Page 3 of The Second Death of Locke

She took off her boots and tucked them next to her pallet.

He shifted over to make room for her on his, moving the blankets of his bedroll to make a cocoon for her.

Grey crawled up and sat cross-legged, knees warmed by the fire, Kier’s left side pressed to her right.

He’d dragged the small table over for their cups of tea and food.

“So?” she asked.

He made a low noise in his throat, eyes miles away. She nudged him with her shoulder, and he handed her a piece of cheese and a hunk of bread as if to say, Eat, I’ll get to it .

“I don’t like the sound of this one,” he said finally. “Feels off.”

“What about it?” Grey asked.

“The High Lord, for one thing. It can’t mean anything good if he’s involved.”

Grey chewed her lip. He had a point—Grey and Kier were fighting in the southern border, against Luthar; the High Lord, known only as Scaelas, in the fashion of all Idistra’s sovereigns, was in the northeast. For him to be involved, their mission had to be big .

That wasn’t the only thing that bothered her about the High Lord’s involvement, and possibly bothered Kier, too.

Grey and Kier and his brother, Lot, had grown up in a village on Scaela’s northeast coast, close to the capital and the High Lord’s seat.

It had been years since Grey had worried about the presence of Scaelas in her life.

“It means you’re trusted,” she said.

Kier shot her a look. “It means we’ve been noticed .”

“It could be a good thing,” she said decidedly.

“Do you trust me?” Kier asked, which was absolutely the most pointless question he’d ever posed to her.

“Eternally,” she said. She watched his fingers as he dissected his bread.

They were long and scarred, and he wore a single silver ring on the middle finger of his right hand even though he really wasn’t supposed to, given the constant, looming risk of degloving in battle.

It had once belonged to Lot, before he died in a skirmish against Eprain.

Kier sighed, setting the gutted rind of his bread aside, tossing a few crumbs into the fire. “I’m afraid of this one. I have a feeling that… I don’t know, Grey. I don’t like it.”

It was the use of her name that gave her pause. He did it so rarely that her knee-jerk reaction was to say, “I didn’t know you gained the gift of prophecy while I was bathing.”

That was enough to get a half-smile out of him.

Grey studied his face, the lines at his eyes that had only appeared recently.

He’d started going gray at the temples last year, a fact that she teased him about relentlessly even as it made her stomach ache.

At twenty-six, he was one of the youngest captains in Scaela, and she hated how every day of his duties made that fact less and less clear.

Kier frowned. “I didn’t like the look on Attis’s face… and there was something else on her desk. I know I shouldn’t have read it, but I did.”

Grey shouldered into him. “Kier Seward, you charlatan. Reading the master’s secret correspondence? That’s not like you.”

He smiled, but it didn’t reach his eyes. “It looks like Luthar found something that they think can make more wells. Fight the waning. If they believe they’ve found something that could generate wells, restore power… well, I can see why the High Lord is involved.”

Grey stiffened for half a second—Kier was watching her intently, taking in the planes of her face, and he would catch her the second unease flickered across. So she didn’t let it. “The only way they can restore power,” she said, “is if they found the heir to the Isle.”

“I know,” Kier said.

Grey fidgeted with the edge of her blanket. She did not want to think of what it would be like if they found the heir to the Isle of Locke, a feat that had long since become improbable, since someone had attacked the Isle, the source of the five other nations’ power, and reduced it to nothing.

Detonated or submerged, when the Isle of Locke had descended into the sea sixteen years before, any fragile peace that existed between the remaining nation states dissolved completely—and the hunt began in earnest when Scaelas received a letter from Severin of Locke, signed with his true name, proving that the heir apparent had survived the decimation.

Grey remembered the patrols through the villages, Scaelan soldiers interrogating every boy between twelve and twenty, just in case.

She remembered one of the half-dozen times when they came for Lot, and his blank look when he returned from his questioning late that night.

