I rip Zane back against me as everyone pushes close—heads swiveling, spears at the ready, the air thick with a chaotic energy that prickles my skin. There’s the soft hiss of a blade loosening at my back, and it occurs to me how bitterly disappointed Baze would be that I’m not readily armed after all the work he’s put into me over the years.
Silence prevails for a long, tense moment while I scour the jungle, my heart a wild thing beating me up from the inside. Violent fear has my scrunched hand shaking around Zane’s crumpled shirt …
You can’t have him.
“Just a fallen branch,” Cainon bellows from the front. “Let’s push on. I can see the village’s lights through the trees ahead.”
Low murmurs rumble through the group, and everyone starts moving again, Zane easing from my grip with a lopsided smile tossed over his shoulder. I ruffle his hair, face hardening the moment he turns again, and I continue to scan the trees, heart lurching when I spot a stooped clutch of bluebells nesting at the base of a palm a dozen or so feet off the trail.
The tip of my boot hooks on something, and I whip off the track.
My sack goes flying, the piece of coal slipping from my grip when I hit the ground with a hard thud that rattles my teeth, my healing shoulder hunched beneath me.
But I feel no pain, barely hear the chorus of alarmed shouts as I stare at those bluebells with a stone-sized lump in my throat. Because that color right there—thatexacttone—was the last puzzle piece that made up my brother on the wall in Whispers.
This feeling surges deep inside my gut that tingles all the way to the tips of my fingers. This need to have them. Hold them. Cradle them.
I ease up onto my knees, fingers stretched—
Firm hands land upon me, and I’m lugged back, brushed down, hair swiped from my face—breaking my sight of those bluebells.
“I’m fine,” I snap, batting Cainon’s hand away.
His eyes flare, tension crackling, and from the corner of my eye I see the men stare at their boots, pretending they didn’t just watch me chastise their High Master.
Perhaps they wouldn’t be so confused if they knew he was inserting last-minute caveats that prevent my people from receiving promised, life-saving aid at the earliest possible convenience. That he holds all the power to change the savage tide of death spilling across the continent in the palm of his hand, and that he’s dangling it over my head, just out of reach, until Idance.
All that proves is he doesn’t trust me. Which makes it damn hard for me to trust him.
Cainon shifts forward, smothering me in the smell of citrus and salt as he crushes the space between us. I keep my chin high, even as a burst of goosebumps sprouts down the side of my neck. “We need to talk,” he mutters against my ear.
“Then let’stalk.”
“Later.” He picks up my sack, spins, and continues down the path with it lumped over his shoulder like a trophy.
I glance at the bluebells, heart heavy as I search the undergrowth for my lost piece of coal …
Gone.
Hands bunching so tight I feel the scabs on my right palm crinkle and split, I look to my sack, foot swinging forward—
“Orlaith.” Gun’s blunt warning has my attention snapping back. He shakes his head, wearing a guillotine stare that suggests I’m trudging a line thinner than the pinch of his lips. “It’s not the right time, luv.”
Perhaps not. But it’s nothisbody that’s being sold for a promise that keeps slipping further between his fingers.
* * *
The sweet smell of sugar makes my tongue tingle as the trees thin, giving way to a hedge of tall buildings pressed against each other like a fortress. They’re plagued by a constellation of blazing lanterns bolted to the cobbled walls blotched with fluffy moss.
The majority of our convoy falls back, ordered to follow a stable sign that appears to direct them around the edge of the village.
Cainon spears down a slender path cleaved between the otherwise impenetrable wall.
I charge after him, trailed by Gun and Zane, shooting out in the settlement’s courtyard that’s barricaded on all four sides by tightly packed buildings.
Everything’s cobbled: the buildings, the ground, the water fountain in the center of it all—held in the bright embrace of tree-tall lanterns arching over buildings like bowing stick figures, their flaming heads caught in glass globes.
I shield my eyes from the glare as I stalk Cainon in long, determined strides, stare narrowed on my sack slung over his shoulder.
