Page 21 of The Second Death of Locke

She went back to the girl’s papers, searching for Leonie’s report about healed injuries.

It was short, perfunctory: none. Nothing.

No sign of previous injury. Not even an interesting scar.

Sela certainly hadn’t been fighting before: that empty injury report would be nigh impossible if she had.

And Leonie was thorough—she’d even noted Kier’s eyebrow scar, even though that had been acquired in childhood.

Grey chewed on her lip, flicking back to another page: Leonie’s notes on Sela’s general well-being.

She ran her finger over the writing, careful not to smudge the ink.

She read the line again, Missing third molar, no sign of surgery , and her tongue immediately traced the place where her own back molars had come in—and been removed—only a couple of years before.

Further down, Leonie noted that she’d employed help from a bone mage to make sure nothing had been broken.

There, she’d written, Humeral head unfused , and included a diagram.

It stirred a memory within Grey, of one of her worst days as a healer.

She had been called out of her bed and taken to a back room in the fortress full of tables laid with bones.

There, the lead healer of the camp had asked for her help: they’d found the remains in a village nearby, the flesh picked away by scavengers.

It was her job to determine how many of the bones belonged to children, make an assessment of the sex of the assorted bodies and find any other nuances in the remains, in the hopes that relatives could be informed.

They had worked for hours trying to line the bodies up, Grey’s mind clouded with the progression of bones and how they grew in the body until she could barely think of anything else.

She sat now staring at nothing until her eyes went dry with strain. She stared until someone nudged her on the shoulder and she looked up to find Eron standing over her.

“You should finish eating,” he said kindly. “Do you want to join the ca— Kier on the first watch?”

She fussed with the papers, putting them in order before she buried them at the bottom of her kit.

“Yeah, I have to be awake if he’s on watch—can’t siphon without me and all,” she said.

Eron probably knew quite a bit about mages and wells, but not being one himself, she wasn’t sure how aware he was of the technicalities.

It was true that a normal mage couldn’t draw on their well if they were sleeping, but with Kier bound to her, that left another loophole.

She got up, knees popping, and took the med kit back to her bedroll.

The others had finished their food and were settling in for the night. Grey should’ve made more of an effort to talk, to get to know them—but this wasn’t a mission for friendship.

They’d arranged their bedrolls in a haphazard formation with Sela at the center. The girl was already down, lying on her uninjured shoulder, eyes closed but not asleep. Brit and Ola were on either side of her, angled in, with Eron at her head.

“Everyone feeling okay before I head off on watch?” Grey asked. She kept her head low as she searched her pack, coming up with the stub of a pencil and a ragged notebook she’d purchased in a mountain village three assignments ago.

“Mmph,” Brit muttered, burying their face in the jumble of a coat they were using as a pillow.

“Would love a cup of tea,” Ola said, one arm thrown over her face to block out what little glow emanated from the dimming magelight.

“Fuck off,” Grey said kindly. She pressed her hand on the magelight to take the power back into herself, evaporating the glow, then set off toward the perimeter, where Kier lurked, pausing on the edge of camp to scribble.

She found him perched on a stump, worrying at the hilt of a knife as he stared into the darkness. She slipped him a mug of gruel and the note she’d written. “I’ll take care of the other side,” she said. “Sharp pull when you need me. Pass and switch whenever.”

Kier winced around his first sip of stodgy porridge. She should’ve watered it down. “God. Three weeks of this?”

“Two if we’re lucky.”

“We won’t be.” They never were.

“It’s your fault,” Grey muttered, “for allowing them to treat it as a quest.”

Kier cast her a wounded look. “If it gives them the morale to survive? I’m not taking it back.”

She didn’t bother responding. She moved quietly through the perimeter of the camp, her eyes soft and searching in the darkness.

It had taken her a while to adjust to the forests of Scaela.

The Isle of Locke was a scrabbly, mountainous thing, half cliff and sea spray.

The trees that grew there were sparse and tall, so she could see her brother even halfway across the old patch of growth they called the Ghostwood, which separated the fortress from the Isle’s villages.

Severin, seven years older than her and barely more than a boy when he died, used to take her into the largest of the villages when they had time away from tutors and lessons.

She remembered holding his hand as they made their way through the scant forest, listening to the scream of the wind (on Locke, the wind was always screaming) as Sev tried his best to convince her they wouldn’t be eaten by ghosts.

Sometimes they’d go off the trail, into the trees, all the way past the little creek to the circular clearing, climbing over the ruins of the temple that lurked on the cliff’s edge.

That was where all Lockes were buried, all the way back as far as they went, all the way to the first well.

It hurts my stomach , Grey, then Maryse, always said when they went there. She didn’t like to go in, didn’t like the feeling of a cavern opening all the way inside of her, like it would turn her inside out and swallow her up.

It’s nice , Sev said. He liked to raise flowers there, when they went, and little saplings that bent to him.

It was the only place on the Isle that she could remember being rife with color, from Sev’s flowers.

