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With the fights over, exhaustion weighed down her body and her heavy eyelids threatened to fall closed. She thought about crawling into her cave to sleep. To pretend none of this was real and she hadn’t just claimed a victory someone her size had no right to claim.

When the soldiers didn’t hand Ryn a signet, she reached across the table and took one. She was already walking out of the entrance cave when the soldier with the crooked nose yelled after her. “You’d better give that to your leader! We’ll come looking for you if you don’t! It’s a crime to disobey a soldier, you know!”

Heva scowled back at them as she peeled herself off the wall where she waited. “I should pelt them with pebbles.” She fell into step beside Ryn as the curves of the dim tunnel swallowed them in. “You look much better, Ryn. The colour has returned to your face. I knew eating your meals would do the trick.”

Ryn’s thumb ran over the signet; a circle no wider than her hand chiselled out of wood and coated in chipping white paint. She wondered if real army division commanders got metal ones.

“Ryn.”

Ryn’s feet dragged to a stop. She turned back to find Heva waiting in the middle of the path, half cloaked in shadow, the other half yellow in muted torchlight. Distant chatter and shouts came from the feasting cave at the end of the tunnel where a late dinner was being served.

Heva took in a heavy breath, her chest expanding beneath her stretched white shirt. She let it out slowly and stuffed her hands into her trouser pockets. “You’re still hurting,” she said. “I can tell.”

Ryn didn’t reply. She couldn’t find the will to smile and assure Heva of anything.

“You don’t want to trust anyone again. Not even me.” Heva dragged herself forward a step, her bare feet rubbing over the floor. She scrunched her face as she studied Ryn, seeming to take note of the small bruises and cuts in particular. “You know I’m not the overly spiritual type, but I believe in your god, you know. The God. I was raised to.” She tilted her head, her hair tumbling over her shoulder. “We might not understand what El is doing, but someday, we’ll understand why things happen the way they do. Even the bad things. Even the unfair things. Someday you’ll see why things ended with King Xerxes the way they did.”

After a moment where the only sounds left in the tunnel were crackling torch fires and distant chatter, Heva sighed and walked around Ryn, heading into their cave and leaving Ryn alone with her commander signet in her hand. Somewhere beyond the rocky curves, another Fall Order was coming to its conclusion. Prisoners wailed and cheered as a leader was chosen.

Ryn held up the signet. The edges looked like they were singed by fire. Like this emblem was dug out of a pit as an afterthought. The words across it were in Weylin letters, but she could tell the text said: BURN DIVISION XII. Or something very close to that. She wasn’t familiar with the number at the end.

At some point, Ryn had lost count of the exact number of days she’d been living in this darkness, where flickering torchlight offered the only way to see. In that time, she’d convinced herself the rest of the kingdom no longer existed above, that everything from the palace was just a dream, like Geovani, like the Intelligentsia, the Folke, the Priesthood, the First Temple priestesses, and the Mother City.

It was how she kept all thoughts of the Heartstealer trials at bay. It was how she stopped herself from living in the restless anguish of constantly wondering if Kai had been captured.

“None of it was a dream, was it?” She might have been asking El, but she was really asking herself. She turned the signet around in her fingers, staring at the Weylin symbols. XII. She was just a number now, not even worthy of a name anymore.

Ryn headed into the sleeping cave and stood in the crumbling archway. Heva was already snoring along with a handful of other women inmates taking up most of the floor space. Ryn glanced at the pile of exactly thirty-seven rocks stacked in the corner of the room, at the sixty-three gaping holes that speckled the walls, and the slick ceiling moisture pooling into drips. She walked in and laid beside Heva. After a few minutes, her eyes drifted closed too, sealing the rocks, the women, and the moisture away.

They opened again hours later to shouts.

Heva was up first, blinking the sleep from her eyes and running to the archway. Soldiers marched down the tunnel with booming footsteps, yelling at the top of their lungs, “Get up!”

Ryn climbed to her feet and wandered over to stand beside Heva. Hundreds of prisoners gathered at their cave entrances down the hall, whispers filling the tunnels, inmates pointing at the soldiers now fully armoured with bows strapped to their backs.

“We’re being called out! B’rei Mira is pushing the boundaries back toward the kingdom! Eat immediately and meet at the entrance cave! We leave at sunrise!”

The signet in Ryn’s pocket turned into a rock weighing her down.

They were going to war.

Now.

4

XERXES

One hundred and twelve.

The cold was a sharp knife against Xerxes’s skin, sliding up and down his bare arms. It was a near-silent night, apart from the echoes of the few Division One soldiers still awake beneath the stars. Their mumbled prayers washed through the camp, up to the heavens where the Celestial Divinities would certainly ignore them.

Xerxes rolled over on his cot and plugged his ears. What a bunch of religious nonsense. If the Celestial Divinities cared about Per-Siana, why was the army forced to defend itself with no way out? It wasn’t like the gods had given a solution to their wailing Weylin devotees throwing ashes on their heads and chanting late into the night. Xerxes couldn’t understand why his men kept setting up a temple shelter at every new camp. The attention of the gods was a cruel, terrible thing, and Xerxes wanted the Divinities far away from his battles. He would have banned the desert temple from being erected and the dying animal sounds of all the pleading and prayers, except that he didn’t know what sort of retaliation he’d face from his men if he did.

A gust of sticky wind skated into the tent, indicating Reza’s midnight return. “Can you go tell your devoted friends out there to be quiet?” Xerxes mumbled at him.

Reza didn’t respond.

A breath of ice-cold raced up Xerxes’s back, tightening his spine, and his eyes peeled open slowly.