Page 8 of The Second Death of Locke

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I T HAD NEVER BEEN a sure thing, her becoming his Hand. Two weeks after her eighteenth birthday, in a time that felt like a different life entirely, Grey was wrist-deep inside a chest wound when the door to the infirmary opened and an officer stepped inside.

“Flynn?” they called, searching the ward.

Grey looked up, registered the caller. “I’m currently unable to curtsy,” she said apologetically. Beneath her careful work, the mage on the table made a strangled noise. Grey nodded to the trainee healer beside her, who leaned close to the mage’s nose with a cloth soaked in an herbal anesthetic.

The officer grimaced. “You’ve been requested. Captain Pickett requires your presence.”

Grey inhaled, tasting the blood and sick that hung heavy in the air around them.

She had gone to training with Kier when she was nearly sixteen, Kier’s steady hand forging her guardian’s permission on the necessary parchment.

The pair were separated when she had been deemed too young to be sent to her death right after training and instead was sent to work as a healer, while Kier went with a company of mages to fight.

Until a couple of weeks ago, she figured everyone had forgotten that there was an able-bodied well working in the infirmary—after all, wells made the best healers, though they usually weren’t held back from battle until they’d lost at least one limb.

And she wasn’t shy about her talent—she was a good healer.

Good enough to be requested by captains and masters; good enough to find little bottles of liquor or extra parchment for her letters tucked into her apron pockets by those who’d survived under her hands.

It will be boring , she had written to Kier in her latest letter, but I might not die before my twentieth birthday if they keep me here. Maybe .

He had not written back. In fact, she had not heard from him in months, which filled her with more anxiety with each day that passed.

All she could do was pray to her gods that he wasn’t dead, and send increasingly panicked letters to her adopted mother, Imarta, to ask if Kier’s mothers had heard anything.

Each letter from Imarta came with Laurella and Pia have not heard from him, but he is not dead . It was okay, she thought. No news was good news. After all, when Lot was killed, they knew immediately.

Besides, Kier could not be dead, she figured, because if he was , she was certain she would know. She would feel some sort of reset in her bones, some eternal agony, no matter how much distance separated them.

She finished her work, frowning despite herself. She couldn’t even remember wanting to be anything other than a healer. But when she finished working on the mage, washed the blood away and made her way to the old farmhouse where the officers worked, all the things she’d once wanted fell away.

She was led into the office of Captain Pickett. The cranky, peevish man in charge of the healers at the camp sat behind his desk looking mercurial as always, and…

Another man stood in front of the window, half illuminated by the afternoon sun—it made his hair shine dark and glimmering, made the polished pin at his throat gleam. He wore the red-trimmed blue cloak of a mage, both hands folded in front of him.

Grey froze in the doorway, barely able to breathe.

Half of her life she’d revolved around him, one tiny planet around that great sun.

Two years of her life she’d read every letter a dozen times until the paper wore thin, tucking each into the inner pocket of her cloak for safekeeping.

For nearly three months he had occupied hours of worry as she waited for any word of him.

Now here he was again, and she couldn’t move—she didn’t know if she knew him at all anymore.

“Healer Flynn,” Pickett was saying, perfunctory, ready to get this over with. “You’ve been reassigned. A lieutenant has requested you as his Hand.”

Grey curtsied before she could be written up for disrespect yet again—she wasn’t being unintentionally disrespectful, just forgetful, her brain always skipping from one injury to the next, one patient to the next, without taking stock of who in the room mattered more than her—and skittered three more steps into the room so she could shut the door behind her.

“Kier?” she said, the word escaping her lips before she could stop it.

She hadn’t seen him since the day he was sent to the Nestrian border.

Then, two years before, he wasn’t this broad-shouldered, he wasn’t this stern, and he certainly didn’t have that scar tugging on the corner of his lip, or the other snaking across his left hand into the cuff of his sleeve.

“That’s Lieutenant Seward,” Pickett said. “You won’t be warned again, Healer.”

“I’m sorry. I…” She shook herself out, forced herself to focus, squared her shoulders. She’d known about his promotions. Of course she had. He had written to her about them himself. Any semblance of coherence fled. “Lieutenant. I… Sorry. Your Hand? Me?”

“If you wish,” Kier said, steady as ever. His face, inexplicably different, even as her memory shifted the new angles of him into recognition. His voice, utterly unchanged.

“She does not get the choice, Seward,” Pickett said. Kier winced.

“Of course,” Grey said, swallowing hard. “Of course.”

“Then it’s done,” the captain said, going back to his stack of missives. “You’ll leave right away. Gather your things, Flynn. The carriage is waiting to take you both back to Lieutenant Seward’s post.”

Her head felt full of air as she curtsied again, following Kier in an orderly line down the stairs.

It took her far too long to realize that he’d diverted from the path and drawn her into a broom cupboard, and then before she could even process anything other than the smell of bleach, he was pulling her into his arms.