She remembered listening at the door, stacked with Kier, as Kier’s ma quietly answered Lot’s questions about the war: Why did they question me?

Because you’re a boy of about the right age.

What are they looking for? The only person who can end this war—but even he is just a child.

What would they have done to me? What will they do to him? I don’t know, love. I don’t know.

It was an unfortunate truth, and one that had led to the war between the remaining nation states that made up Idistra.

The Isle of Locke had always been the root of power for Idistra’s other nations: Scaela, Cleoc Strata, Nestria, Eprain, and Luthar.

As the foundation and source, it supplied wells from those nations with the power needed for mages to draw from.

No one knew exactly why or how Locke had been destroyed, nor which nation was guilty of the destruction, but one thing was clear: without it physically existing, without the heir being able to tether to the source, there had not been a single well born in Idistra in sixteen years.

Kier persisted. “Unless they found some other way. Maybe an ancestor? With shared blood? A forgotten cousin?”

“I don’t think that’s how the power works,” Grey hedged. “That sort of connection, a lost cousin of the Isle, would not be strong enough to restore all the power that was lost.”

“Someone more direct, then? A bastard?”

“Everyone with the Isle’s blood was killed,” Grey said sharply.

Each nation had individual alliances with Locke, but Scaela was bound to the Isle by blood and vows.

Scaelas, the High Lord who bore the nation’s title, was the first to go to war in an effort to uncover the fate of Locke’s lost son—first with Epras for going after any cousin with the Isle’s blood within reach, and then with Nestrias for killing the High Lady of Locke’s sister after the destruction of the Isle—and then it was only a matter of time before Cleoc Strata and Luthar followed.

Kier was quiet for a long moment. “I don’t like to think about that part.”

It was impossible to forget, when it was the very reason they were at war. But: “I know,” Grey said.

“So they think they found the heir, then,” Kier said, twisting his ring. “That’s the only explanation.”

“I suppose it is.”

He shrugged. “Not my job to worry about it. Not yours, either. We’ll retrieve whatever it is they want and go from there. It’s a fool’s errand, but if Attis thinks we’re able to do something big, then it at least reflects well on your power. Maybe they’ll move us somewhere kinder.”

She raised her hand to his temple, skimming over the silver shooting through his thick, dark hair.

He was due for a haircut—they’d been on the defensive nonstop for weeks as Luthar pressed for possession of the supply road that went from the bridge across the river and wound down on their side all the way to the port.

Kier was in charge of sixty others (though he always said, “You’re just as much in charge as I am,” and she always laughed at that), so it made sense that a haircut was the last of his priorities.

If she was a better Hand, a more militant Hand, she’d handle it now.

She had the kit in her bag. But for all her dedication to their duty, she so loved the feeling of his too-long hair curling against her fingertips.

“Attis gave us the assignment because we’re capable,” she said.

He sighed. “She gave us the assignment because you’re the best well we’ve got, and she’s finally figured that out, though it pisses her off to admit that you’re stronger than Concord.”

Grey shrugged. There was no true response to that. “Rest easy, Captain,” she said. Then, because there were duties she did have to carry out for his health, she nudged his hand toward his bread scraps. “And eat.”

Kier grimaced, but he obeyed.

They’d been at war for nearly two decades now, the unrest ruling their memories for most of the time either of them had been alive.

Before, back when Locke was there as neutral territory, the six nation states that made up Idistra were as peaceful as the continent.

Grey couldn’t remember what that felt like.

Grey’s parents and brother were casualties of the war.

Following the tradition of Scaela, the orphan girl who washed up on the shore on that gloomy day, found half starved and feral in the woods, was given to a widow of the war.

It was hoped that it would ease suffering—and it solved the issue of what to do with orphaned children, giving them a home despite the distinct lack of caretakers.

It was certainly less helpful that Grey’s new guardian was newly eighteen, only just married and widowed just as quickly, and barely able to look after herself, let alone a grief-stricken child.