Page 71 of The Second Death of Locke

thirty-one

T HAT NIGHT, GREY SLEPT alone.

She woke too early and returned to her office, working through treaties that would never be signed if she died.

After, she fled to the infirmary, helping Leonie and her handful of healers prepare for the looming battle.

Kier did not tether nor pull from her. If he found it an inconvenience, being without magic, he did not tell her.

She returned to the war rooms in the afternoon and took her seat between Cleoc and Scaelas.

The maps on the tables were tidier, marked now with the bases for different regiments and the plans for attack, inked with notes.

Kier stood at the other end of the table, leaning over them, with Reggin at one shoulder.

Reggin’s Hand sat in the chair his mage had previously occupied.

Grey found her eyes often slipping to him, doing her best to distract herself from Kier’s coldness with other thoughts, wondering at their relationship.

Would her own father or uncle or brother drag her into war?

She felt Torrin’s anxiety radiating off him. Perhaps her own was as thick, as noticeable—perhaps everyone misread the tension between Locke and her commander as concern for the battle to come.

“If you think you’re ready,” Reggin was saying to Kier, “then you should trust that instinct.” At Kier’s nod, Reggin turned to the rest of the table. “We will focus our forces here, and here, as Commander Seward has suggested.” Grey followed the indications on the map.

“Locke?” Scaelas said. “What do you think?”

She thought her head was going to explode, and she did not have the brain for strategy.

She knew, with perfect muscle memory, how to wield a blade, how to fight, how to defend.

She couldn’t keep looking at Kier and seeing the disappointment lurking beneath the surface.

She glanced quickly at Scaelas, then used a line she’d heard from him more than once: “I will defer to the wisdom of my commanders.”

The corner of Scaelas’s mouth twitched up. Dainridge, Reggin and Seward were all in agreement: Kier would pull down the temporary shields and open the Isle to attack when their time was up, when Grey’s final rejection of marriage was received.

“The only question that remains,” Dainridge said, pacing behind the table, “is that of Locke.”

Grey’s head snapped up. “In what way?”

“Where will you be during the battle, your majesty?”

She glanced at Cleoc. “ I’ll be in the fortress, safe,” Cleoc said, perfunctory, her hands folded on the table. “I am no soldier.”

Scaelas cleared his throat. “And I will be with my forces. Fighting.”

Grey raised an eyebrow at him, daring him to tell her what to do—but he did not.

“Then Locke, too, will remain in the fortress,” someone said at the end of the table. One of Cleoc’s masters, Grey thought.

“I will not,” she snapped. “I will be fighting with—” She cut off, the thought interrupted before she could finish it: she’d been about to say, I will be fighting with my mage .

What had Cleoc said to her, on that day when they were trying to figure out the problem of Kier’s imprisonment? She could not be loyal to both her Isle and her mage.

Across the table, she met Kier’s eye. He was still angry—but there was surrender there. He would not offer counsel, not on her life; not when this decision mattered so much. He was watching her carefully, but he would not make nor unmake her decisions.

Perhaps, she thought grimly, it was payback for her making decisions without him.

“They’re after you , Locke,” Commander Reggin said very carefully, as if urging her to consider her words when her own commander remained silent. “If you are captured…”

“They are here,” Torrin said, not meeting her eye, “to take you prisoner.”

Grey pressed her lips together. She looked at Cleoc, who did not want a rash, impulsive girl for an ally, who would not trust her if she acted out of hand; she looked at Scaelas, who would be fighting under his own banner, but who looked nauseous at the thought of her doing the same.

And then at Kier, who only waited. Who had already died for her once. She ached for all the things she should’ve done differently, all the words she should’ve told him before they’d gotten this far.

If she died in battle, she could not save him.

“I will be in the fortress,” she said, tasting bile in her mouth, “helping as best I can.”

Kier let out a breath. She did not need to be tethered to him to sense his relief.

“But I refuse to be taken prisoner,” she said, folding her hands in front of her. She remembered the feeling in her stomach when her mother perished in battle. “If I am to remain here, then I want poison or a blade. In case they take the Isle.”

Scaelas did not meet her eye.

