Page 17

The soldiers released Ryn’s shoulders and wrists, and she slumped to sit. She fought the quivering in her lip, the dull pain in her chest.

“Find me a rock, and I’ll throw it at him,” Heva murmured at Ryn’s side. “I don’t care if they stab me clean through for it.”

Heva’s voice was the tether that brought Ryn back. She swallowed the dryness in her throat, the wail, the shout that wanted to break free. She didn’t know what she’d shout anyway. Her voice was lost to the swelling in her chest, the strongest thing she’d felt since the day the King of Per-Siana had stood on the opposite side of palace prison bars much like these ones and had said the things that had turned Ryn numb for days, and then weeks, and then months. After over a hundred days of being underground, training herself to feel nothing, to not care, here Damon was, ripping her back to him and the past she’d left behind. His words were a gong in her ears, her last farewell from Per-Siana.

When barks of complaint lifted through the wagon from prisoners trying to find space to stand, Ryn climbed to her feet and turned away from Damon, from the Folke, from the Navy Road, from the palace that had cast her out, from the Mother City she didn’t belong in anymore. She was hardly considered a Per-Siana citizen, hardly considered human, because of her blood. And now this kingdom expected her to fight for it.

It was a cruel joke. Something the Intelligentsia could go back to the palace and laugh about later.

The first hours of the wagon ride were filled with whining from her division: the air was too hot, the sun was too bright, the wagon was too crowded. Heva snapped at one or two of them to shut up after a while. Surprisingly, they listened to her, but their gazes slid over to Ryn to see if she approved, and that was the first moment Ryn realized they weren’t planning some kind of revolt against her for winning the Fall Order. They were really living under the delusion that she was their leader.

If she wasn’t so bothered by the idea of being responsible for their lives, she might have laughed. Instead, she dragged her eyes off them without a word and stared toward the city as it got smaller, a distant collection of sun reflections off buildings at the end of a long dirt road through pastured hills. Soon they’d reach the mountains.

“She must be in a mood,” she overheard one of the men mutter.

“Maybe she’s scared,” another whispered back.

Ryn didn’t correct anyone. She kept her attention out of the wagon for the next several hours, even when unleavened bread and pomegranates were passed out by the soldiers. The prisoners erupted in cheers, splitting the pomegranates open, marvelling at the bright red seeds.

Six wagons carrying burn divisions crunched over the road ahead, two others from the Mother City prison. Ryn leaned to spy on them. They had the same meal of pomegranates and bread, the prisoners all smiling like they forgot they were being herded to the desert to die like animals.

When a soldier handed Ryn a crispy loaf, she held it up and turned it over slowly. There was no sprinkle of sugar or herbs on the bread. Still, it was the first food she’d seen in almost four months apart from rice and soggy vegetables. She broke a piece off the end and put it in her mouth. She wasn’t sure what she expected with the taste of new food. Joy? Excitement? Relief?

She didn’t feel any of those things.

“Here.” Heva shoved half a pomegranate toward her. “Eat up, Ryn.”

Ryn didn’t take it. She handed her bread to Heva. “I’m not hungry.”

Heva made a face and pushed her hair out of her eyes, revealing a dot of dirt on the end of her nose. When Ryn didn’t let up, Heva took the bread and shoved it into her trousers pocket, then patted it and said, “We’ll save it for later then.”

The wagon lurched—Ryn fell into Heva, and Heva collided with the bars. The other wagons veered right on the path ahead, but their wagon took a sharp left. Of the seven wagons, theirs was the only one heading down a narrow path between two rocky black mountains with mist coiling at the peaks.

Prisoners in the wagon scratched their heads and whispered to each other. Ryn pushed her way through them to the soldiers at the front guiding the horses where they were separated from the inmates by wooden posts. She shook the bars between her and them when they didn’t notice her there. “We’re going off course!”

The soldiers ignored her.

Ryn’s grip tightened around the posts. “Hey!” she snapped, rendering the rest of the wagon silent. Two of the soldiers ahead glared backward at her. The third soldier—the one with a crescent scar on his chin and a gold flute at his chest was the only one not glaring. “Why are we the only ones going left?” she asked. “Isn’t the main border gate to the right?”

The oldest soldier folded his thick arms, stretching his leathers. “Just because you won a measly Fall Order doesn’t mean you can yell at soldiers of the Per-Siana army, Maiden. By the Divinities, you’d better watch your words.”

Ryn bit her lips, waiting as he shifted his large body around in his tiny seat. The younger soldier with flushed cheeks and long blond hair beside him didn’t say a word. The soldier with the flute kept quiet too, but his bright eyes darted toward the old soldier with a bothered look.

When the old soldier saw it, he huffed and flung a hand toward Ryn like he was brushing a bug off his coat. His gruff voice boomed over the wagon, “You have a different mission than the other divisions.” He wiped a bead of sweat off his forehead, then turned his back to her, his silver shoulder plates so bright they were painful to look at.

Ryn glanced to where the other wagons were almost out of sight in a forest of charred, dry trees. Ahead of Ryn’s wagon, the set of dark mountains loomed like shadowy castles from the ancient folktales her father used to recite. “What mission?” she asked, and the old soldier grunted, keeping his back turned.

“You really want to know?” He released a cruel chuckle, scratching the greying stubble on his chin. “Fine, Commander Adassah.” The scorn he said it with made Ryn’s toes curl. “There’s a trapped Per-Siana noble whose palace by the border has been taken over by B’rei Mira and is being used as a base for enemy soldiers. The noble is being held hostage—they’ll kill him any day now, but since news of his situation has spread across our kingdom by the heralds, we need to make it look like we made an effort to rescue him.” The soldier pointed backward toward Ryn and all the men behind her. “That’s why you’ll go there tomorrow.”

Ryn’s hands slid off the bars, falling to her sides as a prisoner somewhere began to weep. The old soldier grunted and shook his head, then slapped the reins, ending the conversation. The horses picked up speed, and Ryn drifted backward until her shoulders came against the barred wall. Men looked at her, waiting for some kind of answer or plan. But she wasn’t foolish enough to believe there was any optimism to give them.

They weren’t even being given one day to live.

“We’ll die on the first day of deployment?” Faro finally spoke the words every soul in earshot was thinking. He released an empty laugh that drove heaviness through the wagon as he pulled at the red ribbon around his neck, his lashes fluttering over unshed tears. “We might as well accept it.” He glanced toward the Mother City they’d left behind hours ago. “Not sure any of our lives are worth living anyway.” His last murmur was almost too quiet to hear.

For once, Heva had nothing to say. She slumped down to sit, running a hand through her long hair and fiddling with a silver bead at the end.

Ryn looked back toward the Mother City too, barely a wisp of blurred colours on the horizon now. She stayed quiet for the ride through the mountains whose shadowed path breathed a slight chill over the wagon, cooling her flesh. High, fogged-over cliffs of rock stretched up on both sides, jutting out like colossal stairs for the gods. Ryn surveyed the magnificent heights as night swept in, followed by a hot yellow morning sun. With the early breeze came traces of sand in the wind, and wisps of desert heat rolling in like a wave off a sea of fire.