Page 35 of The Second Death of Locke

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T HEIR ROUTINE WAS SO well oiled now that Grey barely needed to think. They ate whatever mystery Eron created, then Sela and Brit washed up with buckets of water from the stream while Ola set out bedrolls and Kier examined the map.

“We’ll need to stop when we see a village,” Eron said, unpacking the stores of food and making careful tallies. “We guessed the provisions well, Captain.”

“That’s good,” Kier said, rolling the map up. “Grey, a hand?”

“A hand from the Hand,” Eron muttered, then sighed. “I need a break.”

“Six months of leave,” Kier reminded him.

Grey lowered herself to the floor next to him.

He sat in the corner, one knee tucked up with a stack of papers propped on his thigh, the other leg straight out in front of him.

He had a pale blue magelight balanced on his lap, casting ghostly light over the paper, deepening the shadows of his face.

He kept rubbing at his straightened knee, pain written in the line of his mouth—he’d ripped a tendon in a skirmish three years ago, and it acted up when it was cold, or when he overdid the walking.

Grey laid her hand flat over his knee and pushed a swell of power to him, relishing his sigh of relief.

“Thanks,” he muttered. Brit and Sela came in from the cold, closing the crooked door behind them; Kier barely looked up at the noise. “Can you read this? I don’t know if I’m phrasing any of it right.”

Grey took the paper. Neither of them was uneducated, and part of their training involved a certain measure of diplomacy—and with every promotion, there’d been further training on how to speak to officials.

But there was a difference between “this is how you write a missive to a master” and “this is how you propose a truce between two nations who have been fighting for nearly two decades.”

She leaned against his shoulder, closer to the magelight, and skimmed the lines, half distracted by Ola and Eron’s joking. Her belly was warm with power, overwarm really, and she pushed a great knot of it to Kier.

He made a low noise in his throat, his hand closing over her knee. “You’re making me very sensitive, Flynn,” he murmured.

“I think it’s a start,” she said carefully. “But I know so little about diplomacy, so perhaps Sela—”

Kier’s hand tightened on her knee, fingers digging in. He wasn’t looking at her—he wasn’t looking at anything . His eyes were focused straight ahead, mouth half forming something he didn’t say.

“Quiet a moment,” Grey said to the others, pushing another knot of power at Kier. “What is it?”

He was on his feet in an instant, drawing his sword, swearing in a lovely mush of anger.

“Heartbeats,” he said, stalking into the back room.

There were no windows there, but he launched himself up the ladder to the loft.

Grey hurried up after him, the others starting to follow until Grey made a quick sign with her hand.

Eron pulled Sela into the corner of the back room, away from the door and windows.

Ola and Brit lurked by the door, swords drawn.

Kier hoisted himself up into the loft and threw open a flue he must’ve found earlier. Grey hesitated, watching him push up through the ceiling, then followed suit, dragging herself to sit on the roof with him.

“We are absolutely going to fall through the ceiling,” she muttered, her heart pounding in her chest. Kier looked… She couldn’t say it, couldn’t come up with the words. She pushed him more power and he winced.

“What do you sense?” she asked, squinting out into the frigid night. The dark was cold and clear, the sky cloudless above, but it was a waxing moon—it was so unbelievably dark, and they were down the mountain enough that they didn’t have the lightening effect of the snow.

“I hope I’m wrong,” Kier muttered. He reached out blindly and she pressed her hand to his, squeezing tight. He took a shuddering breath, the tether between them running thick and taut with power. “There are heartbeats, Grey. Human ones. All around.”

She twisted around, looking behind them, up the ridge; then over. There, in a copse of trees behind Kier’s back, she only just made out the barely-there glow of a magelight.

“Kier,” she said, nodding in that direction. He craned around, sucking a breath through his teeth.

“How many do you feel?” she asked.

His eyes flicked shut, and she felt the fizzle of magic. “Thirty, at least,” he said, defeated. “Maybe more. We’re so close to the border— I wanted to avoid the higher elevation. Fuck , Grey.”

“Hey, hey,” she said, squeezing his hand. “We’ve gotten through worse.”

“They’re surrounding us,” Kier said, his magic mapping a scene that she couldn’t see. “I don’t think we can fight them. Not with Brit still injured, not with only five of us and Sela.”

“Don’t panic,” she said, but she was also panicking, so it was unhelpful.

Kier was gazing off into the distance, away from the mountain ridge—she did not like the look on his face. “You could get them out, you know,” he said quietly.

“Kier, I’m not leaving you.”

“You could at least let me try to protect you,” he said, frustrated.

She shook her head. She was not going to be the survivor again, not when it was Kier she risked losing. “Hold the martyrdom for a second. What if… Do you think we could take them? You and me?”

His gaze snapped to hers, brow raised. “Thirty? Forty? An entire company? Not a chance.”

“We could try.”

He shook his head. “There are wells too. Even if we take out the mages and typics, we wouldn’t have the strength to fight the Hands after.”

She chewed on her lip, assessing the well within her. She had not told him, out of fear, what it really meant to be Locke. What it really meant to be the first and last point of power, to hold the fate of all wells in her hands.

She had not told him, in her sixteen years of loving him, what she had done. What she could do. There was the chance, when he knew, that he would not love her back.

He saw that she was thinking something and grabbed her hand. The power flowed stronger between them. “We can’t take them alone,” he said.

Behind Kier’s back, she saw movement as the first line of soldiers crept down the ridge toward the little house—they hadn’t been spotted on the roof, she suspected.

