Page 25

Wanderer, Friend, Father, Spy

Horus goes still, as does every person in the canyon. Then, before any of us can take a breath, he moves. Runs. Straight at me.

Or maybe straight at Reven, who is suddenly in front of me, shadow wisping away from him like trails of dark mist. He reaches back, curling a hand around my wrist.

Horus pulls up short, and I think maybe for the first time since I’ve known him, fear freezes my friend’s features. Before anyone can grab him—and many are trying by now—he falls to his knees, prostrate, hands on the ground, head lowered. “Forgive me, my queen!”

Forgive him? For what? What is Achlys talking about?

“Kill him,” the Shadows whisper. “He betrayed you.”

Heart plummeting, I slam a lid over the well inside me to silence them while I figure out what is happening. At the same time, I try to scoot past Reven, but he doesn’t budge, his shoulders blocking my view. Can he feel the Shadows rising inside me?

Horus offers more choked apologies into the sand, but I can’t see him. I can see Tziah, though. Her hands are clapped over her ears like she doesn’t want to hear any more.

Beside her, Vos’s reaction is worse.

He stares at Horus for a long, hard moment, then a muscle twitches in his jaw and he deliberately turns his gaze away, like he can’t bear to look at his friend a second longer. He’s already decided that Achlys’s accusation is true. Just from a look.

Please don’t be true, my heavy heart whispers. Defend yourself. Tell us you’re being set up. Tell us she’s wrong. Tell us anything.

Horus has been my protector. My confidante. My connection to Aryd when I needed it most. A father figure. I couldn’t have accomplished any of what we’ve done without him.

“I have seen nothing to make me believe he is a traitor,” Bene says from wherever he’s watching overhead. “But his actions are clear.”

The world shifts and a swirling sort of panic sets in. My hand finds Reven’s arm. He flinches at my touch. How am I supposed to handle this? How should I react? The eyes of our allies are on me as one of their queens. As the queen who has had Horus by her side day and night, specifically.

Hakan, who’d been farther up the side of the canyon away from anyone who might accidentally brush up against him, strides our way. “Explain, Achlys.”

Cainis, off to my right, looks between Horus and Achlys, thick brows meeting over his eyes. “What proof do you have?”

Achlys lifts her chin and stares the zariph directly in the eye, something I don’t think she would have done before all this. “I’ve only just discovered it. He was in the palace last night, meeting with Eidolon’s man, Pollux.”

Mother goddess. For how long? When Horus was in the Shadowood with the other Vanished? Reven doesn’t react—he wouldn’t know how much that should hurt him—but Vos flinches and Tziah makes a tiny noise in her throat.

I maneuver around Reven, keeping my hand on his arm, and take in Horus, still on the ground and head bowed.

Defend yourself! I want to yell. Not that he isn’t guilty. But surely, he had reasons…

“Reasons,” a Shadow scoffs in my mind. “Eidolon has reasons, too. Are we starting to consider reasons now?”

Shut up!

Beneath my fingertips, Reven’s forearm flexes. “ This is who you chose to guard Meren?” he snarls at Cain, who glares back at him.

Before Cain can respond, Tabra looks at me, worry darkening her eyes. “We should let him explain.”

“No.” Achlys slashes a hand through the air. “I also found the lever Eidolon pulls to keep Horus under his thumb. That’s what took me a while.”

She glances at Pella, who signals the guard, and immediately a woman is brought into sight, one maybe five or six summers younger than Horus. A tremor of whispers runs through our group, maybe due to the burn scars that mar the entire left side of her face, the skin puckered and angry red, her eye on that side barely visible under a lid of scar tissue that droops over it.

I study the woman. The resemblance is clear.

The woman stares at Horus, tears welling in her eyes. “Abren?”

Horus flinches at the ancient Wanderer word for “brother” but doesn’t move. Doesn’t speak.

Confusion swirls through me. Is this…

“Eidolon blackmailed the spy Vida with her family,” Achlys says. “He did the same with Horus.”

I’ve thought of Vida every single day since she died trying to kill me. The king had her family, threatened to kill them if she didn’t spy for him. That’s how he bought her betrayal of her friends. I think about how, if she’d come to me, I could have helped her. Of how alone she must have felt. Of how she could have chosen so many other paths to solve her problem.

Vida must have known Horus was a spy. That’s why she had begged him to help her family. Because he was the only person who could.

“She was just desperate,” Horus had said about Vida. “Desperation is as close to depravity as a pure soul like hers can get. Trust me. I know.”

Only he meant it differently than I took it then. He meant it as the other spy sent to share our secrets with Eidolon. And then he killed Vida before she could name him as the other traitor.

The images of that moment are all I can see as I look at him now. The way he had pulled her onto his lap with frantic hands and wrapped his arms around her, bowed his head, murmured prayers over her body. Cried.

Wanderers don’t cry. That’s not how they grieve. And I thought…stupidly…that his grief was in having to kill a friend he’d known for years. Years together in the Shadowood. Years with that cheerful smile and her insistent friendship that could win over even the most guarded person.

But it was all a show. A lie.

“I have found a new purpose here,” he’d told me the day we met in the Shadowood. “I am a hunter by trade, and I help to feed these people. In exchange, I have a home and acceptance.”

I remember fighting beside Horus in the Shadowood as Eidolon’s soldiers attacked. His face the day I told him he was worthy of even a princess’s sacrifice. That every soul is worthy. The thousands of times he put himself between me and harm’s way.

Did he mean any of it?

The day he asked to be my personal guard. “I couldn’t protect my own sister, my only family, and I lost my honor and my place in my zariphate and in this world all the same. Let me serve you. Let me regain my honor at your side.”

Was he only asking to get closer to me for information? To kill me eventually?

Horus’s sister jerks toward him, but Pella yanks her up short. She flinches, as if bracing for a strike.

“Horus,” the woman says again, her voice breaking over his name.

“I am sorry, Lana,” I hear the man I’ve wished was my father whisper.

He might as well have lit his own funeral pyre with those words, and I know .

How could he?

I want to scream. I want to beat my hands on his chest and sob and let him see my hurt.

But I can’t. Because I’m a queen.

“Seize him,” Tabra orders quietly.

Wanderers from all the zariphates here—a rainbow of clothing in tans and whites, blacks and blues, reds and various other shades—surround Horus, strip him of his curved blade, telescoping bow, and urumi belt, then stand over him, weapons drawn while he remains on the ground, bowing to Tabra.

“ Traitor ,” someone growls.

And others take up the call, getting louder, gaining heat and anger until the word pounds through me, over and over and over.

Tabra shouldn’t be the one to mete out his punishment. Not this time. He’s my responsibility.

I draw one last bit of strength from Reven before letting go of his arm and stalking toward Horus. The Wanderers surrounding him tense. They probably don’t know who the bigger threat is.

“ Meren ,” Cain warns.

The chanting of “traitor” ceases, leaving only the stirring of the breeze.

I stare down at Horus. His betrayal flays so deeply, I feel it cut to my bones. I trusted him. With my life. With Tabra’s life. With my affection. With secrets. With detailed plans. People have died. Omma died. Many of the Vanished died. Many Wanderers died.

Because of him . And everyone here knows it. They know he’s been exiled before—his being among us at all should spell his death at the hands of any zariph here—but because he’s under my protection, he lives. I need these people to follow me and trust me as we go into battle together, and he just shattered that.

He’s left me with no choice. I have to punish him in the most brutal of ways. One the Wanderers, and even the Vanished, will respect.

I already hate myself for what I’m about to do.

Even if his actions are what brought us to this.