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“I don’t even remember what I said. But the Oditi, the Dinaeii—they think Aleteria spread lies on purpose. That Aleteria was purposefully trying to sow discord. That thing in Colcium? Another tribe entirely—but the whole thing has gotten everyone’s attention. These tribes have been enemies for centuries, and somehow, you and I have brought them together.” His lips quirked with the irony, but his smile faded when he met her eyes.

“The man I punched—he said there’s a price on my head. Yours, too. If we’re lucky, we’ll make it to Norbucum before the other messenger. There’s an old commander of mine that I think got stationed there. He knows me. He can vouch for me. And I can vouch for you.”

Revni didn’t know what to do with this information. Was that the best they had to hope for? She gave a small nod.

Eavus stood awkwardly, his thighs likely stiff from that squat. “I’ll go out so you can bathe.”

“I’m not shy.” The words came out reflexively, because they were true, but then she flushed again. She’d always thought it almost funny how he always turned his back. Isfolj all lived in one long house together, siblings and cousins and guests. No one paraded around, of course, but of course you’d see each other naked. But she suddenly was grateful that he coughed a rough excuse and went out the door. The thought of his eyes on her, traveling like hands…She hurriedly stripped and sank into the blissful water. It wrapped its delicious heat around her muscles, but her mind kept gnawing, and she couldn’t seem to escape it.

She had wanted the gods to will her to a purpose. Norbucum made sense. Unlike Colcium and Lordinius, she knew for a fact that Isfolj lived there—even if those specific Isfolj were the reason her clan had avoided it. Regardless of which families had battled with which, the Isfolj were her true people.

So why did she feel the same as after she’d killed the slaver? Like she’d been on the gods’ path and had suddenly taken a wrong turn? She’d thought the heaviness in her bones was just fatigue, but they felt hollow, too, like she was carving a piece of herself out and leaving it behind.

Revni held her breath and dunked her whole head under, her knees rising into the cold and splashing water over the sides. Under water, her senses shrank to nothing but the muffled rush of her own blood in her ears, and she felt the vibrations of Eavus’ footsteps rather than heard them. She came up for a stuttering breath and twisted to see.

Eavus stood halfway between the tub and the door, his body stiff and his eyes squeezed shut. A shiver ran over her—likely the air hitting her too suddenly. But she had a sudden tingling urge to stand, dripping and open, and see what happened. The ripple down her spine made her nipples tighten.

“Sorry, I realized…You don’t have anything to dry off with.” He raised his arm to point, an ungainly, unbent elbow, like a piece of a machine. “There was more cloth in the chest. Probably something you can use.”

He spun on his heel like a true soldier and retreated, smacking into the door frame before cursing and finding his way out. Revni sank back in, her mind a chaos of unconnected thoughts. Who might either of them have been if they’d grown up somewhere else? A little village in the Continent? A hillfort here in Faen? The two of them as children, digging gardens and exploring creeks, holding hands as they got older, their worlds as small as the boundaries of a town.

Why didn’t you tell me, he had asked, that you planned to split up?

Because I am a coward, she should have said. Not because she didn’t want to tell him, but because she didn’t want to go.

That wasn’t right, was it? He wasn’t blood. He had done such horrible things. But he wasn’t horrible, not at the core of who he was. He was broken, like she was, from a place that had broken him. He had had all his goodness beaten out of him, but she had watched it come back, crawling over him like sunrise over water. That was the loss she felt, perhaps. That she would never get to see what more there was.

Revni scrubbed herself as clean as she could, and stepped out. She found a length of herb-scented sacking, dried, re-dressed in the cheap clothes she’d bought with Eavus’ coins back in Lordinius. She went to the door and opened it. Even from his silhouette in the darkness, she could see goosebumps, and the shame of selfishness washed over her.

“You should have come in.”

He stepped forward, his cold into her heat, but then stopped, only breaths away. His eyes were shadowed, but they stared into hers and Revni suddenly felt the chill. She wanted to warm herself against him, as she had so many times in the night. He swallowed, and his neck was splotchy with a blush. He had a crook in his nose she’d never noticed.

“How was your bath?” His voice was rough, raw. Revni tried to answer but couldn’t seem to speak.

Hunger. That’s what this feeling was. Only she’d never felt this kind before. Like if she had a taste, she’d consume a swath so wide she’d never find its end.

“Your turn.” Her voice, when she found it, rasped low. She’d never heard that tone from her own throat, either.

Revni stepped aside to let Eavus in, then closed the door behind her. The dark, the breeze, was welcome after all that fire and steam. Her heart thudded so loud in her chest she could barely think.

The voices of the gods whipped over the steep canyon and whistled through the ruined walls at her back. What do you want from me? she almost screamed into the darkness. She had never wavered, from whatever task was set before her, from what she knew to be right. But she didn’t know what right was any longer, and every time she tried to follow it, it seemed to take her farther from what she wanted. The gods thundered in her heart, but she couldn’t hear them over the storm that was raging between her ears.

The gods had sent her to this island to find a home. That home would not be with her parents anymore. She had hoped it would be on her own land, but that possibility was lost with her ring. Isfolj, Isfolj, Isfolj. It had been the rhythm she’d been marching to all this time, but the refrain felt thin, like an echo lingering through a valley she’d already crossed. These Isfolj in the city weren’t her Isfolj, and this longhouse that was not an Isfolj longhouse only made it clearer: close enough only made the differences more stark. What was a country you’d all come from, and left behind? Was that blood? Was it wooden halls with the right carvings, the right altars to the right gods, the right spices with your meat? She could taste the sharpness of fermented fish with dill, smell the sap-thick fires in the memory of her nose, but did that suffice? She had her whole life stretched before her, and it suddenly seemed empty and long and alone, and she didn’t know what home even meant when everyone you knew had left or died or abandoned you.

Home was never really a place, anyway. Any Isfolj knew that. It was carved out of whatever corner of the world the gods pitched you into. And truthfully, she’d always been most at home on a boat, tossed in a wild sea. That’s what this feeling was, too. Wild and unpredictable, waves of giddiness and fear crashing upon her while she gripped the sides with unsteady legs. Her heart was a war drum, steady as a fist pounding on a shield. But this— This was a dark ocean that bled off the edges of the map.

She wanted to steer directly into it.

Revni was a sea-raider, a shield-bearer. She wasn’t meant for solid land, for safe and reasonable choices. She was a child of the gods, and the gods were rife with chaos and wanting and taking.

Revni wanted.

And was that so terrible a thing?

She turned, and opened the door.

THIRTY-EIGHT