Page 73 of The Second Death of Locke

thirty-two

T HEY WERE ONLY IN the war room long enough for the lookouts to give their reports before the commanders left to direct their forces. Kier bowed his head, kissed her hand and said a gruff “My lady,” and then he was following Scaelas and Reggin and Dainridge into battle.

Without her.

Ola and Brit were already in the field. Eron, still injured, had been ordered by Leonie to stay away—and that meant he was assigned to stay with Grey.

She kept a thought on Kier, feeding him power as he moved down the Isle. He sent her a swell of reassurance and love and the promise that he would be back soon.

“Well, Locke,” Cleoc said when the war room was clear of all but her attendants and Eron. She nodded to the padding Grey wore, the same she would wear under her armor. “Are you going, then?”

Grey chewed her lip. “Would you think less of me if I told you I still haven’t decided?”

Cleoc’s sharp look softened. Grey wondered, then, how old Cleoc was: old enough to have Sela, but she didn’t know much beyond that. She didn’t even know who she had been before she carried her nation’s title, or how long she had had it.

Cleoc turned to Eron, offering him her arm. She started out of the room; Eron, confused, went with her, followed by Cleoc’s attendants. “Let me know when you do decide,” she said breezily. “Though it would disappoint my daughter if you died. She is quite taken with you and the commander both.”

Grey stood blinking in surprise. It took her a second to realize why Cleoc had taken Eron with her: Cleoc suspected that he would stop Grey if she did something ill-advised.

She was halfway up the stairs to her room when she felt the tug on the tether. She pushed power at Kier without thought; immediately, she felt the carnage as he began to wield his magic.

She stopped at her rooms only long enough to secure her armor and grab her father’s sword and strap it to her hip. Then she was racing to the tower, pushing her way through the door as pinpricks of death continued to erupt all over the Isle. She felt every one like a blow.

Gasping, she grabbed the edge of the crenelation and looked out.

There were hundreds of soldiers on the beaches below Osar.

That was what she noticed first: how the fighting congregated there, how she could see the orderly lines of the bodies even from here.

There was more fighting in the harbor as boats landed, spilling forces into the town.

Just past the harbor, one of Eprain’s ships burned with blue fire, downed by one of Cleoc’s mages.

She knew, in some distant way, that they’d been prepared for this. That this was exactly what they’d expected. But she also knew the awfulness of battle, and she could not stay here in the fortress while others were dying for her.

No one took any notice of her, in the mess of it.

She slipped through the Ghostwood like a wraith, only stopping to drive her father’s sword through a Luthrite mage who would’ve otherwise cut her down.

She’d memorized the path Kier was meant to take, and she tried her best to follow it.

She was gripped with a sudden, awful fear that he was going to die, and she would be nowhere near him.

She’d been a fool to let him go alone.

She felt the tether grow stronger as she drew near the company Kier led.

She almost stumbled over the first of the bodies as she entered the thick of the fighting, the smell of blood and magic and sweat mixing.

A Hand captain from Eprain nearly ran her through before she raised her own sword and drove it up through their sternum.

She felled three more opponents and took a hit to her side, protected by her armor from anything more than a bruise, before the battle shifted and she spotted Kier.

He wielded magic carefully, cutting down a soldier in front of him even as he deflected a blow to his side with a shimmering gold shield; he called something to Brit, who fought to his side with Ola at their back.

All of his castings were gold now, she noticed with a rush of adoration.

She pushed a heavy knot of power at him. His expression shifted, concentration rippling for only one second, and then his eyes were on hers and there was a wicked smile curving across his face.

“Watch my back?” he called.

“Always,” she agreed, fighting her way to his side.

“Welcome to the party, Hand Commander,” Ola grunted, dodging a sword before Brit aimed a spray of metal pellets at the attacker.

Kier pulled another knot of power from her. She felt vital, like she would never run out of the warm, golden power. Even with each quiet explosion within her, she felt more rushing up to replace it.

“How are we doing?” she asked, in the faintest lull.

Kier made a low noise, dodging another hit. “Not as well as we could be,” he admitted through his teeth. He turned, just enough to catch her eye. “Grey, I’m glad to see you, but you shouldn’t be here.”

Her answering smile was hot as live steel. “It’s a good thing you don’t outrank me.”

They pushed back, but it didn’t take Grey long to realize that the tide of soldiers from the beach was endless and growing, and their own force of ten thousand was dwindling. With blood leaking from his newly rebroken nose, Kier angrily ordered his regiment to pull back, closer to the Ghostwood.

“Grey,” he said after a while. Her arms were exhausted, every muscle aching with the strain of keeping them alive.

She was bleeding from a split lip and a cut across her eyebrow, and she’d lost sight of Ola and Brit.

“We’re losing ground. If they push us through the Ghostwood, we’ll be cut off from the other regiments. ”

Grey swiped the blood out of her eyes with the edge of her surcoat.

The horror of war, the blood and the bile, the fear and the hate—it was all hot on her tongue.

She couldn’t remember why she’d wanted this, why she’d left the fortress at all.

She watched as one of the Stratans was disemboweled, falling to his knees as his insides slipped out, slippery and red and purple.

The swordsman, a Luthrite Hand, turned toward Grey with murder in his eyes.

She froze. Felt the power rising up within him, this man in front of her, who carried the power of her own nation.

She felt it as it slipped down the thread to his mage, fighting a little ways away; felt it as it was directed at her.

It glanced off her, because a well could not be harmed by magic, but it didn’t matter.

This was the truth of power.

She reached out, felt the power in the snarling well before her and pulled. His face went blank with shock as he reached for his power— and felt nothing.

“Grey!” Kier shouted, feeling the pull and realizing what it meant: his lady was revealed. Grey’s brain faltered, realizing that she’d pulled the power with barely a thought, like a reflex, as easily as she fed power to her own mage.

“ LOCKE!” the soldier shouted, lunging toward her.

Kier threw a shield to protect her a half-second too late: the sword bit into her side and pierced her armor.

The soldier dragged the blade to the side to do as much damage as possible before Kier’s shield caught it, lodged in her flesh.

Not even the mostly decorative armor of Kitalma could save her as she looked up at the shocked face of the man before her and saw death staring back.

She only barely saw a sword cut him down as she fell to her knees.

It was like time slowed down, her very own dilation.

“ Grey .”

Kier caught her as she fell, shielding both of them without a second thought.

She pressed a hand to his face, leaving a print in blood behind.

Her vision was crowding with dots—behind him, she thought she saw the goddess at the edge of the Ghostwood, surveying the destruction Grey had wrought on her very own Isle.

She felt the deaths, every single one. Perhaps that, too, was what it meant to be Locke: even as she felt her own heart stalling, even as she felt the weight of her soul caught in the balance, she knew the dance of the battle in the pit of her stomach.

She felt it in every strong thread of power tethering her soldiers to their mages; she felt it in the broken cords of tethers as Hands lay dead and dying.

They were hers, all of them; she felt every single life on her shores.

Some of those lives were familiar, like Kier’s in the center; or like Leonie, her well of power waning as she fought to keep Grey’s army alive.

She felt pain from somewhere close, from someone she loved—Ola’s name flickered briefly, like a dying light, before Grey felt herself again unsettled.

She reached for them, those she loved, and there were no words that came back: only a rush of agony, the sear of determination. She felt like she was outside of her body as the lights she held inside of her flickered out one by one, as she felt the power in the Isle tightening and receding.

And above it, all around her, she looked up, and she saw him.

“I’m sorry,” she said. She tasted blood, which meant nothing good for her wound.

“ Grey ,” Kier said, his face wavering in her vision. “Don’t—”