Everything else was unchanging, steely gray, from the sky to the stone of the cliffs to the angry expanse of the sea.

Far off in the distance, depending on where they were on the Isle, they could see Cleoc Strata or Scaela or Luthar or Eprain.

There was only one bit, far up in the highest reaches of the Barrens, the part of the Isle uninhabited and covered by rocky cliffs and thin trees, where they could look out and see nothing but sea.

That’s where I want to go , Sev said.

Where?

Anywhere but here .

She hadn’t realized, when she was only a girl, how difficult it had been for Severin.

In the tradition of the Isle, the heir to the title and its power would not be declared publicly until all children in consideration were fully grown.

Until that came to pass, all eligible children were kept on the Isle for their own protection, apart from closely guarded diplomatic journeys.

With seven years separating Grey and her brother, he had a long time to wait before he could officially either take up the role of Locke or leave the Isle and its customs behind for her to rule.

They never made it that far. The heir to the Isle was never revealed. On the mainland, it was assumed that Severin was the true heir, that he would inherit; after all, in the rest of Idistra, inheritance followed the right of primogeniture.

In Leota, there hadn’t been much more in the way of forests.

Cliffs overlooked the stony beach, and the rest was seagrass and scrubby old rock.

She remembered the long ride to the training camps, her arm pressed to Kier’s in the convoy as they wound toward the mountains, further from Locke than she’d ever been before.

They stopped to stretch their legs and they were in the middle of a wood, trees stretching on either side and high above, so thick and dense that she worried they’d all fall in on her.

But now she’d been everywhere, seen every terrain Scaela had to offer. Forests were no longer unfamiliar, and she found she liked them. There was something peaceful here that she’d never found by the sea—she could move through the trees without her heart in her throat.

For years, she looked at every single view, forcing away that awful thought that Severin had never gotten to see any of it. That he died only really knowing the Isle.

Grey eased into the monotony of the watch and the pain of her own unceasing guilt, scanning the forest ahead, moving every so often. Her sword was drawn, but there was no need to use it.

When her joints were just beginning to ache, she heard a stirring in the wood. She searched for the source and saw Kier cutting through the brush before her. He slipped the note back to her, stub of graphite wrapped inside.

“Switch,” he said. Grey nodded and moved away. At her new post, she checked the note and frowned.

The girl’s shoulder joint is unfused

MEANING? EXPLAIN LIKE I’M A CHILD

There was no point in saying she’d talked him through this process hundreds of times before purely out of boredom. Kier had not lived her life, her training: he had not been brought the bones of lost villages like she had; he had never been asked if there were children among the dead.

Twice more in the deep hours of night, they switched positions and notes. When Grey’s eyes were heavy, she gripped the tether between them and sent two pulses of exhausted power in Kier’s direction. She felt an answering two pulses and turned back to camp.

He caught her just outside the clearing and handed her the note. She skimmed over it.

Like a child: shoulder ball fuses to arm bone. Full fusion happens in late teens. The girl has too big a gap. Her bones are too young.

WHEN DID L GO?

16 yrs

IT’S ALMOST YOUR BIRTHDAY

She looked up at him, gaze steely. “That’s not the point.”

Kier shrugged. He took the note back, and with a fine twist of his fingers, the paper burned in a quick, flameless burst and crumbled to ash.

“She was probably a baby when Locke disappeared, if she was alive at all,” Kier said quietly. “You got all of this from, what? Bones ?”

“Mm.”

He sighed.

“To be discussed,” she said, turning back toward camp.

“To be shared?”

Grey hesitated. “Not yet.”

She followed his tracks through the darkness back to camp.

He roused Ola and Brit while she stretched out on her bedroll.

The rough-spun shirt she wore was uncomfortable, but she’d deal: they each only had space for one other change of clothes in their packs, so she wouldn’t switch until they had the time and means to properly wash.

Sela and Eron slept soundly, Eron snoring just slightly.

After a moment of consideration, Grey abandoned her own bedroll and slipped into Ola’s recently vacated pile of blankets instead, putting herself closer to Sela in case the girl tried to escape in the middle of the night.

Years of training had made Grey a light sleeper. Plus, Ola’s blankets were already warm.

Kier mirrored her, slipping into Brit’s bedroll and turning on his side to look at Grey over Sela’s head.

She looked back.

The corner of his mouth quirked up and she tried not to read too much into it, first because it was half scar tissue, after all; and second because they’d gone to sleep like this every night for years, face-to-face and sometimes closer, though never with someone between them like Sela was now.

Maybe it was because they were out of camp and only three weeks of gruel and hiking stood between them and the rest of their lives, but she ached for him to reach out and push the hair out of her face like he sometimes did when they were on the edge of sleep, as if he couldn’t bear to drift off without seeing her face.

Somehow, in the indeterminate haze of Eron’s snoring and Sela’s measured breathing and the liquid hazel of Kier’s gaze, Grey fell asleep.