She was stiff, still against him for two more seconds—and then she was wrapping her arms around him, digging her fingers into his shorn hair, hiding her face in his chest.

“You’re alive,” she said into his chest, breathing too hard, as if she needed to reassure herself. He smelled like he always did, sunlight and clean linen and his mothers’ lavender soap. He smelled like home . “You’re alive.”

“I’m alive,” he said, just as desperate, as if he too needed convincing. “A near thing, but I’m here. I’m alive.”

“You didn’t write back.”

His expression flickered. “It’s been difficult,” he said. “I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry. I just haven’t been able to think, let alone write.”

“And you want me ?”

“I didn’t mean to pull you from safety,” he said, “but when I saw you listed as a well, for reassignment— Oh, Grey, I shouldn’t have, and you must think me selfish.”

She gripped his shoulders, pushed him away just enough so she could see the gleam of his eyes in the dim.

He looked— She couldn’t think, couldn’t focus.

He looked like every dream she’d had of him, stretched over two years and too many heartbeats fearing she’d never see him again. He looked like an absolute stranger.

She moved her hands up, cupping his face. “I’m so sorry,” she said, the words coming unbidden—and she had to say them in person, write them into the space between them like she’d never been able to write them in letters. “I’m so sorry about Lot.”

He closed his eyes. Turned his head to press his lips to her palm.

He was always so affectionate, even when they were children, always one to kiss her temple or link his arm through hers or lay a hand over her shoulder.

She used to read something into it before she considered that it might be the only way he knew to prove she could trust him.

“Don’t,” he murmured against her skin.

His shoulders shook, and he was just a boy again. She pulled him down—when he’d gotten so much taller than her, she didn’t know; unless he’d always been so tall and she’d forgotten, which was unthinkable—and buried his head in her neck. Neither acknowledged his tears.

Soon after, once she had collected the single bag of her belongings and her ill-fitting new cloak trimmed in Hand’s black, he said, “Pickett is wrong. You didn’t have to agree.”

“You said they were assigning me anyway. Best it’s with you.”

“Yes, but… where we’re going. It’s not anyone’s first choice.”

“Why?”

“It’s… it’s bad. It’s bloody. It’s awful. And I… I shouldn’t bring you into it.” He looked at her, then, in the darkness of the carriage. She longed to run the tip of her thumb over that new scar, feel the swell of his lip under her skin.

“Then why did you?”

He didn’t speak for a long time, just watching her. “We’re not bound,” he started.

Grey laughed. Binding significantly increased the power that a mage and well shared.

It allowed the mage to draw from only one power source, allowed the well to only respond to that mage.

And in return, the connection was so much more sensitive: Grey could give Kier much more of herself, and Kier could take even the smallest power and run with it.

It was also illegal, forbidden and punishable by death.

She elbowed him in the ribs, hard, and laughed harder at his pout. “We’re not allowed to be.”

Kier shrugged, allowing it. Nobody was allowed to be bound.

Not for a decade; not since the High Sovereigns realized that the magic was waning in earnest. To cut off the abilities for mages and wells to be interchangeable was to cut down their usefulness dramatically, and Grey was not harboring any illusions.

She was only valuable to the army for her usefulness.

“I don’t want anyone else to hurt you,” Kier said, “and I know you like I know myself.”

He turned to her then, urgent like he usually wasn’t.

This wasn’t the Kier she remembered, but the Kier she knew, the boy she’d grown up with, had never nearly died.

That Kier’s brother was still alive, not buried next to the tree they used to play on as children.

He reached for her hand, and she let him take it—she felt the draw immediately, the pull, the unfurling of power in the middle of her chest. An unreadable look flickered across Kier’s face.

“How easily,” he murmured, “you give up your magic to me.”

She blushed despite herself, pulling away from him with something like embarrassment. “It’s not magic when I have it. It takes you to make it into something.”

“We’re not bound,” Kier said again, his hands knotted in his lap as if he couldn’t bear to say what he needed to.

“But the way you know me—it’s close to it, isn’t it?

Binding makes the tether stronger. If you were matched to someone else—there would be too much to know, Grey, and I couldn’t stand it, imagining you in that kind of danger. ”

She chewed on her lip. In truth, she was grateful, and he was right. If she’d become Hand to anyone else, there would be a lot of hiding, or else a lot of explaining.

“Will you be my Hand?” Kier asked. “My companion?”

How could she say no? How was she ever meant to say anything other than yes?

She narrowed her eyes. “What’s in it for me?”

That drew a laugh out of him, and she was grateful—she didn’t know what to do with this new, serious version of the boy she’d always known. “Better quarters? My cheese portions?”

“You’ve got to try harder than that.”

“Unlimited access to my shirts?”

Grey shrugged. “I could be convinced,” she said finally. The answering smile on his face was utterly dazzling.