But Kier did. When she glanced up, he was looking at her steadily. She had been such a fool, to try to make decisions like this without taking him into account. They always chose the cliff, the poison, the blade, to be the sacrifice—they always chose one another.

She remembered her mother braiding poison into her hair.

Her father checking her boots for blades.

Severin, not hesitating to kill the girl he thought he would marry.

She thought of holding Kier’s hand as they jumped.

She felt, with bile in her throat, of how she had taken the choice of sacrifice or salvation away from him.

And again, she thought of how she couldn’t bear it—and how, if she took the choice away from him, he would be so much more likely to decide on his own sacrifice, without her.

“Then you shall have both, at your disposal,” Kier said.

When darkness finally fell, the eve before the battle to come, Kier was not in her room when she went upstairs to bed.

The door to his own room, his actual room, was firmly closed.

She had not been able to catch a moment with him before they were both pulled in different directions—and still, she was not sure what to say.

She left it. She bathed, sitting in the water with her knees pulled to her chest until it went cold.

Then she dressed in warm clothes and a cloak, and left her hair wet down her back, though her grandmother always told her that would be the death of her.

She walked through the fortress like a ghost, then up and up and up.

Alone, on the roof of Locke’s tallest tower, she looked out at her Isle.

The stone of the crenelations was frigid under her hands.

The torches in the harbor glowed with violet magelight, a warning to any ships that sailed too close.

There were a few lights spread around the Isle as soldiers from each camp kept watch.

Far offshore, the ships circled. She did not know how much longer they would keep their distance, treating her like prey.

There were boots on the stairs behind her. Grey stiffened, expecting Kier—but it was only Ola who came, wrapped in a blanket, her hair loose over her shoulders. She moved next to Grey and let her head fall on her shoulder.

“I imagine you’re not here of your own free will,” Grey said bitterly.

“Would you believe me if I said I was?”

Grey shot her a scathing look.

Ola sighed. “You’re a good one, Flynn. If you must know, the commander came into my room in a rage the other night and demanded that I make sure you actually went to sleep tonight.”

Damn him.

“You fought.”

It wasn’t a question, so Grey did not answer it. “Do you think we’ll survive tomorrow?” she asked instead, desperate to think of anything else.

“Who knows,” Ola said. “But there have been many days when I’ve asked that question, so it’s not much of a change.”

Grey snorted. “I have never felt so powerless in my life,” she said finally. “Everyone here seems determined to die for me. And I— I don’t know, Ol. There has to be something I can do, something that will save them.”

“You’ve been determined to die for everyone else, Grey,” Ola said mildly.

“It’s different,” Grey insisted.

“Is it?”

She didn’t answer. The only noise was the waves crashing below as she considered this. “I might understand why Kier is angry,” she said finally. “But that doesn’t explain why everyone else is willing to die.”

Ola chewed on her lip. “If it helps, it’s not about you at all. Locke was always the linchpin in the middle of a complex set of treaties. It benefits Scaelas and Cleoc to return to that.”

Grey put her elbows on the stone and rested her head in her hands.

It did help, and she did know that, though it was easy to forget.

It was almost a relief to know they were following her for her political significance rather than her personality.

“And there’s been no word from Nestria. They hope to remain neutral, to fall in with the favor of whoever wins. ”

“Lucky bastards,” Ola said simply, rubbing Grey’s back. “I envy them. If only someone would do the work for us .”

They stood in silence for a while, listening to the wind, growing progressively more damp as the clouds spat down their drizzle. Grey watched the warships out at sea.

She flexed her fingers, checking in on her well, and the gentle pull of the power from the Isle.

Now, days into her position as Locke, she understood it further.

It was like a mapwork of light inside of her: she could feel the strongest tether, between her and Kier, shining golden and strong; there was another flow of power too, a doorway between her and the Isle.

But something had changed, since time started again.

She felt pinpricks within her of all other wells.

Before, when she’d reached for someone’s power on the battlefield, to rip it away, it had been there when she’d looked for it.

Now, she didn’t even need to look. She could see the connections, like silvery threads of power, winding from Locke to those who carried its riches.

“I think they expect something impressive of me,” she said quietly.