Page 7

Reza unfolded his arms. “Try to hold on. I hear the Intelligentsia might send burn divisions to aid us. Maybe…” He looked off and patted his belly. “Maybe something will come of that.”

A grunt escaped Xerxes, coming right from his gut. “No, they won’t. I forbade the Intelligentsia from forming burn divisions before I left the Mother City.” He shoved the map into his pocket and glanced toward his tent opening, looking for his satchel. He was just a little too far away to see in. “You can go now, General. I need to pack.” Without another word, Xerxes headed down the path, flicked the tent flap aside and went in. Reza’s heavy footsteps drifted toward the medicine tents.

Xerxes’s eyes fell closed, a prickle rising over his skin, his jaw solidifying.

Not once, not one time, had he let a spy get away. Until tonight.

Maybe he’d pushed his limits too far, played with fire a little too long. Maybe it was wishful thinking to assume he could keep attacking pockets of Alecsander’s army and never have to face the real thing. The real man. The full B’rei Mira army that outnumbered Per-Siana’s eleven to one.

Xerxes had sent exactly twenty-four spies across the desert in pairs to try and learn Alecsander’s location first. Not a single one had returned. Reports claimed they’d been captured by Alecsander’s savage warriors, dragged back to B’rei Mira’s capitol city, and…

Celestial Divinities, have mercy. Per-Siana citizens—Xerxes’s men. Dead now. Alecsander had a flair for showing off his prizes before a crowd. The warlord even had a museum of living war hostages, his most prized possessions. But twenty-four measly Per-Siana spies weren’t worthy of adding to his collection of the living.

Xerxes spotted his satchel on a rock in the corner of his tent. He took in a deep breath as he stared at it, deciding to think of anything but Alecsander of B’rei Mira. He marched over and grabbed the bag, then glanced around at his few belongings, deciding what to take and what to leave behind.

He’d barely stuffed a set of clothes into the bag when a soft voice rose through the tent behind him.

“Xerxes. Open your eyes.”

Xerxes whirled, his gaze tracing the flap rippling in the breeze. He stared hard at the firelit path outside. A warm wind rushed in, brushing along his shoulders and drying up the cold sweat over his skin. His flesh pebbled.

“I told you I wanted nothing to do with you,” he said to the voice, as he had the first time he’d heard it back in the tower in Per-Siana. He’d forgotten about that moment until now. But it was definitely the same voice—a calm whisper accompanied by a warm breeze.

A long pause followed, and Xerxes tilted his head. Maybe the being had already left. Or maybe Xerxes had just imagined hearing it; other soldiers had suffered side effects like this after battle. Delusions. Nightmares. Paranoia.

He turned away and continued packing, sliding his last pair of sandals into his bag. He reached for a tin bowl on his nightstand rock and studied his warped reflection in the metal, thinking of how many years he’d dreaded looking in the mirror, afraid of what he’d see. He didn’t look like a beast now, but his black hair was a mess, his skin was tanned by the sun, and grains of sand stuck to his eyelashes.

“And I told you I’ll be here when you’re ready.”

Xerxes dropped the bowl. It clattered against the side of his cot and tumbled to the ground as his hand tightened around his satchel, strangling it to death.

Sand swept across the room with the breeze, lifting gently from the floor and scurrying in whirls like grain-sized bugs. It brushed along his boots as he took in a deep breath and let it out slowly, unpeeling his fingers from his bag one by one, imagining standing in the palace tower back in Per-Siana after everything had come to an end—his voices, his tree, his curse. That brief feeling of emptiness, of quiet after the dark temptations went silent for the first time since he was a boy.

But there was no room for memories out here. The desert wasn’t a kind enough place to offer time for such useless things.

“Then I’m not ready.” His words were a whisper against the dry wind, lost to the distant sounds of the camp almost as quickly as they were created. “Stay out of my head.”

No. He’d never be ‘ready’ for voices again.

He looked over his shoulder, wondering why in the name of Boreas this voice was back now? Was it not enough the last time Xerxes had cast him out? Had this being followed Xerxes into the desert to turn him mad and watch him destroy his own army from the inside out for sheer entertainment?

Another thought dawned on him, and he held up his hands. “One hundred, plus ten…” he murmured, raising fingers to count and putting them down again in sequence. Soldiers passed by his tent, their metal armour tapping together. If they overheard the mutterings of a king, they didn’t react to it. “…plus one more…” Xerxes looked up. “One hundred and eleven.”

One hundred. And eleven.

Xerxes went back to packing, cursing the memory of the tower, and all the other memories that swept in with it.

The desert was a different world, and there was too much to do; always a strategy to form, never a moment of peace to recall the time when he’d lived in a palace of star runes and glass among pretentious nobles or the times he’d butted heads with the Intelligentsia. After his father’s death, after growing up alone in the palace, and even after becoming a beast, it was those voices that had ruined Xerxes the most.

But at least he’d been heartless back when he was a monster chasing voices. And perhaps he should have stayed heartless. Because the one thing that hurt more than being a monster everyone feared was realizing he had a heart, that it could beat, that it could feel.

And then having that heart be violently ripped from his chest by a maiden.

Strange, how even all the way out here, how even after all these months, that thought managed to claw its way in past the barricade of walls Xerxes had built. Walls of sand, battle, kingdoms, and warlords.

When Xerxes finished packing, he hoisted his satchel over his shoulder, and he marched out of the tent to bring Division One to a fresh, new horizon, all the while whispering, “One hundred and eleven.”

3