back. ”

How much of that was my fault? Yours? Lot’s? She pushed the thought away, her anger mounting. “Scaelas never killed one of them, Kiernan,” she said. “He would never.”

“But he cannot protect them. How many times have you told me that? There is no way to know, no way to trust anyone else, because that could be our very undoing. If we take this girl to Scaelas, she will be identified, and what? They’ll try to use her to resurrect the Isle and find that they cannot?

Or worse, someone else will kidnap her and kill her trying to bring Locke back? ”

“That is not my responsibility,” Grey said tightly. “When she’s out of our hands—”

“When she’s out of our hands,” Kier said, “they will know she is not truly the blood of Locke.”

Grey knew what he was doing: after all, every barb he threw at her now, she had supplied him with herself.

“Grey,” he said. “The only reason you are safe now is because everyone is certain you are dead. I’m just trying to—”

“Trying to save me?” she snapped, turning back to face him.

His cheeks blazed with color, his eyes alight with anger.

They fought so rarely that the effect was something to be savored.

She wondered with a fierce swell of desperation if this was what he looked like in other fits of passion, then pushed it away immediately—that was a thread she couldn’t bear to untangle.

He reached out, tugging her against him.

It was awkward with the pallet between them, banging against her shins.

She caught herself with both hands against his chest. His hand cupped the back of her skull, nearly big enough to cradle her from ear to ear.

He lowered his mouth so his lips were against the shell of her ear when he spoke the name she’d only said to him a handful of times, always under the cover of darkness.

“What will we do,” Kier said, “if they discover that you are Maryse of Locke?”