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“Then we keep it gone.” He hoisted his bag higher on his shoulder. “Let’s get the hell away from the ruins of the damned wall.”
I wasn’t sure what I’d expected upon returning to Aneira. That we’d likely need to avoid soldiers, yes, and probably anyone else besides.
But endless miles of utter silence and stillness had never crossed my mind. There were no travelers. What few people we saw at a great distance in the fields appeared to turn and run when they spotted us. All around, there was a strange feeling in the air.
Fear.
It hung over the terrain like an invisible cloud, covering everything from the grass to the sky itself, and it only grew stronger the farther we traveled. I didn’t think it was just the product of my own nerves either. No, it was those instincts that had once told humans when a hungry beast was prowling near their tents and caves.
Something was very wrong in my home country. Given the fallen Warden Wall, it worried me for us, my people, and anyone else in the path of whatever lurked out there, waiting.
“Tell me,” Casimir commented as we sat around a tiny campfire one night. “Has Aneira been this sparsely populated for the past thirty years, or is this a more recent development?”
The giants glanced at me as if waiting to see what I wanted to say. Sitting with his back to us at the farthest reaches of the firelight, even Roan’s head turned toward us slightly. He hadn’t said a word to anyone in days, but clearly he was still listening if he seemed curious about my answer.
“This is new,” I murmured. “At least as far as I know.”
Casimir’s eyebrow arched at me, curious.
“I rarely traveled before this,” I admitted. “With the war and what happened to my mother, my father didn’t like me leaving the castle, barring a few state visits here and there. My stepmother encouraged him to keep me close as well. For protection, she claimed.”
The truth rankled. My protection had never mattered, at least not in any context my father or I would have supported. In reality, Melisandre only sought to control me. Control my father too, through his fears. All that time, she’d only actually wanted to turn me into this creature and sacrifice me to the Voidborn.
Of course she couldn’t risk someone else killing me first.
“Royalty in a time of war would have been a tempting target,” Casimir said kindly. “He was not mistaken.”
I smiled, grateful for the attempt to make me feel better, even if it didn’t change much. “What I saw of Aneira wasn’t like this, though. People were still traveling from place to place. Farmers didn’t run from the sight of strangers. This…” I shook my head. “Something’s very wrong.”
“Word has likely gotten out about the wall coming down,” Dex said. “And if what destroyed it is here as well, it would make sense that people are staying home or hiding.”
“Do we think it’s the queen?” Niko asked with a questioning look to us all. “Could she still be alive?”
“Perhaps…” Byron nodded thoughtfully. “But why would the queen make people run? Assuming she hasn’t revealed she’s a vampire and all.” He made a perturbed sound. “Even what we saw through the magic mirror at the cabin never showed a populace running at the mere sight of someone they didn’t know—and when those strangers were still easily two miles or more away.”
“No kidding,” Clay said. “What the hell did they think we were going to do? Fly across that distance to attack them?”
Murmurs of disquieted agreement came from the others around the campfire. But my skin crawled, my eyes slipping toward the deep night beyond our little circle of light. We’d made camp in the lee of a large outcropping of stone, where rocks had long ago crested through the gently rolling hills. To one side, the granite sheltered us, while the other side was open to the broad expanse of grass and grain that we’d crossed today. Most of us were up near the rock, and only Roan lingered at the edge of the light like he was trying to put distance between himself and us all.
But although we had stone at our back to cut the wind and shelter the light of our flames—to say nothing of how we’d seen no one in my land for hours—suddenly I felt as if we were horribly exposed to the moonless night.
“Who wants to take first shift keeping watch, eh?” Clay said.
“Are you volunteering?” his brother countered.
Clay scoffed. “Hell, no.”
Several of the others chuckled and shook their heads as if this was an old argument and it amused them to hear it again.
I watched my giants while Niko grew several long blades of grass from the ground and held them in his fist for the others to select in a prairie version of drawing straws. How many nights must they have spent just like this during the war, sneaking through their own country and then across mine as well?
“So now that we’ve made it past that wall,” Casimir prompted when the drawing of proverbial straws was finished and Clay was indeed given first watch. “What is your plan from here?”
He directed the question to all of us, but my heart still sank because I had no answer. We weren’t an army. We were a collection of people who for various reasons would be seen as a threat by my people, not allies, no matter what they now faced. And while the Voidborn were a danger beyond anything I could imagine—an enemy that wanted to eradicate all life from our world and crush reality itself—that wouldn’t change what my people thought about us.
To the Aneirans, I was an assassin. A princess who had murdered her own father in cold blood, only to escape after being imprisoned for that crime. Moreover, they believed my giants were invaders whose people had killed my mother.
And all of us together…
