Page 40 of The Second Death of Locke

“You’re lucky you missed dinner. Eron tried to be creative to make us all feel better.”

Grey sighed, but she forced herself to drink. There was a timid knock at the door, and she and Ola looked up as Sela peeked inside.

“Come in,” Ola said. “I doubt we can do much more to offend Grey’s modesty.”

Grey shrugged. After years living in shared tents, she didn’t have much modesty to begin with. “Kier mentioned something about clothes,” she said, glancing down. Her vest was different, and she didn’t remember these breeches either—they weren’t the black ones she’d been wearing on the road.

Ola and Sela exchanged a look. Three wells in a room, Grey thought neutrally, and two as good as useless.

“Your clothes caught on fire,” Sela said.

“Not fire , really—”

“What?”

Ola shot Grey a glare. Chided, she went back to sipping her tea. “We didn’t see the whole thing,” she said, “and the captain is unwilling to give us details. But there was a great flare of light, and then you were screaming—Brit ran out to help because they’re incapable of following orders.”

“You were on fire,” Brit said from near the wall. Grey hadn’t even heard them come in. “Sorry—I’m supposed to tell you Kier is relieving Eron on watch.”

“He shouldn’t,” Grey said grimly. She set the empty cup down and pulled herself fully into sitting position. She felt mildly better and annoyed about it. Ola took the cup and set to brewing a new blend of tea and herbs.

“He has been…” Ola searched for a word.

“Unmanageable?” Brit offered.

“Unstable?” said Sela.

“ Stressed ,” Ola said, glaring at both of them. “He has been worried about you. With good reason. Brit ran out, then they carried you back in, smoldering and naked, choking on blood, with a full company dead outside. Mages and wells.”

Grey winced. She accepted the full cup Ola offered and tried to sip without pulling a face. “I’m sorry,” she said finally. “I didn’t mean for things to… end like that.”

Ola sighed. “Sela, sweetheart,” she said, turning to the girl. “Can you go fetch Grey some bread?”

Sela nodded and went out. As soon as the door shut behind her, Ola leaned forward. Brit moved in front of the door, their shoulder pressed against it so they’d catch it when Sela came back.

“That’s not normal power,” Ola said, an unsteady edge to her voice.

Grey was too tired for this. “Kier and I are bound,” she said, as if that was explanation enough.

Ola shook her head. “Magic can’t kill wells, Captain.”

Grey met her gaze. She felt half-dead and exhausted, but the weight of Kier’s confession had given her new buoyancy—perhaps, she thought, she was ready to gamble.

“If you’re trying to say something,” she said, “it’s best to get on with it.”

“You knew Sela wasn’t Maryse of Locke.”

At least that one was easy. “Leonie left notes. I knew she was too young.”

Ola grimaced, pushing that away. “Clever. But how did you know for certain that she wasn’t a Locke? How did you have that much power?”

Brit crossed their arms. “There are just a few things that don’t add up,” they said apologetically. “Nothing against you, Captain, but I’ve never seen Ola catch fire and burn all her clothes off.”

“You wish,” Ola muttered.

“It was a lot of power at once,” Grey said. “I can’t pretend to understand what happens when one uses that much power that quickly.”

Brit and Ola exchanged a look, as if holding some unspoken conversation. Brit raised an eyebrow and Ola shook her head; Brit seemingly disobeyed her advice. “Why were you crying out for Severin of Locke?”

“What?”

“Severin. He was the heir, wasn’t he?”

Grey clamped her jaw shut. Just barely, she remembered what Kier had said to her when she first woke up: Are you here?

Where had she been before? Or more accurately, when ?

She shook her head. “Can I have a shirt, please?”

“Sorry,” Ola said, handing her a soft gray one, too big, from Kier’s bag. “But Grey—”

“I’m not going to tell you anything that endangers you or the mission,” Grey said, struggling into the shirt.

It hurt to pull anything over her head, hurt to move her arms like that.

She knew, deep inside, that she should’ve been more alarmed: it could mean nothing good for others to know about her identity, and if Brit and Ola knew, then Eron probably did as well, and possibly even Sela.

Sixteen years of hiding, all of it for naught.

But she didn’t care. She couldn’t find it in herself.

All she felt was that empty hollow where her power used to rest, and the anxiety of being out of Kier’s eyeline.

“We can talk later. After this is over,” she said eventually, when they wouldn’t move from their tense positions. “Is that answer enough?”