“Not alone,” she said quietly. The reality of the situation was dawning on her, watching that line of soldiers move slowly but steadily toward them. She saw Kier’s gaze shift and suspected he was watching the same thing over her shoulder.

“Captain?” Eron called from below. “There’s movement ahead.”

“Do you trust me?” Grey asked.

He looked at her, serious as she had ever seen him. She had no idea what he could possibly be thinking when he said, “Unquestionably.”

Once she did this, once she showed this, she could never take it back.

She reached out, very carefully, and touched his cheekbone. “You and me,” she said, so quietly, as if her heart had already broken.

“You and me,” he agreed. “Final count is forty-three.”

She nodded, feeling that odd power run through her, placid as ever. When she followed him down the stairs, she felt herself a girl again, following Severin into the basement. Kier’s boots hit the dirt and the image flickered; the fire burned to nothing.

“Listen close and listen quickly,” Kier said. “We don’t have much time.”

The others stood awkwardly, weapons ready, confusion clear.

“We’re completely surrounded,” he announced with the grim sort of cheer that came before a near-death experience—or death, she thought.

“Grey and I are going to do what we can. Brit, Ola, the second you hear anything, I want you running out the front and down the ridge, toward the sea. Eron and Sela, you ride Pigeon and seek shelter. The others will catch up. Get as far as you can. If we make it, we will find you. Do you understand?”

“But Captain—” Brit started.

“That’s an order,” Kier said. He looked at Grey, his eyes heavy with longing, and she understood.

He hesitated, scanning the others. “I don’t think I can say what an honor it has been to lead you,” he said, and she couldn’t look at him, because if Kier was being soft like this, so openly—well, it really was the end, wasn’t it?

The others put on their coats. Grey sheathed her sword at her hip, like a soldier—she needed her hands. “Can you tell them apart?” she murmured to Kier as they crossed the front room.

“Yes,” he said. “Do you trust me ?”

She gave him a long look. If she did not trust him, they would’ve been dead a long time ago.

There was no sign of movement when they went out the door and shut it behind them. She had the impression of the artificiality of the night’s stillness: no birds flew; no small creatures rustled in the grass. They went three paces from the door and stopped.

Grey faced Kier, watching the wind whip the stray curls over his forehead, tug at the bottom of his coat.

“If we live through this,” she said quietly, “I want to bring back Locke.” She knew, with gripping certainty, that there was very little chance she would live through this.

The corner of his mouth tugged up, half scar, entirely hers. “I’ll meet you there,” he said.

Something moved in the grass beyond them. There was a signal, then an increase in the rustling. They did not have much time. Grey drew a breath, but she did not look away from her mage. Inside herself, she felt her own power, and she reached.

It was always meant to be this, she could see now, looking up at Kier and watching him look back. The two of them together, dying like this, so close that years from now, someone would come back to this place and find their bones locked together.

She wondered idly, on the edge of death, what had happened to her brother’s body. Severin , she thought. Severin, how could I ever forget you?

She leaned forward before she could lose herself, already feeling the tugging in her middle. She pressed a hand to Kier’s cheek to steady herself, then pushed to her toes and kissed him, once, her mouth to his in a move that was almost chaste. It was the only goodbye she could manage.

She broke away—and one of his hands was at the small of her back, pulling her hard against him.

His hand found her hair, his fingers spearing through, thumb sweeping across her temple.

Kier kissed her, properly kissed her as he never had before, and her heart ached with everything she would never have.

Maybe he did know. Maybe, after all this time, this was the one consolation he could give her.

He looked at her when she pulled away, brushing the hair from her forehead. “Power in bravery,” he murmured, the motto of Locke.

He held his hands out, palms up. Grey placed hers on top of his, feeling the certain exchange of a closed circuit, of her power flowing into him and growing, growing, growing.

She took all of the feelings that made her more powerful and swallowed them, not caring if they traveled through the tether.

She faced the adoration and the devotion and the love, the jealousy and the agony and the longing.

There was not a single word she could say to him to encompass it all, sixteen years by his side and the devastation of not having more.

She forced herself to focus on the pulsing well of power in her middle. She stretched and stretched, reaching, finding the other pulses surrounding them—and she pulled .

There was a gasp somewhere, then a cry. Another shout. Kier’s eyes flashed open—the irises were not quite hazel, glowing in the gold that emanated from their palms—and there was another yell, too close, and he said, “Grey—”

She felt the power sliding loose from the wells around them, the cries of horror as all were drained and left barren. It was too much, filling her as she pulled harder, stripping them, leaving them as defenseless against Kier’s magic as common typics.

She took all of that power and pushed it at Kier.

The tether in her middle pulled taut, so tight she thought it would cleave her in half. She gritted her teeth against the pain, tears squeezing from her eyes, rolling down her cheeks. She hadn’t remembered how much it hurt, to take so much power into herself, to pull it from the root.

It was like being drunk, to have so much at once, to command it.

“Take it all,” she said.

Kier listened. Grey felt the power leave her in one fierce swell even as more rushed in to replace it, and then there was more screaming, louder, from all around; she thought she was screaming, too, and maybe even Kier.

Grey detonated.

She was on her knees in the dirt. There was blood in her mouth. There was blood in her mouth and she was not quite down because there was something there; something had caught her and held her as the screaming around them cut off sharply.

Severin’s hands on hers, bruise-tight—

There was nothing left. She was an empty vessel, lowered to the ground on her back. She stared up at the night sky for an immeasurable moment, choking on her own blood.

She felt it in her stomach, the shift of power, the moment her mother died—

Power in bravery . Grey’s vision flickered, and she was only half aware of the voice calling her name. Quietly, she slipped away.