It felt as if Baba’s death had unleashed something in me, something I had kept tethered when I still had hope of him.
But now, there was no hope.
I wasn’t going to rein myself in any longer.
I closed my fists tight, thinking of Casildo, the man who had double-crossed my father. They had been friends since childhood, and the man had been like an uncle to me. That he could so easily turn my father in made my skin cold. But in that coldness I found power, as if I could lock out all emotion and it would distill my goals to the only ones that mattered. Maybe that was the answer to everything. Maybe if I turned my body to ice I could become the weapon I needed to avenge my father.
To avenge myself.
Thirteen
“Noor, wake up.”
Noor rubbed her eyes groggily and blinked at me. “It’s still dark. The sun hasn’t even started to rise.” She sat up from her little pallet on my grandmother’s floor. The few clothes we had were strewn around us on the floor, the room a mess from the night before, when nearly half the village had been here. “Dania, are you okay?”
“I heard something, maybe a shout?” I bit the inside of my lip. “I think we have to leave now.”
Noor clambered to her feet. “I’ll saddle the mule.”
“Do it quickly. I’ll gather our bags.”
Something about the tension in the air didn’t feel right, and my voice came out in urgent puffs. Noor glanced through the window. “I don’t see anything, but there could be an ambush. Someone might have gotten word to the emperor’s soldiers.”
I folded my clothes tightly into my pack. “It would take the emperor’s soldiers half a day to ride here. We need to be long gone before that happens.” I paused. “Unless someone got word to the city last night.”
“What about your grandmother? Don’t you want to say goodbye?”
The chipped paint on Nanu’s door stood out in the dim light ofher compact mud-brick house. I looked at it for a long moment and thought of what I had told myself last night.
The only way to continue this was to contain any emotion, to lock everything up.
I didn’t have room for my grandmother, I didn’t have room for kindness.
I turned my blood to stone and continued packing. “We don’t have time to wake her. Goodbyes aren’t necessary.”
Noor frowned. “But don’t you want to—”
“No. When all this is over, maybe.” I wasn’t sure if there would be anything left of me when what I had planned was over, and I didn’t want to contemplate that future. But I would see Nanu then. Maybe I’d come back to this village and live some hollowed-out existence.
Noor looked as if she wanted to say more but shook her head instead. “Let’s go, then.”
We left before the sun filtered its first rays of morning. I looked down at Basral, the emperor’s city, as we climbed up through the mountains. A cloud of dust rose in the air from the valley, growing ever closer.
“Horses.”
Noor looked over her shoulder. A group of black dots on the horizon signified the emperor’s riders.
“Someonedidalert them.”
My heart slammed against my chest, adrenaline and anticipation cutting through my anger.
If I met with Vahid’s soldiers now, I’d turn the ground red with their blood.
I fluttered my eyes closed, breathing through my nose. Fighting a few low-level soldiers wouldn’t serve me, and it wouldn’t give me my revenge. We had to concentrate on making a quick escape, before they could confirm we were ever here.
“They’ll be tracking us.”
“I wouldn’t be too worried about that.” Noor nodded toward theother direction, across the desert to where the sky dripped down to the earth in a gray haze.