Ola and Brit exchanged a long look. “Yes,” Brit said finally.

“Good.” Grey slipped down in her nest of coats. “I’m going to sleep, then. Again. I’ve had enough of you lot for one day.”

Neither of them protested. Grey closed her eyes, pushed away the ache of her empty well and forced herself to sleep.

She woke again in the early hours of the morning to the pitch-dark hut.

She sat up, relieved to find that her bones felt as they should and her skin was not aching in that oversensitive way it did when she’d used too much power.

The only thing that hurt was her head, and that was to be expected after being unconscious for the better part of two days.

She squinted into the dark, making out two shapes nearby: Sela and Eron, she decided, so Brit and Ola were probably on watch duty and Kier was…

Anxiously, she reached through the tether, but she couldn’t find him there. She got up, wobbling a little, holding to the wall for stability. She felt steadier by the time she reached the door, just barely ajar. She pushed through it.

The front room was smaller than the back: a worktable pushed against one side under the window, curtains drawn; two chairs beside it the only other furniture. Kier sat in one, hunched over the table, writing. A half-melted stub of candle was lit beside him, the light dim and flickering.

“Magelight would be more effective,” Grey said softly.

He looked up, an errant lock of hair falling across his forehead. His expression softened when he saw her standing, like that was a mighty, marvelous thing.

“I like the novelty,” he said. It was a bold-faced lie and she knew it—he couldn’t make a magelight without her, and he wasn’t going to draw from her. She reached within herself and felt the tether dormant.

“We used to do this back home,” she said carefully. “Candles. Fires burning in the hearth.”

He raised an eyebrow. “All that power, and you chose not to use it?”

It hadn’t seemed like an abnormality when she was a child.

In truth, the Isle of Locke was a cold and brutal place: fire warmed much more effectively than magelight, and she’d always preferred the flickering of candlelight over magelight’s flat, unchanging glow; she suspected her mother was the same, and her grandmother.

Her grandmother, Locke’s own mother and the Locke before her, was still living when the Isle was conquered.

Grey had not watched the old woman die. Now, she recalled her weathered, wrinkled hands holding a candle as it burned, then tipping it so the wax pooled neatly in the middle of the parchment.

She was the one who had taught Grey the lineage of her mother’s ancestors, guiding Grey’s finger up the lines of the tree.

Her husband, Locke’s father, had been from Luthar, just as Locke’s husband was Scaelan; it was the custom for the sovereign to marry within the other nation states to renew power there.

Grey pushed the memories away. Those dusty books, the family trees, her grandmother’s body—all were lost to the sea.

“You can pull from me,” she said mildly. “I’m okay.”

“You very nearly weren’t.”

She shrugged, allowing this.

On her feet, removed from her cozy pile, she felt utterly filthy.

Kier hadn’t been lying earlier when he accused her of having blood in her hair.

She was surprised he’d wanted to kiss her, but perhaps that was the thing about love.

She didn’t mind him filthy post-battle. The sweat, the dirt, the blood—it all meant he was still alive.

She spotted vats of water near the door, two full, one nearly empty. She retrieved a cup and filled it with water, using it to wash her mouth. She found a packet of tooth tabs in one of the packs and chewed the chalky tablet into a paste.

“What are you doing?” she asked Kier after she rinsed her mouth. She already felt vaguely more human. She found a bucket on the other side of the room, probably used to hold water or feed when the hut was in use, and checked to make sure it was clean.

He sighed, sitting back. “Writing correspondence to Scaelas. I meant to yesterday, but you were…” He trailed off, leaving the state of her up for interpretation. “I keep crossing things out, rephrasing.”

She pulled off her shirt so she wouldn’t get it damp.

Grey retrieved the soap from Kier’s shaving kit (his pack was much closer than hers, and his soap smelled nicer anyway) and poured a cup of water over her hair, leaning over the empty bucket.

Her hair mostly contained, she started massaging the soap into it.

It made a phenomenal mess, but at least she would be free of the filth of her sickbed.

“What are you doing?” Kier asked.

“Washing my hair.”

He sighed, the sound long-suffering. “You’re getting soap and water everywhere. Grey—how about I do that, and you can repay me by looking this over? Or write it yourself? I imagine you’re far better at it.”

She looked up from her bucket, wet hair dripping day-old blood down her face. “I’m a lady,” she said primly, “in every definition of the word.”